Dolores (15 page)

It was with faith in her father's pleasure, that she wrote to her family the news of this bending of her future. His awaited letter lingered in coming; and there was an expectant smile on her lips when at length she broke its seal.

“MY DAUGHTER,—I have considered the plan for your future which you laid before me, and see there is much to be said for it. I have, however, another to suggest, with which it is my desire that you shall comply, and that your compliance will be willing, and for your happiness. Your sisters and youngest brother are at an age when education must begin in earnest. There is no school for girls within daily distance, and none for boys but that where Bertram is teaching, and which offers little in its lower forms. I cannot send them away to school. The decrease in my income puts it out of the question. My proposal is, that you shall settle at home, and undertake
their teaching. A governess able to do this as you would do it, would require a salary larger than you could supply, if you should accept the post you describe, and offer to provide it; and would occasion trouble in the household. I need not tell you that your mother would not consent. Bertram will welcome your help in his studies; we shall all be glad of your companionship; and a life at home will in many ways be better for yourself.

“God bless you, my daughter—Your affectionate father,

CLEVELAND HUTTON.”

Dolores went with the letter in her hands to be alone. The first hour of blind belief, that this was a thing which clashed with her own claims on herself, was by the others an hour of ease. But soon the hours were dark. Soon she saw what her father asked through her father's sight—simply the accepting of a service to her kin for one to strangers. She neither rebelled then, nor set her face to sacrifice. It was her way to see her life, as in the background rather than the fore, of the lives of others. It was to duty she owed her service—the choice that held the best for the lives on which it bore; and a service untouched by generous effort—given simply as owed. She knew that her father's letter had truth in its every word. But that which bound her, was the something deeper
than its words. Beneath them she read the outcry for her companionship; of declining years in a home that held its weariness; of yearning for the presence, which shadowed the prime knit with a nobler soul. Dolores' survey of a crisis in her own experience was primitive and stern. For others might be honest doubt, and blameless wavering at a parting of the ways: for herself there was a road to be taken, and another to be left. On the one side lay effort for strangers, to whom others' effort sufficed; on the other the claims of kindred, of her father and her father's children.

She grew older in the days that followed. It was not that she struggled: the struggle had been but of an hour. It was simply that she suffered, and that the suffering went deep. Through the much that was hard to say and do, she still saw grief a lesser evil than justice a good. And when the hardest came, it was as one who lived the unreal that she saw and heard.

“Ah, you are going? Ah, well. Do not forget what has passed between us. I shall not forget. I have spent much time in teaching here; but I have taught none. They have all been strangers. You have been my pupil.”

The village lay in its silent, unprogressing peacefulness—meeting Dolores as it had met her four years earlier, on the threshold of her womanhood. Now that womanhood seemed old. Those four bright, troubled years, which had left this early world the same! As she spoke and moved beneath the pressure of her pain, she found herself simply dwelling through a dream on their difference, had nothing been sought but the sameness. But the living beneath her pain was not that which was before her. It was the living above it: and she found she had hardly faced what she had freely chosen—the suffering living of this visible, unmeaning, demanding round. For there were other things that were the same.

“Oh, Dolores, I cannot be thankful enough, that you have come home for good,” said Bertram. “In a life that grows more hopeless with every day, it seems the last straw to have nobody to make a companion of.”

“Why, Bertram, what is the trouble?” said Dolores.

“Nothing, beyond what you know. But it is enough to feel one's youth slipping away; and have no chance of doing what must be done then or never; and which will spoil one's life if it is not done.”

“Oh, Bertram, is it so impossible that you should go to college?” said Dolores. “Cannot you or father see any way, in which it could be managed?”

“I can see a way very well,” said Bertram. “Simply by the mater's making a little effort against expense for a few years. But father cannot—is not allowed to see it; and I can drudge on in a schoolroom of bumpkins, when a course at Oxford would open a career. It is not a light matter to me, Dolores. I am nearly two-and-twenty; and the years for it will be gone. One cannot begin one's life too late. But not a farthing further is to be wasted on me. Father takes credit to himself for having kept me sheltered and fed, while I should have starved or died of exposure, if he had not.”

“I suppose his income is really very much less,” said Dolores, in nervous uncertainty how to respond. “This fall in the tithes has made such a difference. He cannot do things for the younger ones, as he once intended.”

“But they are not living the best years of their youth,” said Bertram. “It does seem that some sort of effort might be made, to save the
whole of my life. Father and the mater think that so long as I can just support myself, so as to be off their hands, I am not to be troubled about.”

Dolores moved in silence. She felt a bewilderment in this forcing upon her of bitterness other than that of her own, which had filled her world. She looked about her, as one troubled in a dream. The familiar road seemed laden with suggestions of the old, monotonous round; the gabled parsonage was in sight. It was with an effort that added paleness to the set lines of her lips, that she crushed her despair in the denial of a lonely hour, for her sympathy's release; and set her face to the unknowing, family greetings.

