CHAPTER XIII
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. Her father would sit in his huge arm-chair on one side of the fire, talking with the eagerness of a boy of the last new poem, or the extraordinary promise of this or that young painter. Bridget, sometimes in a fantastic, sometimes a whimsical, less often in a serious mood, moved about the room, talking and laughing in her eager, vivid fashion. She was a girl again then, Helen said to herself with a thrill of pleasure—the Bridget of three years ago—quick, impulsive, with as many moods as there were hours in the day, sometimes in the highest heaven of delight, sometimes the uttermost depths of dejection. She never spoke of her husband. By tacit consent, his name was rarely mentioned between them. “I want to tear out that chapter, and burn it,” she said once. “It will have to be destroyed in a slow fire; but in the end it will perish utterly.”
Imperceptibly, however, as the months went on, Helen noticed a change in her. A growing restlessness possessed her. “Bid, you’re getting too thin,” she said, one morning, looking at her critically, as she sat down to breakfast. “Also your eyes are too big.”
“The better to see you with, my dear,” Bridget replied, helping herself to sugar. She laughed a little nervously as she spoke.
“You rush about too much. I think you’ve undertaken far too much work,” 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.
“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. “By the way, he doesn’t come in so often now; he hasn’t been here for quite a fortnight. James was only remarking upon it yesterday. Ah!” as her brother entered the room at the moment. “James, we were just saying that Mr. Carey has deserted us.”
“Busy, I expect, seeing his book through,” the Professor said, taking his seat at the table. “Bridget, my dear, you’re not off, are you?”
“Yes, dear sir, if you will excuse me. I’m due at Hampstead at ten o’clock.” She waved a smiling farewell to him, and hurried from the room.