CHAPTER IV
A fewdays later, Bridget found a letter for her on the breakfast table. It was from Helen Mansfield, and as she read it her eyes brightened.
“Mother,” she cried rapturously, “Helen wants me to go and stay with her—next week. How lovely!”
Mrs. Ruan paused in the act of pouring out a cup of tea. Her face brightened too.
“Well, what about your dresses, will they do? They’re grand folks, I suppose, plenty of money, ’aven’t they? Pa, Bid will want a few things. You’d better give ’er some money.”
Mr. Ruan emerged from behind his paper.
“She’ll ’ave to make a five-pun note do, then. ’Ard times, nowadays,” he mumbled, with his mouth full of buttered toast.
“Oh! but the Mansfields are quite poor people, I know,” said Bridget. “They live very quietly. I sha’n’t want a lot of grand frocks.”
Her mother’s face clouded. She pushed Bridget’s cup of tea irritably towards her.
“I never in my life met such a girl as you!” she said. “You go to an expensive school enough, Heaven knows, and the only friends you make are a miserable, poverty-stricken crew that are no good to you. You’ll never get a ’usband as long as you live, and serves you right. You’ve got no more gumption than a baby. I’m sick and tired of it all.”
Bridget’s face flushed.
“Ahusband!” she echoed scornfully. “Do you think that I’m always thinking and scheming forthat, like that awful Wilby girl? It’sdisgusting, I consider.”
“That awful Wilby girl ’ud get married five times over, before you!” retorted her mother, angrily. “Sheknows how to make herself agreeable, an’ that’s what the men like.”
“I don’t care twopence what ‘the men’ like,” Bridget broke out fiercely. “Idon’t like ‘the men,’ and that’s what matters to me. Did I come into the world to consider the taste of Mr. Jenkins or Mr. Wilby, do you think?”
“You came into the world to make me wretched, that’s allIknow,” replied Mrs. Ruan, scraping her chair back from the table, and rising as she spoke.
“Sit down, mother, an’ don’t trouble your ’ed about that fool of a girl,” Mr. Ruan exclaimed, dashing down his paper into the butter-dish.“These ’igh-falutin’ ways don’t suit your mother or I,—so now I tell yer,” he continued, turning angrily to Bridget, “’usband or no ’usband, if you can’t make yourself pleasant at ’ome, you’d better clear out of it. Go an’ be an old maid somewhere else, that’s my advice to you.”
Bridget stood up slowly, trembling from head to foot. She clenched her hands, and she spoke with a great effort, forcing herself to utter the words quietly.
“Very well,” she said, her great eyes blazing, “I’ll take you at your word. Iwillgo.”
She moved proudly from her seat to the door and closed it behind her.
Mrs. Ruan burst into tears.
“’Enry, shewill!” she exclaimed wildly.
“Let ’er!” shouted Mr. Ruan. “Damnthe girl. I’m sick of this. Who’sshe, I should like to know? If we ain’t good enough for ’er, let ’er go and find them that is. Bring me my boots, Mary, an’ look sharp about it. Confound the women, say I. A man might ’ave a decently comfortable life without ’em. As it is, I’m glad to get out of the ’ouse.”
Professor Mansfield’s little flat was in the neighborhood of the British Museum.
The drawing-room, overlooking a formal square, was filled with the scent of violets theevening Bridget arrived. She sat after dinner in a low chair, in the rosy glow of the fire, deliciously conscious of the subtle flower-scents, of the play of light and shade on the books lining the low shelves round the walls, of the flash of orange or dainty pink out of the shadows, as the light glanced on a curtain or a rose-filled bowl.
Helen was at the piano, playing softly. On the opposite side of the fire the Professor lay back in his reading-chair, gently tapping the tips of his long fingers together in time to the melody. At his side his sister sat, with a mass of soft white wool in her lap, her wooden knitting needles clicking softly now and again. The Professor and his sister were both somewhat elderly people. Dr. Mansfield was forty before he married the young wife who died at Helen’s birth, and Miss Mansfield, who was two or three years his senior, had lived with him since Helen was a baby. Bridget glanced at them both every now and again. She noticed the Professor’s broad forehead, the masses of whitening hair above it, his keen eyes, and thin, humorous mouth.
