“Splendid,” he told her, and then left her, to get some news of Susan, if he could, by way of Dennis O’Brien’s sisters.
He’d been reminded of those girls by Janet Welford, to whom he had told the story of Susan and Dennis. Janet knew everybody, it seemed to Bertram, and he was not surprised when she said, “Dennis O’Brien? Of course! And his three sisters in Maid of Honour Row. Don’t you remember how they learned dancing with us in the old days at the Kensington Academy?”
Yes, he remembered now, three little girls with pigtails down their backs and an Irish way of speech, and a habit of dropping rosaries out of their pockets when they danced. They were Irish Catholics, and he and Janet, alone together in her rooms, had discovered them at the old address in the telephone directory, under the name of their father, Sir Montague O’Brien.
No news is good news, as Bertram found when he went to the O’Briens’ house. They had received news of their brother Dennis, and it was bad. He guessed that at once, when the maid showed him into one of the rooms of their house in Maid of Honour Row, a little Queen Anne house with panelled walls and a powder closet, where once the waiting ladies of a Stuart Queen had lived, not far from the old red-brick palace in Kensington Gardens.
The three O’Brien girls suited the house, and the panelled room, painted white, with little chintz curtains in the casement windows, and gilt-framed mirrors on the walls, and miniatures of Irish gentry in old-fashioned dress.
The girls whom he remembered with pigtails, had their dark hair coiled high, and their frocks were cut low at the neck, showing their full white throats, not unlike the portrait of a Georgian lady over their mantelpiece. Bertram remembered their names now, long forgotten, as he thought, though tucked away in his subconscious storehouse of old memories—Rose and Betty and Jane, in order of age.
A young priest was with them, and Bertram, as he entered the room, saw at a glance that they’d been praying on their knees, for they had risen hastily at the maid’s tap on the door. The young priest held his beads. They had been reciting the rosary, as Catholics do, for the dying or dead. The girls had red eyes, and tried to hide the sign of tears when Bertram announced himself as “a kind of brother-in-law” and asked for news of his sister Susan.
A letter lay open on the table, and Rose O’Brien, the eldest sister, handed it to him without a word, while another gush of tears came into her eyes. It was in Susan’s handwriting and was but a short message. Dennis had been arrested near Dublin, and taken to Mountjoy Prison. She was in hiding with friends they knew. It would not be safe for her to write any more. She sent her love, and ended her letter with the words, “God save Ireland—and my dear Dennis!”
There was silence in the room while Bertram read the letter. So Susan had crossed to Ireland with the boy, as he had guessed. Dennis had been taken to Mountjoy Prison. On what charge?
He asked the girls that.