“Helen, when this is settled I want to be quiet and peaceful for a little while,” she said wistfully. “We shall live abroad a great deal, I think. I wonder if I ever shall be peaceful and content,” she went on musingly. “I’m afraid not. What an awful thing it is to have so many moods, and to want fresh things and people to appeal to them! Why, in some of my moods lately, I’ve even wanted the type of person I used to hate and despise so intensely, just as an antidote to the simple life I was wild to lead, when I hadn’t the chance of doing it!” She laughed a little. “Poor Larry!” she murmured, half laughing, half in earnest. “Will he put up with me, I wonder?”
“You’re an aggravating person, but most people put up with you,” Helen returned.
“Yes, it’s a charming way they have; I love them for it! It’s—it’s—rather a tremendous thing to have come to this point in one’s life, isn’t it?” she went on presently. She rested one elbow upon the table, and pushed back her thick hair with the other hand. “I’ve found myself going over all my past life to-night, as they say you do when you’re dying, you know. It seems to me that I’ve always been rebellious, always struggling against something,—kicking against the pricks, in fact. When I left school, I used to lie awake night after night, and listen to the shouts of drunken men outside, divided between an agony of shame that we had anything to do with their drunkenness, and contempt of myself for hating my father’s business. That was bad to bear. Then the next rebellion was against the dreary, loveless teacher life; after that, followed revolt against the degrading existence of a woman who doesn’t love her husband, but is forced to be his slave. Now, I am up in arms against social prejudice, which makes two people suffer a lifetime (perhaps their only lifetime) for a mistake which one of them has made! When will it end, Helen?”
“Never, while you are alive, with that restless mind of yours,” Helen said, a little sadly. “You, and women like you, are born into the wrong age for peaceful happiness, I’m afraid. A transition age is surely the most difficult one for a woman to live in, well,—worthily. There’s only one thing that comforts me, Bid,” she added after a pause, “a great thing. You love this man,—I see it, I know it. You have never loved any man before.”
“The only good that comes out of what is past, as far as I can see,” Bridget replied, turning her shining eyes upon her friend, “is that I can compare it with this new feeling—and trust myself. But”—she smiled with quivering lips—“I always was an extravagant person. My experiences, even, cost more than most people’s!”
When Helen left her, she went to the window and drew back the curtains. The moon hung like a great white flower in the clear sky; she fancied the sweet scent which came floating into the room, as she pushed open the casement, streamed from its shining heart. There were mystic silver pathways through the pine woods round the house, and between the black motionless trees the distant sea shone like a lake enchanted. The silver radiance of the night held her spellbound. She covered her eyes with both hands at last, and shut out the white glitter of the moonlight. She was intoxicated with the beauty of the world, with the joy at her heart,—alive, clamorous, insistent. The cup of life, brimming and honey sweet, was at her lips at last. “At last!” she repeated, whispering to herself in ecstasy, “this is my moment—this—and to-morrow. And I thought life had cheated me,—that it held nothing I had dreamt of!—that I should die without—” She sank on her knees before the window, and hid her happy, smiling eyes against her folded arms.
A moment or two later, the breathless stillness, which seemed to encircle her, and hold her delight at its heart, was broken. Somewhere in the distance, the silence was cut by the sudden hoarse barking of a dog. She raised her head slowly, with a long sigh, to find the room in shadow. A cloud had floated across the moon. There was a glint of silver on the distant sea, but the glamour had gone from the landscape. In a moment’s space it had grown gray and dim. The mysterious, silver pierced wood, was just a clump of pine-trees, overhanging the darkening sea.
She felt a sudden, inexplicable contraction of the heart. Her exalted mood was evaporating, escaping, melting away from her. It was as though a cloud had passed also over her mind. She wondered vaguely why she had felt so deliriously happy a moment since. There were troubles,—there was suffering in store, of course. She had said so to Helen that very day. There was her mother, for instance. She paused. Her forehead contracted into a frown. She had thought out this question so many times, why need she go through it all again? She shrugged her shoulders impatiently. Why couldn’t she have even one perfect hour, unspoilt by misgivings, by self-torturing scruples? She had decided. The thing was settled. Why couldn’t she give herself up to her joy? She was possessed by an impatient, impotent sense of anger at her inability to recapture the mood of ten minutes ago. It evaded her; it was gone. Instead, unrest, a vague troubled sense that she was considering the question for the first time, filled her mind. The first time!—when she had gone through it all, reasoned with herself every day for months, and had finally made her decision!
With a sigh she turned away from the window at last, from the sight of the darkened wood, and the slowly lessening streak of silver on the sea.
The noise of barking was renewed; it was answered presently by the voice of Zut, the dog belonging to the café. Bridget paused to listen as she unbuttoned her dressing-jacket. Zut’s clamor increased; he was barking furiously, and she fancied she heard a step along the road. There was a stir, and the sound of subdued voices overhead, and presently some one went softly down the creaking stairs outside her door, just as the garden gate slammed. There was a whispered colloquy below, and then a retreating step on the gravel path. A moment later, there was a gentle tap at her door.