The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes Part 60

Mrs. O'Keeffe could not tell, but looked mysterious meanings. This excited Eileen, so that the poor woman had no rest till she answered plainly, "Because, mavourneen, it's married you are going to be, please the saints."

"Married! Me!"

"It was your father's dying wish, G.o.d keep his soul."

"But to whom?"

"You should be asking the priest how good he is. Didn't you notice that the chapel is being white-washed afresh and how clear the Angelus bell rings? Not that it matters much to him, for he has lashings of money as well as a heart of gold."

"Hasn't he a name, too?"

"Don't jump down my throat, Eileen darling. I shouldn't be thinking of O'Flanagan if your father--"

"O'Flanagan! Do you mean the man that bought our Castle at the auction?"

"And isn't it beautifully repaired he's having it for you? He saw you when you were home for the holidays, and he asked us for your hand, all so humble, but your father told him he must wait till you came home for good."

"O'Flanagan!" Eileen flicked him away with her thumb. "A half-mounted gentleman like that."

"Eileen aroon, beggars can't be choosers."

Eileen flushed all over her body. "No more can beggars on horseback."

"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), pa.s.sionately 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sionate 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 a.s.segais 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 gra.s.s 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 h.o.a.rdings were flamboyant with ugly stage-beauties, melodramatic tableaux, and the advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 G.o.d 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 c.o.c.katoo 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 s.p.a.cious skirts, bedecked with the long glitter of the gla.s.s-houses; her head reached the roof and wore the weatherc.o.c.k 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 pa.s.sed 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 repet.i.tions of misp.r.o.nounced words, the subtlest subst.i.tution 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 gla.s.ses at her elbow.

She repaid them, however, by adroit educational remarks.

"How stupid of me again!" she said once. "I held out my hock gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s.

"No, no, Lucy, don't play pranks on a stranger," her husband put in tactfully. "It's this gla.s.s, 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 s.h.a.g, 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.

VI