Love of Brothers Part 9

A charming girlish face looked in at the open door.

"May I? Is it Lady O'Gara whom my dearest Mamma so greatly loves?"

There was the slightest foreign intonation in the voice,--something of deliberate utterance, as though English was not the language of the speaker.

The girl came into the room and towards them. She was charming. Her hair curled in rings of reddish brown on her little head. Her eyes were grey with something of brown in the iris: her eyebrows strongly marked. She had a straight beautiful little nose, lips softly opening, a chin like that of the Irish poet's "Mary Donnelly," "round as a china cup." There was something softly graceful about her as she came into the room. She looked down, then up again. Her eyes,--were they grey?

They were brown surely, almost gold. Her little head was held as though she courted a caress.

"I am so glad you have come back, Stella," Lady O'Gara said, fascinated straight off by this charming vision.

"I wonder how Mamma stayed away so long," Stella returned. "The sweet house, the beautiful grey country." She took Lady O'Gara's hand and kissed it lightly; yet with an air of reverence,--"the beloved people."

"The country will not prove too grey for you, I hope, Stella," Lady O'Gara said, feeling touched and pleased by the girl's air of homage.

"My husband's mother, who was an Italian, said that the grey skies made her weep when first she came to Ireland. They were so unlike Italian skies."

"I must be Irish then," said the girl, "for I adore them. Even when it rains I shall not weep."

"She has something of your colouring, Mary; don't you think so?" Mrs.

Comerford asked.

"Yes, perhaps--more golden."

She was feeling surprised at herself. This girl made more appeal to her than Eileen Creagh whom she had had with her from childhood. This girl touched some motherly chord in her which Eileen had never awakened. She wanted to stroke her dear curls, to be good to her. Yet she had been telling herself all those years, that she had no need for a daughter, having Terry.

CHAPTER VII

BRADY'S BULL

The meeting between Eileen Creagh and Stella Comerford brought the flying dimple to Lady O'Gara's cheek. She watched them as though they were young children meeting in the shy yet uncompromising atmosphere of the nursery.

Stella was inclined to be friendly and then drew back, chilled by something she detected in Eileen's manner. Eileen was indifferently polite.

Terry and his father were out when the party arrived for luncheon, but they returned very soon afterwards. Lady O'Gara's attention was otherwise absorbed so that she did not notice the sudden delighted friendliness in Terry towards Stella nor the quick withdrawal into sullenness which spoilt Eileen's looks for the luncheon-hour.

Lady O'Gara was wondering about her husband. Why should he have looked so startled when his eye fell on Stella? He had known that she was coming. To Lady O'Gara's anxious eye Sir Shawn looked pale. He had been pale of late, with curious shadows about his face, but when she had asked him if he was not feeling well he had answered with an air of lightness that he felt as well as ever he had felt.

At the luncheon table he sat with his back to the light. The persistence of those shadows in his face worried her loving heart. She wondered if Mrs. Comerford saw a great change in him. It ought to have been a very happy occasion. Mrs. Comerford had met Shawn with an air of affection mingled with deprecation, as though she asked pardon for the old unreason. If she saw that the years had changed him she made no sign.

"I have stayed away a long time from you and Mary," she said. "I had made it difficult for myself to come back: but I have wanted to come back. Now I hope we shall remain neighbours to the end."

Sir Shawn had not responded as he ought to have done. He had worn a queer look. After a while his wife had found the proper adjective for it: his eyes were haunted. He might have seen a ghost. It distracted her from her talk across the table with Mrs. Comerford, happy talk of friends long parted and re-united, full of "Don't you remember?" and "Have you forgotten?": arrears of talk in which so much had to be explained, so many fates elucidated. It might have been so happy if only Shawn had not worn that odd look.

Once Lady O'Gara thought she caught his eyes fixed with a gloomy intentness on the group of young people at the other end of the table.

She glanced that way, and the ready smile came. Terry was making himself very agreeable to the two pretty girls. It was obvious, even at a glance, that Eileen had little chance against the new-comer's vivacity. She sat with her lips pursed a little and something of gloom on her face. Terry, between his sallies with Stella, who was at once shy and bright, full of those charming glances out of the eyes which were grey at one moment, golden brown at another,--sent now and again a tenderly apologetic look Eileen's way, trying to draw the sulking beauty into the conversation. There was nothing for Shawn to be gloomy about in this little comedy. Terry was always so sweetly amiable.

