PART ICHAPTER I
Thirteenor fourteen years before the afternoon when Bridget Ruan’s novel was discussed in Mrs. Trelawney’s sitting-room, she and Bridget were school-girls at Eastchester.
Saturday was a holiday at Myrtle Lodge,—Miss Brownrigg’s boarding-house for the Eastchester High School girls,—and tennis was in full swing in the school-garden behind the house.
“Play!” “Forty-love!” “Vantage all!” came shrilly from the tennis court. On a side grass-plot, whose trampled, badly kept turf bore witness to the violence of the game, rounders was being played by the little ones, who screamed themselves hoarse, and danced madly in a frenzy of excitement as one small figure after another flew round the course, and avoided the savagely aimed ball.
Several of the older girls strolled quietly along the gravel paths, with arms interlaced, whispering together in the peculiarly confidential “penny-mystery” fashion of school-girls.
“Where’s Bridget? Where’s Bridget Ruan?” one of the tennis-players called suddenly. “We’re making up a new set, and we want her!”
“Bid! Bid! Bridget, where are you?” two or three of them began to call.
Bridget shook her hair over her ears to deaden the sound, and went on writing.
She sat in a little dilapidated arbor in a far corner of the garden. It contained a rickety, dusty table, on which papers and books were untidily scattered. The arbor was surrounded by long rank grass, uncut since the spring, and drenched with the recent rains. The path she had made for herself through it was plainly visible in the trampled, broken-down stalks which extended up to the door.
The summer-house was screened from the rest of the garden by a clump of lime-trees, and in spite of frequent impatient calls, Bridget had been in possession the whole of the afternoon.
“Bid! Bridget!” the cries grew louder and more urgent.
“Bother!” whispered the girl, stamping her foot impatiently and writing faster.
“Bridget! Miss Ruggles wants you. Where are you?”
The girl uttered a smothered, furious exclamation, but otherwise paid no attention.
“She’s never in the summer-house, through all this awfully wet grass!” she heard a nearer voice exclaim. “Run and see, Dulcie; your frocks are short!”
There was a rustling in the grass outside, and in a moment a small child stood examining her damp stockings on the threshold.
Bridget raised her head with an impatient jerk, and confronted her visitor with an angry, “Well?”
Heavy masses of curling, copper-colored hair hung round her face to her shoulders. It was a small, delicately tinted face, with a dainty, pointed chin, and a pair of big gray eyes. They were singularly bright and restless eyes, and when she was angry they blazed royally.
She was angry now, and the small child shrank back.
“I—I—Alice sent me. Miss Ruggles wants you,” she stammered.
“Confound!” Bridget exclaimed with frank emphasis, snatching up her papers and bundling them into a book.
She rushed out of the arbor like a whirlwind, and the child cowered against the door as she passed. Half way through the long grass she recalled the frightened action, and turned impetuously back.
“All right, Dulcie! I’m not angry withyou,” she said, bending over the little girl.
Dulcie flung her arms round her, and kissed her rapturously, tears of fright still in her eyes.
“You may carry up my books for prep. to-night, and bring me the biscuits at supper,” Bridget whispered consolingly, disengaging herself with a hasty kiss.
Miss Ruggles was upstairs in the bedroom, stooping over an open drawer, as the girl entered, panting and frowning.
“Lookat this drawer again, Bridget!” she cried angrily. “What do you come to school for, I should like to know?”
“To be bothered from morning till night,” was the prompt, unreflecting reply.
Miss Ruggles stopped in her work of tidying, and stared hopelessly at her for a moment.
“You will be reported, of course,” she said at last, in a voice which indicated that she knew the uselessness of the punishment, but was compelled to inflict it for want of another more efficacious. She began to expostulate and argue in querulous, futile fashion, turning over the contents of the drawer with an air of impotent exasperation. She had just laid her hand on a large, untidy bundle of papers, when, with a swift movement, Bridget swooped upon it, and tucked it under her arm.
“These areprivate,” she announced breathlessly,shot an annihilating glance at Miss Ruggles, and dashed unceremoniously out of the room.
Down below in the garden Helen Mansfield, her special friend, was sitting alone on the grass near the house reading.
Bridget swept up to her. “Come along! Come into the arbor! Let us talk!” she cried imperiously.
Helen rose and followed her.
