"Your father will be sorry you take it like that, mavourneen." And the
stout saint burst into tears.
Eileen winced. She could almost have flung her arms round her mother and
promised to think of it. Suddenly she remembered Lieutenant Doherty. How
dared they tear her away from the man she loved! They had not even
consulted her. She flicked her thumb agitatedly on the back of her
mother's chair. Let her weep! Did they want to sell her, to exchange her
for a castle, as if she were a chess-piece? The thought made her smile
again.
Her mother said no more, but she could not have employed a more
convincing eloquence. The reticence wrought upon Eileen's nerves. After a
couple of months of maternal meekness and family poverty, the suggested
sacrifice began to appeal to her. A letter from Doherty on his steamer
(forwarded to her from Paris by Marcelle), passionately protesting
against her intention to take the vows, came to remind her that sacrifice
was what she yearned for. The coming of the letter was providential, she
told herself: if Marcelle had not posted hers against her will, she might
not have had this monition. To return to the Castle as a bride, martyred
for the family redemption, was really only a way of returning to the
Convent. It meant a life of penance for the good of others. To think
of her mother sunning herself again upon the battlemented terrace, or
sleeping--if only as guest--in the great panelled bedroom, brought a lump
to her throat; her poor tenantry, too, should bless her name; she would
glide among them like a spirit, very sad, yet with such healing in her
smile and in her touch. "Sure the misthress is the swatest angel God iver
sint, so she is." At home she would sit and spin in the old tapestried
room, her own life as faded, and sometimes she would dream in the hall,
among the antlers and beast-skins, and watch the great burning logs, so
much more poetic than this peat smoke which hurt one's eyes. Ah, but then
there was O'Flanagan. Well, he would not be much in the way. He liked
riding over his new estate in his buckskin breeches, cracking his great
loaded whip. She had met him herself once or twice, and the great shy
creature had blushed furiously and ridden off down the first bridle-path.
"I turn his horse's head as well as his," she had thought with a smile.
Yes, she must sacrifice herself. How strange that the nuns should
imagine you only renounced by giving up earthly life. Why, earthly life
might be the most celestial renunciation of all. But Lieutenant Doherty,
what of him? Had she the right to sacrifice him, too? But then she had
never given him any claim upon her--she had been merely his little
mother-confessor. If he had dared to love her--as his passionate protest
against the veil seemed to suggest--it was at his own risk. Poor Doherty,
how grieved he would be in far Afghanistan. He would probably rush upon
the assegais and die, murmuring her name. Her eyes filled with delicious
tears. She sat down and scribbled him a letter hastily, announcing her
impending marriage, and posted it at once, so as to put herself beyond
temptation to draw back. Then she dashed to her mother's room and sobbed
out, "Dear heart, I consent to be martyred."
"What?" said Mrs. O'Keeffe, opening her eyes.
"I consent to be married," Eileen corrected hastily.
"Do you mean to Mr. O'Flanagan?" Mrs. O'Keeffe's face became red as the
sun in mist. The cross heaved convulsively on her black silk bosom.
"To whom else? You haven't forgotten he wanted to marry me."
"No, but _he_ has, I am fearing."
"What?" It was now Eileen's turn to open her eyes, and the tears dried on
her lashes as she listened. Mrs. O'Keeffe explained, amid the ebb and
flow of burning blood, that she had waited in vain for Mr. O'Flanagan to
renew his proposal. At first she thought he was waiting for a decent
interval to elapse, or for the Castle to be ready for his bride, but
gradually she had become convinced by his silence and by the way he
avoided her eye when they met and turned his horse down the nearest
boreen, that Eileen had been right in calling him half-mounted. He had
proposed when he imagined the Squire's fortunes were as of yore, but now
he feared he would have to support the ruined family. Well, he needn't
fear. The family wouldn't touch him with a forty-foot pole.
"If only your poor father had been alive," wound up Mrs. O'Keeffe, "the
dirty upstart would never have dared to put such an insult on his
orphaned daughter, that he wouldn't, and if Dan O'Leary should hear of
it--which the saints forbid--it's not the jig that his foot would be
teaching Mr. O' Flanagan."
The bathos of this anti-climax to martyrdom was too grotesque. Eileen
burst into a peal of laughter, which was taken by her mother as a tribute
to her lively vituperation. Decidedly, life was deliciously odd. Suddenly
she remembered her posted letter to Doherty, and she laughed louder.
Should she send another on its heels? No, it would be rather difficult to
explain. Besides, it would be so interesting to see how he replied.
V
Holly Hall--Eileen's first place--was in the English midlands, towards
the North: a sombre stone house looking down on a small manufacturing
town, whose very grass seemed dingied with coal-dust. "A dromedary town,"
Eileen dubbed it; for it consisted of a long level with two humps,
standing in a bleak desert. On one of the humps she found herself
perched. Below--between the humps--lay the town proper, with its savour
of grime and gain. The Black Hole was Eileen's name for this quarter;
and indeed you might leave your hump, bathed in sunlight, dusty but still
sunlight, and as you came down the old wagon-road you would plunge deeper
and deeper into the yellowish fog which the poor townspeople mistook for
daylight. The streets of the Black Hole bristled with public-houses,
banks, factories, and dissenting chapels. The population was given over
to dogs and football, and medical men abounded. Arches, blank walls, and
hoardings were flamboyant with ugly stage-beauties, melodramatic
tableaux, and the advertisements of tailors. After the Irish glens and
the Convent garden the Black Hole was not exhilarating.