A picture of her father’s face as he sat, pipe in hand, with a sporting paper in one hand and a glass of grog at his elbow, rose to her mind for a second in vivid contrast.
She hurriedly put it from her, with a sudden shamed, disloyal feeling that translated itself in a frown and an involuntary gesture of repudiation. The Professor’s quick eyes noted the movement, and his thoughts wandered from the music to speculate upon its cause.
Helen rose from the piano a minute later, and came forward into the firelight.
“The room has one of its pretty moods to-day, hasn’t it, father?” she said, glancing about her, as she settled herself on the low curb before the hearth, close to the Professor’s chair.
“Don’t you notice that rooms have their pretty days just as people do, Bid?” she asked.
“I believe every day is a pretty day for this room,” Bridget returned, with a contented sigh. “It’s sweet. Oh, and thebooks!”
Her lap was full of volumes, which she turned over with eager fingers, as she spoke.
“What is this? Keats! how delicious!—in this dear little volume, I mean. They have such a hideous edition at the Free Library. Oh, Helen! and this charming Herrick with the dainty green and gold cover! And what’s this? George Meredith—Oh! a poem? Well, I tried to readRichard Feverel—that’s his, isn’t it?—the other day, but I didn’t like it much. I couldn’t understand what he was talking about,—what hemeant, you know.”
The Professor laughed a little.
“How old are you, Miss Bridget?” he asked, with an amused smile. “Eighteen? Well—read ‘Richard Feverel’ again when you are five-and-twenty.”
“Yes,” said Bridget, earnestly, raising her eyes. They were big and bright with excitement. “I’ll remember; but perhaps I shan’t care for novels then. I shall be so awfully old.”
The Professor laughed again. “What a delicious thing it is to be so awfully young!” he said. “Helen, light the lamps, my dear. Miss Bridget can’t see our slender stock of books properly by this light.”
“Oh, do youmindmy turning them over so?” she asked, deprecatingly. “It’s such a treat to see somany. I feel excited at just looking at their covers.” There was a little tremor in her voice as she laughed.
“I see you touch them as a miser touches gold,” he returned. “Rilchester is not a good place for books, then?”
“It’s not a good place for anything,” Bridget began, impetuously, and checked herself. “No, I can’t get many books,” she added, in a studiedly quiet tone.
There was a pause. Bridget fluttered the leaves of the book of verse she held, andsmoothed the cover gently, with a caressing touch, before she put it down.
Miss Mansfield had left the room a moment or two before to give an order to the servant, and Helen was busy with the lamps.
“May I look at the books on the shelves?” Bridget said, rising as she spoke.
“Certainly, you insatiable young woman,” returned the Professor.
He watched her with an amused, critical air, as she moved lightly from one shelf to the other, reading titles, opening a volume here and there to glance at the frontispiece, stopping to read half a page now and again.
“Like a half-starved child in a pastry-cook’s shop,” he thought, as he followed her movements.
“What have you found there?” he asked at last. The girl was bending over one of the books longer than usual, and he caught a glimpse of her absorbed face from where he sat.
“It’s an essay,—about Christ; whether he was God,” she said, glancing at him brightly.
“Ah,—h’m!” observed the Professor, with an incipient smile of amusement. “That’s not a book for the young person.”
“But I’m not a young person, and this is just the sort of book I want,” Bridget replied eagerly.
“But the Bible tells you so,” objected the Professor, mildly.
She turned, looked at him fixedly a moment, and then laughed. Bridget was charming when she laughed. The Professor involuntarily joined her.
“What I say is quite correct, nevertheless,” he added.
“Of course; but I want to know why I should believe what the Bible says.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” he murmured, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “Where do the young people of the present day get their ideas, I wonder?”
“Well, chiefly from books like yours, I think,” she returned demurely. “I read your ‘Veritas’ a year ago.”
“Verily my sin has found me out!” he exclaimed. “Well, and at what conclusion have you arrived?”