“Why, Dolores, you are looking very pale and thin,” said Mrs Hutton. “You do not look so after you have been at home for a few weeks.”

“She needs a rest,” said Mr Hutton, who could not repress an unwonted buoyancy, in welcoming the return with academic honours of the child of his hidden tenderness. “The news of your place on the lists gave me great pleasure, my daughter.”

“Will you be glad to be settled at home, Dolores, or would you rather be at college?” said Mrs Blackwood, who was calling with her husband and children, and whose presence had determined her sister's words. “Which life do you prefer?”

“I have had many happy days at both,” said Dolores. “I should not compare them.”

“Do you think you will like teaching your sisters and brother?” pursued Mrs Blackwood, who had had a difference with Mrs Hutton earlier in the day. “With the home duties that are sure to crop up, you will get very little time to yourself.”

“I am fond of teaching,” said Dolores; “and I have no especial pursuits to make me anxious for much spare time.”

“You are a very good sister, and a very good daughter,” said Mrs Blackwood; “and I think we may say a very good stepdaughter too.”

“My dear Carrie, you need not talk as if teaching three intelligent children were a condition of slavery,” said Mrs Hutton. “We did not heap advantages on Dolores, for her to make no use of them. She really ought to be teaching away from home.”

“My dear, that would be a foolish arrangement from your point of view,” said Mrs Blackwood.

“Well, Bertram, what does your sister think of your new prospects?” said the Rev. Cleveland, interposing with a note of weariness.

Bertram, who had been talking in lowered tones to Elsa, looked up as if reminded of something jarring.

“Oh, I have not mentioned them to her, sir,” he said.

Mr Hutton was silent; and Bertram continued in a casually bitter tone, in answer to Dolores' question.

“Oh, I have been offered a higher post at the grammar-school—the mastership of a house that takes boarders; so that I can settle down to give up my life to farmers' sons, and their welfare—mental and bodily.”

“It is not a question of giving up your life,” said the Rev. Cleveland. “Promotion is not tabooed any more to you than to other men.”

“It is tabooed to me, as much as to other men with no qualifications, sir,” said Bertram.

“My dear Bertram, learning is not only to be had at Oxford and Cambridge,” said Mrs Hutton. “I am getting tired of this harping on that subject. You talk as if learning were a thing to be bought with pounds, shillings, and pence. Books are the same all the world over, surely. You have plenty of spare time; and you are not a baby. There is no reason why you should not give yourself as good an education, as any one need have.”

“I have given myself as good a one already, as most people have,” said Bertram. “I should have thought I need not tell you, that it is not only that, that Oxford and Cambridge give—are supposed to give, if you like,—it comes to
the same thing. No good post is open to a man, who is not turned out of one or the other. Any man understands that.”

“Yes; to hear Uncle Cleveland talk, one would think his years at Oxford were the only time in his life he found worth living,” said Elsa.

“But, really, though I suppose the atmosphere and ancient associations of Oxford and Cambridge must influence all that one reads and thinks in them, the learning in itself must always be the same, must it not?” said Lettice.

“Letty, your habit of talking as one possessed by an imbecile spirit, has been wearying to me from your cradle,” said Elsa. “I am sorry to see it growing upon you.”

“Ah, there is a great deal of truth in anything that Letty says, I have no doubt,” said Mr Blackwood, preferring passive conviction, as less exacting than active judgment. “I have no doubt of that.”

Elsa resumed her talk with Bertram without yielding her father a glance; and neither gave heed to the general company, until Mrs Blackwood's awakening to the need for leaving; which occurred at a discomfiting point in argument with her sister, and was proof against pressure of hospitality.

Bertram escorted the guests to the door; and on his return, Dolores was struck by a difference in him. He was buoyant, as she had known him
only in unwitnessed moments of the younger time. His spirits lasted till the parting for the night; and apart from their giving of perplexity, in their bearing on the mood they followed, they seemed to sit on him strangely. To-day she had power to follow what she saw, only through sorrow's dazing sense of living the unreal; but the memory was to grow into meaning.

Poor Dolores! She wrestled along in the silent hours that night—holding to her own nature in the wrestling; neither weeping nor rising to pace the ground; but lying with dry eyes and worn face, and hands clutching the coverings tensely. When the morning grew light, she rose schooled for her lot.

The day was the Sabbath, which brought more of friction than peace in the parsonage household. She walked with her father in the garden after the constraining morning meal, at which Bertram's moodiness returned, to diffuse a general oppressiveness; and strove to give the daughterly comradeship, for which she gauged his unworded yearning. But it was not long hidden, that this which she felt the chief of her hard service, it might be a greater service to leave undone. Mrs Hutton's voice fell cold and repelling on her ear, as they passed down the churchyard to the church.

‘I shall expect you to take your share of what has to be done, now that you are at home,
Dolores. I shall not expect you to enjoy yourself with the men of the household, and leave me
all
the brunt of the general management. The mere teaching of the children is not a work which exempts you from everything else. There were a good many things you might have done to save me between breakfast and church; which would have left me free for your father, at a time when he always likes to have me with him.”

