Love of Brothers Part 36

Lady O'Gara left Terry in the cheerful room and went up the winding staircase. As she entered Stella's room she had an idea that the place had become more home-like with Mrs. Wade's presence. Mrs. Wade was wearing the white dress of a nurse and a nurse's cap, the white strings tied under her chin. The room was cosy in fire and lamplight and yet very fresh. Stella was awake. She turned her head weakly on the pillow and smiled at Lady O'Gara.

"My darling child, this is an improvement," Lady O'Gara said, quite joyfully.

"My mother has come back," Stella whispered, and put out a thin little hand to Mrs. Wade, who had stood up at the other side of the bed and was still standing as though she waited for Lady O'Gara to bid her be seated.

"I am very glad," Lady O'Gara said, and bent to kiss Stella's forehead.

It was cool and a little moist. The fever had quite departed.

"You should not have gone away and left her," she said reproachfully to Mrs. Wade. "You see she cannot do without you."

"I shall not leave her again," Mrs. Wade said. "She chooses me before all the world."

Oh, poor Terry! There was something of a definite choice in the words.

They meant that Stella had chosen her mother before all the world might give her. And the poor boy was sitting just below them, bearing the time of waiting with as much patience as possible, listening to the sounds upstairs, his mother divined, with a beating heart.

"Won't you sit down?" said Lady O'Gara. "I cannot sit till you do."

"Thank you," replied Mrs. Wade, and sat down the other side of Stella.

Her profile in the nurse's cap showed against the lamplight. It was a beautiful soft, composed profile, like Stella's own. And her manner was perfect in its quiet dignity. A Nature's lady, Lady O'Gara said to herself.

Lady O'Gara could not have told what inspired her next speech. It was certainly not premeditated.

"My son is waiting for me downstairs in your pretty room."

Mrs. Wade bowed her head without comment on Terry's waiting. "We were sorry to hear of the accident to Sir Shawn. I hope he is better," she said.

How quietly they were talking! It might have been just conventional drawing-room talk. No one looking on could have guessed at the web of difficulties they were snared in, at the tragedy that menaced so many harmless joys. Again Lady O'Gara felt surprise at her own att.i.tude towards Mrs. Wade, at Mrs. Wade's towards her. She had no feeling of inequality, nothing of the att.i.tude of the woman who has always been securely placed within reverence and affections, to the woman who has gone off the rails, even though she be more sinned against than sinning. Mrs. Wade met her so to speak on equal grounds. There was no indication in her manner of the woman who had stepped down from her place among honoured women.

And yet, the mere saying that Terry was in the house had somehow affected Mrs. Wade. There was agitation under the calm exterior. In the atmosphere there was something disturbed, electrical.

She hardly seemed to hear Lady O'Gara's answer to her inquiry about Sir Shawn. She got up after a few minutes, and, saying that she would get some tea, went out of the room; to recover her self-possession, Lady O'Gara thought.

When she had gone Stella turned her eyes on Lady O'Gara's face.

"When I get well," she said, "I am going away with my mother. It will be best for everybody. I shall begin a new life with her."

"Oh, Stella, child! You can't give us up like that! You have made your place in our hearts."

There were tears in Mary O'Gara's kind eyes and in her voice.

Stella reached out and patted her hand as though she were the older woman.

"You needn't think I shan't feel it," she said. "You have been dear to me, sweet to me; and I shall always love you. And poor Granny----" A little shiver ran through her and for a second she closed her eyes. "I am sorry for her, too, poor woman! but it will be kinder to you all for me to go away. I did think that I was going to die and that would have made it so much easier for every one. Only, now that my mother has come back and needs me, I must go on living--but at a distance from this place. Terry will forget me and marry Eileen and be very happy."

The tired voice trailed off into silence. Evidently the long speech had been an effort.

"Terry is obstinately faithful," said Lady O'Gara, with a sound like a sob in her voice. "But now, I think you have talked enough. Go to sleep, child. We shall have plenty of time for talk, even if you do keep to your resolve to leave us all."

Stella opened her eyes again to say:

"No one is ever to say a word against my mother. She never did anything wrong, my poor little mother, even if she was deceived. I honour her more than any one in the world."

"Don't talk about it, child. No one will dare to say anything," Lady O'Gara a.s.sured her, eager to stop something which she felt too poignant, too intolerable to be said or heard.

Almost at once Stella was asleep. There came a little knock at the door. It was Susan to say that, please would Lady O'Gara come down to tea, while she sat with Miss Stella.

Again Lady O'Gara felt the strangeness of it all. There was Mrs. Wade pouring out the tea, handing cakes and toast, doing the honours like any a.s.sured woman in her drawing-room--except that she would not take tea herself and could not be prevailed upon to sit down with them.

Once or twice Lady O'Gara thought she intercepted a soft, motherly glance, with something of beaming approval in it, directed from Mrs.

Wade's eyes upon Terry. There was light upon Terry's dark head from Mrs. Wade's eyes. The boy was shy, ill at ease. He was dying to ask questions, but he felt that the situation craved wary walking. He fidgeted and grew red: looked this way and that; was manifestly uncomfortable.

None of them had heard the hall-door open nor any one enter, but Keep, stretched on the hearthrug, growled. Shot lying under the table answered him. From Michael, in the kitchen, came a sharp hysterical barking. Michael was not so composed, not so entirely well-mannered as his brothers of the famous Shot breed.

The door opened. In came Mrs. Comerford, tall, in her trailing blacks, magnificent, the long veil of her bonnet floating about her. She looked from one to the other of the group with amazement.

"I am surprised to find you here, Mary O'Gara," she said. "But perhaps you come to see my child. Where is Stella? I have brought the carriage to take her back to Inch."

"Oh, the poor child is too ill to be moved," said Lady O'Gara tremblingly.

"You should be by your husband's side," Mrs. Comerford said, as though Mary O'Gara was still the child she had loved and oppressed.

She had not looked at Mrs. Wade since the first bitter contemptuous glance. Suddenly Mrs. Wade spoke with an air as though she swept the others aside. She faced Mrs. Comerford with eyes as steady as her own.

"Stella will not go with you, she said. She stays with me."

"You! her nurse. I did not know the child was so ill as to need a hospital nurse."

"Her mother, Mrs. Comerford. You did not satisfy her in all those years since you took her from my breast. I take her back again."

CHAPTER XXVII

THE STORY IS TOLD

Lady O'Gara's first terror was of a scene which should waken Stella and alarm her in her weak state. She made as if to stand between the two women: she looked fearfully for the signs of the rising storm as she remembered them in Mrs. Comerford, the heaving breast, the working hands, the dilated nostrils. But there were none of these signs.

Instead Mrs. Comerford was curiously quiet.

For a moment the quietness seemed to possess the little house. In the silence you might have heard a pin drop. Shot sighed windily under the table and Keep laid his nose along his paws and turned eyes of worship on his mistress. Long afterwards Mary O'Gara remembered these things and how the wind sprang up and drove a few dead leaves against the window with a faint tinkling sound.

Then the momentary tense silence was broken.

"You are Stella's mother--Terence's..."

What she would have said was for ever unsaid.

"Your son's wife, Mrs. Comerford," said Mrs. Wade proudly. She held out her hand with a gesture which had a strange dignity. On the wedding finger was a thin gold ring.