“Well! what did she want you for?” she inquired, when the arbor was reached.
“Oh!” Bridget shrugged her shoulders contemptuously. “Another row! Bedroom untidy or something. I’m reported again; so I thought it was waste of time to listen to all Miss Ruggles’ talk, as well as Miss Brownrigg’s, this evening, and I came away in the middle.”
“Bid!”
“Well, you’d have thought I’d broken all the Ten Commandments, instead of leaving my brush and comb out of the bag! What idiots teachers are! They mix up all the big things with the little ones, as though they were all crimes equally. Oh! a boarding-school’s a beast of an institution! Worry, worry, worry, about trifles from morning till night. And Miss Brownrigg calls this ‘preparation for life.’ Does life mean tidy wardrobes, and wordsunderlined with red ink without any smudges, and sums all worked the way of the book or else they’re not right even when the answers are the same? If so, I don’t think it’s worth preparing for.”
“Miss Ruggles isn’t worth exciting one’s self about,” returned the other girl, calmly.
“Not foryou, of course. You haven’t any temper. But I’m not made like that. I gomad. I wish I didn’t.” She flung herself down on the seat beside her friend, and there was silence for a moment.
The sunshine filtered through the chinks in the pine-log roof of the summer-house, and fell in little pools and splashes of light on the table, and on the girls’ summer dresses. Shadows of the lime-trees outside danced lightly, and flickered on the rough walls, and brought a sense of dainty stir and flutter into the arbor.
Presently Bridget moved, and broke into a laugh.
“What adufferMiss Ruggles is!” she exclaimed, her eyes dancing. “I’m sofuriouswhen rows are going on that I don’t notice the absurd things she says; but they come upon me afterwards. Just now, for instance, she said it was ‘my duty to keep my linen-drawer tidy, becauseChrist might come at any moment.’ I must putthatin.”
“In? Where?”
Bridget started, and her color rose. “Oh! never mind!” she began.
“What’s in that parcel?” her friend asked, her eyes falling for the first time on the packet Bridget had thrown beside her.
She did not reply for a moment; then she said desperately, “Well, that’sit. My story, you know. I’ve put every one nearly in,—Miss Ruggles and Mademoiselle and Miss Jones, and a good many of the girls. Notexactly, of course, but something like. It’s very stupid,” she added perfunctorily. Then, with a quick change of voice, “No, it’s silly to say that, just becauseIwrote it. Idon’tthink it’s stupid; but I daresay you wouldn’t care for it.”
“Let me see.”
“I’ll—I’ll read it to you, if you like.” She blushed again. “Will you tell me what you think of it, Helen? What youreallythink of it?” she repeated anxiously.
“Yes,” Helen returned.
Bridget began to read, her nervousness betraying itself in the breathless gallop at which she rushed through the first page,—a pace which steadily diminished, however, as she grew accustomed to the sound of her own voice. Then she began to do her work justice by intonation andemphasis, encouraged by an occasional spontaneous laugh from her friend.
It was a crude enough little story of school life; badly constructed, of course, though not without a certain redeeming vigor of its own. The characters, although inclining towards caricatures of their originals, were boldly drawn, with a touch of daring humor. The whole thing was curiously realistic. The girl had indulged in no flights of imagination or rhetoric. She had observed keenly, portrayed faithfully, if somewhat mercilessly, after the manner of the young. There was about it an indication of power rather remarkable in a school-girl effusion.
“Well?” said Bridget, looking up as she dropped the last sheet. “Well?” It was uttered a little breathlessly, and she leant forward in her eagerness, propping her chin on her hands, her elbows resting on the table.
“Yes,” returned her friend, slowly, “I like it. You have made the people seem real, but—” She paused.
“But,” repeated Bridget, impatiently. “Do go on, Helen!”
“I’m trying to think what my father would say.”
Bridget’s face darkened; she began to fidget impatiently with the paper in front of her; but Helen was looking at the sunlit leaves.
“I think he would say thestylewas bad,—might be improved,” she said, unconsciously substituting a phrase of the professor’s for her own.
“Style?” Bridget repeated. “What do you mean? Whatisstyle?”
“I don’t know quite; it’s difficult to explain. Father would tell you. It’s awayof saying things, I think.”
“But you said I had made themrealpeople!” Bridget protested.
“So you have.”
