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), passionately 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 God 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 passionate 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 assegais 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 grass 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 hoardings were flamboyant with ugly stage-beauties, melodramatic tableaux, and the advertisements 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 God 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 cockatoo 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 spacious skirts, bedecked with the long glitter of the glass-houses; her head reached the roof and wore the weathercock 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.