The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes Part 59

"A weatherc.o.c.k is dead--you are alive."

"Not at night, _ma mere_. At home in my bedroom I used to put out my candle every night by clapping the extinguisher upon it. Who is it puts the extinguisher upon me?"

The good sister almost wished it could be she.

But she replied gently, "It is G.o.d who gives us sleep--we can't be always awake."

"Then I am not responsible for my dreams anyhow?"

"I hope you don't have bad dreams," said the nun, affrighted.

"Oh, I dream--what do I not dream? Sometimes I fly--oh, so high, and all the people look up at me, they marvel. But I laugh and kiss my hand to them down there."

"Well, there's no harm in flying," said the nun. "The angels fly."

"Oh, but I am not always an angel in my dreams. Is it G.o.d who sends these bad dreams, too?"

"No--that is the devil."

"Then it is sometimes he who puts the extinguisher on?"

"That is when you have not said your prayers properly."

Eileen opened wide eyes of protest. "Oh, but, dear mother, I always say my prayers properly."

"You think so? That is already a sin in you--the sin of spiritual pride."

"But, _ma mere_, devil-dreams or angel-dreams--it is always the same in the morning. Every morning one finds oneself ready on the pillow, like a clock that has been wound up. One did not make the works."

"But one can keep them clean."

Eileen burst into a peal of laughter.

"_Qu'avez-vous donc?_" said the good creature in vexation.

"I thought of a clock washing its face with its hands."

"You are a naughty child--one cannot talk seriously to you."

"Oh, dear mother, I am just as serious when I am laughing as when I am crying."

"My child, we must never cultivate the mocking spirit. Leave me. I am vexed with you."

As her first communion approached, however, all these simmerings of scepticism and revolt died down into the recommended _recueillement_. Her days of retreat, pa.s.sed in holy exercises, were an ecstasy of absorption into the divine, and the pious readings began to a.s.sume a truer complexion as the experiences of sister-souls, deep crying unto deep. Oh, how she yearned to take the vows, to leave the trivial distracting life of the outer world for the peace of self-sacrificial love!

As she sat in the chapel, all white muslin and white veil, her hair braided under a little cap, the new rosary of amethyst--a gift from home--at her side, her hands clasped, exalted by incense and flowers and the sweet voices of the choir, chanting Gounod's Canticle, "_Le Ciel a visite la terre_," she felt that never more would she let this celestial visitant go. When after the communion she pulled the last piece of veiling over her face, she felt that it was for ever between her and the crude world of sense; the "Hymn of Thanksgiving" was the apt expression of her emotions.

But next time she came under these aesthetic, devotional influences--even as her own voice was soaring heavenward in the choir--she thought to herself, "How delicious to have an emotion which you feel will last for ever and which you know won't!" And a gleam of amus.e.m.e.nt flitted over her rapt features.

III

When Eileen returned to the Convent after her first summer vacation in Ireland she was richer by a surrept.i.tious 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 p.r.o.ne 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.s or receive the letter beneath the desks through the dangerous s.p.a.ce of daylight between the two. "Let not your right hand know what your left hand doeth," Eileen once quoted when Marcelle's conscience p.r.i.c.ked. 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 sn.i.g.g.e.rings.

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.

IV

As the end of her conventual period drew nigh Eileen resolved never to go back to the spotted world, but to ask her father to pay her dowry as Bride to the Church, and she had just placed in Marcelle's niche the letter informing Lieutenant Doherty of her call to the higher life (and pointing out how apter than ever his confessions would now be) when Marcelle's signal warned her to look in her own niche. There she found a letter which she could not read till bread-and-chocolate time, but which then took the flavour out of these refreshments. Her lover--he leaped to that verbal position in her thought in this moment of crisis--was ordered off in haste to Afghanistan. The geographical proficiency which had won her so many marks served her only too well, but she hastened to extract her atlas from the fatal niche, and to pore over her geographical misery.

She felt she ought to withdraw her own letter for revision, but she could not get at Marcelle or even make her understand. In her perturbation she gave Cabul and Candahar as Kings of Navarre, and Marcelle, implacable as a pillar-box, went away in the evening like a mail-cart.

But the very same night the Superior handed Eileen an opened cablegram which banished Lieutenant Doherty much farther than Afghanistan. Her father was very ill, and called her to his bedside. Things had a way of happening simultaneously to Eileen, these coincidences dogged her life, so that she came to think of them as the rival threads of her life getting tangled at certain points and then going off separately again.

After all, if you have several strings to your life, she told herself, it would be more improbable that they should always remain separate than that they should sometimes intertwine.

Eileen reached the Castle through a tossing avenue of villagers, weeping and blessing, and divined from their torment of sympathy that "his honour" was already in his grave. Poor f.e.c.kless father, how she had loved him spite all his rollicking ways, or perhaps because of them. Through her tears she saw him counting--on his entry into Paradise--the children who had preceded him, and more than ever fuzzled by the flapping of their wings. Oh, poor dearest, how unhomely it would all be to him, this other world where his jovial laugh would shock the nun-like spirits, where there was no more claret, cold, mulled, or b.u.t.tered, and no sound of horn or tally-ho.

Perhaps it was as well that so many of his brood had gone before him, for with his departure the Castle fell metaphorically about the ears of the survivors. Creditors gave quarter no longer, and Mrs. O'Keeffe found herself reduced to a modest red-gabled farmhouse, with nothing saved from the crash save that part of her dowry which was invested in trustees for the education of her boys. There was no question of Eileen returning to the Convent as a pupil: her desire to take the veil failed at the thought that now she could only be a dowerless working-sister, not a teacher. And for teaching, especially music-teaching, she felt she had a real gift. By a natural transition arose the idea of becoming a music-teacher or a governess outside a Convent, and since her stay at home only helped to diminish her mother's resources, she resolved to augment them by leaving her. Family pride forbade the neighbourhood witnessing a deeper decline.

The O'Keeffes were still "the Quality"; it would be better to seek her fortunes outside Ireland and retain her prestige at home. The dual existence would give relish and variety.

Eileen's mind worked so quickly that she communicated these ideas to her mother, ere that patient lady had quite realised that never more would she say, "It's your wife I am, Bagenal dear."

"No, no, you are not to be going away," cried Mrs. O'Keeffe, in alarm.

"Why wouldn't I?" asked Eileen.