“Yet she was young once. She’d been teaching, and had lived in furnished apartments twelve years before we knew her, if you recollect. Poor woman! And she looked as though all the grayness of those twelve years had slowly gathered in her face.”
There was silence, while the Professor bent forward and stirred the fire into a blaze.
“Bridget,” he said, leaning back in his arm-chair again, “Bridget will live in lodgings. Girls of her class are unaccustomed to the British chaperon. It will not occur to her mother that a chaperon is required. I wonder if it will occur to her to give the girl such instruction as may fit her for leading an independent, solitary life? I doubt it. I imagine her a poor, feckless body. But you will see to that, Charlotte?”
“My dear James, she’s got all her examinations to pass yet, and then there’s a school to be found—no easy matter nowadays, I should imagine. It will be two years before these preliminaries are over. The girl may never come to live in London at all. She’ll probably get sick and tired of studying alone, and she’ll marry or something. Why trouble about it?”
“She’ll write in time; of that there’s very little doubt,” said the Professor, musingly. “Stevens was very much impressed with the few things she showed him. But she’ll have to go through the mill, I think. Hers will be no cheap success; and then success is a strange, elusive thing. At all events, if she comes we can look after her a little, Charlotte. If Helen is as devoted then as now, there won’t be much difficulty about that,” he added.
But two years later, when Bridget was teaching at the Fairfax School near Hackney, the little flat in College Street was closed. The Mansfields were abroad. Helen was delicate, and the physicians had advised a year’s travel. They had been to Egypt, and were then in the south of France.
CHAPTER V
It was Saturday morning. Bridget was awakened by the sound of the rain beating heavily against the windows of her room. From where she lay she could see a neglected slip of back-garden, which seemed to exist solely for the purpose of providing a convenient area for an avenue of clothes-props, terminating ineffectively at the point where the steeply-sloping roofs of the opposite buildings touched the top of the garden wall.
Streams of water poured continuously over the roofs, and ran in dirty streaks down the whitewashed wall. The quick falling drops made a dreary splashing on the tiles of the yard below the bedroom window. Bridget surveyed the inspiring prospect miserably. Her half awakened thoughts connected it with her yesterday’s geography lesson to the Second Form. “Look at the streams of water running down a roof, the next time it rains,” she found herself repeating; and then she stirred restlessly. “I’m in the groove already. Lessons on the brain!”