“And you might maybe be gettin’ her an orange wid this,” Jim said, handing her a penny.
“Well, now, it’s the lucky child poor Minnie is,” Mrs. Connolly declared, “to have such a good daddy. Finely set up she will be wid a doll and an orange. I’ll bring her the best in Dublin, Jim, no fear.”
“She might fancy the orange, anyway,” Jim said, half to himself, with a queer remorseful sort of look.
Mrs. Connolly having gone, he began to expect her back again with an unreasonable promptitude which lengthened the afternoon prodigiously. He had suffered innumerable apprehensions, and fidgetted himself into a fever of anxiety before she could possibly have returned. At last, however, when her broad, cheerful countenance did reappear to him, looming through the misty March dusk, he felt that he would almost have chosen a further delay. For he had staked so much upon this venture that the crisis of learning, whether it had failed or succeeded could not but be rather terrible.
There was nothing apparently alarming in Mrs. Connolly’s report. She had found Minnie doing finely. Her nurse said she would be out of bed next week, and was very apt to get her health better than before she took bad. The orange had pleased her highly, and she had bid Mrs. Connolly tell her daddy that he might be sending her another one next Saturday if he liked. All this was good as far as it went, but about the doll, Mrs. Connolly kept silence, and it struck Jim that she shrank away from anything which seemed leading towards a reference to the subject. Jim, who at first had half dreaded and half longed every moment to hear her speak of it, began to think that she might go away without mentioning it, which would not do at all. In the end he had to introduce it himself.
“And how about the bit of a doll, ma’am?” he inquired as unconcernedly as he could. “Was you able to get her e’er a one?”
Unmistakably Mrs. Connolly was much disconcerted by the question. Her face fell, and she hesitated for a while before she replied, with evident reluctance—
“Sure, now, man alive, you never can tell what quare notions childer’ll take up wid when they’re sick, and more especially when they do be about gettin’ well agin, the way Minnie is now. Quiet enough the crathurs do be as long as they’re rale bad. But, tellin’ you the truth, Jim, not a bit of her would look at the doll. Some fantigue she had agin it, whatever ailed her, an’ it a great beauty, wid a pink sash on it and all manner. Slingin’ it into the middle of the floor she was, only the nurse caught a hould of it, an’ biddin’ me to take it away out of that. So says I to her, ‘What at all should I do wid the lovely doll, after your poor daddy sendin’ it to yourself?’ And, says she to me, ‘Give the ugly big lump of a thing to the ould divil,’ says she, ‘an’ let him give it to the little young black-leggy divils to play wid if they like.’ I declare to you, Jim, thim was the very words of her, sittin’ up in her bed, not lookin’ the size of anythin’. ‘Deed, now, she’s the comical child. But sure who’d be mindin’ her? And the nurse says she’ll keep the doll till to-morrow, an’ if Minnie doesn’t fancy it then, she’ll give it to the little girl in the next cot that does be frettin’ after her mother, so it won’t go to loss. An’ besides—”
She stopped short in surprise, for Jim, who had been laughing silently to himself, now broke out in tones of positive rapture—
“‘The little young black-leggy divils’—that’s Minnie herself, and no mistake this time, glory be to God! Sorra the fantigue it was, but just the nathur of her, for the thoughts of a doll she never could abide all the days of her life. She’d as lief be playin’ wid a snake or a toad. So if you’d let on to me that she liked it, ma’am, well I’d know ’twas only romancin’ to me you were. But the truth you tould me, right enough, and thank you kindly. The little villin’ll be runnin’ about before I am, plaze goodness. Och, bedad, I can see her slingin’ it neck an’ crop out of the bed.”