I
Nelly O'Neill had her day in those earlier and quieter reaches of the
Victorian era when the privilege of microscopic biography was reserved
for the great and the criminal classes, and when the Bohemian celebrity
(who is perhaps a cross between the two) was permitted to pass--like a
magic-lantern slide--from obscurity to oblivion through an illuminated
moment.
Thus even her real name has not hitherto leaked out, and to this day the
O'Keeffes are unaware of their relative's reputation and believe their
one connection with the stage to be a dubious and undesirable
consanguinity with O'Keeffe, the actor and fertile farce-writer whose
_Wild Oats_ made a sensation at Covent Garden at the end of the
eighteenth century. To her many brothers and sisters, Eileen was just the
baby, and always remained so, even in the eyes of the eminent civil
engineer who was only her senior by a year. Among the peasantry--subtly
prescient of her freakish destinies--she was dubbed "a fairy child":
which was by no means a compliment. A bad uncanny creature for all the
colleen's winsome looks. The later London whispers of a royal origin had
a travestied germ of truth in her father's legendary descent from Brian
Boru. He himself seemed scarcely less legendary, this highly coloured
squire of the old Irish school, surviving into the Victorian era, like a
Georgian caricature; still inhabiting a turreted castle romantically out
of repair, infested with ragged parasites: still believing in high living
and deep drinking: still receiving the reverence if not the rent of a
feudal tenantry, and the affection of a horsey and bibulous countryside.
When in liquor there was nothing the O'Keeffe might not do except pay off
his mortgages. "He looked like an elephant when he put his trousers on
wrong--you know elephants have their knees the wrong way," Eileen once
told the public in a patter-song. She did not tell the public it was her
father, but like a true artist she learned in suffering what she taught
in song. One of her childish memories was to be stood in a row of
brothers and sisters against a background of antlers, fishing-rods, and
racing prints, and solemnly sworn at for innumerability by a ruddy-faced
giant in a slovenly surtout. "Bad luck to ye, ye gomerals, make up your
minds whether ye're nine or eleven," he would say. "A man ought to know
the size of his family: Mother in heaven, I never thought mine was half
so large!" These attempts to take a census of his children generally
occurred after a peasant had brought him up the drive--"hat in one hand,
and Squire in the other," as the patter-song had it. At the moment of
assisted entry his paternal dignity was always at its stateliest, and it
was not till he had gravely hung his cocked hat upon an imaginary
door-peg in the middle of the hall and seen it flop floorward that he
lost his calm. "Blood and 'ouns, ye've the door taken away again."
Sometimes--though this was scarcely a relief--another befuddled gentleman
would be left at the uninhabited lodge in his stead. That was chiefly
after hunt dinners or card and claret parties, when a new coachman would
take a quartet of gentry home, all clouded as to their identities. "Arrah
now! they've got thimselves mixed! let thim sort thimselves." And the
coachman would grab at the nearest limb, extricate it and its belongings
from the tangle, and prop the total mass against the first gate he
passed. And so with the rest.
Eileen's mother, who was as remarkable for her microscopic piety as for
the beauty untarnished by a copious maternity, figured in the child's
memories as a stout saint who moved with a rustle of silken skirts and
heaved an opulent black silk bosom relieved by a silver cross.
"Who are you?" her spouse would inquire with an oath.
"It's your wife I am, Bagenal dear," she would reply cheerfully. For she
had grown up in the four-bottle tradition, and intoxication appeared as
natural for the superior sex as sleep. Both were temporary phases, and
did not prevent men from being the best of husbands and creatures when
clear. And when the marketwomen or the beggarwomen respectfully inquired
of her, "How is your good provider?" she made her reply with no sense of
irony, though she had been long paying the piper herself. And the piper
figured literally in the household accounts, as well as the fiddler, for
the O'Keeffe was what the mud cabins called a "ginthleman to the
backbone."