“I think,” she said slowly, “that it’s impossible to tell whether there is or is not a God. If there is, I’m sure of one thing, He’s not theBibleGod.”
“Why, may I ask?”
“Well, for many reasons, but chiefly because it’s so unjust to call people into the world without asking if they want to come, and then by way of adding insult to injury to tell them,directly they get here, that if they don’t believe that a man who lived thousands of years ago was God, they shall go to hell.”
“Bid!” said Helen, deprecatingly.
“But that is exactly what Christians are invited to believe,” she returned.
The Professor was silent. He looked at Bridget attentively, without speaking for some moments.
“Where did you learn that? Who has talked to you about these things?” he said at last.
“No one,” Bridget answered; “I thought them myself, after the Scripture lessons at school.”
“Happy and successful teachers!” he murmured ironically. “That being the case, Miss Bid, may I presume to inquire what is your philosophy of life?”
There was a touch of earnestness under the lightness of his tone, to which the girl immediately responded.
“Oh! I don’t know,” she replied with a deep breath.
She crossed the room slowly, as if in thought, and came and stood gravely before the fire, holding out her hands mechanically to the blaze.
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “It’s so puzzling. If it could be so, I think—as we’reonlysureof this life—that we ought to make the best of it. Use it in the way our natures prompt us to use it, don’t you? I mean we oughtn’t to be afraid to beourselves, not to let people and opinions hinder us. That’s whatoughtto be. But itcan’tbe, often,” she added bitterly. “We have affections, we love people who have nothing in common with us. It’s a great bother, but it is so. Often I wish I didn’t, that I mighttakemy own way, lead my own life, be myself. But one can’t, one can’t. It wouldn’t beyou, after all, if you trampled other people under foot, and yet how they hinder you, how they—” she paused, trembling a little, and flushing.
“Ibsen has surely not arrived at the Rilchester Free Library, has he?” the Professor inquired.
“Ibsen?” she repeated. “Who is Ibsen? I never heard of him.”
“You will,” he said. “Seven years hence, you will probably be in the thick of a fight that has already begun, Miss Bridget. But to return to our muttons. What do you want to do? What would you do if you could? Is it Girton? Newnham? Medical student, or hospital nurse?”
“Neither of those things, I think. Certainly not Girton or Newnham. I don’t know why, but I’m not drawn to that idea. I want—life;—toknow how things go on in the world amongst men and women. I want thewholeworld, not the set of High School girls to whom life means the mathematical tripos. I want to know the men and women who travel, who write books, who think things, who are interesting—”
“To be in the movement, in fact?” said the Professor.
“Yes,” she responded with an eager gesture; “that’s what I mean, but I didn’t know how to say it.”
There was a short silence. The flames sang a quick, murmuring little song, leaping round the coals as they whispered together. The warm, scented room was full of firelight and dancing shadows. Bridget stood in her soft gray gown, with one little foot on the fender, resting the tips of her fingers on the high white mantel-shelf. Ruddy lights and wavering shadows chased one another over her slender figure from head to foot, and played in her thick, curling hair, and lighted up her big, serious eyes.
Helen opened the door suddenly, and re-entered the room, followed by a tall man.
“Here’s Mr. Stevens, father,” she said.
The Professor rose hastily. “Stevens! Really you? Delighted!” he exclaimed with cordiality.Then after a word or two, “Let me present you to Miss Ruan.”
Bridget put out her hand, blushing a little nervously.
“Here’s a man who would be deeply grateful if half the people who at present ‘think things,’ and write books about the things they’ve thought, would refrain. He protests by holding them up to public scorn in the papers, you know,” he said.
Stevens laughed, and Bridget raised her eyes and gave him a quick, searching look, full of curiosity and interest. The two men fell into talk, in which the girls did not join, but the editor was conscious that they had an absorbed listener in one of them, as she sat quietly in her low chair before the fire opposite.
Helen took her friend off to her own room half an hour later. “We sha’n’t come back, father,” she said, as she passed him. “We’re going to try on frocks, and that will take us till bedtime. Good-night.”
“That’s a striking-looking girl,” said Stevens, when the door closed. “She’ll be beautiful, if I’m not mistaken, when she’s older.”