“Well! what does it matter how I put the words, as long as I’ve done that?”
“I don’t know, but itdoes. Father says it is very important. Cultivated people—”
“But I’m not a cultivated person, you see!” Bridget returned fiercely, her face flushing. “I don’t belong to cultivated people, and I don’t know how to finick, and be mincing, and awfully refined in writing, any more than in talking. Ifthat’swhat style means, I’d rather be without it, and say straight out what I mean, and what I see. I should hate to be such ayoung lady”—there was an accent of fierce contempt in the words—“as—as—”
“AsIam, for instance,” put in Helen, quietly. “But I thought we were talking about style. I don’t know why people can’t write down what they see, and yet have good style.”
But Bridget was not attending. She had flung out her arms across the table, and, with her head buried in them, was sobbing convulsively.
Helen paused a moment; then she bent over the girl and kissed her hair.
At her touch Bridget sprang up.
“Oh! I’m a beast—abeast!” she cried incoherently. “I’m always being so hateful to you; and it isn’t your fault.... Only, Helen, I can’t help it, I’m so jealous, so horribly jealous!” She paused, sobbing uncontrollably.
“But why, Bid, dear?”
“Oh! it is hateful, I know,” Bridget whispered; “but if you only knew how I envy you your sort of home, your kind of father.Youalways live with people who are ladies and gentlemen. They talk about interesting things,—books and pictures; and they are—the word you used—they arecultivatedpeople. Sometimes—O Helen, I can’t help it—I almosthateyou, for knowing all you do, so easily. It all comes so naturally to you. AndIwant it too!” she exclaimed passionately. “What I said just now wasn’t true. You knew it wasn’t true. Ishouldlike to have style—and—and—all the rest. I want to know the sort of peopleyouknow. I shallnevercare for any others. And I never can,” she added bitterly, “just because,—oh! it’s awful, just as though itwerea crime!”
“But, Bridget,” protested her friend, soothingly, “you are so clever! When you are grown up, you will write books. People willwantto know you then. Even the stupid people, who— Besides,” she continued hastily, leaving the sentence unfinished, “youarea lady. Nothing can alter that; any one can see it. Why, even that wretched Lena Mildmay—”
“Ah!” cried Bridget, unheeding, “and there again is a worse trouble. Ihatemyself, Helen; it seems so mean to say anything, even toyou, that seems—that seems—” She hesitated, her lips trembling. There was silence for a moment. “Oh! youknowI love my mother, Helen,” she whispered brokenly; “but—”
“Yes, yes, Bid, darling!” Helen interposed, in a voice that was already womanly in its tenderness.
There was another short silence, and then Bridget jumped up.
“That’s enough of the dumps!” she said, with a vivid gesture. “You are an angel; and what are my eyes like? Dare I meet the others? or will that little duffer, Mary Molton, say, ‘What’s the matter, Bridget? Have you beencrying?’ Come along; let’s play tennis! My style’s good enoughthere, anyway,” she added mischievously, with a flashing backward glance at Helen, who was picking her way through the wet grass.
It was four years since Miss Brownrigg, departing from her “usual rule,” took a tradesman’s daughter as a boarder at Myrtle House. Times were hard in the educational as well as the outside world, and tradesmen had this saving grace,—they usually paid promptly. Besides, Bridget’s home was a distant one, and, as Miss Brownrigg remarked to her sister, it was very unlikely the other girls would ever know,—“unless, of course,” she added with a sigh, folding up a check for entrance fees paid in advance,—“unless the child is very uncouth, which is unfortunately to be expected.”
Miss Brownrigg’s expectations were, however, falsified in both particulars.
In the first place, Bridget was not uncouth. In the second, she speedily left no doubt in the minds of her school-fellows as to the nature of her social position. It was with considerable relief that Miss Brownrigg saw a slender, graceful little girl emerge from the cab which brought her to the door on the first day of term.
“My dear Eliza,” she observed, “the child is not merely presentable,—she ispretty; she has style. She is even dressed well,—simply, I’m glad to say, butwell. We sha’n’t have much trouble.”
This was when the drawing-room door hadclosed upon Bridget after the first interview, and she was following the maid upstairs to her bedroom,—a dejected little figure, with bent head and trembling lips.
And, in the particular way she expected, Miss Brownrigg was right.
