CHAPTER XX

AN EAVESDROPPER

The morning sun was in my room when I awoke and my godmother was by my bed.

“You have been crying in your sleep, Bawn,” she said.  “I thought I heard you several times during the night, but was not sure.  Are you anxious about Theobald, child?”

“There is some trouble in the air,” I said, turning away my head.  “But I don’t think it was I who cried.”

“I would not say that to Lady St. Leger, Bawn,” she said, lifting my face and making me look at her.

“It is not for a death,” I said, “or we should have heard the coach.”

“God forbid!” I noticed that her face had a new look of care since yesterday, that there were rings round her fine eyes as though she had not slept.  “Yet it may be bad enough, although not for a death.”

“What is it?”

“Why, Bawn, child, that is the strangest thing of all.  You are no longer a child, Bawn, and I bring my burden to you to lighten it by sharing.  They will not tell me what the trouble is.”

“Not tell you!”

I was amazed.  For so long I had known Mary Champion as the stay and support of my grandparents that I could hardly believe there was anything they would keep from her.

“They will not tell me,” she repeated.  “Your grandmother says that it is Lord St. Leger’s will that I am not to be told.  It is something they must endure together.  I know it is something about Luke.  If they will not tell me I shall go and ask Garret Dawson why he is frightening them and with what.”

“Grandpapa would never forgive you,” I said.

The shadow fell deeper on her face.

“I know he would not,” she said.  “Must I wait for them to speak, then, lest I should do harm?”

“I think you must wait for them to speak.”

“If it was a mere matter of money”—­she wrung her hands together in a way which in a person of her calm, benignant temperament suggested great distress—­“if it were a mere matter of money, I would sell Castle Clody—­yes, every stick and stone of it.  But I think it is more than money.  I shall ask Lord St. Leger to tell me.  It is not fair that I, who ought to have been Luke’s wife and their daughter, should be kept in the dark.”

She went away and left me then, and I got up and dressed with a heavy heart, which all the chorus of the birds and the sweet green of the trees and grass and the delicious scents and sounds outside could not charm from its heaviness.

At breakfast, although my godmother did her best, talking about old friends we had met in Dublin and delivering their messages to Lord and Lady St. Leger, and although I tried to do my part, the gloom was as marked as the gloom last night.  My grandfather and grandmother sat side by side at the round table, and now and again they looked at each other like people who were absorbed in grave anxieties to the exclusion of what went on about them.