NOBODY’S FAULT

Nobody’s Fault

BY NETTA SYRETT

BOSTON: ROBERTS BROS., 1896 LONDON: JOHN LANE, VIGO ST

Copyright, 1896, By Roberts Brothers. University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.

NOBODY’S FAULT

Out in the London Square a dismal November fog mingled with the gathering twilight, and blotted out the trees and the opposite houses.

Mrs. Trelawney’s drawing-room, where the fire burnt clear, and the softly shaded lamps shed a subdued light, was very pleasant by contrast. Mrs. Trelawney herself sat on one side of the fire in a low seat, beside which a small table was drawn up, covered with multi-colored silks for the embroidery she held.

“Are you very busy just now?” she asked presently of a man who sat leaning back in an arm-chair opposite her on the other side of the table.

“Busy? Stevens is never busy,” her husband assured her. He rose lazily from the sofa as he spoke, and sat down on the arm of his wife’s chair. “He sits in his den before a good fire, with a novel in one hand, and the editorial cigar in the other; and that’s what he calls hard work!”

[8]Stevens groaned. “May you never do anything harder! You don’t mention the kind of novel over which I’m usually to be found gnashing my teeth!”

“Poor man! as bored and savage as all that?” Mrs. Trelawney asked, smiling. “But you get a good one sometimes, of course.”

“Once in three months, perhaps. Oh! there are mitigations of misery, I allow. Last night, for instance, I reviewed a book that interested me. It was good; very good,” he added, meditatively.

“A new writer?”

“Yes, or new to me, at least. It was a woman’s book,—not the usual woman’s novel with a capital W, though, Heaven be praised! The writer’s name is Bridget Ruan. I don’t know whether—”

Mrs. Trelawney dropped her needlework with an exclamation. She turned swiftly to her husband, her eyes shining.

“How splendid!” she said softly, a thrill of excitement and triumph in her voice.

“You know her?” Stevens inquired curiously.

“She is my great friend.” Mrs. Trelawney lifted her head proudly as she spoke.

“Why, you know Bridget Ruan, Mr. Stevens!” she exclaimed, a moment later. “She used to stop with me years ago, after we both left[9] school, you know. You were very much interested in her—”

“Not the clever little girl, whose father—”

“Yes!” she cried, interrupting him in her eagerness. “I forgot that you have never met her since. You’ve been away much too long!”

“Really? Strange that I shouldn’t have known, I mean,” he returned, raising himself a little on one elbow to talk. “I remember her perfectly, of course, but her name had escaped me. Well, it’s a clever story, a very clever story. Strong, but delicate too. No screaming—no rant—but it tells. You have seen it, perhaps?

“She was a striking girl,” he went on musingly. “Is she as beautiful as she promised to be?”

Mrs. Trelawney rose, and crossed the room to a cabinet, from which she took a photograph. She put it silently into his hands.

The editor stood up, and moved nearer the light.

“Yes,” he said, after a moment’s scrutiny. “I remember her face. But she has altered. It was a face full of possibilities. Some of them have become realities, I should say. Yes, she is beautiful—really beautiful.”

“Now you’ve raised yourself, if possible, several inches in Helen’s estimation,” her husband said with a laugh.

[10]Mrs. Trelawney made no remark. She took the photograph gently from Stevens, and, re-crossing the room, put it in its place. There was the suggestion of a caress in the little touch with which she settled the frame, before she returned to her seat.

Then she took up her work, and bent over it a moment without speaking.

“I’m so glad,” she said presently,—and as she raised her head, Stevens thought he detected a trace of tears; “and she’ll be so glad you think well of her book. You must meet her again. I will arrange it. She hasn’t forgotten you. Why, it was you who first praised her work, don’t you remember?”

CHAPTER I

Thirteen or fourteen years before the afternoon when Bridget Ruan’s novel was discussed in Mrs. Trelawney’s sitting-room, she and Bridget were school-girls at Eastchester.

Saturday was a holiday at Myrtle Lodge,—Miss Brownrigg’s boarding-house for the Eastchester High School girls,—and tennis was in full swing in the school-garden behind the house.

“Play!” “Forty-love!” “Vantage all!” came shrilly from the tennis court. On a side grass-plot, whose trampled, badly kept turf bore witness to the violence of the game, rounders was being played by the little ones, who screamed themselves hoarse, and danced madly in a frenzy of excitement as one small figure after another flew round the course, and avoided the savagely aimed ball.

