Trueberry was so improved next morning that I found the children playing in his room. They were a little lad and girl in the toddling age, prettily named Brendan and Mave. I have never seen children so well-bred, so charming to look at and to talk to. The boy had thick brown curls, with a reddish gleam in them, and his mother’s eyes, while the girl had her gold hair, with big eyes, like the leaf of a purple pansy. They lisped, as only angels ought to lisp, and fetched your heart between your eyelashes from very delight and sympathy.
While we played and chattered, and those pretty creatures rolled over Trueberry, the waves of their embroidered skirts entangled in his beard and neck, they like white balls, taking their falls so good-humouredly, and then on the ground, standing like birds to shake out their snowy plumage, the door opened, and Brases smiled upon the threshold.
Trueberry’s pinched expressive face waved pink, and gazing blue went instantly to black. I stood grasping the back of my chair, and saw Brases for the first time not icily aloof, not throned on dead dreams. There was a human flame under her pallor, and her smile had an approachable womanly sweetness. It deepened the grey of her eyes, and lent an ineffable softness to her sad mouth. The curves of the lips pleaded like a child’s for tenderness and unexacting devotion. I could have bent a knee to her in a rush of feeling less lofty than homage, and said: ‘Bid me suffer, dear one, so that you are happy.’ To my surprise, she shook hands with me, in cordial frankness, hoped I was pleased with the condition of my friend, and then bent and took Trueberry’s hand with a very different air. Of course, he was her invalid, and no woman worth the name is ever the same to the sick and the strong. For Brases to look at me like that, and hold my hand with that gentle imperiousness, I, too, should have to be wounded and stretched under her roof on my back.
She had no Irish fluency, and her speech was curiously strained and elaborated, without, however, any obvious affectation. The words came deliberately, and yet with a fearless reticence. It was repression, not secrecy. Life with her was a tale of baffled personal hopes, of unmeasured pain, of nature overcome, of lower impulses proudly unrecognised, of cold allegiance to duty, and the unfathomable tenderness of maternity. Her children, as she told us, with their little arms about her neck, were her one joy.
‘I fear I spoil them,’ she added; ‘but I strive to make them think of others, while they, alas! so well know that I only think of them.’
Mave, I was glad to see, was the mother’s favourite. At all times I like a woman to love her girls best; the preference breathes in my esteem, so essentially of distinction and lovableness. But æsthetic gratification here was sharpened by the fact that Mave’s father had never seen her. To me Mave was all her mother’s child, for which reason, during my visits, I never failed to coax her on my knee, where she would sit at first in a stiffened attitude of good behaviour, until she got used to my dark, foreign face, and gleefully ran to greet me. While she nestled and gurgled in my arms, lisping her excited speech, Trueberry and Brendan chanted nursery rhymes, taught each other surprising verses, and told one another fairy tales.
It was the day Trueberry first got up that conjecture stabbed me with the jealous knife of certainty. Despair closed round me like a physical grasp, and I toppled rudely over my airy ideal of renunciation and self-effacement. I had dwelt with such soothing vanity of spirit on my gracious bending to the happiness of my sovereign lady and my friend, and when I saw them then exchange a long, grave, shining gaze of full confession, and noted the enchanting air of command with which she waved him back to his chair, when he stood to greet her, the deeps of nature burst their barriers.
Unstrung and irritable from the strain of my false position, I walked rapidly up to the cottage, asking myself whether I should go or stay, and unable to decide which would cost me more. My host was smoking a pipe outside, in placid contemplation of a patch of potatoes. He directed secretive eyeshot sideways on me in sharp inquiry, then bent his glance again upon the green leaves, and meditatively kicked away a stone.
‘’Tisn’t good for a young man of your years, sir, to lead this sort of life,’ he said. ‘Foreign cities are gay places, I’ve heard tell. ’Tis among them you ought to be. The moors, and the rocks, and the sea, the praties I plant and eat, and the salmon I catch, satisfy the likes of me, but I’m thinking, sir, ’tis poor work for you, counting the stars be night, and crying for the moon be day.’
‘A man might be worse employed than watching the stars,’ I replied, ignoring his rebuke.