Sometimes-though this was scarcely a relief-another befuddled gentleman would be left at the uninhabited lodge in his stead. That was chiefly after hunt dinners or card and claret parties, when a new coachman would take a quartet of gentry home, all clouded as to their identities. "Arrah now! they've got thimselves mixed! let thim sort thimselves." And the coachman would grab at the nearest limb, extricate it and its belongings from the tangle, and prop the total mass against the first gate he passed. And so with the rest.
Eileen's mother, who was as remarkable for her microscopic piety as for the beauty untarnished by a copious maternity, figured in the child's memories as a stout saint who moved with a rustle of silken skirts and heaved an opulent black silk bosom relieved by a silver cross.
"Who are you?" her spouse would inquire with an oath.
"It's your wife I am, Bagenal dear," she would reply cheerfully. For she had grown up in the four-bottle tradition, and intoxication appeared as natural for the superior sex as sleep. Both were temporary phases, and did not prevent men from being the best of husbands and creatures when clear. And when the marketwomen or the beggarwomen respectfully inquired of her, "How is your good provider?" she made her reply with no sense of irony, though she had been long paying the piper herself. And the piper figured literally in the household accounts, as well as the fiddler, for the O'Keeffe was what the mud cabins called a "ginthleman to the backbone."
II.
Family tradition necessitated that Eileen should at least complete her education at a convent in the outskirts of Paris, and her first communion was delayed till she should "make" it in that more pious atmosphere. The O'Keeffe convoyed her across the two Channels, and took the opportunity of visiting a "variety" theatre in Montmartre, where he was delighted to find John Bull and his inelegant womenkind so faithfully delineated. So exhilarated was he by this excellent take-off and a few bocks on the Boulevard, that he refused to get down from the omnibus at its terminus.
"Jamais je ne descendrai, jamais," he vociferated. Eileen was, however, spared the sight of this miniature French revolution. She was lying sleepless in the strange new dormitory, watching the nun walking up and down in the dim weird room reading her breviary, now lost in deep shadow with the remoter beds, now lucidly outlined in purple dress with creamy cross as she came under the central night-light. Eileen wondered how she could see to read, and if she were not just posing picturesquely, but from the fervency with which she occasionally kissed the crucifix hanging to the rosary at her side Eileen concluded she must know the office by heart. Her own Irish home seemed on another planet, and her turret-bedroom was already far more shadowy than this: presently both were swallowed up into nothingness.
She commenced her convent career characteristically enough by making a sensation. For on rising in the morning she felt ineffably feeble and forlorn; she seemed to have scarcely closed her eyes, when she must be up and doing. The tiny hand-basin scarcely held enough water to cool her brow, still giddy from the sea-passage; to do her hair she had to borrow a minute hand-glass from her neighbour, and when after early mass in the chapel she found other prayers postponing breakfast, she fainted most alarmingly and dramatically. She was restored and refreshed with balm-mint water, but it took some days to reconcile her to the rigid life. To some aspects of it, indeed, she was never reconciled. The atmosphere of suspicious supervision was asphyxiating, after the disorderliness and warm humanity of her Irish home, after the run of the stables and the kennels, and the freedom of the village, after the chats with the pedlars and the beggars, and the borrowing and blowing of the postman's bugle, after the queenship of a host of barefooted gossoons, her loyal messenger-boys. Now her mere direct glance under reproof was considered "hardi." "Droop your eyes, you bold child," said the shocked Madame Agathe. A fancy she took to a French girl was checked. "On defend les amities particulieres," she was told to her astonishment. But on this one point Eileen was recalcitrant. She would even walk with her arm in Marcelle's, and somehow her will prevailed. Perhaps Eileen was trusted as a foreigner: perhaps Marcelle, being a day-boarder, weighed less upon the convent's conscience. There came a time when even their desks adjoined and were not put asunder. For by this time Madame La Superieure herself, at the monthly reading of the marks, had often beamed upon Eileen. The maitresse de classe had permitted her to kiss her crucifix, and the music-mistress was enchanted with her skill upon the piano and her rich contralto voice, such a godsend for the choir. In her very first term she was allowed to run up to the dormitory for something, unescorted by an Enfant de Marie. "Ascend, my child," said Madame Agathe, smiling sweetly, for Eileen had outstripped all her classmates that morning in geography, and Eileen, with a prim "Oui, ma mere," rose and sailed with drooping eyelashes to the other end of the schoolroom, and courtesied herself out of the door, knowing herself the focus of envy and humorously conscious of her goodness. She had learned to love this soothing sensation of goodness, as she sat in her blue pelerine on a hard tabouret before her desk, her hands folded in front of her, her little feet demurely crossed. The sweeping courtesy of entrance and exit dramatised this pleasant sense of virtue. Later her aspirant's ribbon painted it in purple.
She worked hard for her examinations. "Elle est si sage, cet enfant," she heard Madame Ursule say to Madame Hortense, and she had a delicious sense of overwork. But she was not always sage. Once when her school desk was ransacked in her absence-one of the many forms of espionage-she refused to rearrange its tumbled contents, and when she was given a bad mark for disorder, she cried defiantly, "It is Madame Rosaline who deserves that bad mark." And the pleasure of seeing herself as rebel and phrasemaker was no less keen than the pleasure of goodness.
One other institution found her regularly rebellious, and that was the pious reading which came punctually at half-past eight every morning. She was bored by all the holy heroines who seemed to have taken vows of celibacy at the age of four. "Devil take them all," she thought whimsically one morning. "But I dare say these good little people have no more reality than our 'little good people' who dance reels with the dead on November Eve. I wish Dan O'Leary had taught them all to shake their feet," and at the picture of jiggling little saints Eileen nearly gave herself away by a peal of laughter. For she had learned to conceal her unshared contempt for the holy heroines, and found a compensating pleasure in the sense of amused superiority, and the secret duality which it gave to her consciousness. She even went so far as to ransack the library for these beatific biographies, and when she found herself rewarded for "diligent reading" her amusement was at its apogee. And thus, when the first awe and interest of the strange life receded, Eileen was left standing apart as on a little rock, criticising, satirising, and even circulating verses among the few cronies who were not sneaks. The dowerless "sisters" who scrubbed the floors, the portioned Mesdames, with their more dignified humility, the Refectory readers, the Father Confessors, the little Enfants de Jesus, the big Enfants de Marie, who sometimes owed their blue ribbon to their birth or their money rather than to their exemplary behaviour, all had their humours, and all figured in Eileen's French couplets. The difficulty of passing these from hand to hand only made the reading-and the writing-the spicier. Literature did not interfere with lessons, for Eileen composed not during "preparation," but while she sat embroidering handkerchiefs, as demure as a sleeping kitten.