Eileen became interested in Robert Maper, for the old books he opened
up to her were quite new and enlarging. She had imagined the Church
replacing Paganism as light replaced darkness. Now she felt that it was
only as gas replaced candle-light. The darkness was less Egyptian than
the nuns insinuated. Plato in particular was a veritable chandelier. It
occurred to her suddenly that he might be on the black list. But she was
afraid to ask her Confessor for fear of hearing her doubt confirmed. To
tell the good father of the semi-secret meetings in the library would
have been superfluous, since there was nothing to conceal even from Mrs.
Maper, though that lady did not happen to know of them. Eileen did not
even use the garden door. Besides, there was never a formal appointment,
not infrequently, indeed, a disappointment, when the library held nothing
but books. Robert Maper merely provided that possibility of an innocent
double life, without which existence would have been too savourless for
Eileen. Even a single line of railway always appeared dismal to her; she
liked the great junctions with their bewildering intertanglements, their
possibilities of collision. And now that Lieutenant Doherty had faded
away into Afghanistan and silence--he did not even acknowledge the letter
announcing her approaching marriage--Robert Maper proved a useful
substitute.
One day Mr. Maper senior invited her to drive down with him and go over
the factory, and as Mrs. Maper was not averse from impressing her
employee by the sight of the other employes, she was permitted to go.
Nothing, however, would induce Mrs. Maper to adventure herself in these
scenes of her early life, touching which she professed a sovereign
ignorance. "Machines are so clattery," she said. "My head wouldn't stand
them. I once went to that exhibition in London and I said to myself,
never no more for this gal."
"And you never did go _any_ more since you were a _girl_?" asked the
companion, with professional pointedness.
"No, never no more," replied Mrs. Maper, serenely, "once is too often, as
the gal said when the black man kissed her."
Eileen laughed dutifully at this quotation from the latest comic opera,
and went off, delighted to companion the husband by way of change. He
proved quite a new man, too, in his own element, bringing the most
complicated machinery to the level of her understanding. Room after room
they passed through, department after department full of tireless
machinery, and tired men and women, who seemed slaves to the whims of
fantastic iron monsters, all legs and arms and wheels. It took a morning
to see everything, down to the pasting and drying and packing rooms, and
as a last treat Mr. Maper took her to the engine-room, whence he said
came the power that turned those myriad wheels, moved those myriad
levers, in whatever department they might be and whatever their function.
Eileen gazed long at the mighty engine, rapt in reverie. She could
scarcely tear herself away, and when at last Mr. Maper brought her into
the counting-house, she had forgotten that she must meet his son there.
The white-browed clerk in corduroys did not, however, raise his eyes from
his ledger, and Eileen was grateful to him for preserving the piquancy of
their relation.
She did not find it so piquant, though, in the library next Sunday
afternoon when he was clutching at her hand and asking her to be his
wife. She awoke as from a dream to the perception of a solemn and
grotesque fact.
"Oh, please!" and she tried to tear her hand away.