Netta Syrett

“ To go to church with her on Sunday, to hear the excited whisperings from the Wilbys’ pew just at the back, to see all eyes fixed on them as they walked up the aisle, to know that Bridget’s picture hats, her well-cut gowns and dainty shoes were being eagerly scanned, and would serve as food for voluble, envious criticism on the homeward walk from the members of every family in Rilchester, was to her the breath of life. ”

“ I know your feeling. It is terrible, this conflict between what one owes to one’s self, and one’s love, or obligation to those who stand in the way. But, Bridget, what are we to do? How will the world go on if we are to be cramped, hindered, fettered, forever? If we are never to be ourselves, never to take the path that leads highest? Suppose you had remained with your—with Travers, out of fear of hurting your mother? ”

“ But we are afraid; we hesitate; we haven’t the courage to take our happiness! I don’t know that there is any life but just this one. Why should I starve my nature? Why should I refuse the chance of a great happiness? I don’t say the certainty, you see, but the chance, even! If I don’t take it I shall be forever in a gray land, tortured with the thought that it’s my own fault, my doing, my cowardice, perhaps. If I do—”
“Yes—if you do?” Helen repeated.
“I don’t say we shall not both suffer,” Bridget answered slowly. ”

“ You’ll always belong to some one. You’ll be afraid to be yourselves. 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 you I shouldn’t care to know if I wasn’t obliged; not because of what your fathers are, but because of what you are,—a set of silly, tame sheep, who daren’t think 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. ”

“ Bridget exclaimed, settling herself against the padded back of the cab. “I’ve never been in a hansom before! Ah, how beautiful the lights are! See that long line of lamps reflected in the wet pavement!” She never forgot this drive,—from Piccadilly to Wentworth Street. In dreams, sometimes, she saw long, dark roads, outlined in points of flame, white smoke rising from the reeking flanks of the horse, as the lamplight for a moment streamed full across its path,—shining, wet pavements, reflecting yellow gleams: all seen through rain-dimmed glass. ”

“ The thought of her mother, of her angry reproachful words half an hour ago, brought back her misery in a flood. She always shrank from allowing herself to analyze her feeling for her father; but for her mother—that was different.
Her eyes wandered over the little room. She looked at the frilled curtains her mother had hemmed, at the valance round her bed, at the lace-edged covers on the dressing-table and chest of drawers, at the numberless trifles about the room, all of them dainty and pretty. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Bridget poured some milk out of the cracked jug into her tea, with a shaking hand, and raised the cup half way to her lips. Then she put it down with a sudden rattle into the saucer. Her tears choked her. She pushed away her plate, with the dried-up piece of bacon upon it, rested her elbows on the corner of the table, and covered her face with both hands. For a minute or two her tears fell fast, then she raised herself with a hasty movement, and pushed her hair back from her face impatiently. “What a fool you are to cry like a baby, at your age, because you are dull!” she said to herself. ”

“ The dressing-table was adorned by several woolly mats of a violent green shade; and on the mantel-piece there was a row of mourning cards with chaste designs of silver urns, willows, and weeping angels. Bridget gazed at them all with weary indifference. “What am I to do with this day, and to-morrow, and Monday? Three whole days to be passed between this room and the next, if it rains like this all the time,—and it probably will. At least there are the children on working days. I wish there were no holidays. When you’re working you can’t think. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I’m not saying that doing away with marriage is any cure for the sorrows which may come. It will happen a thousand times, of course, that love lasts on one side and not on the other. But that is the tragedy of life,—terrible, but inevitable. And how does the legal bond which holds two people chained together, when one loves and the other hates, mend matters? ”

“ Bridget replied quickly. “How can one human being accept or refuse a risk for another? We stand, each of us, alone. We have not rushed blindly into this, Helen. He left me absolutely free, to make my own decision. He wouldn’t even see me again for fear he should urge me.” Her voice shook, “Helen, if you only knew what his gentleness and tenderness are to me! I don’t think you can realize it till you have had to endure the other sort of love. Love!—I mean the mere selfish passion.”
The last words were almost inaudible. She held her hands tightly clasped on her lap ”

