The proposal duly took place in a bunker, while Eileen was whimsically vituperating her ball. The fascination of her virginal diablerie was like a force compelling the victim to seize her in his arms after the fashion of the primitive bridegroom. However the poor Honourable refrained, said boldly, "Try it with this," and under pretence of changing her golfsticks possessed himself of her hand. For the first time his touch left her apathetic.
"Now it is coming," she thought, and suddenly froze to a spectator of the marionette show. As the Hon. Reginald went through his performance, she felt with a shudder of horror over what brink she had nearly stepped. The man was merely a magnificent animal! She, with her heart, her soul, her brain, mated to that! Like a convict chained to a log. Not worthy of him forsooth! "There's a gulf between us," she thought, "and I nearly fell down it." And the Half-and-Half rose before her, clamouring, pungent, deliciously seductive.
"Dear Mr. Winsor," she listened with no less interest to her own part in the marionette performance, "it's really too bad of you. Just as I was getting on so nicely, too!"
"Is that all you feel about-about our friendship?"
"All? Didn't you undertake to teach me golf? I haven't the faintest desire not to go on ... as soon as we have escaped from this wretched bunker. Come! Did you say the niblick?"
Reginald's manners were too good to permit him to swear, even at golf.
"One's body is like an Irish mud-cabin," Eileen reflected. "It shelters both a soul and a pig."
XV.
Nelly O'Neill threw herself into her work with greater ardour than ever. But her triumphs were shadowed by worries. She was nervous lest the Hon. Reginald should turn up at one of her Halls-she had three now; she was afraid her voice was spoiling in the smoky atmosphere; sometimes the image of the Hon. Reginald came back reproachfully, sometimes tantalisingly. Oh, why was he so stupid? Or was it she who had been stupid?
Then there was the apprehension of the end of her career at the Lee Carters'. The young generation was nearly grown up. The eldest boy she even suspected of music-halls. He might stumble upon her.
Her popularity, too, was beginning to frighten her. Adventurous young gentlemen followed her in cabs-cabs were now a necessity of her triple appearance-and she never dared drive quite to her door or even the street. Bracelets she always returned, if the address was given; flowers she sent to hospitals, anonymous gifts to her family. Nobody ever saw her wearing his badge.
A sketch of her even found its way to one of Mrs. Lee Carter's journals.
"Why, she looks something like me!" Eileen said boldly.
"You flatter yourself," said Mrs. Lee Carter. "You're both Irish, that's all. But I don't see why these music-hall minxes should be pictured in respectable household papers."
"Some people say that the only real talent is now to be found in the Halls," said Eileen.
"Well, I hope it'll stay there," rejoined her mistress, tartly. Eileen recalled this conversation a few nights later, when she met Master Harold Lee Carter outside the door at midnight with a rival latch-key.
"Been to a theatre, Miss O'Keeffe?" asked her whilom pupil.
"No; have you?"
"Well, not exactly a theatre!"
"Why, what do you mean?"
"Sort of half-and-half place, you know."
By the icy chill at her heart at his innocent phrase, she knew how she dreaded discovery and clung to her social status.
"What is a half-and-half place?" she asked smiling.
"Oh, comic songs and tumblers and you can smoke."
"No? You're not really allowed to smoke in a theatre?"
"Yes, we are. They call it a music-hall-it's great fun. But don't tell the mater."
"You naughty boy!"
"I don't see it. All the chaps go."
She shook her head. "Not the nicest."
"Oh, that's tommyrot," he said disrespectfully. "Their women folk don't know-that's all."
Eileen now began to feel like a criminal round whom the toils thicken. In the most fashionable of her three Halls, she sang a little French song. And she had taught Master Harold his French.
Of course, even if Nelly were seen by Eileen's friends or acquaintances, detection was not sure. Eileen was always in such sedate gowns, never low-cut, her manners were so suppressed, her hair done so differently, and what a difference hair made! In fact, it was in her private life that she felt herself more truly the actress. On the boards her real secret self seemed to flash forth, full of verve, dash, roguery, devilry. Should she take to a wig, or to character songs in appropriate costumes? No, she would run the risk. It gave more spice to life. Every evening now was an adventure, nay three adventures, and when she snuggled herself up at midnight in her demure white bed, overlooked by the crucifix, she felt like the hunted were-wolf, safely back in human shape. And she became more audacious, letting herself go, so as to widen the chasm between Nelly and Eileen, and make anybody who should suspect her be sure he was wrong. And occasionally she paid for all this fever and gaiety by fits of the blackest melancholy.
She had gradually dropped her habit of prayer, but in one of her dark moods she found herself slipping to her knees and crying: "Oh, Holy Mother, look down on Thy distressed daughter, and deliver her from the body of this death. So many wooers and no spark of love in herself; a woman who sings love-songs with lips no man has touched, a lone-of-soul who can live neither with the respectable nor with the Bohemians, who loves you, sanctissima Maria, without being sure you exist. Oh, Holy Mother of God, advocate of sinners, pray for me. If I had only something solid to cling to-a babe to suckle with its red grotesque little face. You will say cling to the cross, but is not my whole life also a crucifixion? I am rent in twain that a thousand fools may laugh nightly. Oh, Holy Mother, make me at one with myself; it is the atonement I need. Send me the child's heart, and I will light a hundred candles to you.... Or do you now prefer electricity? Oh, Maria mavourneen, I cannot pray to you, for there is a mocking devil within me, and you will not cast her out." And she burst into hysteric tears.
XVI.
As she was about to start one evening for her round, Mrs. Lee Carter's maid brought up a bombshell. Superficially it looked like a letter with foreign stamps, marked "Private" and readdressed with an English stamp from Ireland. But that one line of unerased writing, her name, threw her into heats and colds, for she remembered the long-forgotten hand of Lieutenant Doherty. She had to sit down on her bed and finish trembling before she broke the seal and set free this voice from the past.
"DEAR MOTHER-CONFESSOR,-You will be wondering why I have been silent
all these years and why I write now. Well, I will tell you the truth.
It wasn't that I believed you had really gone into the Convent you
wrote me you were joining, it was the new and exciting life and
duties that opened up before me when I got to Afghanistan, far from
post-offices. Afterwards I was drafted to India and had a lot of
skirmishing and tiger-shooting, and your image-forgive me!-became
faint, and I excused myself for not writing by making myself believe
you were buried in the Convent. ["So, after all, he never got the
letter telling him I was going to marry back the Castle!" Eileen mused
joyfully through her agitation.] But now that I am at last coming home