“Yes, and the poor child has brains, moreover, which makes things ten times worse,—complicates the case.”
“Worse?” he repeated.
“She’s one of the curious developments for which this very remarkable end of the century is responsible. Would you have conceived it possible that that girl should be the daughter of a publican, for instance? A man who does all the roaring trade there is to do, in a god-forsaken place like Rilchester. But sheis. Moreover, she’s a lady in tastes and instincts, down to the tips of her fingers. She’s an individualist by nature,—not the spurious, second-hand article manufactured out of badly digested Ibsen. She’s refreshingly ignorant of books at present; but she hasthought, atherage.”
“And she walks like a princess already, and has imperial eyes,” Stevens added, smiling. “Curious.”
“Oh, she represents a large class,” the Professor returned, “though she happens to be a striking example.
“Poor child! I’m sorry for her. Did it ever occur to you, Stevens, what a girl like that must suffer? Our class barriers are but imperfectly broken down after all. She stands between two hostile classes,—by education and by nature she belongs to one, by birth and social position to the other. She has strong sympathies with both, but belongs wholly to neither. Her parents, poor souls, have probably denied themselves and striven strenuouslyto give her a ‘splendid education,’ thinking that in some mysterious fashion it will be good for her. When she returns to them, there is a great gulf fixed. Her tastes, her sympathies, her ideals, are not theirs, never can be theirs.Theyare hurt,sheis hurt. It is inevitable. It is that saddest, most hopeless thing in life, ‘nobody’s fault.’ The girl is made to feel a traitor, disloyal, supercilious, at every turn, because things in the home life jar,—are distasteful to her. She hates herself, yet chafes at the hindrances in her path. The parents look on, uncomprehending, irritated and irritating,—disappointed, of course. And it is all inevitable, irrevocable, part of the movement.”
“This girl’s life is a case in point, you think?”
“Yes. She has revealed a good deal of it to me this evening. Oh! unconsciously. She’s as proud as Lucifer, of course. But I read between the lines, and Helen has talked to me about her sometimes. They were at school together.”
“You think it would have been a happier thing for her if she’d gone to some academy at Rilchester for a few years, with the other tradespeople’s children, and subsequently been given in marriage to a first-class grocer, who kept his provision-cart?”
“No, not in this girl’s case,” Dr. Mansfield replied decidedly. “She’s too clever. She would have carved her own path eventually in spite of everything. She would have been fretted to death by the petty routine of a third-class day-school, and that would have been an additional burden.
“No, she’s had a start in life, of course, though a very little one. She’ll go through great tribulation—she’s just the sort. But, nevertheless, the trivial round, the common task was always out of the question for Bridget Ruan, so she must take what the gods send her, and if I’m not mistaken, she’ll take it unflinchingly.”
“She interests you, evidently,” Stevens said.
“Yes, I own it. Perhaps she’ll interest you too, one day, professionally. Helen says she writes stories. I wonder what they’re like. I imagine them crude to the last degree, and almost as clever.”
“I should like to look at them.”
“Well, ask her. She’ll be overcome with shyness, but she’ll let you see them. She wants to stop in London. I must see what I can do for her.”
There was a pause. “By the way,” the Professor asked suddenly, “what of that article of yours on bimetallism? I saw some account of itin theChronicleto-day.” Stevens replied, and the conversation drifted into other channels.
Bridget returned to Rilchester at the end of a fortnight, full of hope and vague, tremulous excitement. To Dr. Mansfield she had confided her intention of fitting herself to earn her own living. She had finally decided to prepare herself for teaching in a public school; and the Professor, on mentally reviewing the possible occupations open to women, had decided that she had probably chosen the most human of them.
“And I wouldn’t say that to every one,” he remarked with a smile. “I’ve met one or two High School teachers in my time,” he paused. “But I don’t think you’ll easily become an Instruction-machine, my dear; and as far as I can judge, human beingsoughtto be more inspiring than an office table, and long envelopes and halfpenny stamps.
“But you have a climb before you,” he added, glancing a little pitifully at the girl; “and it must be a steady one,—no spurts, you know; and—well, the view from the mountain top may not be so very inspiring after all. What do you say?”
