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 sexes 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. God 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 snatches 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 passive form, like 'loquor' (though that
passive 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 bass chorister's wife
or a Baronet's wife, the wife of an Honourable dolt, and the wife of a
dishonourable dramatist. J'en passe 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 God, 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. 'God!' 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
God 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 nobility 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.... God 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.