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. Mrs. Ruan had the feminine graceful touch commonly supposed to be the peculiar monopoly of women of a higher class. She glanced from one thing to another, and as she looked her eyes filled again with tears. Her mother had spent so many hours making her room pretty before she came home from school! A portrait of her stood on one side of the dressing-table. Bridget took it up, and looked long at it. Even in the photograph, the querulous lines round the pretty, weak mouth were strongly indicated. But Bridget only saw her mother’s face. As she gazed, hundreds of little nursery scenes flashed through her mind. She remembered coming in from a walk once, long ago, crying with cold. She saw her mother running towards her with pitying, caressing exclamations. “Mother’s poor little girl! Was she cold and miserable? Let mother warm her!” She felt once more the delicious sense of warmth and protection as she lay cuddled in her lap, her little bare feet wrapped in the warm flannel apron. She remembered her mother’s heart-broken tears the first time she went to school.
“But she’ll come home such a little lady, won’t she, father?” she had said with a pitiful smile and trembling lips, as Bridget had clung to her, crying too.
She turned the photograph over, and read with tear-dimmed eyes the words on the back, “Mother’s love to her dear little Bid.” It was the photograph she had sent her the first term at school.
Bridget threw it down with a sob.
“Poor mother! poor mother!” she wailed. She rose impulsively and opened her door. The light downstairs was out. All was darkness opposite, where her mother slept, and she closed the door, with the added misery of being in some way again repulsed. She undressed mechanically, her tears falling all the time. “Poor mother! She must be so disappointed! It’s all so different from what she expected. I understand how she feels. And yet how can I help it? We haven’t a thought or a pleasure in common; but we love one another, and that makes it so difficult, so impossible to go, so unbearable to stay. And it’s nobody’s fault—that’s the worst of it. Oh, if we were only not fond of each other, how much simpler it would be!” She turned out the gas, crept shivering into bed, and buried her face in the pillow, sobbing miserably. In the opposite room her mother lay, crying quietly lest her husband should wake, but not less bitterly.
CHAPTER IV
A few days later, Bridget found a letter for her on the breakfast table. It was from Helen Mansfield, and as she read it her eyes brightened.
“Mother,” she cried rapturously, “Helen wants me to go and stay with her—next week. How lovely!”
Mrs. Ruan paused in the act of pouring out a cup of tea. Her face brightened too.
“Well, what about your dresses, will they do? They’re grand folks, I suppose, plenty of money, ’aven’t they? Pa, Bid will want a few things. You’d better give ’er some money.”