Dolores (24 page)

She looked through the future calmly. It seemed to her that her power to struggle had been worn to its death; that to suffer in secret daily, and lie in the night hours helpless under agony below the easiness of tears, was the lot that was natural for her.

It was not till the evening before her return to the college, that her father spoke of her settling to the life of mistress of his home. As he spoke, there came no change to her face. No paling
or quiver of a struggle was seen. It remained, simply, a face sad in its worn youthfulness.

“You will settle down at home now, and look after us all, my-and look after us all, Dolores? That will be your duty now; and I trust you will not find it uncongenial?”

“Yes; that is what I thought, father. I see it is best,” said Dolores, understanding the instinct that checked the words, ‘my daughter.' “You must just do as well with me as you can; and I must just do as well as I can. I shall not try and fill any one's place.”

“Dolores,” said Sophia, “it was my dear mother's wish, that you should be at the head of things when she was gone. She said when—when she knew she was to be taken from us, that it was the one thing, that would let her die at ease about father and us all. She told us that her message to you was that she trusted us all to you. She said it would mean to you everything, she wished she could say to you herself.”

As Sophia's voice broke, Dolores wept with her; with a feeling that she was weeping away the surface sorrows, whose melting would uncover those that held her soul as dead.

She felt that her soul was dead, when she made her lonely journey, for the winding up of the life she dared not look back upon. She felt it was dead; and had a strange, dull gladness in feeling
it; for that it might awaken was a petrifying thing. But it awoke. When she saw the bent, still figure among the familiar desks, it awoke; and she knew that her hour was come.

Claverhouse did not turn as she entered. His aspect told of the old absorption; and from time to time his hands and head moved with the old suddenness. His roughly-hewn face wore a look of calm content; and the look laid a chill on Dolores' heart.

She closed the door with a sound; and he turned his head. His face lit up, with the swiftness of a happy knowledge that comes by a deeper power than sight. Dolores took the seat at his side, silent and cold.

He said no word; and his acceptance of a lot, in which closeness of comradeship gives countenance to speech or silence, brought a pang which seemed to shake her.

She began to speak—with a feeling that she must clutch the fiercest pain, her words and their work could cost, as the means of holding her emotions from following his.

“I am come to say—to tell you that this meeting is our last. My father has lost his wife; and he and his children have no one to look to, but me. I am needed in his home; and I must see that it is there I must feel my duty. There is one thing I ask you to do—to do for me,
and for her—to give all your powers to the play.”

As he turned his sightless eyes towards her, the manner of the change on his face blanched her own. After a long silence he seemed to be trying to speak; but it was minutes before the power of utterance came.

“What?” he said, in a toneless mutter.

She repeated her sentences, word for word, in a voice that had lost its life.

He sat looking before him; and his frame relaxed; as though he were sinking passively to utter hopelessness. Suddenly he turned to her, and sat leaning towards her, as though the whole of his being were straining in question towards the whole of hers. She knew the question as if he had spoken it. There was then in all her feeling towards him no love for him?

She rose and left the room; neither breaking through the doorway, nor throwing a farewell glance at the figure at the desk; but walking slowly and helplessly, as though the meaning of movement were gone.

She went to her own study and fastened the door.

Five years had gone, unmarked by word between Dolores and Claverhouse. From the recoil and quiver of the inner soul come the issues in the world that is seen. In their differing bondage of seeming to choose to forsake, and feeling lightly forsaken; with their differing helplessness before the barrier of his blindness; with their same night-searching of their fellowship's strange restraint, lest the one soul had read the other falsely as a mirror of itself; they lived in silence; while there grew into each heart, as a part of itself, its aching hourly questioning of the other.

At the end of five years, the utter sameness broke. At the end of five years, Soulsby—who at a word from Dolores before the years began, that marriage was against her heart, had gathered his shrinking being to himself; and gone from her sight to live for service to his friend; tongue-tied as always upon anything that could hint that he had a life of his own,—was again of good courage; and was seen in the neighbourhood of Millfield Parsonage.