Dolores was silent. Thrusts of this kind could not strike without leaving a wound; but the pain was lost in that which pressed without ceasing. And it pressed heavily. The little familiar church, failing by the side of the childhood's conception which she carried; the loved, familiar face, whose aging struck again the painful note of discord with memory; the familiar, ponderous utterance, whose words were alone in harmony with what had foregone—being exactly those, which a few years earlier had celebrated the corresponding Sabbath;—all went to bring home the straitness of the lot, she had taken for that which she held as fullest.

At the midday meal her brother's vivacity returned; and the casual manner of the notice which met it, revealed that his changes of mood were wonted. At its end, he suggested that his sister and he should take a walk to the meeting-house; where an afternoon service was to be held by Mr Blackwood.

“You seem to have a fondness for that meeting house, Bertram,” said Mrs Hutton. “Do you approve of his going to dissenting-places so often, Cleveland?”

“I do not understand his preference,” said Mr Hutton; “but it is not a matter upon which I should interfere with a son of mine.”

Bertram looked a little embarrassed.

“I think the Blackwoods like some of us to go now and then, sir. They come to your church sometimes, to hear you preach.”

“It is hardly a province where reciprocation should be regarded as an exchange of civility,” said the Rev. Cleveland, following his son and daughter with rather ungenial eyes, as they left the room; “and I think' sometimes,' and ‘now and then' might be reversed in their connections.”

The meeting-house showed a scene that was typical of Millfield experience. The seats were covered—or sprinkled—by such of the district's labouring and trading folk, as combined dissent with admiring confidence in Mr Blackwood, as oratorical evangelist. Mr Blackwood himself was standing near the platform, with bent head; twirling his moustache in frank evolution of the coming discourse. Dr Cassell was seated in the front, with an air half-critical, half-approvingly expectant; allowing his eyes to dwell at intervals on the toilette of his wife, whose gloved hand lay on his arm. Mrs Blackwood sat with her son and
daughters, with her eyes fixed on her husband, and a rather tense demeanour. An elderly labouring man, whose face expressed that order of goodwill, which may be described as evangelistic, was conducting strangers to places, with a deportment fitted to the reversed proportion of visitors to empty seats. Dolores and Bertram had hardly been ushered with warmth of welcome to the front, when Mr Blackwood stepped upon the platform; opened a hymn-book in which his finger had been keeping a place, and gave out a hymn. A woman took her seat at a piano; which bore a small brass plate, with the inscription: “Presented by Dr Cassell”—to which Dr Cassell's eyes showed a tendency to turn;—and the assembly sought the place, with a bearing in keeping with apprehension of results, should the first line pass, unsung by any one of them. The rustic official showed an almost painful anxiety, lest lack of books should conduce to this pass; and did not consider it too late to hasten to supply the need—his own lips not ceasing to move the while—in a case which had escaped his notice, during the last verse. This attitude was common to most of the audience, especially the men; two of whom resigned their own books, not failing to point to the line being sung; and stood empty-handed; in one case singing, with an air of struggling with complacence in knowing the words, and in the other remaining silent, as if deprivation was
nothing to a sense of it in another. At the end of the hymn, Mr Blackwood broke upon the general standing in wait for the “amen,” with the suggestion that the last verse, as carrying peculiar benedictiveness, should be sung a second time. This done, and a prayer pronounced in a declamatory tone, he delivered his discourse; which imposed no particular strain upon either himself or his hearers. It was dogmatic in tone, and tending to the antagonistic, as though with unexpressed reference to holders of other faiths; and was unhampered by line of argument, or ruling aim. It provoked consentient murmurs and rustles, which he clearly found congenial; not failing to be inspired by them with greater power of emphasis. The sentences tended to rise and swell with ease, but to fail towards the end, or even to meet some trouble in attaining an end; in which cases he made compensation for balance of language in impressiveness of utterance. Mrs Blackwood did not take her eyes from his face while he spoke; and wore the air which is observable in parents at the public performance of their children. Many of the older people were provided with Bibles; and when a scriptural allusion was made, bestowed some tedious precision on seeking the place; as if the neglecting to regard what they had heard, in the text, were an omission more serious than losing the words that ensued. Dr Cassell lived the hour with the
bare endurance of a bad listener; and once sat suddenly upright, and looked with flushed eagerness towards the speaker, as though the duties of an auditor and the corrective power of his normal character were at sharp conflict; and then gave a glance at his wife, and settled down with an air of restless resignation. At the end of the final hymn and prayer, he at once made his move to leave the chapel; and his face fell as his friend made public a hope, that no one who desired a word with himself would have hesitation in remaining: and two old people availing themselves of this thoughtfulness, incurred from him a glance of a hardly brotherly nature. Outside he stood in silence, giving his wife no word of his pause, as though feeling that the demands of speech might tend to disarrangement of the matter in his mind. When Mr Blackwood appeared, he at once began to speak, making his habitual gesture with his hand.