Several of the older girls strolled quietly along the gravel paths, with arms interlaced, whispering together in the peculiarly confidential “penny-mystery” fashion of school-girls.

[12]“Where’s Bridget? Where’s Bridget Ruan?” one of the tennis-players called suddenly. “We’re making up a new set, and we want her!”

“Bid! Bid! Bridget, where are you?” two or three of them began to call.

Bridget shook her hair over her ears to deaden the sound, and went on writing.

She sat in a little dilapidated arbor in a far corner of the garden. It contained a rickety, dusty table, on which papers and books were untidily scattered. The arbor was surrounded by long rank grass, uncut since the spring, and drenched with the recent rains. The path she had made for herself through it was plainly visible in the trampled, broken-down stalks which extended up to the door.

The summer-house was screened from the rest of the garden by a clump of lime-trees, and in spite of frequent impatient calls, Bridget had been in possession the whole of the afternoon.

“Bid! Bridget!” the cries grew louder and more urgent.

“Bother!” whispered the girl, stamping her foot impatiently and writing faster.

“Bridget! Miss Ruggles wants you. Where are you?”

The girl uttered a smothered, furious exclamation, but otherwise paid no attention.

[13]“She’s never in the summer-house, through all this awfully wet grass!” she heard a nearer voice exclaim. “Run and see, Dulcie; your frocks are short!”

There was a rustling in the grass outside, and in a moment a small child stood examining her damp stockings on the threshold.

Bridget raised her head with an impatient jerk, and confronted her visitor with an angry, “Well?”

Heavy masses of curling, copper-colored hair hung round her face to her shoulders. It was a small, delicately tinted face, with a dainty, pointed chin, and a pair of big gray eyes. They were singularly bright and restless eyes, and when she was angry they blazed royally.

She was angry now, and the small child shrank back.

“I—I—Alice sent me. Miss Ruggles wants you,” she stammered.

“Confound!” Bridget exclaimed with frank emphasis, snatching up her papers and bundling them into a book.

She rushed out of the arbor like a whirlwind, and the child cowered against the door as she passed. Half way through the long grass she recalled the frightened action, and turned impetuously back.

“All right, Dulcie! I’m not angry with you,” she said, bending over the little girl.

[14]Dulcie flung her arms round her, and kissed her rapturously, tears of fright still in her eyes.

“You may carry up my books for prep. to-night, and bring me the biscuits at supper,” Bridget whispered consolingly, disengaging herself with a hasty kiss.

Miss Ruggles was upstairs in the bedroom, stooping over an open drawer, as the girl entered, panting and frowning.

“Look at this drawer again, Bridget!” she cried angrily. “What do you come to school for, I should like to know?”

“To be bothered from morning till night,” was the prompt, unreflecting reply.

Miss Ruggles stopped in her work of tidying, and stared hopelessly at her for a moment.

“You will be reported, of course,” she said at last, in a voice which indicated that she knew the uselessness of the punishment, but was compelled to inflict it for want of another more efficacious. She began to expostulate and argue in querulous, futile fashion, turning over the contents of the drawer with an air of impotent exasperation. She had just laid her hand on a large, untidy bundle of papers, when, with a swift movement, Bridget swooped upon it, and tucked it under her arm.

“These are private,” she announced breathlessly,[15] shot an annihilating glance at Miss Ruggles, and dashed unceremoniously out of the room.

Down below in the garden Helen Mansfield, her special friend, was sitting alone on the grass near the house reading.

Bridget swept up to her. “Come along! Come into the arbor! Let us talk!” she cried imperiously.

Helen rose and followed her.

“Well! what did she want you for?” she inquired, when the arbor was reached.

“Oh!” Bridget shrugged her shoulders contemptuously. “Another row! Bedroom untidy or something. I’m reported again; so I thought it was waste of time to listen to all Miss Ruggles’ talk, as well as Miss Brownrigg’s, this evening, and I came away in the middle.”

“Bid!”

“Well, you’d have thought I’d broken all the Ten Commandments, instead of leaving my brush and comb out of the bag! What idiots teachers are! They mix up all the big things with the little ones, as though they were all crimes equally. Oh! a boarding-school’s a beast of an institution! Worry, worry, worry, about trifles from morning till night. And Miss Brownrigg calls this ‘preparation for life.’ Does life mean tidy wardrobes, and words[16] underlined with red ink without any smudges, and sums all worked the way of the book or else they’re not right even when the answers are the same? If so, I don’t think it’s worth preparing for.”

