Love of Brothers Part 5

"I don't think you ever told me about that thing before," she said. "I should have remembered if you had told me."

"No," he said with an averted face. "It happened--the winter you were in Florence. I came home and was met by the news that you were away.

The sun dropped out of my skies."

She blushed suddenly and brightly. Her husband had turned from his gloomy contemplation of the lawn outside, on which a tiny Kerry cow was feeding. He said to himself that she was more beautiful in her mature womanhood than the day he married her. She had been soft and flowing even in her girlhood, with a promise of matronly beauty. Now, with a greater amplitude, she was not less but more gracious. Her bronze hair which had the faintest dust upon it went back from her temples and ears in lovely waves which no art could have produced. It was live hair, full of lights and shadows. Her husband had said that it was like a brown Venetian gla.s.s with powdered gold inside its brownness. There were a few brown freckles on the milk-white neck. Her eyes were kind and faithful and set widely apart: her nose straight and short: and she had a delightful smile.

She came now and put her arms about his neck. They were in curious contrast, she so soft, fair and motherly: he slender and dark, with weary eyes and a look as though he had suffered.

"Shawn!" she said, "Shawn!" and there was a pa.s.sionate tenderness in her voice, as she pressed his head against her heart.

Then she let her arms fall and turned away, looking as though some sadness had clouded her joy.

"Poor Terence!" she said.

There was the same thought between them, but they left it unspoken.

She had chosen Shawn O'Gara in her own heart even while she was expected to marry Terence Comerford.

"Why do you talk of Terence now?" he asked.

"I have had a letter from Aunt Grace after all these years." She held the letter towards him.

"She has forgiven you?" he asked, making no movement to take the letter.

"She is coming back to Inch. She writes that Stella, her adopted daughter, is growing up. She has forgiven us. She is pleased that we named our son after poor Terence. You remember you were rather opposed to it, Shawn."

"I did not wish to be reminded of the loss of my friend at every moment," he said. "The tragedy was too new."

Still he showed no indication of taking the letter from her hand.

"Read it to me," he said, in his weary voice. "I wonder how Stella will like Inch after Italy. There is so much rain and cloud. One has to be born to it to like it."

"When I was in Italy I simply longed for a day of Irish rain," Mary O'Gara said: "it is good for us. We need it. We grow parched in the dry climates."

"It has held the secret of perpetual youth and beauty for you, Mary,"

her husband said, looking at her with loving admiration.

She laughed and blushed. She was not beyond blushing at a compliment even from her husband.

"We must make things as gay for the child as possible," she said. Then she added:

"I wonder if Aunt Grace realizes that Terry is now a young man. He seems _epris_ with Eileen, so I suppose he will not fall in love with Stella?"

Sir Shawn looked startled.

"I hope not," he said. "Eileen seems to have him very securely in her chains."

Lady O'Gara frowned ever so slightly. "I wish our children did not grow away from us so soon," she said. "Terry might have continued a little longer being in love only with his mother."

Sir Shawn lifted his eyebrows in a manner which accentuated his foreign look.

"Jealous, Mary?" he asked.

"Not of Eileen. She allures him, but, I come first."

"You would always have your place. You are of the women who are adored by their sons. You would not care for Eileen for a daughter-in-law, though she has been almost your adopted daughter these ten years back?"

"She would not suit Terry."

"She is very fond of you."

"Yes, I think she is fond of me." Her voice was cold.

"I hardly know you, Mary, in this mood towards Eileen. You are usually so sweetly reasonable."

"It is the privilege of a woman to be unreasonable sometimes."

The sunshine came back to her face, laughed in the depths of her eyes and brought a dimple to either cheek.

"I suppose I am a little jealous of Terry," she said. "You see he is very like you, Shawn. And I am fond of Eileen, really. Only, I suppose all mothers are critical of the girls their sons fall in love with, especially if it is an only son. It is odd how it has come suddenly to Terry that Eileen is a pretty girl. Of course he has only seen her in her vacations. Sit down now, Shawn, and I will read you Aunt Grace's letter."

He sat down obediently in the revolving chair in front of his desk and she came and stood by him. Her voice was a little disturbed as she read the letter.

"MY DEAR MARY,--You will be surprised to hear that I am coming back again to Inch. The years bring their dust, as some poet says: they certainly soften griefs and asperities. When I left Inch I was broken-hearted for my one boy. It was a poisoning of the grief at that time to know that you and Shawn O'Gara were going to be married. I felt that you had forgotten my beautiful boy, that his friend had forgotten him: but that I acknowledge now to have been a morbid and unreasonable way of looking at things. My boy never thought of any girl but you, yet I could not expect you to go unmarried for his sake: indeed I would not have wished it. You and Shawn must forgive that old unreasonable bitterness of mine, the bitterness of a mother distraught by grief.

"I have left you alone all these years, but I have not been without knowledge of you. I know that your son is called Terence after my son.

I appreciate that fact, which indicates to me that you keep him in loving remembrance.

"After all these years I am suddenly weary for home, so weary that I wonder now how I could have kept away so long. Whether I shall end my days at Inch depends on Stella. My wild experiment of adopting this child, as some of my friends thought it at the time, has turned out very well. Stella is a dear child. I send you a photograph which hardly does her justice. As she is entirely mine she goes by my name, although her father was French. I should like to say to you that though I shall provide for Stella it will not be to your detriment. I have a sense of justice towards my kin.

"I trust to you to receive Stella and me in a manner which will prove that you have blotted out any memories of the past that are otherwise than happy.

"Your affectionate cousin-aunt, "GRACE COMERFORD.

"PS.--Stella has something of your colouring."

"Here is the photograph," said Lady O'Gara, handing it to her husband.

"Stella is very pretty, is she not?"

He twisted his chair so that the light from the window might fall on the photograph. The face was in profile. It was tilted delicately upwards. There was a little straight nose, a round chin, a mouth softly opened, one of those mouths which do not quite close. The large eyes looked upward; the hair was short and curled in little rings.

He looked at it and said nothing, but his eyes were tragic in the shadow.

"The profile is quite French," said Lady O'Gara. "I remember the young man who I think must have been Stella's father. He was a lieutenant of Cha.s.seurs. He was killed in Algiers--afterwards. I saw it in a newspaper about four years after our marriage. He was going to be married when he came to Inch. His mother, who was as poor as a church mouse, had written a bitter complaint to Aunt Grace that Gaston was about to marry a poor Irish girl, a governess, whose part he had taken when he thought her unfairly treated. I think Stella must be Gaston de St. Maur's child."

"Odd, not leaving the child her own name," Sir Shawn said, handing back the photograph.

"Aunt Grace would want her so entirely for her own. She always had a fierce way of loving. If she had loved me more reasonably and less jealously she would not have quarrelled with me as she did. She was always rather terrible in anger."