When Eileen returned to the Convent after her first summer vacation in
Ireland she was richer by a surreptitious correspondent. He wrote to her,
care of Marcelle, who had a careless mother. He was a young officer from
the neighbouring barracks who, invited to make merry with the hospitable
O'Keeffe, had fallen a victim to Eileen's girlish charms and mature
appearance, for Eileen carried herself as if her years were three more
and her inches six higher. Her face had the winsome Irish sweetness; it,
too, looked lovelier than a scientific survey would have determined. Her
nose was straightish, her mouth small, her lashes were long and dark and
conspired with her dark hair to trick a casual observer into thinking her
eyes dark, but they were grey with little flecks of golden light if you
looked closelier than you should. Her hands were large but finely shaped,
with long fingers somewhat turned back at the tips, and pretty pink
nails--the hands were especially noticeable, because even when Eileen was
not playing the pianoforte, she was prone to extend her thumb as though
stretching an octave and to flick it as though striking a note.
It was not love-letters, though, that Lieutenant Doherty sent Eileen,
for the schoolgirl had always taken him in a motherly way, and indeed
signed herself "Your Mother-Confessor." But the mystery and difficulty
of smuggling the letters to and fro lent colour to the drab Convent
days, far vivider colour than the whilom passing of verses. So long
as Marcelle's desk remained next to Eileen's it was comparatively
easy--though still risky--while one's head was studiously buried in
"Greek roots," for one's automatic hand to pass or receive the letter
beneath the desks through the dangerous space of daylight between the
two. "Let not your right hand know what your left hand doeth," Eileen
once quoted when Marcelle's conscience pricked. For Marcelle imagined
an amour of the darkest dye, and could not understand Eileen's calmness
any more than Eileen could understand Marcelle's romantic palpitations
alternating with suggestive sniggerings.
But when Marcelle was at length separated from Eileen by a suspicious
management, a much more breathless plan was necessary. For Marcelle would
deposit the Doherty letter in Eileen's compartment in the curtained row
of little niches--where one kept one's work-bag, atlas, and other
educational reserves--or Eileen would slip the reply into Marcelle's, and
there it would lie, exposed to inspectorial ransacking, till such times
as Eileen or Marcelle could transfer it to her bosom. Poor Marcelle lived
with her heart in her mouth, trembling, at every rustle of the curtain,
for her purple ribbon. However, luck favoured the bold, while the only
bad moment in which Eileen was on the verge of detection she surmounted
by a stroke of genius.
"What are you hiding there?" said the music-mistress, more sharply than
she was wont to address her pet pupil. Eileen put her hand to her bosom.
'Twas as if she were protecting the young lieutenant from pursuing foes,
and he became romantically dear to her in that perilous moment, pregnant
with swift invention.
She looked round with dramatic mysteriousness. "Hush, _ma mere_," she
breathed; "the Mother Superior might hear."
"Ah, it concerns the Reverend Mother's fete," cried the music-mistress,
falling into the trap and even saving Eileen from the lie direct. "Good,
my child," and she smiled tenderly upon her. For the birthday of the Lady
Superior which was imminent was heralded by infinite mysteriousness. The
Reverend Mother was taken by surprise, regularly and punctually. The
girls all subscribed, their parents were invited to send plants and
flowers. The air vibrated with sublime secrecy, amid which the Reverend
Mother walked guilelessly. And when the great day came and the fete was
duly sprung upon her, and the pupils all dressed in white overwhelmed her
with bouquets and courtesies, how exquisite was her pleased astonishment!
That night talking was allowed in the Refectory, and how the girls
jabbered! It was like the rolling of ceaseless thunder--one would have
thought they had never talked before and never would talk again, and that
they were anxious to unload themselves once for all.
"How the ordinary becomes the extraordinary by being forbidden,"
philosophised Eileen. "At the Castle I can do a hundred things, which
here become enormous privileges, even if I am allowed to do them at all.
Is it so with everything they say is wrong? Is all sin artificial, and do
people sin so zestfully only because they are cramped? Or is there a
residue of real wickedness?" Thus she thought, struggling against the
obsession of an inquisitorial system which merely clouded her perceptions
of real right and wrong. And alone she ate silently, a saintly figure
amid the laughing, chattering crew.
She wrote her maternal admonitions to young Doherty during the
preparation-time, and far keener than her sense of the lively,
good-looking young officer was her sense of the double life she led
through him in this otherwise monotonous Convent. When she achieved the
blue ribbon of the _Enfants de Marie_, for which she had worked with true
devotion, it added poignancy to her pious pleasure to think that one
false step in her secret life would have marred her overt life.