THE DEAD HAND
Terry came to his mother a week later with a look in his face which
made her want to take his young head in her arms and weep over it. A
shadow had fallen on his comely youth. He looked "grumpy," as he had
been accustomed to look in his darling childhood when he was about to
have a croupy attack, at which times the sense of injury against all
the world had been part humorous, whole poignant, to his mother's mind.
"What is it, darling?" she asked, although she knew before he spoke
what was the matter.
"I have been talking to Father," he broke out. "Mother, it is
intolerable. He says he will not consent to my engagement to Stella.
As though he or anybody could prevent it."
"You have not quarrelled?" she asked in quick alarm, anxious for both
her men.
He laughed angrily.
"Oh, we didn't shout at each other, if that is what you mean. He told
me he would never consent to my engagement. Why? In the name of
Heaven why? I asked him that and he wouldn't answer me. He told me to
come to you. What bee has he got in his bonnet? I should have
thought--Stella is a sort of little sister of Terence Comerford, from
whom I am called, whose death I have always understood shadowed
Father's life. Oh, I know you've been throwing cold water on me,
leading me up to this. I knew when you would not let me shout it out
that first night, as I wanted to, before all the world. Father said
something about Eileen. Ridiculous! We have never thought of each
other. As a matter of fact she has a young man of her own. I always
knew he wanted me to marry Eileen. As though I ever could have married
any one but Stella!"
She did not at all resent her husband's laying the burden of comfort
upon her. He had always left Terry to her.
She looked at his young angry face. He was ramping up and down the
little boudoir like an animal in a cage. He was adorably young and she
loved him. What was she to say?
"I'm not a child," Terry went on. "Things can't stand like this, as
Father expects them to, apparently. One doesn't throw over a girl one
loves better than life for no reason at all, and Father will give none
except that the marriage is unsuitable. How can it be unsuitable
except that I am so unworthy of her? Mother"--he stopped suddenly in
his pacing to and fro--"you can do anything with Father. Make him see
sense. You know my whole happiness depends on this--and hers. It has
gone deep with me."
Suddenly he turned away, and putting his two arms on the mantelpiece he
laid down his face upon them.
She went to him and stroked his hair softly. He looked up at her and
his eyes were miserable, and so young.
"Darling," he said, "you have always been good to me. Can't you talk
Father over? I am going away to-morrow. If he persists in this
insanity I shall chuck my commission, go off to Canada and try to make
a home there for Stella."
"Terry!" The name was wrung from her like a cry.
"You see I couldn't stay, darling, hanging round in the hope that
Father might change his mind. I couldn't stick being engaged and not
engaged. I should hate to leave you, of course, darling, but then you
wouldn't come. You'd never leave Father. He says his decision is
final, but he gives me no reason for it. It is the maddest way of
treating a man I ever heard. What does he mean by it?"
"He was always a very indulgent father, Terry. If he refuses you a
thing you desire so much he must have a good reason."
She felt the feebleness of her plea even before he turned and looked at
her.
"That is really foolish, Mother," he said. "I beg your pardon if I am
rude. I'm not a child, to be kept in the dark and told that my elders
know what is best for me. Do you know his reasons?"
She had been dreading the question, yet she was unprepared with an
answer.
"I see you do," he went on grimly. "But of course you won't tell me,
if Father will not, though he sent me to you."
The poor lady was profoundly wretched. Tears were not far off. She
would not for the world have wept before the boy. He had enough to
bear without her tears.
"Where is your father?" she asked.
"He is in his office. You will speak to him? You angel! Tell him how
impossible it is that Stella and I could give up each other. You love
her, Mother, don't you? The bird-like thing! I remember you said at
first that she was like a bird. She has flown into my heart and I
cannot turn her out. Say..."
"I will say all I Can, Terry. Do you feel fit to go back to the
others?"
"They don't want me. They are quite happy knocking about the
billiard-balls. Evelyn would know, and I don't think I could stand
little Earnshaw's chaffing ways."
Boyishly he looked at himself in the glass. He had rumpled his hair
out of its usual order. There was a bright colour in his cheeks. He
looked brilliantly handsome. What he said was:
"Lord, what an outsider I look!"
She left him there and went off to look for her husband. Her heart was
very heavy. Already she knew that the compromise she had to suggest
would be received with scorn. It was a weak womanly compromise, just
the kind of thing a man will put his foot on and squelch utterly.
He turned round as she came in.
"Well, Mary," he said. "I've been having a very unpleasant discussion
with Terry. It ended where it began. He would not listen to me."
She came and stood behind his chair. The fire was low in the grate.
There was the intolerable smell of a smoking lamp in the room. The
reading-lamp on the table was flaring. She turned it down and
replenished the fire. The discomfort of it all--the room felt cold and
dismal--depressed her further.
"The poor boy!" she said. "What are we to do, Shawn? You can't expect
him to give up Stella without any explanation. He would be a poor
creature if he could--not your son or mine. Shawn, you will have to
tell him. How could you leave it to me?"
"And if I do, what then?"
She shook her head. She did not know what then: or rather she did not
wish to answer the question.
She was sitting on the arm of his chair. He leant his head against her
wearily. In the glass above the chimney-piece, tilted towards them,
she saw his face and was frightened. Were the purple shadows really
there, or did she only imagine them?