“I say, that I can’tbreathein the valley!” Bridget replied.
The Professor looked at her a moment in silence.
“Well, try it,” he said. “At least you will be better able to ‘possess your soul;’ that is something.”
“It iseverything,” she returned eagerly.
The Professor smiled.
“Leave to possess your soul will seem a very tame affair in a year or two, I fear,” he said, his smile fading a little sadly. “But, who knows? Don’t let the writing go to the wall.”
Bridget gave a little low, excited laugh.
“No,no. HowcanI, now? If Mr. Stevens is only right!—but I can’t depend on that, of course. I must learn to earn my living in some other way, incase—” She paused, as though unwilling to finish the sentence.
On the evening of the day Bridget left the Mansfields the Professor sat silent for some time, looking into the fire.
“That child is rather on my mind, Charlotte,” he said at last. “Have I done right, I wonder? One shudders when one realizes the frightful isolation that a life like the one she is bent upon means for a girl.”
His sister looked up from her work placidly.
“That’s so like you, James, with your theories aboutlivesandcareers, and so on. How can you possibly know anything about the sort of life that’s in store for Bridget Ruan?”
“One observes, my dear,” returned her brother, mildly. “The High School mistress lives in lodgings—often alone. She is obliged to live in lodgings, because she must be within reasonable distance of the school in which she teaches, and possibly there’s no boarding-house, or ‘family desirous of meeting with an amiable young lady,’ near enough to make any other mode of life practicable. She is often compelled to live alone, either because the other mistresses in the school have already paired off, or, as may very well happen, because she doesn’t care sufficiently for any of them to be willing to share a room or rooms with them.”
“Bridget ought not to be allowed to live alone,” Miss Mansfield said decidedly. “She’s too pretty, too attractive altogether.”
“My dear Charlotte, one does not say to the New Woman, thou shalt not. It’s too late in the day. She holds the reins.”
“And drives a great deal too fast,” observed his sister, dryly, “downhill, too, I’m afraid.”
“That may be; but you and I sit too far back to put on the brake, even if we felt alarmed at the pace. For my own part, I’m not alarmed. I have faith in the driver. In any case, we needn’t shake our heads over the recklessness of the young woman teacher who lives in furnishedapartments. Poor soul! she doesn’t impress me with the idea that she knows much of thejoie de vivre. Do you remember Alice Evans?”
“But, my dear James, Alice Evans was thirty-five if she was an hour. You can’t compare her case with Bridget Ruan’s.”
“Yet she was young once. She’d been teaching, and had lived in furnished apartments twelve years before we knew her, if you recollect. Poor woman! And she looked as though all the grayness of those twelve years had slowly gathered in her face.”
There was silence, while the Professor bent forward and stirred the fire into a blaze.
“Bridget,” he said, leaning back in his arm-chair again, “Bridget will live in lodgings. Girls of her class are unaccustomed to the British chaperon. It will not occur to her mother that a chaperon is required. I wonder if it will occur to her to give the girl such instruction as may fit her for leading an independent, solitary life? I doubt it. I imagine her a poor, feckless body. But you will see to that, Charlotte?”
“My dear James, she’s got all her examinations to pass yet, and then there’s a school to be found—no easy matter nowadays, I should imagine. It will be two years before these preliminariesare over. The girl may never come to live in London at all. She’ll probably get sick and tired of studying alone, and she’ll marry or something. Why trouble about it?”
“She’ll write in time; of that there’s very little doubt,” said the Professor, musingly. “Stevens was very much impressed with the few things she showed him. But she’ll have to go through the mill, I think. Hers will be no cheap success; and then success is a strange, elusive thing. At all events,ifshe comes we can look after her a little, Charlotte. If Helen is as devoted then as now, there won’t be much difficulty aboutthat,” he added.
But two years later, when Bridget was teaching at the Fairfax School near Hackney, the little flat in College Street was closed. The Mansfields were abroad. Helen was delicate, and the physicians had advised a year’s travel. They had been to Egypt, and were then in the south of France.