"I was dying to rush to you—you wouldn't see me. And the Major dragged me—"
"Through all that mud? All those Indian escapades?"
He groaned, "And you listened—!"
"Am I not your mother-confessor?"
He seized her by the wrists. "Don't madden me! You're not really on the Halls? You are living here as governess. It is some prank, some masquerade! Say it is!" He shook her. She tried to wrest her hands away.
"Not till you tell me the truth! You haven't been lying to me all these months?"
A sudden remembrance came to give her strength and scorn. "I have told you the truth, only my letter crossed you on the ocean. When it returns to England, you will see."
His grip relaxed, he staggered back. "Come," she said, pursuing her unforeseen advantage. "We will talk this thing over quietly. I always said you were in love with a shadow. But I find it was I who imagined a Bayard."
"And what have I done and said worse than other men?" Again Master Harold Lee Carter's complacent sentiment came to her. Men were all alike, only their women folk didn't know.
"Worse than other men!" She laughed bitterly. "I wanted you better—all the seven heavens better—saint as well as hero, with no thought but for me, and no one before me or after me. Oh, yes, it sounds a large order, but that's what we women want. Don't speak! I know what you're going to say. Skip me. Talk of yourself."
"You get what you want. The other's only make-believe. It passes like water from a duck's back. You women don't understand. The white fire of your purity cleanses us, and that is why we will have nothing less—"
"Ah, now you have skipped to me. I'm not pretending there isn't an evil spirit in me to match yours. It split away from me and became Nelly O'Neill. You asked which I was? I am both. Here, I am a respectable governess. Let me ring for Mrs. Lee Carter. She'll give you my character. The white fire and all that." She pressed the bell.
"Don't be so absurd. Give me time to collect my senses."
"All right, pick up the pieces, while I collect these." She stooped over the bits of glass.
"But for Heaven's sake don't bring that woman into it—"
The door opened. "Yes, miss?"
"Another glass, please." The servant disappeared.
"I do hope you won't break this one. In what country is it that the bridegroom breaks a glass in the marriage ceremonial? Oh, yes, I remember. Fossy told me. Among the Jews. There's a lot in the profession. Not that it's such a marrying profession. And to think I might have been a regular bride! But I've lost you, my dear boy, hero of a hundred hill-fights, I know it—and the moment you've picked your little bits of senses together, you'll know it, too. Alas, we shall never go tiger-hunting together.
"I don't say I won't keep my promise," he said sulkily.
"Your promise! Hoity toity! Upon my word! I'm no breach-of-promise lady—Chops and tomato sauce indeed! I recognise that we could never marry. There would always be that between us!"
Her fascination gripped him in proportion as she let him go.
"I don't know that I should mind if nobody really knows," he began.
"You! It's I that would mind. And I really know. Could I marry a man who had told me smoking-room stories? No, Eileen is done with you. Good-by!"
"Good-by? No, I can't go. I can't face the emptiness. You've filled me and fooled me with love all these weeks. Good God! Do you owe me nothing?"
"I leave you something—Nelly O'Neill! Go and see her. Now you're off with the old love. You mark what a prophetess I was. Nelly'll receive you very differently. No cant of superiority. You'll be just a pair of jolly good fellows. You'll sit up drinking whisky together and yarning anecdotes. No uncomfortable pretences; no black bog posing as white fire; no driven snow business, London snow nicely trodden, in. And the tales of the world you tell me—how useful they'll come in for stage-patter! Oh, we shall be happy enough! We can still pick up the pieces!"
"Eileen! Eileen! you will drive me mad. What do you mean? You know I could never have a wife on the Halls. It would ruin me in the clubs, it would—"
"In the clubs! Ha! ha! ha! Every member of which would be delighted to have tea with me! But who's proposing to you a wife on the Halls? You said I owed you myself, and it's true, but you don't suppose I could marry a man I didn't respect? I told you we're not a marrying profession. Come, let's kiss and be friends."
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."
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.