In the days that followed the comedy unfolded itself. Stella was very often at Castle Talbot, or they were at Inch. Terry was evidently drawn towards Stella, while loyally endeavouring to keep up his former att.i.tude towards Eileen. If Eileen wished to keep him she went the worst possible way about it, for she sulked, and sulkiness did not become her. Her fair skin took on a leaden look. She repulsed Stella's advances till Stella was hurt and vexed.

"Eileen will not be friends with me," she complained to Lady O'Gara.

"She is so cold. That lovely pale hair of hers I took it in my hands one day when it was undone, and it was cold as ice. Her heart is like her hair. Why will she not like me?"

Why not, indeed? Apart from the fact that Stella chattered, pretty chatter like the singing of a bird, and was so quickly intelligent about everything, and so interested in the new life that the slower Eileen was rather left out of things, her att.i.tude towards Eileen was most disarming. She admired her greatly and was evidently quite unaware of her own good looks. She tried to win her over with gifts, which Eileen accepted, while she was not propitiated.

"She will not like me," Stella complained with a flash of tears in her eyes, "if I was to give her my heart she would not like me."

"You should not have given her your seed-pearls," said Lady O'Gara.

"It is too valuable a gift to pa.s.s from one girl to another."

It was beginning to dawn on her that Eileen was greedy and selfish.

Perhaps she had had intuitions of it when Eileen had disappointed her.

Eileen was only friendly to Stella when she wanted something. Once she had obtained it she relapsed into her former coldness. Lady O'Gara realized that Eileen had always been greedy. She had laid Terry under heavy toll for small attentions and such gifts as he might give her.

Eileen's incessant eating of chocolate had made Lady O'Gara wonder how she could give so good an account of herself at meal-times. She smoked--it was a new fashion of which Lady O'Gara did not altogether approve--a cigarette now and again and Terry supplied the gold-tipped, scented kind which Eileen took from a cigarette case of platinum with her name in turquoise at the corner. The cigarette case was a new possession. Lady O'Gara supposed that it came from Terry. She had not asked. A violet scent, so good that on its first introduction Lady O'Gara had cried out that some one was wearing wet violets, now always heralded Miss Creagh's coming into a room.

There were some things which had not come from Terry. When Lady O'Gara had noticed them Eileen had said carelessly that they were given her by Robin Gillespie, the son of the doctor at Inver, and a doctor himself in the Indian Army. Anthony Creagh and his wife had an overflowing quiverful. Lady O'Gara made excuses for the girl who must have had it in her blood to do without. Still, Robin Gillespie, the doctor's son at Inver, could not have much to spare, but apparently he had given Eileen a good many trinkets.

"When does Terry join his regiment?" Sir Shawn asked his wife one day with a certain sharpness.

"Not till September."

"And it is now August. A pity he should waste his time philandering."

"Does he philander?"

Lady O'Gara's voice had a hurt sound in it. She found nothing amiss in her one child.

"He philandered with Eileen till Stella came. Now apparently he inclines to Stella. He mustn't play fast and loose with girls."

"It sounds so ugly, Shawn. Terry is incapable of such a thing,--as incapable as you yourself. He is not the flirting sort. He is just a simple boy."

There was something piteous in her voice.

Her husband lifted her face by the chin till he looked down into her eyes.

"If he were like me he would only have one love," he said. "You made your own of me, Mary, altogether, from the first moment I saw you."

Stella had made friends with every one round about her. She was in and out of the cottages. She knew all about the old people's ailments and nursed all the children. Eileen complained with a fastidious disgust that Stella did not seem to know whether the children were dirty or clean. She kissed and hugged them all the same. In likewise she loved and petted the animals and so commended herself hugely to Patsy Kenny.

"She's worth twenty of Miss Eileen," he said. "All I'm afeard of is she'll run herself into danger. She doesn't know what fear is. She ups and says to me the other day whin I bid her not make too free with the mares that the only rayson the crathurs ever was wicked was that men wasn't good to them."

"I've heard you say the same yourself, Mr. Kenny," said Susan Horridge, over the half-door of whose lodge he was leaning. He often paid Susan a visit in this uncomfortable fashion, refusing a chair in the kitchen or even one outside.

"So you have," Patsy acknowledged, and made as if to go; but lingered to ask what Mrs. Horridge thought of Miss Stella.

"I like fair hair best myself," he said, with a shy glance at Susan's hair, neatly braided around a face that began to have soft, even plump, contours once more.

"Miss Eileen has a lovely head of hair," Susan acknowledged.