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The Bridge House
by
The hand dropped; but Brydon’s face was hot, and his eyes were hard.
Pierre continued: “But then women are strange. What you expect they will not–no. Riches?–it is nothing; houses like that on the hill, nothing. They have whims. The hut is as good as the house, with the kitchen in the open where the river welts and washes, and a man–the great man of the world to them–to play the little game of life with…. Pshaw! you are idle: move; you are thick in the head: think hard; you like the girl: speak.”
As he said this, there showed beneath them the front timbers of a small crib of logs with a crew of two men, making for the rapids and the slide below. Here was an adventure, for running the rapids with so slight a craft and small a crew was smart work. Pierre, measuring the distance, and with a “Look out, below!” swiftly let himself down by his arms as far as he could, and then dropped to the timbers, as lightly as if it were a matter of two feet instead of twelve. He waved a hand to Brydon, and the crib shot on. Brydon sat eyeing it abstractedly till it ran into the teeth of the rapids, the long oars of the three men rising and falling to the monotonous cry. The sun set out the men and the craft against the tall dark walls of the river in strong relief, and Brydon was carried away from what Pierre had been saying. He had a solid pleasure in watching, and he sat up with a call of delight when he saw the crib drive at the slide. Just glancing the edge, she shot through safely. His face blazed.
“A pretty sight!” said a voice behind him.
Without a word he swung round, and dropped, more heavily than Pierre, beside Judith.
“It gets into our bones,” he said. “Of course, though it ain’t the same to you,” he added, looking down at her over his shoulder. “You don’t care for things so rough, mebbe?”
“I love the river,” she said quietly.
“We’re a rowdy lot, we river-drivers. We have to be. It’s a rowdy business.”
“I never noticed that,” she replied, gravely smiling. “When I was small I used to go to the river-drivers’ camps with my brother, and they were always kind to us. They used to sing and play the fiddle, and joke; but I didn’t think then that they were rowdy, and I don’t now. They were never rough with us.”
“No one’d ever be rough with you,” was the reply. “Oh yes,” she said suddenly, and turned her head away. She was thinking of what the young doctor had said to her that morning; how like a foolish boy he had acted: upbraiding her, questioning her, saying unreasonable things, as young egoists always do. In years she was younger than he, but in wisdom much older: in all things more wise and just. He had not struck her, but with his reckless tongue he had cut her to the heart. “Oh yes,” she repeated, and her eyes ran up to his face and over his great stalwart body; and then she leaned over the railing and looked into the water.
“I’d break the man into pieces that was rough with you,” he said between his teeth.
“Would you?” she asked in a whisper. Then, not giving him a chance to reply, “We are very poor, you know, and some people are rough with the poor–and proud. I remember,” she went on, simply, dreamily, and as if talking to herself, “the day when we first came to the Bridge House. I sat down on a box and looked at the furniture–it was so little–and cried. Coming here seemed the last of what grandfather used to be. I couldn’t help it. He sat down too, and didn’t say anything. He was very pale, and I saw that his eyes ached as he looked at me. Then I got angry with myself, and sprang up and went to work–and we get along pretty well.”