The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes Part 76

"Eileen! Eileen! you will drive me mad. What do you mean? You know I could never have a wife on the Halls. It would ruin me in the clubs, it would--"

"In the clubs! Ha! ha! ha! Every member of which would be delighted to have tea with me! But who's proposing to you a wife on the Halls? You said I owed you myself, and it's true, but you don't suppose I could _marry_ a man I didn't respect? I told you we're not a marrying profession. Come, let's kiss and be friends."

He drew back as in horror. "No, no, Eileen, I respect you too much for that."

She looked at him long and curiously. "Yes, the s.e.xes don't understand each other. Well, good-by. I almost could marry you, after all. But I'm too wise. Please go. I have a headache and it is quite possible I shall scream. Good-by, dear. I was never more than a phantom to you--a boyish memory, and a bad one at that. Don't you know you gave me a pair of black eyes? Good-by: you'll marry a dear, sweet girl in white muslin who'll never know. G.o.d bless you."

XXI

Sir Robert Maper simply could not get up on the Monday morning. The agony of suspense was too keen, and he lay with closed eyes, trying to drowse his consciousness, and exchanging it in his fitful s.n.a.t.c.hes of sleep for oppressive dreams, in one of which Eileen figured as a Lorelei, combing her locks on a rock as she sang her siren song.

But she did not prolong his agony beyond mid-day.

"MY DEAR SIR ROBERT,--Both of us are dead and gone, so, alas! neither can marry you. Don't be alarmed, we are only dead to the world, and gone to the Continent. 'Get thee to a nunnery.' Hamlet knew best. If I could have married any man it would have been you. You are the only gentleman I have ever known. But I don't love you. It's a miserable pity. I wish I did. I wonder why 'love' is an active verb in all languages. It ought to have a pa.s.sive form, like 'loquor' (though that pa.s.sive should be reserved for parrots). Forgive the governess! I seem to have undergone 'love' for two men, but one was a fool and the other not quite a rogue, and I dare say I never really loved anybody but myself (and there the verb is very active)! I love to coquet, but the moment a man comes too close, I feel hunted. I dare say I was secretly pleased to find my hero tripping, so as to send him packing. Was ever hero in such a comic plight? Poor, unlucky hero! But this will be Greek to you--the kind you can't read. Oh, the men I could have married! It is curious, when you think of it, the men one little woman might marry and be dutifully absorbed in. I could have been a ba.s.s chorister's wife or a Baronet's wife, the wife of an Honourable dolt, and the wife of a dishonourable dramatist. _J'en pa.s.se et des meilleurs._ I could have lived in Calcutta or in Clerkenwell, been received in Belgravia or in Boulogne. Good Lord! the parts one woman is supposed to be fit for, while the man remains his stolid, stupid self. Talk of the variety stage! Or is it that they all want the same thing of her?

"Talking of the variety stage, there would have been the danger, too, of my thirsting for it, even with a Dowager Lady for a stepmother. The nostalgia of the boards is a disease your love might not have warded off. You are well rid of both of us.

"You said--at my first and last supper--that money and station are the mere veneer of life, the central reality is love. That is true, if by love you read the love of G.o.d, of Christ. Do you remember my going one day over the works with your poor father? Well, after I had been through rooms and rooms of whirring machinery infinitely ingenious and diversified--that made my head ache--they took me to a shed where stood in a sort of giant peace the great engine that moved it all. 'G.o.d!' was my instant thought, and somehow my headache fled. And ever since then, when I have been oppressed by the complex clatter of life, my thought has gone back to that power-room, to the great simple force behind it all. I rested in the thought as a swimmer on a placid ocean. But the ocean is cold and infinite, and of late I have longed for a more human G.o.d that loved and forgave, and so I come back to the Christ. You see Plato never satisfied me. Your explanation of the B.C. glories was sown on barren soil. I grant you a n.o.bility in your Plato as of Greek pillars, soaring in the sunlight, but somehow I want the Gothic--I long for 'dim religious light' and windows stained with saints. Oh, to find my soul again! If I could tell you how the Convent rises before me as a vision of blessedness--after life's 'shaky scraw'--the cool cloisters, the rows of innocent beds, the delicious old garden. There are tears at my heart, as I think of it. What flowers I will bring to my favourite nun.... G.o.d grant she is still alive! What altar-cloths I will weave with my silver and gold! Yes, the wages of sin shall not be death, I will pay them to the life eternal; my dowry as the bride of Christ. I, too, shall be laid on the altar, my complex corrupt soul shall be simplified and purified, and the Holy Mother will lead me by the hand like a little child. But all this will be caviare to you. Adieu. I will pray for you.

"Eileen.

"P.S.--It is a convent that trains the young, so I shall still be a Governess."

"And perhaps still a Serio-Comic," thought the Baronet, bitterly.