CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The next morning at half-past six Madame Joyselle, creeping quietly downstairs, was, to her amazement, overtaken by Brigit.
"I have not slept," the girl explained, "and am going for a walk. I have promised to take Tommy to see 'Peter Pan' this afternoon and must feel better when I do."
"I am sorry you did not sleep. I am going marketing—and to Mass."
They opened the door and went out into the fresh morning air. Golden Square was asleep as yet, and the well-kept grass in the garden looked pleasantly fresh behind the brown railings.
"Come with me; it will do you good," said the older woman suddenly, "and it will amuse you to see France in this old dark London of ours."
She carried a large basket, and looked, in her trim dark dress and bonnet, so exactly what she was that it occurred to Brigit, by force of contrast, how remarkably few people nowadays do look what they are.
"I will come with pleasure," she said gently, as they turned to the left. "Where do you go first?"
"To Notre Dame de France in Leicester Street. There's a Low Mass at seven. Then I must go to the butcher in Pulteney Street, and to the Ile de Java for coffee. Toinon," she continued, reflecting, pausing to give a penny to a beggar, "is a very good girl, but she cannot buy. She simply takes what they offer her, and no housekeeper can stand that, of course."
Leicester Street is but a ten minutes' walk from Golden Square, and Brigit felt as she walked that the world was meant for better things than tragedy, after all.
Her torture of Joyselle the evening before had been infinitely cruel, and yet her love for him had grown as she tortured him. She was as yet quite unused to the dominion of her own emotions, and they, being so much stronger than her self-control, had carried her away with them. It had been a kind of mental fakirism, and as fakirs smile as they burn and cut themselves, so she had been able to smile as she burnt and cut at her own heart in Joyselle. Yet she was not an altogether cruel woman.
And this quiet walk with the homely, good, little Félicité tranquillised and steadied her maddened nerves and brought reason to her mind.
Félicité left her basket in the vestibule of the church, and going in dipped her fingers into the holy water fountain and held her hand out to Brigit.
Unconsciously the girl touched it, and then, as the other woman turned and knelt at one of the worn praying-desks, Brigit hastily touched her own forehead and breast.
The drop of water stayed for some seconds on her forehead, and in its coolness seemed to burn her.
After a short pause she walked down the aisle and sat down in the second row of seats.
The priest came out as she took her place, and the Mass began.
Its very silence was restful to the girl, and as she watched, the sleep that had refused to come to her all through the night touched her eyelids and they closed wearily.
When she opened them it was as if a cool hand had been laid on her aching heart. Here was peace.
The Good Shepherd in the round window seemed to mean much as he looked down at her, and even the statue of the Mother and Child in the altar to her left looked beautiful to her. "Salve Regina, Mater Misericordiæ," she read.
To the right of the main altar a group of tiny votive candles were burning; an old nun in a kind of white sunbonnet, draped with a black gauze veil, dropped her rosary with a little clatter to the wooden floor.
There were only a dozen or so people in the church, but this made no difference. The priest would not feel slighted, as an Anglican curate might. He had a serious ascetic face, and seemed not to know that any was present beside his God and himself.
"I am a brute," Brigit told herself, "a perfect fiend to torture him so. Why cannot we be good to each other? And how will it all end? I will be good to him in the future."
Then she shivered, for she was not a child and realised perfectly that her "being good" to Joyselle was by no means altogether safe.
"It is playing with fire," she thought. "That is one reason why I am so horrid, perhaps."
The priest had gone, and the little congregation, with last genuflections, were hurrying out of the church. Busy people, these; workers who before their day's labour begins have always time to say Bonjour to their God.
"A beautiful church, hein?" asked Félicité, as they came out of the church. "You liked it, my daughter?"
"Yes. I liked it. Where do we go now, petite mère?"
More than one passerby turned to stare at the beautiful girl with the weary eyes and her humble companion as they made their way towards Rupert Street. With the violently sudden change of mood that was part of her character, Brigit's spirits had gone up. She would be kind to Joyselle; that would be being kind to herself, and therefore she would be happy. In an hour they would be at home and she would see him. A great longing to feel his strong arms round her came to her, and her face flushed as she decided to go to him frankly and ask to be taken back.
"It is a beautiful day," she said softly.
Félicité smiled up at her.
"Yes. And it is good to begin a day by going to Mass. It clears one's mind of yesterday, and to-day is—ours, Brigitte."
For all her native shrewdness, it would not at all have surprised Félicité if Brigit had suddenly become dévote, and even now as she watched the girl's radiant face it seemed to the Norman that the Mass had helped even more than she had ventured to hope. "She is going to try to fight it down," she thought gratefully, "and that is all that is necessary."
M. Bourbon, charcutier, in Rupert Street, has a beautiful shop full of wonderful things. Félicité bought a pound of galantine de volaille truffée, for which she paid two-and-six, and for which in Piccadilly she would have paid five shillings; she bought half a pound of jellied eel; she bought Pont l'Évêque cheese; flat little Parisian sausages; she bought a glass jar of preserved pears, brown with cinnamon.
Then they made their way to the Ile de Java, where they acquired a large tin of coffee, on to the Boucherie Française, where Félicité had a long discussion with M. Perigot lui-même, whom she insisted on seeing, to the disgust of the young man in attendance, who wished to look at Brigit, and whom fate assigned to an ancient dame from Brewer Street.
There were other errands to be done, but at last they reached home, and in the passage Félicité paused and set down the basket.
"You will find my husband in his study," she said, looking earnestly at Brigit. "Go to him, my dear, and be happy. Remember, he is nearly an old man, and loves you like his daughter. And remember, also, that because it is not fitting in any way, your love for him will change sooner or later, and become that of a daughter for her father. So don't worry."
Brigit stood looking after her for a moment, and then went slowly upstairs. Joyselle, in the crimson-velvet garment, was writing a letter as she entered; he looked ill and miserably unhappy.
"Victor," she began without preamble, laying her arm across his shoulders and pressing her cheek to his hair. "Will you forgive me? I—I love you."
Then she broke down and cried in an old-fashioned and weakly feminine way that she could not combat, although she quite realised its absolute inappropriateness to her character.
"How could you?" he whispered, holding her close with the greatest tenderness, the torturing formula of yesterday coming to his lips. "How could you?"
His eyes, too, were wet, but her breakdown had given him his strength back. "I thought you did not care."
"Not care!"
"But you said so," he persisted, manlike.
"Victor—you don't know how much I love you, and I don't know how I can be such a brute as I am. But—it hurts me the worst. It—it kills me. Say you forgive me."
"Dear child—I forget," he answered, as gently as a father. And Félicité, on her way upstairs, heard him through the half-open door, and smiled.