'Please, miss, would you mind giving it to him yourself?'
'Who's Irish, you or I? I won't speak to him at all, I tell you.'
'But I don't like to send him away like that, when he's been so kind to mother.'
'When has he been kind to your mother?'
'Those grapes you brought-'
'That was old Mr. Maper.'
'So is this.'
'Oh!' Eileen was quite taken aback, for once. 'All right, I'll go into the parlour.'
He was infinitely courteous and apologetic. He had been very anxious about her. Why had she been so unkind as to leave, and without ever a good-by to him?
'Oh, hasn't your wife told you, then?'
'She has told me you were rude, and that you left without notice, and she wants me to prosecute you. I suppose you lost your temper. You found her rather difficult.'
'I found her impossible,' said Eileen, frigidly.
'Yes, yes, I understand.' He was flushed and unhappy. 'You found her impossible to live with?'
Eileen nodded; she would have added 'or to make a lady of,' but he looked so purple and agitated that she charitably forbore. She was wondering whether Mrs. Maper could really have been so mean as to omit her share in the quarrel, but he went on eagerly:-
'Quite so, quite so. And what do you think it has been for me?'
She murmured inarticulate sympathy.
'Ah, if you only knew! Oh, my dear Miss O'Keeffe, while you've been in the house, it's been like heaven.'
'I'm glad I've given satisfaction,' she said drily.
'Then what do you give by going? I assure you the day you came to the works it was like heaven there too.'
'You forget the temperature,' Eileen smiled. 'However, it was a very nice day, and I thank you. But I can't come back after-'
'Who asks you to come back?' he broke in. 'No, I should be sorry to see you again in a menial position, you with your divine gifts of beauty and song. The idea of your getting a new place,' he added with a fall into prose, 'makes me feel sick.'
'I value your sympathy, but it is misplaced,' she replied freezingly.
'Sympathy! It isn't sympathy! It's jealousy. Oh, my dear Miss O'Keeffe!' He seized her limp hand. 'Eileen! Let me help you-'
As the true significance of his visit, and of the purple agitation, dawned upon her, the grim humour of the position overbore every other feeling. Her hand still in his, she began to laugh, and no biting of her lips could do more than change the laugh into an undignified snigger. Instead of profiting by his grip of her, he dropped her hand suddenly as if a hose had been turned on his passion, and this surrender of her hand reduced Eileen to a passable gravity.
'I'm very sorry, Mr. Maper. But really, life is too horribly amusing.'
'I'm very sorry it's me that affords you amusement,' he said stiffly.
'No, it isn't you at all, it's just the whole thing. You've been most kind all along. And I dare say you mean to be kind now. But I don't really need any help. Your wife's threats of prosecution are ridiculous, she made my longer stay impossible. I could more justly claim a month's notice from her.'
'That's what I thought. I've brought you a month's salary.' He fumbled in his pocket-book.
'Don't trouble. I shall not accept it.'
'You shall,' he said sternly. 'Or I'll prosecute you.'
Eileen's laugh rang out clear. This time he laughed too.
'Now, don't you call life amusing?' she said. 'Here am I to take a cheque under penalty of having to pay it.'
'Well, which shall it be?'
'Such a cheque is charming.' And she held out her hand. He put the cheque in it and shook both warmly. They parted, the best of friends.
'Come to me for a character, of course,' he said.
'Don't you come to me,' replied Eileen, with a roguish smile.
XII.
Eileen's next place was-as if by contrast-with a much more genteel family, and a much poorer, though it flew higher socially. It lived in a house, half in a fashionable London terrace, half in a shabby side street, and its abode was typical of its ambitions and its means. Mrs. Lee Carter drew the line clearly between herself and her governess, which was a blessing, for it meant Eileen's total exclusion from her social life, and Eileen's consequent enjoyment of her own evenings at home or abroad, as she wished. This unusual freedom compensated for the hard work of teaching children in various stages of growth and ignorance how to talk French and play the piano. Her salary was small, for Mrs. Lee Carter's ambition to live beyond her neighbours' means was only achieved by pinching whomever she could. She was not bad-hearted; she simply could not afford anything but luxuries. Eileen wondered at not being asked sometimes to perform at her parties, till she found that only celebrities ever did anything in that house.
This was a period of much mental activity in Eileen's life. The tossing ocean of London life, the theatres that played Shakespeare, the world of new books and new thought, her recent perusal of Plato and of man, all produced fermentation. But every night she knelt by her bedside and said her 'Ave Maria' with a voluptuous sense of spiritual peace, and every morning she woke with a certain joy in existence and a certain surprise to find herself again existing. Her old convent-thought recurred. 'We are worked from without-marionettes who can watch their own performance. And it is very amusing.' Once she read of a British action in Afghanistan against border-tribes, and she wondered if Lieutenant Doherty was in the fighting. Since she had ceased to be his mother-confessor he had become very shadowy; his image now rose substantial from the newspaper lines, and she was surprised to find in herself a little palpitation at his probable perils. 'One's heartstrings, too, are pulled,' she thought. 'I don't like it. Marionettes should move, not feel.' These reflections, however, came to her more often anent her family, and the struggles of her kin for a livelihood touched her more deeply than any love. 'We are like bits of the same shattered body,' she thought. 'In these cold English families everybody is another body.' She sent most of her salary to Ireland, and her pocket-money came from singing in the choir on Sunday.
The bass chorister was a very amusing man. His voice was sepulchral but his conversation skittish. Eileen's repartees smote him to almost the only serious respect of his life, and one day he said: 'Why, there's a future in you. Why don't you go on the stage?'
'What nonsense!' But the blood was secretly stirred in her veins. She saw herself walking along the Black Hole with the programme-girl, but her point of view had been modified since she had received a similar suggestion with a shudder. If she could play Rosalind to a great London audience, the staring men-folk would matter little.
'Why not?' went on the bass tempter. 'A humour like yours with such a voice and such a face!'
'The stage is full of better voices and better faces.'
'No, indeed. Why, there isn't a girl at the Half-and-Half-' He stopped and almost blushed.
She smiled. 'Oh, I don't mind your going to such places. What is the Half-and-Half, a place where they drink beer?'
'Oh, it's just our slang name for a little music-hall that's just between the East End and the West End, with a corresponding programme.'
'Our slang name?'
'Well-' he paused. 'If you'll keep it very dark-but of course you will-I appear there myself.'
'You! What do you do?'
'I sing patriotic songs and drinking-songs-'
'Aren't they the same thing in England?'
'Don't say that on the stage or they'll throw pewter pots. They're very patriotic.'
'That's just what I said. What's your name-I suppose you change it?'
'Yes-as I hope you will yours-some day.'