Five years had gone unmarked. On the path through Millfield churchyard, that led from the road to the parsonage, there walked a man and a woman. As the man spoke, his tones fell grave and musical.

“Yes; it has been a sad life—a life full—full of such troubles as must be borne alone, and in which friendship seems of little help. It is a great grief to me—the greatest grief I have known, to watch him failing.”

“You cannot say that
your
friendship has been of little help,” said Dolores, unable to withhold from her voice a deep, personal gratitude.

“Some years ago I should not have said it,” said Soulsby, with his easier utterance of trouble. “But of late it has been so. I am not enough for him, as once I was. How it is I do not know. He seems to be lonely. He shows a longing for—for something or some one, of whom he never speaks. And it is not for—for his wife. At least—at least, I think I may say so. His sorrow for her was different; and it was over before this last change began. I do not understand. It is the one thing in which I have not his confidence.”

“He is really failing, is he?” said Dolores, looking away from her companion to the ruddy evening sky.

“Yes, he is failing,” said Soulsby. “He never leaves his house now; and he has given up
teaching. And it is more than that. There is disease—a disease of the heart, which must be fatal. It may be soon, or in years; but it must be in the end. And he does not struggle to live. He feels his life holds nothing, now he is blind.”

“He is quite blind?” said Dolores.

“He can distinguish light and darkness—nothing more. He cannot read; and writing is no good to him—or so he says—as he cannot judge what is written. He has done very little since the issuing four years ago of his great play. It is a thing that will not bear words—that he has not power to give the time that is left him, to using his genius.”

“But do not you read to him what he has written?” said Dolores, with a note that was almost a cry in her voice. “Cannot you make what changes he wishes? I cannot see that blindness is utterly preventive of his writing.”

“No,” said Soulsby, with simple sadness; “I cannot—more than a little. He does not—does not allow me. I—I am—he does not feel me in sympathy with him—in my mind, I mean. He feels I do not follow him—and indeed often I do not; and the feeling repels him. He seems to shrink from revealing to me his conceptions while they are growing. Even—even in the old days, I only heard what he chose to read to me. And—and even then, he was often impatient of what I said and thought—even
before—before feebleness and privation had made him hasty.”

Dolores was silent; living in the sad picture which had grown to be a part of her consciousness. She lived in it with a heavy, simple grief. She had no wonder how the playwright in his blind and penniless age, came by daily bread and tendance; not needing to hear the words which she knew could not pass her companion's lips. As her eyes were drawn to the fine, spare figure, with the grey hair in scantier waves, and the saddened, older face, a rush of feeling came—a rush which she had been forcing back through many days. She yielded now. She let herself watch the other picture, which lay before her mind's vision—her own life bound with the life of this noble creature, who alone of those she knew of her kind, had given her more than she gave—her own life holding the tenderness and cherishing it had never held—carrying for the history of the first of its changed chapters, the deliverance of the greater life, that had waned too far to be knit except thus with her own. She could not but see the picture; and as she walked on, shrinking from breaking the silence whose significance she knew, her thoughts hovered round it, and drew it into the range of the possible and near.

For changes had grown in the parsonage household, in the five years in which Dolores
had been its mistress. The Reverend Cleveland had buried his second bereavement more easily and finally than his first; and was a happier and less unresponsive man in his doubly widowed days. Bertram was absorbed in the fair and prosperous ordering of his own life; Cleveland, with full, and quite unemotional paternal consent, had been adopted by the Very Reverend James; and of the young sisters, Evelyn was betrothed and on the point of marriage to Herbert Blackwood, and Sophia had grown into a womanhood beyond her years, and into much of the place in her father's heart which in the earlier time had been Dolores'.

