CHAPTER XII
Bridgetarrived at the flat in College Street one evening, a week after her visit to Rilchester. She was pale and thin, Helen noticed, as she helped her lay aside her wraps in her bedroom upstairs. All the evening she was very silent. She said little just then about her home visit; but Helen gathered that there had been a painful scene when she explained its purport to her father.
The next day she began to make inquiries about work with feverish eagerness. Partly through her influence at the Hackney school, partly as a result of Dr. Mansfield’s exertions on her behalf, it was not long before she was able to get enough to satisfy her for the immediate present, at all events.
“I never knew such a girl!” Helen exclaimed one morning, looking at her critically as she stood tying on her veil before the glass. There was color in her cheeks, her eyes were bright and happy, as she caught up her gloves and her books in haste to start. “I believe you love being worked to death. You look radiant!” Bridget turned to her swiftly.
“Wait till you’ve passed three years of wretched, enforced idleness,” she said, catching her breath, “and then tell me if it isn’tblissto work.”
She had returned one day rather late from an afternoon class, to find the drawing-room deserted. Tea was laid on a low table before a brightly burning fire, and she drew her chair towards it with a sigh, half weariness, half content. For a long time she sat holding her cup and saucer in her lap, gazing steadily into the fire. She was startled from her musing by the sound of a ring. A moment later the maid opened the drawing-room door, followed by Carey.
Bridget rose hastily, putting down her cup, and gave him her hand, smiling.
“Helen is out,” she said, “shopping with Miss Mansfield, you know. It’s perfectly delightful to see Helen excited over her frocks,” she went on, confidentially, with a little laugh, as Carey took the chair opposite to her. “In the old days, before Jim, she always reminded me of the lilies of the field, in her serene toil not attitude towards her clothes. Now, chiffon is a vital question; she doesn’t consider it a matter for jesting, and I’m considered flippant because I don’t approach the subject with sufficient reverence.” She laughed again.
“Are you held to be unworthy to officiate in these solemn rites, then?” Carey asked.
“Oh, no! I should have gone shopping also, with a solemnity befitting the occasion, but I have a class at Forest Hill on Tuesdays, you know. I’ve only just come in. Let me implore you not to go away with the idea that I despise chiffons!” she added, earnestly. “I love them—I always have; and if any one at my baptism promised in my name to renounce them, it was like his impertinence.”
She was pouring out tea as she talked. Carey absently watched her white, slender fingers touching the dainty pink china as she moved the cups on the tray. She wore a perfectly plain dark serge dress. As he crossed to the tea-table to take the cup she held out to him, she raised her face. Her bright eyes were filled with amusement; there was a smile on her lips. She looked much as she did when he first met her. His impression of her as a brilliant, self-contained woman of the world seemed curiously incongruous in the presence of her newly recovered girlishness.
“You are teaching, then?—and writing too, I hope?” Carey asked. “You like teaching, don’t you?”
“Children, yes; grown-ups, no,” she returned. “Children are charming, simply charming, whenthey’re listening intently to the words of wisdom that fall from one’s lips. It’s necessary to make the words fall in somewhat eccentric positions, by the way, or else this admirable intentness is not observable to any great extent. But when onedoesget the whole attention of a class of little children, there’s nothing quite like it, for pure pleasure. Their serious eyes are so pretty, and their characteristic attitudes of attention are sweet too. By which remark you will have discovered that I’m no formal disciplinarian. When I was at school theyclickedat us with a miserable little wooden apparatus. One click meanthands in laps; two clicks,sit bolt upright; three,attention!—which, being interpreted, signified, take every atom of individuality out of your personal appearance, and become as much like a little automaton as circumstances will permit. Oh, if I could have ground that clicker to pieces!” They both laughed.
“It doesn’t seem to have been a complete success in your case,” he said. “The figure would not work, in fact.”
“No; but then I never conformed to anything. I suppose I never have. There are some people who are born to kick against the pricks—foolish, no doubt; it wears one’s shoes out, and if they are pretty shoes it seems a pity;but—” She gave her shoulders a little shrug, and paused.
“Better are shabby shoes and freedom therewith,” returned Carey, looking up with a smile; and then he too paused abruptly. It struck him, suddenly, that he had trenched unintentionally upon delicate ground.
Bridget flushed a little.
“I’m so anxious for your book to come out, Mr. Carey,” she said, rather hastily. “Everything you write has the sunshine lying right across it,—real hot sunshine! I like the way you have of bringing Eastern scenes before one’s mind by a single word, sometimes. I always think, if you hadn’t written you would have painted; you would have been a great colorist,” she added, with the quick, pretty smile which always conveyed to Carey a sense of flattery more subtle than her frank words.