“ He spoke in a tone of half laughing raillery, but Bridget’s smile faded.
Involuntarily she withdrew her hand from his arm.
“I’m not the sort of girl who requires a chaperon,” she replied coldly. “I’m a High School teacher. The High School teacher is used to going about alone. If she wasn’t she would die of loneliness in her lodgings,” she added; “and life is sweet even to a teacher.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Helen went on, in a dissatisfied tone. “I never see you all day now; you tear from one place to another like one possessed! Your writing will suffer. I don’t believe you’ve put pen to paper for weeks. Why don’t you?”
“I don’t know—there isn’t time,” Bridget said vaguely. “I can’t write now,” she went on, with a touch of desperation in her tone. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me!” She moved restlessly in her chair.
[194] “I can tell you—over-work; isn’t it, Aunt Charlotte?”
“That’s what Mr. Carey always says about Bridget,” Miss Mansfield said, placidly sipping her tea. ”

“ It was shaking, he felt.
“This comes of a long day’s shopping, and no lunch!” said Carey, as they turned into Waterloo Place.
“How do you know?” She looked up at him a moment, and smiled. “Oh, it’s so stupid of me! I never felt like this before!” she cried.
“You won’t make me believe you never went without your lunch before. All women do when they are left to their own devices; they think it’s so economical.”
“There’s no denying that it is,” Bridget replied. The fresh air had revived her already, and the miserable feeling of faintness was passing off. ”

“ How are you, father? oh! and Aunt Jinny.”
She entered the room with her arm round her mother’s waist, kissing her between the words, over and over again. The maid came in with fresh tea, and she sank into a low chair by the fire, pulling off her gloves, and chattering.
Mrs. Ruan glanced triumphantly at her sister, and then back again at Bridget.
“Child! how you’ve grown!” she exclaimed, with a glance at the girl’s slight, erect figure and bright eyes.
“So I ought,” Bridget cried. “I’m eighteen. Eighteen! Aunt Jinny, what do you think of that? Lovely tea, mother—oh! and hot cakes!—delicious!” ”

“ The winter wore on, and Bridget remained with the Mansfields. Every attempt on her side to urge that she ought to take rooms was met by determined opposition on the part of her friends. Finally, it was settled, that she should stay at any rate, till after Helen’s marriage, which was arranged for the middle of May. Helen never forgot the evenings of that winter, when the curtains were drawn, and the shaded lamps and the firelight made their little drawing-room glow like a warmly tinted jewel. Nearly every night two or three people came in after dinner, in informal fashion. ”

“ By the time they are old enough to understand, there will be still more free men and women than there are now, who dare to face realities. They will be their friends. But in any case,” she raised her big eyes, and looked full at her friend, “I can’t help believing, Helen, that his children and mine, would rather be born of a man and woman who love each other, than of a legal marriage where contempt was the strongest feeling, on one side, at least! ”

“ Mrs. Ruan said in an irritable voice half an hour later. Her husband had risen to go upstairs to bed, but he paused at the door to listen to her words. Bridget lay back wearily in her chair. Her cheeks were flushed with annoyance, her eyes big and bright with tears. In the light of the gas burner overhead her hair glittered like threads of gold. The sight of the girl’s beauty, as she glanced at her, angered her mother still further. “She’ll throw away all her chances in spite of it,” she thought resentfully.
“Mother, I couldn’t,” she answered with fierce emphasis. “The man’s not a gentleman. ”

“ I love you as I never yet loved a woman; but though I shudder at the mere idea of life without you, I will bear it somehow,—I must bear it, unless you can come to me without a single fear of consequence. ”

“ 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. But your frocks are sweet,” 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.” ”

“ Most of the young men had congregated on one side, and the girls on the other.
Only two or three of the men were in evening dress. The girls for the most part wore much starched summer muslins, high at the neck and long in the sleeves. Some of them had put on their winter best gowns, and attempted to give the “evening” touch by bows of heliotrope or pink chiffon, light gloves, and hair bound with a colored ribbon.
Mrs. Jenkins, a fat comfortable lady in black silk, with an écru lace cap, sat in an arm-chair, alternately beaming upon the young people and applauding “papa’s” lucky shots. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Anything was better than sitting alone, in the chilly parlor, listening to the drip of the rain.
There would be people in the streets. The mere thought of speaking to the grocer’s young man was a relief. Half an hour afterwards, she returned wet through, with the butter and the least dirty of the novels from a dingy circulating library she had discovered. Her landlady, a thin-lipped, bony woman, with a high color and a dirty cap, came out into the narrow, oil-clothed passage at the sound of the opening door, and eyed her wet waterproof resentfully. ”