Mr. Maper, the proprietor of Holly Hall, was a mill-owner, a big-boned,
kindly man, who derived his Catholicism from an Irish mother, and had
therefore been pleased to find an Irish girl among the candidates for the
post of companion to his wife.
As he drove her from the station up the steep old wagon-road he explained
the situation, in more than one sense. Eileen's girlish intuition helped
his lame sentences over the stiles. Briefly, she was to polish the
quondam mill-hand, whom he had married when he, too, was a factory
operative, but who had not been able to rise with him. He was an alderman
and a J.P. That made things difficult enough. But how if he became Mayor?
An alderman has no necessary feminine, not even alderwoman, but Mayor
makes Mayoress. And a Mayoress is not safe from the visits of royalty
itself. Of course the Mayoress was not to suspect she was being refined;
"made a Lady Mayoress," as Eileen put it to herself.
She entered with a light heart upon a task she soon found heavy. For
the mistress of Holly Hall had no sense of imperfections. She was a
tall and still good-looking person, and this added to her fatal
complacency. Eileen saw that she imagined God made the woman and money
the lady, and that between a female in a Paris bonnet and a female in a
head-shawl there was a natural gap as between a crested cockatoo and a
hedge-sparrow. Mrs. Maper indeed suffered badly from swelled self, for it
had subconsciously expanded with its surroundings. The wide rooms of the
Hall were her spacious skirts, bedecked with the long glitter of the
glass-houses; her head reached the roof and wore the weathercock as a
feather in her bonnet. All those whirring engines in the misty valley
below were her demon-slaves, and the chimneys puffed up incense at her.
When she drove out, her life-blood coursed pleasurably through the
ramping, glossy horses.
Mrs. Maper, in short, saw herself an empress. It was simply impossible
for her to realise that there were eyes which could still see the
head-shawl, not the crown. Her one touch of dignity was grotesque--it
consisted of extending her arm like a stiff sceptre, in moments of
emphasis, and literally pointing her remarks with her forefinger.
Sometimes she pointed to the ceiling, sometimes to the carpet, sometimes
to the walls. This digital punctuation appeared to be not only
superfluous but irrelevant, for Heaven might be invoked from the floor.
With this bejewelled lady Eileen passed her days either on the Hump, or
in the Black Hole, or in the environs, and but for her sense of humour
and her power of leading a second life above or below her first, her
tenure of the post would have been short. The most delicate repetitions
of mispronounced words, the subtlest substitution of society phrases for
factory idioms, fell blunted against an impenetrable ignorance and
self-sufficiency. Short of dropping the pose of companion and boldly
rapping a pupil on the knuckles, there seemed to her no way of modifying
her mistress. "Who can refine what Fortune has gilded?" she asked herself
in humorous despair. The appearance of Mr. Maper at dinner brought little
relief. It was a strange meal in the lordly dining room--three covers
laid at one end of the long mahogany table, under the painted stare of
somebody else's ancestors. Eileen's girlish enjoyment of the prodigal
fare was spoiled by her furtive watch on the hostess's fork. Nor did the
alderman contribute ease, for he was on pins lest the governess should
reveal her true mission, and on needles lest his wife should reveal her
true depths. Likewise he worried Eileen to drink his choicest wines.
Vintages that she felt her father would have poised on his tongue in
mystic clucking ecstasy stood untasted in a regiment of little glasses
at her elbow.
She repaid them, however, by adroit educational remarks.
"How stupid of me again!" she said once. "I held out my hock glass for
the champagne! Do tell me again which is which, dear Mrs. Maper."
"I suppose you never had a drink of champagne in your life afore you come
here," said Mrs. Maper, beamingly. And she indicated the port glass.
"No, no, Lucy, don't play pranks on a stranger," her husband put in
tactfully. "It's this glass, Miss O'Keeffe."
"Oh, thank you!" Eileen gushed. "And this is what? Sherry?"
"No, port," replied Mr. Maper, scarcely able to repress a wink.
"You'll have to tell me again to-morrow night," said Eileen, enjoying her
own comedy powers. "My poor father tried to teach me the difference
between bird's-eye and shag, but I could never remember."
"Ah, Bob's the boy for teaching you that," guffawed the mill owner. "I
stick to half-crown cigars myself." His wife shot him a dignified rebuke,
as though he were forgetting his station in undue familiarity.
Afterwards Eileen wondered who Bob was, but at the moment she could think
of nothing but the farcical complications arising from the idea of Mrs.
Maper's providing Mr. Maper with a male companion secretly to improve
_his_ manners. Of course the _two_ companions would fall in love with
each other.
After dinner things usually woke up a little, for Eileen was made to play
and even sing from the scores of "Madame Angot" and other recent comic
operas--a form of music that had not hitherto come her way, though it was
the only form the music-racks held to feed the grand piano with. Not till
the worthy couple had retired, could she permit herself her old Irish
airs, or the sonatas and sacred pieces of the Convent.