“Miss Ruggles isn’t worth exciting one’s self about,” returned the other girl, calmly.

“Not for you, of course. You haven’t any temper. But I’m not made like that. I go mad. I wish I didn’t.” She flung herself down on the seat beside her friend, and there was silence for a moment.

The sunshine filtered through the chinks in the pine-log roof of the summer-house, and fell in little pools and splashes of light on the table, and on the girls’ summer dresses. Shadows of the lime-trees outside danced lightly, and flickered on the rough walls, and brought a sense of dainty stir and flutter into the arbor.

Presently Bridget moved, and broke into a laugh.

“What a duffer Miss Ruggles is!” she exclaimed, her eyes dancing. “I’m so furious when rows are going on that I don’t notice the absurd things she says; but they come upon me afterwards. Just now, for instance, she said it was ‘my duty to keep my linen-drawer tidy, because Christ might come at any moment.’ I must put that in.”

[17]“In? Where?”

Bridget started, and her color rose. “Oh! never mind!” she began.

“What’s in that parcel?” her friend asked, her eyes falling for the first time on the packet Bridget had thrown beside her.

She did not reply for a moment; then she said desperately, “Well, that’s it. My story, you know. I’ve put every one nearly in,—Miss Ruggles and Mademoiselle and Miss Jones, and a good many of the girls. Not exactly, of course, but something like. It’s very stupid,” she added perfunctorily. Then, with a quick change of voice, “No, it’s silly to say that, just because I wrote it. I don’t think it’s stupid; but I daresay you wouldn’t care for it.”

“Let me see.”

“I’ll—I’ll read it to you, if you like.” She blushed again. “Will you tell me what you think of it, Helen? What you really think of it?” she repeated anxiously.

“Yes,” Helen returned.

Bridget began to read, her nervousness betraying itself in the breathless gallop at which she rushed through the first page,—a pace which steadily diminished, however, as she grew accustomed to the sound of her own voice. Then she began to do her work justice by intonation and[18] emphasis, encouraged by an occasional spontaneous laugh from her friend.

It was a crude enough little story of school life; badly constructed, of course, though not without a certain redeeming vigor of its own. The characters, although inclining towards caricatures of their originals, were boldly drawn, with a touch of daring humor. The whole thing was curiously realistic. The girl had indulged in no flights of imagination or rhetoric. She had observed keenly, portrayed faithfully, if somewhat mercilessly, after the manner of the young. There was about it an indication of power rather remarkable in a school-girl effusion.

“Well?” said Bridget, looking up as she dropped the last sheet. “Well?” It was uttered a little breathlessly, and she leant forward in her eagerness, propping her chin on her hands, her elbows resting on the table.

“Yes,” returned her friend, slowly, “I like it. You have made the people seem real, but—” She paused.

“But,” repeated Bridget, impatiently. “Do go on, Helen!”

“I’m trying to think what my father would say.”

Bridget’s face darkened; she began to fidget impatiently with the paper in front of her; but Helen was looking at the sunlit leaves.

[19]“I think he would say the style was bad,—might be improved,” she said, unconsciously substituting a phrase of the professor’s for her own.

“Style?” Bridget repeated. “What do you mean? What is style?”

“I don’t know quite; it’s difficult to explain. Father would tell you. It’s a way of saying things, I think.”

“But you said I had made them real people!” Bridget protested.

“So you have.”

“Well! what does it matter how I put the words, as long as I’ve done that?”

“I don’t know, but it does. Father says it is very important. Cultivated people—”

“But I’m not a cultivated person, you see!” Bridget returned fiercely, her face flushing. “I don’t belong to cultivated people, and I don’t know how to finick, and be mincing, and awfully refined in writing, any more than in talking. If that’s what style means, I’d rather be without it, and say straight out what I mean, and what I see. I should hate to be such a young lady”—there was an accent of fierce contempt in the words—“as—as—”

“As I am, for instance,” put in Helen, quietly. “But I thought we were talking about style. I don’t know why people can’t write down what they see, and yet have good style.”

[20]But Bridget was not attending. She had flung out her arms across the table, and, with her head buried in them, was sobbing convulsively.

