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.
there was a silence, a gasp. mrs. comerford leant across the table and stared at the ring.
"terence's wife!" she repeated slowly. "you don't expect me to believe that! why, my god, if it were true"—her voice rose to a sudden anguish—"if it were true, if it could be true—why didn't you tell me long ago? why did you let me go on thinking such things of my boy? i won't believe it. i tell you i won't believe it. you would have been quick enough to step into my place, old judy dowd's granddaughter! is it likely you'd have gone all these years without your child—in disgrace—the mother of a child born out of wedlock? it's a lie—bride sweeney, it's a lie!"
"it is not a lie," mrs. wade said wearily. "i know it seems
incredible. there is no difficulty about proof. we were married in
dublin, when terence was at the royal barracks and i was staying with
maeve mccarthy, a school-friend. she was my bridesmaid."
mrs. comerford put a bewildered hand to her head. her other hand clutched the rail of a chair as though her head reeled. lady o'gara and terence looked on as spectators, out of it, though passionately interested. lady o'gara gave a quick glance at her son. there was a strange light on his face. he put out his hand and steadied mrs. comerford, helping her to a chair. as she sat down, the long black draperies floating about her, she looked more than ever a tragedy queen.
"you have your marriage certificate?" she asked with an effort.
"i have never parted with it."
"if you are not mad, will you tell me why you masqueraded as my son's mistress when you were his wife?"
"because your son was so afraid of you—you may believe it or not as you will—that he made me swear never to tell it to any one till he gave me leave. poor terence! he did not live to give me leave. he had made up his mind to tell you. he said our child should be born in his old home. then he was killed, and my baby was born, and the world was at an end for me. i only wanted to go away and die somewhere. my grandmother had been terrible; and then you came and you were terrible too: and you took away my baby. i don't think i knew or thought how it was going to affect the baby. you said that she would be brought up to inherit inch if i never claimed her. i was very innocent, very ignorant. i kept the oath i had sworn to terence. i have kept it all these years."
"he need not have been afraid of me," mrs. comerford said in a heart-broken voice. "i loved him so much that i could have forgiven him his marriage. do you think that i would have kept your place from you all these years? that i would have lied and lied to keep the world from knowing what i thought the shameful secret of stella's birth?"
"i think nothing. i only know that he who was afraid of nothing else was afraid of your anger."
the two women stared at each other. something of pity came into mrs.
wade's face.
"it might be that he loved you so well he couldn't bear to bring you trouble," she said. "i was only a poor girl from the village, judy dowd's grand-daughter, who served in the bar of the little public-house. it would have been a bitter story for you to hear, and you so proud."
"terence would have raised his wife to his own station. what insanity! i was always hot-tempered but i soon cooled and forgave. what was there in my anger for my six-foot son to be afraid of?"
mary o'gara remembered how terence shook with terror of his mother's anger after some boyish escapade. grace comerford deceived herself! apparently she had no idea of how terrible her fits of temper could be, how the fear of them overclouded the lives of children, defenceless before her.
"you wanted her," mrs. wade indicated lady o'gara—"for terence's wife.
it was not likely you could have put up with me instead."
"she preferred shawn o'gara," said mrs. comerford, with a queer bitterness. "i might have turned to you who loved terence. i had nothing against shawn o'gara. he loved terence better than a brother. i meant not to lose sight of you though i forbade you ever to claim the child. you disappeared from the place where i had sent you. i did not mean you to want for anything. after all you were terence's."
her voice ended on a queer note of tenderness.
suddenly terry o'gara spoke, coming out of his corner, the bright light on his glowing eager young face.
"stella will not refuse to listen to me, now," he said. "you will not refuse me stella, mrs. comerford?"
he addressed mrs. wade. the name sounded most strangely in the ears of those who heard it. the woman addressed coloured and looked at him with softly parted lips. her eyes were suddenly dewy.
"if it had been as … as … the poor darling thought," the boy blushed vividly, averting his gaze from the face that was so like stella's in its softness and wonder and shyness—"it would have made no difference. my mother knows. it would have made no difference. the only barrier would have been stella herself. i was afraid of stella's will."
"stella must decide for herself. thank god, she did not turn from her mother. i thought i would go away and that this tale need never be told. i knew i had been wrong to come back. i never thought any one would have had the heart to tell my child that story."
she turned suddenly accusing eyes on mrs. comerford.
"even yet she does not know that i was married to her father," she went on. "but she does not shrink from me. my little daughter! that such an anguish as that should ever have come to her! she has chosen me even so before all the world!"
she lifted her head proudly as she said it. then her expression softened as she saw the shadow on terry o'gara's candid face.
"give her time," she said. "if your father and mother will not mind her being my daughter—why—i think you should ask her."
"where have you been hiding yourself all this time?" mrs. comerford asked, with a certain roughness. "if i had known where you were i might have extracted this story from you earlier. i suppose it is true. how i have suffered by your folly! do you know that i have had hard thoughts of my dead son—that he disgraced me?"
