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.
“You made a statement, Blackwood—I should say, perhaps, quoted the statement, that, ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions.’ The word, ‘mansion,’ does not signify in this context, as you implied—the accepted meaning of—a sumptuous dwelling; but merely its derivative meaning, ‘resting-place.’ It is the Latin word, ‘mansio,’ used by the translators of the Bible in its native significance.”
“Ah, is that so, doctor?” said Mr Blackwood, not very gratefully—the transition from emotional exaltation to acceptance of correction not coming very easily to pass. “Well, but now, I don’t believe, you know, in this finding some new interpretation for every text in the Bible. I believe in the old gospel meanings, that have been dear to us from our cradles —that is what I believe in. I like the old meanings of the old texts—that is what I like. Why, there are some people who would go on giving us their new meanings, till in the end we shouldn’t have any of the old meaning left.”
“But—er—it is not a question in this case of giving a different meaning; it is a question of getting back to the original meaning,” said Dr Cassell, feeling the peculiar injustice of these implications in reference to himself. “It is surely better, to take every method of getting nearer to the truth.”
“Ah, well, the Truth itself is what I care about. I don’t care about the different methods of getting near to it,” said Mr Blackwood loudly; producing in poor Dr Cassell a hardly bearable sense of seeing the fallacious point in his reasoning, but being unable in a moment to locate it. “Now, I have just been having a talk with a poor old body, who was so anxious to get a word with me, that she hardly knew what she was doing; and it was wonderful the faith and the joy she showed she had in the gospel. ‘Ah, sir,’ she said, ‘you little know what you do for us, your poorer brethren, in preaching the gospel to us; and looking after our needs in the matters where we have the greatest need—you little know it,’ she said. That is the sort of thing it does one good to hear—that is the sort of thing, that makes one feel that the Gospel is the thing that is wanted, and not interpretations, and criticisms, and things of that sort.”
Dolores, standing with her brother in hearing of this dialogue, found that the old, half-tender sense of the humour of its kind was dead within her. She was living in two worlds; darkly groping in the one for a spot of solitude, that she might in the spirit live wholly in the other. A glance down the road brought the pain of self-reproach. A heavy figure was moving slowly into sight. So not for an hour could her father still his yearning for her fellowship.
It was as she thought. He shook hands in silence with his friends; and motioning her to his side, turned at once towards the parsonage. Bertram and Elsa followed; and behind came a group of Cassells and Blackwoods; of whom the doctor had secured the reins of the talk, and was enlightening a now receptive audience, an excellent example of attentiveness being set by Mrs Cassell.
Dolores gave her power of effort to yielding her father what he needed; but on reaching her home, and meeting his wife on its threshold, she was again brought face to face with the knowledge, that seemed to render as vanity her hard faithfulness to that which she had seen as just.
“Dolores, I hope you understand that I meant what I said to you this morning. It is not my habit to say one thing, and expect people to do another. I wish work to start in earnest tomorrow. Have you looked out the children’s books, and got everything into order?”
Dolores answered, with heavy feelings hidden by her courteous tone, that all should be in order by the morning; and the following day was a pattern of many that succeeded. They were days whose trials would have been embittering, had not daily trials become as childish things. Mrs Hutton did not leave the teaching wholly to her judgment, but in theory gave the direction herself; and her unfitness for the task, and the irritable jealousy which sprang with each day into easier life, made a round of hourly friction. Bertram continued his changes of mood; and was at one time depressed and silent, at another in the spirit that carried no less of painfulness. Her father at the outset spent much of his time in her company, at first in carelessness, and then in defiance of the results in his home; but by degrees, in weariness of discord, and the poisoning of his wife’s companionship, fell back into formal recognition of his fatherhood; making his wife his apparent associate, and burying the deeper loneliness; though with a suggested wistfulness which made each glimpse of the bent grey head the begetter of a pang.
One day she received a letter from Perdita; which she read with a deeper paleness than its fellows brought, in their hope of a word of the creature who filled her heart and life, and on whom her lips were sealed. It held a request to be bidden to stay in Dolores’ home; as the writer was an orphan, poor in kindred, and this was their only chance of renewing their friendship. Dolores wondered at her little suffering in asking the favour of her stepmother. Her natural, easier feelings seemed all but dead; and the one thing of moment was the chance of staying her yearning with some scanty food. But the result of her effort seemed a rebuke. Mrs Hutton was not a stranger to remorse, for the much that clouded her stepdaughter’s days, and was often given in spite of an effort of will; and welcomed a means of making amends, and showing her sister her manner of fulfilling her stepmother’s duty.
Perdita found great favour at the parsonage, where she showed herself full of understanding. She paid Mrs Hutton a pretty deference, petted and praised the children, implied a view of her host as an eminent scholar and divine, and avoided betraying too open a preference for being with Dolores, or encroaching on the hours of her duties. Her visit showed her Bertram at his best. His spirits ceased to fluctuate, and were natural and pleasing. He seemed to have become resigned to his future, and talked of the offered post at the school with evident purpose to accept it, and even with jests of the airs he should assume, when the head of a household. In a moment of being alone with Dolores, he observed that the boys in a country school were not without lives to live, and need to be fitted for living them; and she knew she was to hear the burial words of the university dream.