“Well, my poor old grandfather, at any rate, would have blessed you for that remark. He brought me up, you know; he was a painter himself. It was a great blow to the dear old boy that I didn’t take to his trade. That reminds me,” he added suddenly, putting his cup down, and looking across curiously at Bridget. “I’ve been haunted ever since I knew you by your likeness to some one. You know what a tantalizing, maddening thing a likeness you can’t fixis. Now I know! You are exactly like a sketch of his—one he made when he was a young man, somewhere in the north of Ireland. It’s the head of a girl—”
“A fisher girl?” Bridget cried, eagerly. She rose and went to a writing-table. “Not this? I brought it down to show Helen yesterday,” she said, coming towards him. She put the sketch into his hands.
Carey half rose from his seat. “Bridget O’Hea! This is his writing—this is the Bridget he mentioned once. Who is she?” he demanded.
“My grandmother,” she answered, smiling. “She was just a fisher girl at Dara’s Bay in Galway.”
Their eyes met. “My grandfather said she was the loyalest and best, as well as the loveliest woman in Ireland,” he returned. “You are like her. Very like her,” he added, glancing from the sketch to Bridget.
“Thank you!” Her color rose a little; her face wore a softened, grateful look. “I’m glad to hear that, though I don’t remember her,” she said. “I have always been interested in this grandmother of mine.”
Carey leant back in his chair, and gazed musingly at the sketch. “How strange!” he said. “There was a romance, you know,” he wenton slowly, after a moment. “My grandfather loved her—he never forgot her, I believe.”
“And she?” Bridget asked, breathlessly, with parted lips.
“I don’t know. She was a married woman, with two or three children, when he met her; and as loyal a one as ever breathed, he said, the only time he spoke of her; but whether she cared for him—”
“Ah! she did—she did, I’m sure,” Bridget answered swiftly, bending over the picture. “You poor little grandmother!” she added softly. She rose, and silently replaced the sketch, laying it gently, almost reverently, he noticed, in the drawer.
When she came back to her seat she was silent a moment, fingering the tassels of the work-bag in her lap absently, with a trace of nervousness. This discovery seemed to have brought them in some peculiar fashion suddenly near to one another. Bridget felt all at once unaccountably shy.
“It is so strange,” she said quietly at last, breaking a somewhat awkward silence, “that it was all so long ago. Yet how young she looks! I remember I spoke of her the first time I ever saw you—” She stopped.
“At the Wagner concert,” Carey said, finishing the sentence. “I remember, when you toldme your name was Bridget, I said to myself, quite involuntarily,Bridget O’Hea, and the thought of the sketch flashed through my mind. That was a delightful evening. Can’t we go to another Wagner concert together, Mrs. Travers, for auld lang syne?”
He waited, with a touch of eagerness in his look, for her answer.
“We will make up a party. Helen wants to go to the next one; and Jim will tolerate Wagner, for the sake of Helen, for one evening,” she said, unconcernedly.
“Let us consider it an arrangement, then, if the others agree,” Carey replied, in the same tone.
Bridget did not speak at once. She put her head back against her chair, a trifle wearily; her color had faded; she looked pale and tired.
Carey rose and fetched a cushion from the sofa.
“Sit up a moment; let me put this for your head,” he said, with the air of gentle authority she had noticed once or twice in his voice. It sent her thoughts back to the night she was so tired, so dreadfully tired, after the concert, when he had taken care of her.
She didn’t want the cushion; but it was nice to be taken care of. She raised her head, as he told her, with a smile, and he arranged the pillow with deft, capable hands. She hadalways liked the decided way he touched things; it was a sort of translation of his voice, she thought.
“You are tired. You are working too hard, I believe,” he said, going back to his seat.
“Only a little tired. I suppose Iamworking hard; but I like it, thank you.”
“You teach all day, and write all night,” he went on, looking at her deliberately and critically. “You will always wear yourself out—it is your nature, I suppose. The first time I ever saw you—”
“You told me it was my duty to have a sort of Lord Mayor’s luncheon every day,” she interrupted, laughing. “Oh! I’m not working too hard. I certainly don’t write all night; though sometimes, I own, it’s a little late when I happen to look at the time,” she added, with an air of great candor. “I’ve been lucky enough to get work on theTide, thanks to Dr. Mansfield, you know; so a great deal of it is writing that must be done.”
“And the rest?”
“Oh!—experiments—attempts at the impossible, I’m afraid. I’ve got back my old longing for experience—always experience. Directly one begins to write one is conscious how little one knows—reallyknows, I mean. I should like to have lived the life of every one of mycharacters—I ought to have lived it, to write about them.”
“That would make existence a somewhat long drawn out affair. Even the theosophists have more mercy; they draw a veil of oblivion between the lives in most cases, don’t they? Besides, where does imagination come in?”
“Imagination is useful, certainly. Intuition is better—much better; but an ounce of experience is worth either of them six times over!” she declared. “It’s rather a demoralizing occupation—writing, I mean; don’t you think so?” she went on presently. “You begin, in time, to feel like a moral kaleidoscope, constantly shifting from one set of emotions to another, till you don’t know which is the real you—or if you’ve got ayou.”
