Jenny was breaking down fast.
“Aw, the heart’s a quare thing, ma’am. Got its hunger same as anything else. Starve it, and it’ll know why. Gives you a kind of a sinking at the pit of your stomach, ma’am. Did you never feel it, ma’am?”
Davy’s speech was rude enough, but that only made its emotion the more touching to Jenny. Between gulp and gulp she tried to say that if he went away he would never be happy again.
“Happy, ma’am? D’ye say happy? I’m not happy now,” said Davy.
“It isn’t everybody would think so, Captain,” said Jenny, “considering how you spend your evenings—singing and laughing——”
“Laughing! More cry till wool, ma’am, same as clipping a pig.”
“So your new friends, Captain, those that your riches have brought you—”
“Friends? D’ye say friends? Them wastrels! What are they? Nothing but a parcel of Betty Quilleash’s baby’s stepmothers. And I’m nothing but Betty Quilleash’s baby myself, ma’am; that’s what I am.”
The stalwart fellow did not look much like anybody’s infant, but Davy could not laugh, and Jenny’s eyes were streaming.
“Betty lived at Michael, ma’am, and died when her baby was suckling. There wasn’t no feeding-bottles in them days, and the little one was missing the poor dead mawther mortal. But babies is like lammies, ma’am, they’ve got their season, and mostly all the women of the parish had babies that year. So first one woman would whip up Betty’s baby and give it a taste of the breast, and then another would whip it up and do likewise, until the little baby cuckoo was in every baby nest in the place, and living all over the street, like the rum-butter bowl and the preserving pan. But no use at all, at all. The little mite wasted away. Poor thing, poor thing. Twenty mawthers wasn’t making up to it for the right one it had lost. That’s me, ma’am; that’s me.”