From Mrs. Maper's keenness about the University Boat Race as it drew near, and from her wearing on the day itself a dark blue gown trimmed profusely with ribbons of the same hue, Eileen divined that Bob was an Oxford man. This gave the invisible deformed a new touch of interest, but long ere this Eileen had found a much larger interest—the theatre.
She had never been to the play, and the Theatre Royal of the Black Hole was the scene of her induction into this enchantment. In those days the touring company system had not developed to its present complexity, and the theatre had been closed during the first month or so of Eileen's residence in Dromedary Town. But at length, to Mrs. Maper's delight, a company arrived with a melodrama, and as part of her duties, Eileen, no less excited over the new experience (which her Confessor had permitted her), drove with her mistress behind a pair of spanking steeds to the Wednesday matinee. Mrs. Maper alleged her inability to leave her homekeeping husband as the cause of her daylight playgoing, but Eileen maliciously ascribed it to the pomp of the open carriage.
They occupied a box and Eileen was glad they did. For instead of undergoing the illusion of the drama, she found it killingly comic as soon as she understood that it was serious. It was all she could do to hide her amusement from her entranced companion, and somehow this box at the theatre reminded her of the Convent room in which she used to sit listening to the pious readings anent infant prodigies. One afternoon it came upon her that here Mrs. Maper had learned her strange pump handle gestures. Here it was that ladies worked arms up and down and pointed denunciatory forefingers, albeit the direction had more reference to the sentiment.
It was not till a comic opera came along that Eileen was able to take the theatre seriously. Then she found some of the melodies of the drawing room scores wedded to life and diverting action, sometimes even to poetic dancing; the first gleam of poetry the stage gave her. When these airs were lively, Mrs. Maper's feet beat time and Eileen lived in the fear that she would arise and prance in her box. It was an effervescence of joyous life—the factory girl recrudescent—and Eileen's hand would lie lightly on Mrs. Maper's shoulder, feeling like a lid over a kettle about to boil.
When they came home Eileen would gratify her mistress by imitations of comedians. Presently she ventured on the tragedians, without being seen through. She even raised her arm towards the ceiling or shot it towards the centre of the carpet pattern, and Mrs. Maper followed it spellbound.
But from all these monkey tricks she found relief in her real music. When she crooned the old Irish songs, the Black Hole was washed away as by the soft Irish rain, and the bogs stretched golden with furze-blossom and silver with fluffy fairy cotton, and at the doors of the straggling cabins overhung by the cloud-shadowed mountains, blue-cloaked women sat spinning, and her eyes filled with tears as though the peat smoke had got into them.
VII
In such a mood she was playing one Saturday evening in the interval before dinner, when she became aware that somebody was listening, and turning her head, she saw through the Irish mist a man's figure standing in the conservatory. The figure was vanishing when she cried out a whit huskily, "Oh, pray, don't let me drive you away."
He stood still. "If I am not interrupting your music," he murmured.