Love of Brothers Part 22

That is what any lover worth his salt would say: yet when one is older and very proud of one's family the bar sinister is not a thing to be thought of."

"You said yourself that Bridyeen was an innocent creature. You forgave Terence, who was her tempter. You love his memory and you have called your one son after him. Is it fair, is it just?"

She was frightened at her own temerity. The subject of Terence Comerford had always been like an open wound to her husband.

"Did I forgive Terence?" he asked with a wonder that had something child-like about it; "I was very angry with Terence, dreadfully angry.

Do you remember that pa.s.sage, Mary?

"Alas they had been friends in youth;

you know how it goes on:

"And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain."

She had slipped an arm about his neck, and her hand went on softly caressing his cheek.

"I think we shall have to tell Terry," she said, "if we persist in our refusal. We could not take up such an untenable position.

Unless..."--she hesitated.

"Go on, Mary," he said.

"Unless we were to accept Grace's story of Stella's birth. Why should it not be true?" She asked the question piteously. "Are you sure, Shawn, about the other thing?"

But while she said it she remembered Stella's likeness to Mrs. Wade.

Why, any one might see it, any one. A new fear sprang up in her heart, troubled by many fears. This time it was for Stella. Any day, any hour, some one besides herself might discover that likeness. Why, for all she knew the place buzzed with it already. Sooner or later some one would recognize Mrs. Wade as Bridyeen Sweeney. Then it would be easy to piece the old story together. Already people had noticed that Stella had the Comerford colour, which had been, in her own case, the Creagh colour. Grace Comerford ought not to have come back. Shawn was quite right. She ought not to have come back.

"You are a very clever woman, Mary. But it seems to me a cheap novel kind of suggestion. I think we must face the thing as it is. I shall tell Terry to-night."

Terry was told. He came to his mother's room after hearing the story.

She had been expecting him. In the end her men always brought her their troubles. So she had piled up a bright fire, had set a couple of softly cushioned chairs side by side, as though the physical comfort would reach the wounded spirit. She smiled to herself rather piteously at the thought. Men were susceptible to comfort, to being petted, no matter at what age one loved them, or in what grief one would comfort them.

She was in her silk dressing gown, her hair in two long plaits before Terry came. Despite his miserable preoccupation his face lightened at sight of her.

"How sweet you look, Mother!" he said. "And so young with your hair like that."

"Come and sit down, my darling boy."

He came and sat by her, and presently he laid his face on her shoulder to conceal, she divined, set eyes.

"What am I to do, Mothereen, at all, at all?" he asked, going back to the phraseology of his nursery days.

"Your father has told you?"

"Yes, he has told me."

"It is pretty bad," she said compa.s.sionately.

"Mother," he lifted his face and his eyes were bloodshot. "Why did you call me after that villain? Why does my father love him still? I have never heard you say one word against him."

She flinched before the accusation.

"Dear," she said. "I have only just been told of this. Your father kept it from me all those years."

"And you were engaged to him at the time! Good Lord!" he broke out with young pa.s.sion. "Don't tell me, Mother, that there is any excuse for him. I could not bear that from you. One law for the man, another for the woman: it is the easy way of the world. My poor little darling!"

Suddenly he choked and got up and went away from her. She found nothing to say.

He was back again in a second, while she watched him helplessly.

"I don't want her to know," he said. "She must not know. What am I to do? She ought to enter this family as its loved and honoured daughter.

Mother, I do not intend to give her up."

She had been waiting for it. If he had said otherwise she would have been bitterly disappointed, however much she might have tried to deceive herself. It was a pity, a thousand pities, the child could not have come to them without that smirch. But it had not touched her: there was no stain on her. Thinking upon Stella's mother she said to herself that no levity in the girl she had been had led to her downfall. Why, Shawn had said she was the simplest, whitest of creatures. It made Terence's sin all the blacker.

She drew her boy's head down to her and kissed it.

"I did not ask you to give her up," she said. "I do not take the world's view of such things."

He looked at her with an incredible incredulous relief.

"You angel mother!" he said with a deep sigh. "I might have trusted you. There is one thing. Stella must never know."

"She must never know," she repeated after him.

Her husband's foot sounded in the adjoining room and Terry went away comforted. Shawn did not come in to say good-night to her as usual, by which omission she conjectured the trouble of his mind. She prayed for light, almost in despair of finding it, and slept, although she had expected to lie awake, seeking unhappily a way out of this threatening sorrow for all dear to her.

She awoke somewhere in the small hours. The moon was on her bed and the air was very cold. She came awake suddenly, with a thought in her mind so concrete that it was as though some one had spoken it aloud.

"Is it quite certain that Terence did not marry Bridyeen Sweeney?"

She caught at it as a drowning man catches at a straw. Her heart gave a wild bound towards it. It was so thin, so frail a hope, that while her fingers closed upon it she knew the futility. Again she slept, and the thought was with her when she awoke in the grey morning.

CHAPTER XVII

MISS BRENNAN

She was grateful to the exigencies of the Service which made it absolutely necessary for Terry to be back in barracks next day. He had gone off after breakfast with Major Evelyn and Mr. Earnshaw, forbidding her to come to see him off. Sir Shawn, who was High Sheriff for the year and had to be in the county town for the opening of the a.s.sizes, took the party to the station on his way. She was left with the morning on her hands.

How to use it? Oh, she had been impatient for them to be gone! The hope which had seemed so frail in the night had strengthened and failed, strengthened and failed many times since. This morning it was strong within her. It was founded on so little. Terry had called Terence Comerford hard names last night. A villain. She did not think Terence was a villain. He had been a kindly, affectionate fellow, very quick to be angry about a cruelty to any helpless thing. A good heart: oh, yes, Terence had had a good heart: but, even to her had come the dreary knowledge that good-hearted people can be very cruel in their sins.

She had looked at it from many points of view. Supposing Terence had meant to marry the girl and been prevented by his sudden death!

Something came into her mind, dreary and terrible. "The way to h.e.l.l is paved with good intentions." Poor Terence, who had laid this coil for their feet, tangling their lives and happiness in the meshes of his pa.s.sion, had he been paving h.e.l.l, just paving h.e.l.l, with good intentions never to be realized?

Early as they had started she had found time to speak to her husband about the possibility of there having been a marriage. He had found her beside his bed full-dressed when he opened his eyes on the grey morning.