For there was a further difference between the Mr Hutton of to-day, and the husband and father of the days of his second wife. The close of the second passage of his wedded experience, by its removal of the check upon remembrance of the first, had seemed to rob the latter of its earlier sanctity. Both were sunk in memory; and for a man of his history and years, he lived little in the past. Dolores' place in his life was hardly larger than her sisters'; many of his old qualities, in chief his moroseness and liking for thoughtful companionship, were far less marked; and Sophia was of an age and nature to sustain easily the lightened burden, and fitly the greater dignity. Dolores felt that her will was her own; that this feebler and later promise of brightening in her
path was undimmed by looming shadows. When Soulsby spoke, she felt it was her right to hear him without struggle.

“Claverhouse has not—has not done and suffered what he has, without giving me a share of his troubles. I miss his friendship—the real friendship that once I had, deeply. I am thrown much on myself. I have never been a man of—a man of friends. I am—I am lonely. I have—I hope I may have—a hope——”

He broke off. It was not his earliest effort. The task was barely in his power.

They had reached the gate that opened from the churchyard to the road. Dolores gave him her hand. He pressed it with a deepening of his usual deprecating deference, glanced into her face as he lifted his hat, and while she passed through the bushes from his sight, remained still and bareheaded.

As she neared the parsonage garden, she saw two figures pacing with arms entwined before the porch. They were the figures of her father and Sophia; and she paused in the blooming rhododendrons, leaning on a firmly - growing branch, and watched them.

No; she was no longer essential to her father's life. The years which carried the undoing of the life that was supreme to her thought, and held the supreme need, had seen the end of the duty whose call had been her command. Five years,
and this change! The cup was not to pass from her. It must seem—it seemed—that little was done, in the place of what might have been done. But her nature remained for her help; and she was spared the wishing different what she had done hardly and sorrowing. The glimpse of the heavy figure and the youthful was pregnant with memories. Before these five years, she could not have judged otherwise than as she had judged.

And now her life was her own. As she stood leaning on the cold bough, with the damp earth under her feet, her hands clasped together, and her worn, woman's face towards her childhood's home, there were simple, pitiful feelings mingling with those which lay too deep for herself to name them. No; it was not only the brightening of the darkened end of the life which was the meaning of her own—not only the living for the noble fellow-creature who sought her for herself;—it was the other things of which her lot had been empty;—daily cherishing, little hourly signs of a heart's homage, the glances of those who knew her early years, and deemed her unsought of men, and grateful that the shelter of her father's roof was ungrudging. It was such things as these, that left the others beneath, and struggled to the surface. For there are times when the heart is hungry, and cries out for the simplest sustenance as stay for its need.

The Blackwoods had bidden their friends to an evening mildly convivial; and Mr Blackwood, twirling his moustache in survey of his drawingroom, had a sense that he was doing a pleasant thing which he could ill afford, and which was therefore generous as well as pleasant. In Mrs Blackwood, who sat with a very upright bearing and a studied air of ease, which seemed to clash with each other, the sense of pleasantness was rather painfully subordinate to that of the ill-affording; and there were further misgivings to give complication to qualms. The Huttons and Cassells were to be supplemented, not merely by Mrs Merton-Vane; whose acceptance of Blackwood good-fellowship was sufficiently rare—being limited to cases when Mr Hutton was known to be included in the company—to be held momentous; but by Soulsby; upon whom Mr Blackwood had pressed his invitation, without reference to authority more domestic than his own impulse, and with genial insistence unhampered by a
sense of acquaintance resting on a single meeting, or of the guest's probable experience of evening hospitality.

Mr Hutton had suffered some unperturbing amazement, that this chance of convivial experience had commended itself to his friend; and Mrs Merton-Vane, to whom in confidence he admitted his view, easily entered into it. Mr and Mrs Blackwood, with the true instinct of hospitality—which is known to feel astonishment an unfitting attitude to the doings of guests,—had not yielded to surprise over any case of welcome extended to the pleasure they offered.