Carey laughed a little. “I think there’s a very decidedyouat the back of the kaleidoscope,” he said, rising as he spoke. “It colors all the little pieces of glass. I’m dining at Lady Vernon’s to-night,” he added, glancing at the clock. “Is it really half-past six.”
She gave him her hand. “Good-bye,” she said, looking frankly at him. She wondered vaguely why his appearance always suggested to her so much strength and reliability. He was rather gracefully than strongly built—far from being a physically powerful man; yet she hadalways thought that if she were ever in an accident—a fire, or a railway smash, for instance—she would prefer to obey Carey’s directions to any man’s she knew. Something told her he would be absolutely calm and self-possessed.
He held her hand a moment in his firm clasp.
“You mustn’t work too hard,” he said, looking down at her; “but I’m glad you’re working.”
Ten minutes later Helen came in, followed by Miss Mansfield.
“Bid! all alone? How long have you been in?” Helen said, crossing the room towards Bridget’s chair.
She knelt down before the fire, and, pulling off her gloves, held her hands to the blaze.
“The silk matches to perfection!” Miss Mansfield announced triumphantly. “Helen, you’ll get chilblains. I’m going straight upstairs to change my dress before I sit down.”
Helen laid one hand caressingly on her friend’s lap.
“Tired and lonesome, Bid?” she asked.
“No; Mr. Carey has been here, and we’ve been talking.”
“What about?”
“Oh, most things. We’ve discovered that our respective grandparents were in love withone another. Isn’t that thrilling?” She gave a rapid little sketch of the discovery.
Helen looked gravely into the fire, and was silent.
Bridget laughed. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, with a malicious flash of her eyes.
“What?”
“That history repeats itself, and that I shall fall in love with Mr. Carey.”
Helen looked a trifle disconcerted. “You are a trying person, Bid,” she returned, after a moment. “You always were anenfant terrible. You’ve preserved most of your aggravating school-girl habits, and added to them grown-up ones which are ten times worse. Do you always say just what comes into your head, if it happens to be true?”
“No, very seldom,” Bridget returned, calmly. “For the last few years I’ve said everything that came into my head that happened to be false. It was required of me, and I soon learnt the trick. Ah, no, you needn’t be afraid. I am sick of love!” She made a hasty gesture with her hands, as of flinging something from her. There was a pause.
“I saw him to-day, as I came across the park,” she said presently, very quietly. “He was with that woman—Mrs. Gefferson. You know who I mean. They didn’t see me.”
Helen turned her head. “You poor child,” she said gently. “London isn’t big enough, after all.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Bridget returned, in a colorless voice. “Perhaps it’s dreadful that I have so little feeling left. I looked at him to-day as though he were a stranger. I couldn’t realize that I had lived with him for three years. Do you remember,” she went on, after a moment, “the night we saw the ‘Doll’s House,’ there was a derisive laugh when Nora says, ‘I can’t stay in the house with a strange man’? How little imagination people have! That’s howIfeel. He is a strange man; I have nothing to do with him. Thank Heaven, the first shameful feeling of it has all gone. I’m quite indifferent now.Love?” She gave a short, scornful laugh.
Helen winced. “You have never loved yet, Bridget,” she said, gravely.
Bridget turned to her with a swift movement.
“Ah, I’m a brute to speak so,” she exclaimed softly. “You and Jim—yes, that is different. I’m so glad it’s different.” She rose impulsively, and put her arms round her friend.
Helen still looked troubled. “Bid, you puzzle me. Shall I ever know such a mass of contradictions, I wonder? Why did you laugh about—about—? I should never have said that Ifeared it for you,” she went on, desperately; “but, Bid, it is not an impossibility that some day—and then I should be so afraid!” She dropped her voice, and hurried over the last sentence.
“Dear, I laughed—why did I laugh? Just out of mischief, because I can so easily tell your thoughts. I wasn’t thinking of the importance of what I said—just because that sort of thing seems so far from me—so impossible. I don’t want it!” she added vehemently. “I won’t have it. You said I had never loved. I believe you are right. I think I never did. I was dazzled; and what I took for the sun was just very poor electric light, that had a trick of going out suddenly. I don’t want the experience twice over,” she went on, shuddering. “I pray Heaven I may never have it. I’ve been talking to Mr. Carey about wanting every experience life has to offer,” she said, speaking slowly, “and yet I’m praying Heaven not to send me the supreme, the most tremendous of all possible experiences. Strange, isn’t it?”
She raised her eyes to Helen’s, and saw they were full of tears.
“You said once, when you were a precocious little girl, that Heaven never by any chance answered prayers,” Helen said, trying to speak lightly. Her voice was not steady, however.