The one or two hardly noticeable peculiarities of phrase and pronunciation—which to a very close observer indicated that her home was not on the same level of refinement as the rest of her school-fellows’—the child corrected herself before she had been in the house a month. She never made a mistake twice. The English teacher, who was observant, noticed that she was at first morbidly sensitive on the subject.
Her mental character, as disclosed in the monthly conclave of teachers, was rather distractingly diverse. She was a dunce, incorrigibly idle, and a genius, according to varying accounts; but they all with one accord lifted up their voices and denounced her iniquities.
With the girls her popularity was undeniable, and the public disclosure of her social status notwithstanding, she retained it during the whole of her school life.
At the beginning of her second term at Myrtle House, a child about her own age came to school for the first time. Bridget always made much of the new girls, flying in the faceof the time-honored tradition that they were to be treated as interlopers, and not allowed to display any “cheek” for several weeks.
“The stupidest idea I ever heard,” she declared, “just when they feel loneliest, and most miserable, to treat them badly, in case they should havecheek! Is it likely they’d feel cheeky the first fortnight, poor things? Didyoufeel cheeky? You cried for nights and nights. Youknowyou did. So did I.”
Essie Langford—who had been petted and dosed with chocolates whenever she was discovered with her head in her locker, dissolved in tears, like a miserable little ostrich—naturally lost her heart to Bridget, and abandoned the idea of suicide.
“Will you let me be your friend?” she whispered one day, creeping up to her. Bridget sat in her favorite attitude, curled up on the floor, with her book on the sofa.
“Of course,” she returned, raising abstracted eyes for a second from the open page.
“Well, now let us tell each other what our fathers are,” said Essie, confidentially, lowering her voice, and glancing apprehensively round. “Mine has asortof business, you know,—not ashop, of course,” she added hastily, “because there are wire blinds up at the windows, but—”
“I don’t want to know what yourfatheris,”Bridget replied scornfully, forgetting her book. “What does it matter? I don’t know him. I knowyou, not your father.”
The girls were assembling for preparation of home lessons. They gradually drifted, as they generally did, over to Bridget’s side of the room.
“What does Bridget say, the darlint?” one of them inquired.
“She says it doesn’t matter what your father is,” Essie replied in a low voice, blushing furiously.
“Doesn’t matter?” echoed one of the elder girls. “Ofcourseit matters.”
“Why?” Bridget broke out, wheeling round and facing her.
“Why? Oh, well—because— Well, it decides whetheryouare a lady.”
“How can yourfatherdecide that?” asked Bridget, hotly. “He is notyou. You areyourself.Youdecide that. What do you mean by a lady?”
“Some one whose father is a gentleman,” replied Lena, obstinately. “And you can always tell whoisthe daughter of a gentleman.You’rea lady, Bid, of course. If your father had been a butcher or baker or candlestick-maker, you’d have been quite different. Your face would have been different; you’d haveugly broad hands, instead of nice thin little ones, like yours.” She took one of them with a caress, and tried to draw the girl down beside her on the sofa, but Bridget drew back. “You would dress horribly,—in bad taste, like those Higginses in church, the grocer people, you know. Butyourfrocks aresweet,” she went on, stroking Bridget’s pink cotton skirt admiringly.
“Oh! and then you’d have a horrid uneducated voice. And altogether,—any one can tell a lady. It’s nonsense to say it doesn’t matter who your father is. Why, nobody knows a person whose father is not a gentleman.”
“Of course not!” some of the girls echoed. Others were discreetly silent. One or two remembered reassuringly that mamma always spoke of “your father’s office,” and added, “Of course not!” a little late, but very emphatically.
“Well, then, listen!” cried Bridget, her voice ringing imperatively. “I don’t care who hears! Listen! and see howstupidyou all are! I suppose you don’t call a man who keeps a public house a gentleman. Well, I’m the daughter of a man who keeps a public house.”
There was dead silence. A sort of undefinable flutter of surprise and consternation was in the air. Unconsciously the girls fell back a pace or two. Bridget noticed it, and threw up her head defiantly.