"he thought you would call his marriage disgrace."
"he wronged me there. it would have been a bitter pill, but i'd have got over it. to think of all those years during which i believed that my one son had betrayed a girl and left her to suffer the shame."
"you should not have thought it; you were his mother," mrs. wade, or mrs. comerford, said simply. then she settled down as to a story-telling.
"my grandmother kept her word to you, mrs. comerford," she said. "you told her i was not to come back. she did not live very long after we left killesky. we had reached liverpool on our way to america, and she became ill there. she was very old and she had gipsy blood. she thought i had disgraced her. even then i kept my oath to terence, till almost the very end when she was dying—i thought he would forgive—i whispered in her ear that i was married. she died happy because of that word."
"what folly it was! what cruel folly!" the other woman said, as though she were in pain.
"i came back again," mrs. wade went on, "after some years. i did go to america, but the homesickness was terrible. it was bad enough wanting the child, but wanting the country was a separate pain. it was like a wolf in my heart. i used to look at an irish face in the street and wonder if the man or woman suffered as i did. i believe that if i had had stella i should have still suffered as much, or nearly as much."
"i know," mrs. comerford said. "it was not as bad with me, but i had to come back."
"i did not dare come near killesky, though i knew that trouble had altered me. i came to drumlisk on the other side of the mountain. you had been generous, mrs. comerford, and my grandmother had saved money and i wanted for nothing. i lived in a little cottage there and i nursed the poor. father anthony o'connell, the priest there, was very good to me. he is a dear old saint. he had a terrible woman for housekeeper. she had a wicked tongue, and she persecuted him with her tantrums, and half-starved him because she was too lazy to cook for him or get up in the morning to keep his house. he used to say—'ah well, she doesn't drink!' he'd find some good in the worst. he wouldn't get rid of her, but at last she got rid of herself. she went off to look after a distant cousin, who was old and dying and had a little money to leave. i hope she didn't hasten the creature's death. i was with him three months—i loved to work for him: he was such an old saint and so grateful—when she came back and wanted to take up the place again. she hadn't got the money, i believe, after all. but by that time i knew more about her than the saintly old man did, and i threatened to tell, and so got rid of her. i was very happy there at drumlisk—there was a light upon the house. why wouldn't there be with a saint in it? and the least thing you did for him he was so grateful. i told him about my marriage and the oath i'd taken. he absolved me from that oath. he said it wasn't binding, and that i was in the wrong to let people think me something i was not, much less the wrong to the child deprived of her father as well as her mother."
"he was quite right there," mrs. comerford said. "i never had stella's heart. she wanted you if she could not have her father."
"i had too low an opinion of myself. i said to myself that stella would grow up a lady and i was a poor woman. i had done better for her by not claiming her, no matter what sorrow it had meant to me. i had my spies out all the time. lizzie brennan recognized me one day she wandered into the church at drumlisk when i was cleaning the sanctuary lamp. it was no use denying it. she knew me. i made her promise she'd never tell. the creature was grateful for the little i could do for her. she told me inch was empty all those years. then, when father o'connell died, and i was in grief for him, she came and told me mrs. comerford had come back with the little lady. the longing grew on me—i was very lonely and so i came to waterfall cottage, that i might see the child i'd been longing for all my days."
"you should have walked into inch and said out that you were my son's lawful wife. i am not the woman to turn my back on his wife, even though you were judy dowd's grandchild," mrs. comerford said fiercely.
"i never thought of doing that. i only wanted to get a glimpse of the child now and again. then you, lady o'gara, brought her to me, and the love leapt up alive between us the minute we met. i gave myself up to it for a while, feeling as though i was committing a sin all the time. then i was frightened by old lizzie. she discovered somehow that stella was my daughter. she was getting less reliable, being so old. i did not want to stand between stella and her happiness." she looked at terry. "so i ran away, meaning to send for my things. i never meant to come back. i returned to my old cottage at drumlisk till i could make up my mind where i was to go to. lizzie found me there. it is a long way over the mountains. she walked it in the wind and rain to tell me stella was here and pining for me—so i came."
"go up and tell the child, if she can listen to you, that we are friends," mrs. comerford said. "tell her you are terence's wife and my daughter. tell her i am not such an ogre as she thinks and you think. tell her that you and she are to come to inch as soon as she can be moved. tell her all that, mrs. terence comerford. perhaps then she will consent to see me."
she pointed a long finger at stella's mother, looking more than ever like a priestess, and mrs. wade, as she had called herself, obeyed meekly.
when the door closed behind her mrs. comerford turned to terry.
"good-bye," she said. "the future will be yours. you are like your mother, and she never had any worldly wisdom. i love you for it, but now you had better go."
so terry and his mother went away, passing in the dark road mrs. comerford's carriage with its bright lights and champing and impatient horses.
