Accident--the key to all great inventions--supplied Eileen with a new way
of educating her mistress. The cook had been impertinent, Mrs. Maper
complained. "Why don't you hunt her?" Eileen replied. Mrs. Maper
corrected the Irishism by saying, "Do you mean dismiss?" Eileen hastened
to accuse herself of Irish imperfections, and henceforward begged to
learn the correct phrases or pronunciations. Sometimes she ventured
apologetically to wonder if the Irish way was not more approved of the
dictionary. Then they would wander into the library in the apparently
unoccupied wing, and consult dictionary after dictionary till Eileen
hoped Mrs. Maper's brain had received an indelible impression.
One Sunday afternoon a friendly orthoepical difference of this nature
arose even as Mrs. Maper sat in her palatial drawing room waiting for
callers, and they repaired to the library, Mrs. Maper arguing the point
with loud good humour. A glass door giving by corkscrew iron steps on the
garden, banged hurriedly as they made their chattering entry. The rows of
books--that had gone with the Hall like the family portraits--stretched
silently away, but amid the smell of leather and learning, Eileen's
lively nostrils detected the whiff of the weed, and sure enough on the
top of a stepladder reposed a plain briar pipe beside an unclosed Greek
folio.
"The scent is hot," she thought, touching the still warm bowl. "Bob seems
as scared as a rabbit and as learned as an owl." Suddenly she had
difficulty in repressing a laugh. What if Bob _were_ the corresponding
male companion!
"I see Mr. Robert has forgotten his pipe," she said audaciously.
Mrs. Maper was taken aback. "The--the boy is shy," she stammered.
What! Was there a son lying _perdu_ in the house all this while? What
fun! A son who did not even go to church or to his mother's receptions.
But how had he managed to escape her? And why did nobody speak of him?
Ah, of course, he was a cripple, or facially disfigured, morbidly
dreading society, living among his books. She had read of such things.
Poor young man!
After dinner she found herself examining the family album inquisitively,
but beyond a big-browed and quite undistorted baby nursing a kitten,
there did not seem anything remotely potential, and she smiled at herself
as she thought of the difficulty of evolving bibs into briar pipes and
developing Greek folios out of kittens.
From Mrs. Maper's keenness about the University Boat Race as it drew
near, and from her wearing on the day itself a dark blue gown trimmed
profusely with ribbons of the same hue, Eileen divined that Bob was an
Oxford man. This gave the invisible deformed a new touch of interest, but
long ere this Eileen had found a much larger interest--the theatre.
She had never been to the play, and the Theatre Royal of the Black Hole
was the scene of her induction into this enchantment. In those days the
touring company system had not developed to its present complexity, and
the theatre had been closed during the first month or so of Eileen's
residence in Dromedary Town. But at length, to Mrs. Maper's delight, a
company arrived with a melodrama, and as part of her duties, Eileen, no
less excited over the new experience (which her Confessor had permitted
her), drove with her mistress behind a pair of spanking steeds to the
Wednesday _matinee_. Mrs. Maper alleged her inability to leave her
homekeeping husband as the cause of her daylight playgoing, but Eileen
maliciously ascribed it to the pomp of the open carriage.
They occupied a box and Eileen was glad they did. For instead of
undergoing the illusion of the drama, she found it killingly comic as
soon as she understood that it was serious. It was all she could do to
hide her amusement from her entranced companion, and somehow this box at
the theatre reminded her of the Convent room in which she used to sit
listening to the pious readings anent infant prodigies. One afternoon it
came upon her that here Mrs. Maper had learned her strange pump handle
gestures. Here it was that ladies worked arms up and down and pointed
denunciatory forefingers, albeit the direction had more reference to the
sentiment.
It was not till a comic opera came along that Eileen was able to take the
theatre seriously. Then she found some of the melodies of the drawing
room scores wedded to life and diverting action, sometimes even to poetic
dancing; the first gleam of poetry the stage gave her. When these airs
were lively, Mrs. Maper's feet beat time and Eileen lived in the fear
that she would arise and prance in her box. It was an effervescence of
joyous life--the factory girl recrudescent--and Eileen's hand would lie
lightly on Mrs. Maper's shoulder, feeling like a lid over a kettle about
to boil.
When they came home Eileen would gratify her mistress by imitations of
comedians. Presently she ventured on the tragedians, without being seen
through. She even raised her arm towards the ceiling or shot it towards
the centre of the carpet pattern, and Mrs. Maper followed it spellbound.
But from all these monkey tricks she found relief in her real music. When
she crooned the old Irish songs, the Black Hole was washed away as by the
soft Irish rain, and the bogs stretched golden with furze-blossom and
silver with fluffy fairy cotton, and at the doors of the straggling
cabins overhung by the cloud-shadowed mountains, blue-cloaked women
sat spinning, and her eyes filled with tears as though the peat smoke
had got into them.