“And you’ve all known me, and made a fuss over me, for a year, andthought I was a lady,” she said mockingly, looking round at them with slow scorn. “You can’t even discover a lady for yourselves. You have to wait to be told that she isn’t one. But half of you,” she cried, glancing at them one after another contemptuously, “will be like that as long as you live. You’ll alwaysbelongto some one. You’ll be afraid to beyourselves. There! now you know who my father is, and you may do just as you like about ‘knowing’ me, as you call it. Half of youIshouldn’t care to know if I wasn’t obliged; not because of what your fathers are, but because of whatyouare,—a set of silly, tame sheep, whodaren’tthink for yourselves!”
She paused breathless and shaking, her eyes blazing. There was a moment’s awkward silence, and then Helen Mansfield, the head girl, moved from the door which she had entered just as the discussion began, and came forward.
“Bid,” she said carelessly, in her usual self-possessed voice, as though nothing had happened, “will you come and help me see to the lockers? It’s my week, and there’s such a lot to do.”
She put her arm round the girl’s waist, not effusively, but in ordinary school-girl fashion, and they left the room together.
Helen Mansfield had a certain vogue at Myrtle House. On points of etiquette she set the fashion. She was “awfully good style.”
The set of the tide was immediately discernible. Lena Mildmay, indeed, went off with her special satellite, murmuring scornfully that “it was coming to something when you never knew who you might be associating with,” and she should “write home about it;” but the others failed to respond.
Throughout the whole of preparation, surreptitious notes, which caused Bridget to writhe, continued to be passed to her, as she sat doggedly working sums, her curly hair hiding her face.
“Darling Bid, will you walk to church with me on Sunday?”
“My dearest Bridget,I’mnot a sheep, am I? I’m sure your father must be a very nice gentleman. Here are some chocolate almonds; but eat them quietly, because theyscrunch, and old Ruggles hears quickly.”
“My darling Bid, don’t tell any one. My father is a wine-merchant,—something like yours, you see; only, of course, it’swine. But still, you see, I couldn’t mind much aboutyourfather. Besides,—you’ll never tell, will you?—my uncle is a socialist, and mother says it’s a disgrace.”
“Oh, Helen! Helen!” Bridget whispered between her sobs, kneeling beside her friend’s bed that night when the lights were out, “whatfoolsthey all are. But I loveyou. I shall love you for ever and ever.”
The fact that, in spite of her promulgation, Bridget Ruan still led the school, was strikingly apparent when, two or three months later, the girls at Myrtle Lodge were converted.
A revivalist preacher passing through Eastchester was invited to address them, with the result that more than half the school was stricken with conversion. The preacher was, as usually happens in such cases, a man of powerful personality. He spoke fluently, with a certain oratorical effect which appealed strongly to Bridget’s emotional nature. Most of the girls cried copiously. Bridget sat tearless, but white to the lips, as the man prayed, almost suffocated by the violent beating of her heart. Left to themselves, most of the girls would have forgotten the service in a week, but Bridget could not forget. She fanned the wavering flame of ardor in her school-fellows. She, the leader in every game, bitterly denounced hare and hounds, and branded rounders with ignominy. She went about with fixed gaze and unsmiling lips, meditating upon the Second Coming.
She no longer rushed into the dining-room just as the door was being closed for prayers, nor came up flushed and panting when the tail of the two-and-two procession daily formed to walk from the boarding-house to the High School was about to disappear round the corner.
Bridget, in fact, exhibited every sign of that changed heart whose outward manifestation, according to school ethics, consists in a subordination to rules and an immaculate condition of drawers and lockers,—which, from the teachers’ point of view, makes a school conversion a blessed and memorable event.
As an outcome of her fiery zeal, Myrtle Lodge became characterized by a stern, unbending morality. There were no more whispered conversations in the bedrooms when the lights were out and talking prohibited. Self-imposed bad marks became the order of the day. Even the games took on a quiet, well-conducted, ecclesiastical tone. Bridget invented them. One, which she calledScripture Clocks, consisted in finding texts for every hour in the day, and printing them on to a cardboard time-piece, manufactured for the purpose. She organized, too, a Saturday afternoon prayer-meeting in the cloak-room on the ground floor, and this meeting it was which, in accordance with the irony of fate, was her undoing. She had been imploredto take the lead, and offer up prayer herself, but remembering that the fruit of the Spirit is meekness, she had reluctantly declined, giving up her place to an elder girl.
During the prayers she used to kneel beside one of the stained wooden forms, her face enveloped in a waterproof which hung straight and limp from its peg above her head.