"If such a story had been told to me about you, Mary," he asked, "do
you suppose it would have made any difference? I would have said like
an ancestor of mine:
"Has the pearl less whiteness
Because of its birth?
Has the violet less brightness
For growing near earth?
That is what any lover worth his salt would say: yet when one is older
and very proud of one's family the bar sinister is not a thing to be
thought of."
"You said yourself that Bridyeen was an innocent creature. You forgave
Terence, who was her tempter. You love his memory and you have called
your one son after him. Is it fair, is it just?"
She was frightened at her own temerity. The subject of Terence
Comerford had always been like an open wound to her husband.
"Did I forgive Terence?" he asked with a wonder that had something
child-like about it; "I was very angry with Terence, dreadfully angry.
Do you remember that passage, Mary?
"Alas they had been friends in youth;
you know how it goes on:
"And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain."
She had slipped an arm about his neck, and her hand went on softly
caressing his cheek.
"I think we shall have to tell Terry," she said, "if we persist in our
refusal. We could not take up such an untenable position.
Unless..."--she hesitated.
"Go on, Mary," he said.
"Unless we were to accept Grace's story of Stella's birth. Why should
it not be true?" She asked the question piteously. "Are you sure,
Shawn, about the other thing?"
But while she said it she remembered Stella's likeness to Mrs. Wade.
Why, any one might see it, any one. A new fear sprang up in her heart,
troubled by many fears. This time it was for Stella. Any day, any
hour, some one besides herself might discover that likeness. Why, for
all she knew the place buzzed with it already. Sooner or later some
one would recognize Mrs. Wade as Bridyeen Sweeney. Then it would be
easy to piece the old story together. Already people had noticed that
Stella had the Comerford colour, which had been, in her own case, the
Creagh colour. Grace Comerford ought not to have come back. Shawn was
quite right. She ought not to have come back.
"You are a very clever woman, Mary. But it seems to me a cheap novel
kind of suggestion. I think we must face the thing as it is. I shall
tell Terry to-night."
Terry was told. He came to his mother's room after hearing the story.
She had been expecting him. In the end her men always brought her
their troubles. So she had piled up a bright fire, had set a couple of
softly cushioned chairs side by side, as though the physical comfort
would reach the wounded spirit. She smiled to herself rather piteously
at the thought. Men were susceptible to comfort, to being petted, no
matter at what age one loved them, or in what grief one would comfort
them.
She was in her silk dressing gown, her hair in two long plaits before
Terry came. Despite his miserable preoccupation his face lightened at
sight of her.
"How sweet you look, Mother!" he said. "And so young with your hair
like that."
"Come and sit down, my darling boy."
He came and sat by her, and presently he laid his face on her shoulder
to conceal, she divined, set eyes.
"What am I to do, Mothereen, at all, at all?" he asked, going back to
the phraseology of his nursery days.
"Your father has told you?"
"Yes, he has told me."
"It is pretty bad," she said compassionately.
"Mother," he lifted his face and his eyes were bloodshot. "Why did you
call me after that villain? Why does my father love him still? I have
never heard you say one word against him."
She flinched before the accusation.
"Dear," she said. "I have only just been told of this. Your father
kept it from me all those years."
"And you were engaged to him at the time! Good Lord!" he broke out
with young passion. "Don't tell me, Mother, that there is any excuse
for him. I could not bear that from you. One law for the man, another
for the woman: it is the easy way of the world. My poor little
darling!"
Suddenly he choked and got up and went away from her. She found
nothing to say.
He was back again in a second, while she watched him helplessly.
"I don't want her to know," he said. "She must not know. What am I to
do? She ought to enter this family as its loved and honoured daughter.
Mother, I do not intend to give her up."
She had been waiting for it. If he had said otherwise she would have
been bitterly disappointed, however much she might have tried to
deceive herself. It was a pity, a thousand pities, the child could not
have come to them without that smirch. But it had not touched her:
there was no stain on her. Thinking upon Stella's mother she said to
herself that no levity in the girl she had been had led to her
downfall. Why, Shawn had said she was the simplest, whitest of
creatures. It made Terence's sin all the blacker.
She drew her boy's head down to her and kissed it.
"I did not ask you to give her up," she said. "I do not take the
world's view of such things."
He looked at her with an incredible incredulous relief.
"You angel mother!" he said with a deep sigh. "I might have trusted
you. There is one thing. Stella must never know."
"She must never know," she repeated after him.
Her husband's foot sounded in the adjoining room and Terry went away
comforted. Shawn did not come in to say good-night to her as usual, by
which omission she conjectured the trouble of his mind. She prayed for
light, almost in despair of finding it, and slept, although she had
expected to lie awake, seeking unhappily a way out of this threatening
sorrow for all dear to her.
She awoke somewhere in the small hours. The moon was on her bed and
the air was very cold. She came awake suddenly, with a thought in her
mind so concrete that it was as though some one had spoken it aloud.
"Is it quite certain that Terence did not marry Bridyeen Sweeney?"
She caught at it as a drowning man catches at a straw. Her heart gave
a wild bound towards it. It was so thin, so frail a hope, that while
her fingers closed upon it she knew the futility. Again she slept, and
the thought was with her when she awoke in the grey morning.