Love of Brothers Part 12

The light from the cottage fell full on the cairn. Sir Shawn's eyes rested on it and were quickly averted. There the heap of stones for mending the road had lain that night long ago when Spitfire, had run away with Terence Comerford and thrown him. There had been blood on the stones--blood and ... and ... brains. Horrible!

Sir Shawn had come level now with the long ray of light. At the edge of it he paused. He could see plainly the interior of the room. The unshaded lamp threw its bright light into every corner of the room. It was comfortable and homelike. The furniture had belonged to the previous tenant of the cottage and had been taken over by the estate.

It was good, old-fas.h.i.+oned furniture of a certain dignity. The grandfather clock by the wall, the tall mahogany bookcase, the sofa and chairs covered in red damask, were all good. There was a round convex mirror above the fireplace and some pictures on the wall. The fire burned brightly, toning down somewhat the hard unshaded lamplight.

A woman was sitting by the fire. She was in black with a white collar and cuffs. Her hair was braided about her head. She sat with her cheek resting in her hand, a pensive figure.

As though she knew she was being watched she started, turning her face sharply towards the window. Evidently she had forgotten to pull down the blind. As she turned, her face was in the full lamplight.

"My G.o.d!" Sir Shawn said to himself. "My G.o.d!"

He stood for a few seconds as though in pain, leaning against the horse's side, before he went on. When he lifted his head darkness had come again. The window had been shuttered.

CHAPTER IX

THE LETTER

From the pile of her letters one morning a month or so later, Lady O'Gara picked out one and eyed it with distaste. It looked mean. The envelope of flimsy paper was dirty. Some emanation came from the thing like a warning of evil: she laid it on one side, away from her honest respectable letters.

While she read through one or two of these the disreputable letter awaiting her attention worried her. It was something importunate, disagreeable, like a debased face thrust in at her door. With a sigh she turned to it, to get it out of the way before she opened Terry's letter, clean and dandyish, written on the delicate paper the Regiment affected.

She held the thing gingerly by the edge, and, going away from the table, she stood by the fire while she opened it. A smell of turf-smoke came out of it,--nothing worse than that. Perhaps, after all, it was only one of the many appeals for help which came to her pretty constantly.

"HONOURED MADAM,--This is from one who wishes you no harm, but onley good. There is a woman lives in the Waterfall Cottage your husband goes to see often. Such doins ought not to be Aloud.

"From your sinceer Well-Wisher, x.x.x."

If it had been a longer letter she would not have read it. It was so short and written so legibly that the whole disgraceful thing leaped at her in a single glance.

As though it had been a noxious reptile which had bitten her she flung it from her into the heart of the brightly burning fire of wood and turf. A little flame sprang up and it was gone, just as Sir Shawn came into the room.

They had the breakfast room to themselves now that there were no visitors, but Lady O'Gara hesitated to speak. She had no intention of keeping the matter of the anonymous letter from her husband, but she wanted to let him eat his breakfast in peace, and to talk later on, secure from possible interruptions.

She gave him sc.r.a.ps of news from her letters, and from _The Times_ of the preceding day, which reached them at their breakfast table. She felt disturbed and agitated, but only as one does who has received an insult. She would be better when she had told Shawn about the horrid thing.

Her restlessness, so unlike her usual benign placidity, at last attracted her husband's notice.

"Any disturbing news, Mary?" he asked.

"Nothing." Her hand hovered over Terry's letter. "Terry thinks he can get a few days' leave next week for the pheasants and bring a couple of brother-officers with him."

"H'm!" Sir Shawn said, a little grimly. "He hasn't been away very long. I suppose Eileen is coming back."

"She comes on Monday."

"I expect he knows it."

"Perhaps he does. Have you finished, Shawn? Another cup of tea? No?

I want to talk to you, dear. Will you come out to the Robin's Seat.

It is really a beautiful morning."

"Let me get my pipe."

Unsuspiciously he found his pipe and tobacco pouch and followed her.

The Robin's Seat was a wooden seat below a little hooded arch, under a high wall over which had grown all manner of climbing wall-plants. The arbour and the seat were on the edge of a path which formed the uppermost of three terraces: below the lowest the country swept away to the bog. The wall, made to copy one in a famous Roman garden, was beautiful at all times of the year, with its strange clinging and climbing plants that flourished so well in this mild soft air. In Autumn it was particularly beautiful with its deep reds and golds and purples and bronzes. The Robin's Seat was a favourite resting-place of these two married lovers, who fed the robins that came strutting about their feet, and even perched on their knees, asking a crumb.

Despite the disturbance of her mind Lady O'Gara had not forgotten her feathered pensioners. She threw crumbs to them as she talked, and the robins picked them up and flirted their little heads and bodies daintily, turning a bright inquiring eye on her when the supply ceased.

"Well, Mary?"

"I hate to tell you, Shawn." She brushed away the last crumbs from her lap. "I did not tell you the truth when I said there was nothing disturbing among my letters."

"I knew there was something. We have not lived so long together for me not to know you through and through. And you are as open as the day."

"It was a horrid thing, a creeping, lying thing."

"An anonymous letter." His eyes fluttered nervously under the droop of the long lashes. "You should have put it in the fire, darling."

"I did. There was so little of it that unfortunately I saw it all at a glance. It is horrid to think that any one about here could do such a thing."

Suddenly she laughed. She had a peculiarly joyous laugh.

"They,--whoever wrote it--should have said something more likely to be believed. They said--I beg your pardon for telling you, Shawn--that you were visiting a lady at the Waterfall Cottage."

She was looking at him and suddenly she saw the shadows come in his face which had had the power to disturb her before: or she thought she did. The upper part of his face was in shadow from the balsam that dropped its trails like a fringe over the arch.

"You did not believe it, Mary?"

"What do you think? Would you believe such a story of me?"

"Don't!" he said, and there was something sharp, like a cry, in the protest. "No reptile would be base enough to spit at you."

They were alone together. Below them the terraces fell to the coloured bogs. A river winding through the bog showed as a darkly blue ribbon, reflecting the cloud of indigo which hung above the bog. Beyond was the Wood of the Echoes, the trees apparently with their feet in the water in which other trees showed inverted. Not a creature to see them, but the robins.

Suddenly he put his head down on her shoulder, with the air of a tired child.

"Your correspondent was not a liar, Mary," he said. "I have visited Mrs. Wade at Waterfall Cottage, at night too, and only not by stealth because I thought that Hercules' ghost--" he s.h.i.+vered a little--"would have kept spies and onlookers from that place."

Lady O'Gara s.h.i.+fted his head slightly with the greatest gentleness, so that she might caress him, stroking his hair with her fingers.

"Well, and why not?" she asked, with her air of gaiety.

"There never was such a wife as you, Mary," he said. "Go on stroking my hair. It draws the pain out."