Helen paused a moment; then she bent over the girl and kissed her hair.

At her touch Bridget sprang up.

“Oh! I’m a beast—a beast!” she cried incoherently. “I’m always being so hateful to you; and it isn’t your fault.... Only, Helen, I can’t help it, I’m so jealous, so horribly jealous!” She paused, sobbing uncontrollably.

“But why, Bid, dear?”

“Oh! it is hateful, I know,” Bridget whispered; “but if you only knew how I envy you your sort of home, your kind of father. You always live with people who are ladies and gentlemen. They talk about interesting things,—books and pictures; and they are—the word you used—they are cultivated people. Sometimes—O Helen, I can’t help it—I almost hate you, for knowing all you do, so easily. It all comes so naturally to you. And I want it too!” she exclaimed passionately. “What I said just now wasn’t true. You knew it wasn’t true. I should like to have style—and—and—all the rest. I want to know the sort of people you know. I shall never care for any others. And I never can,” she added bitterly, “just because,—oh! it’s awful, just as though it were a crime!”

[21]“But, Bridget,” protested her friend, soothingly, “you are so clever! When you are grown up, you will write books. People will want to know you then. Even the stupid people, who— Besides,” she continued hastily, leaving the sentence unfinished, “you are a lady. Nothing can alter that; any one can see it. Why, even that wretched Lena Mildmay—”

“Ah!” cried Bridget, unheeding, “and there again is a worse trouble. I hate myself, Helen; it seems so mean to say anything, even to you, that seems—that seems—” She hesitated, her lips trembling. There was silence for a moment. “Oh! you know I love my mother, Helen,” she whispered brokenly; “but—”

“Yes, yes, Bid, darling!” Helen interposed, in a voice that was already womanly in its tenderness.

There was another short silence, and then Bridget jumped up.

“That’s enough of the dumps!” she said, with a vivid gesture. “You are an angel; and what are my eyes like? Dare I meet the others? or will that little duffer, Mary Molton, say, ‘What’s the matter, Bridget? Have you been crying?’ Come along; let’s play tennis! My style’s good enough there, anyway,” she added mischievously, with a flashing backward glance at Helen, who was picking her way through the wet grass.

[22]It was four years since Miss Brownrigg, departing from her “usual rule,” took a tradesman’s daughter as a boarder at Myrtle House. Times were hard in the educational as well as the outside world, and tradesmen had this saving grace,—they usually paid promptly. Besides, Bridget’s home was a distant one, and, as Miss Brownrigg remarked to her sister, it was very unlikely the other girls would ever know,—“unless, of course,” she added with a sigh, folding up a check for entrance fees paid in advance,—“unless the child is very uncouth, which is unfortunately to be expected.”

Miss Brownrigg’s expectations were, however, falsified in both particulars.

In the first place, Bridget was not uncouth. In the second, she speedily left no doubt in the minds of her school-fellows as to the nature of her social position. It was with considerable relief that Miss Brownrigg saw a slender, graceful little girl emerge from the cab which brought her to the door on the first day of term.

“My dear Eliza,” she observed, “the child is not merely presentable,—she is pretty; she has style. She is even dressed well,—simply, I’m glad to say, but well. We sha’n’t have much trouble.”

This was when the drawing-room door had[23] closed upon Bridget after the first interview, and she was following the maid upstairs to her bedroom,—a dejected little figure, with bent head and trembling lips.

And, in the particular way she expected, Miss Brownrigg was right.

The one or two hardly noticeable peculiarities of phrase and pronunciation—which to a very close observer indicated that her home was not on the same level of refinement as the rest of her school-fellows’—the child corrected herself before she had been in the house a month. She never made a mistake twice. The English teacher, who was observant, noticed that she was at first morbidly sensitive on the subject.

Her mental character, as disclosed in the monthly conclave of teachers, was rather distractingly diverse. She was a dunce, incorrigibly idle, and a genius, according to varying accounts; but they all with one accord lifted up their voices and denounced her iniquities.

With the girls her popularity was undeniable, and the public disclosure of her social status notwithstanding, she retained it during the whole of her school life.

At the beginning of her second term at Myrtle House, a child about her own age came to school for the first time. Bridget always made much of the new girls, flying in the face[24] of the time-honored tradition that they were to be treated as interlopers, and not allowed to display any “cheek” for several weeks.