She had adopted this attitude, because merely shutting her eyes was not a sufficient safeguard against the seduction of the sunlit leaves round the window, with their background of blue sky. Concentrating her attention thus severely on the prayer, Bridget at first listened devoutly, then less devoutly, and finally began to criticise, and that was fatal.
“How she stammers and hesitates, and says the same things over and over again,” she thought, shaking her hair about her ears in growing irritation. “Why didn’tIpray when they asked me?” She began to compose impassioned addresses, modelled unconsciously on the soul-stirring exhortations of the preacher who had so roused her nature. By degrees she ceased to listen to the halting words of the girl, wrapping the cloak round her head so that her own imaginary prayer might be delivered to a sobbing audience with greater effect, unhindered by the feeble murmurs of her school-fellow.This state of affairs lasted through one or two of the meetings, and then the innings of the Adversary began.
“How ridiculous it is! How absurd you are, making up grand speeches to say to God! How silly it is to be kneeling in this stuffy, dusty room, telling God things that He knows already! Howdisgustingthis waterproof smells!”
She jerked it off with an impatient movement, and it fell upon the head of the girl who knelt next to her, enveloping her in its voluminous folds. She struggled wildly to free herself, “like a cat with its head in a jug,” as Bridget afterwards described the episode, and she began to laugh, softly at first; then the desperate struggles of the girl redoubled themselves so uncontrollably that the form shook, and Essie Langford, who knelt at her left, raised her head sharply, with a sigh of relief when she discovered the cause. Essie’s conversion at the best of times hardly deserved the skin-deep description. Bridget had insisted upon it, as a matter of fact, and now her shallow, pleasure-loving little soul rejoiced, foreseeing the end.
Mary Morton, who was praying, began the first words of the Lord’s Prayer; and when the murmur of response was at its fullest, Essie seized her opportunity.
“Bridget!” Bridget had controlled her laughter, and there was no reply to the whisper.
“Bid!” urged Essie.
“‘Thy will be done’—What?” answered Bridget. The last word was jerked out impatiently, as if in spite of herself.
“The little ones are playing rounders, awfully badly.”
“Be quiet! I know it. Let me think!” she whispered back fiercely; “‘and lead us not into temptation,’” she added, mechanically following the voice of the praying girl.
TheAmenwas followed by the silence of private prayer, broken suddenly by a quick, decided movement from Bridget, who all at once sprang to her feet. Every head was raised curiously, and in a moment or two every girl had risen from her knees.
“Wait a minute!” Bridget cried, “Ibegan these meetings, so I ought to tell you I’m not coming to any more of them. I’m tired of them. I don’t believe it interests God a bit to see us all kneeling down in this horrid dusty room; and He can hear much better prayers in church.”
There was a horrified murmur of “Bridget!”
“Well, so He can, if He likes prayers.Idon’t believe He does, because Heneveranswers any.... Anyway, it’s fine weather. I vote we have rounders after tea.”
There was a large assembly at rounders that evening, and Miss Ruggles, shutting her bedroom window with a bang, remarked to Miss Shuttleworth, the drawing-mistress, that conversion and peace were practically at an end.
The fact that Bridget’s mind had been seriously turned to spiritual matters, however, was not without permanent result. She had been unnaturally quiet throughout a Scripture lesson one Sunday, a month or two after Myrtle Lodge had resumed its normal tone. Just as the lesson was finished she said suddenly, fixing her eyes earnestly on Miss Ruggles,—
“Butthisis what I want to know,—how do you know thereisa God?”
There was an electric silence.
“And you can read your Bible, Bridget, and ask methat!” Miss Ruggles replied in an awed tone.
“But that is just why Idoask. Is there a way of proving that the Bible istrue?”
“Yes, there is the way offaith,” Miss Ruggles returned with impressive solemnity, if defective logic.
“But that isn’t aproof; it’s afeeling.”
“A feeling which you must try to cultivate, Bridget. These very foolish ideas spring from your rebellious nature and defiance of all rules,—your habit of questioning the authority ofany one who is set over you. It will lead you into great sin unless you guard against it watchfully and with prayer.”
“When I grow up,” said Bridget, abstractedly, as though following her own train of thought, “I will find out about these things; but I sha’n’t believe or disbelieve them yet. There’s no good in it that I can see.”