She noticed that her brother earned Perdita’s prettiest dealings. With his high-bred comeliness, and the early growth to maturity in which he followed herself, he unknowing wielded spells over the woman coming with her young needs from a world of women; and Dolores looked into the future, and saw herself bound by further bonds to the friend she loved. When he left the village for a holiday, some days before Perdita’s visit ended, her quickening instinct was alive to the change in her friend, and the purpose in the guardedly sparing words she spoke of him. It was not in her nature to know content, that the love of either should be wholly her own; and she grew to think of the two with tender looking forward.
But this was too frail a tenderness for this troubled time. For herself the presence of Perdita had made darkness and hidden strife. The sacrifice of her choice, lived day by day and silently, was hard to the brink of bending her will. The parting, faced with the knowledge of the sphere of the other’s life, all but ended in failing of heart; in its conflict with the passions, from which it was a further conflict to withhold the shame of jealousy. With Dolores it was going sadly, when she forgot her brother’s life and her friend’s, and bowed beneath the living of her own.
But her experience was, as always, bent by the lighter experience of others. As she stood on the station, with her courage faltering, and her face old for her years, she was accosted by Elsa Blackwood; whose return from a visit had been timed for the reception of her luggage by the parsonage trap; and who joined her in such bright youth, that it would have been strange hearing to a watcher, that the days which had seen the lives of the two were the same. Elsa was in the lightest of her moods. She yielded her possessions, without the soberness of injunction, to the lad who was gardener and groom at the parsonage; and tripped by Dolores with a flow of prattling, which spared her the effort of words. As they neared the place of their parting, her chatter suddenly ceased.
“Why, there is my mother coming to meet us!” she said, in a voice with a studied lightness.
“Elsa, what is this?” said Mrs Blackwood, as she came into hearing. “This letter came for you from your friends this morning. I noticed the postmark, and knowing you were supposed still to be with them, opened it. It was written yesterday; and they were under the impression that you were on your journey home.”
“You have no right to open my letters, mother,” said Elsa. “Surely I am old enough to have a private correspondence.”
“You are clearly not old enough to have any liberty at all,” said her mother. “Where have you been to-day and yesterday? Your father insists on a full account.”
“Oh, mother, am I never to have any friends of my own choice? Am I to be a child under you and father, till all my youth is past?” said Elsa, with tears in her voice. “What shall I have to look back on, when I am as old as you are? You have had your own youth. Why should you grudge me mine?”
“Elsa, do not be foolish,” said Mrs Blackwood. “If you have been with those friends your father does not approve, say so, and we will forgive you this once, and help you to do better in future. It would be a dreadful thing to have such a burden on your conscience. There is a guidance we cannot understand in these things.”
“Oh, well, mother, if you have guessed it, it is no good to say any more,” said Elsa. “Here is the gate to the churchyard, where Dolores leaves us. Let us say good-bye at once, and spare her a family confession and pardon.”
Dolores was used to Elsa’s wildness; and gave her thoughts, as she bent her steps to the parsonage, to preparing an account of the scene for her father, who was always indulgent and amused over the mischief of his wife’s comely niece.
But as she entered her father’s study, whence a hum of voices sounded, thoughts of Elsa were banished. Mrs Hutton stood by the fireplace, looking flushed and nervous, her dress betraying some elaboration of its daily simple fitness; and by the window two portly, sable figures seemed to block out the light with their ample sombreness. They were the figures of the Rev. Cleveland Hutton and the Very Rev. James Hutton. The latter’s greeting came deliberate and deep.
“Well, Dolores, it is a great pleasure to meet you. It must be two years since I visited your father, and found you at home. What a likeness!——She looks more the student than ever, Cleveland.”
“She has done very well at college,” said Mr Hutton. “I am told I ought to be proud of her.”
“And you are not, I suppose?” said the Dean, with rather laboured pleasantry. “Well, you must leave the being proud to me. I am sure I am very ready to be proud of my niece.”
The Very Rev. James showed little change for the years. He was yet in the prime of his pomposity and portliness, his fondness for kindly patronage, and his contentment with himself and his ecclesiastical condition. Experience had dealt with him gently. His hair was less grey than the Rev. Cleveland’s, and his figure straighter for all its greater cumbrousness. His personality was simple and inclined to transparence. Many had said that a minute of his company sufficed for the knowledge that he was married and childless.
It was only of late that this state had struck the Very Rev. James, in its aspect of difference from that of his brother. It was not that he had given no reflection to the comparison of himself and the Rev. Cleveland. It was a matter which had had some attraction for his thought; but it had seemed to him fairly summed up in their professional relation, or, more vaguely, in the position that he was himself the greater man. The new line of his fraternal considering had a climax which afforded him surprise and a degree of amiable excitement.
“You do not owe my visit to chance, or even merely to brotherly feeling for your father,” he said to Dolores, repeating a speech he had made to Mrs Hutton; and improving the effect of its ending by subjecting one of his eyes to a wink in the direction of his brother. “My coming has a purpose. Your father will perhaps explain it.”
“Your uncle has made a most generous suggestion,” said the Rev. Cleveland, turning to his daughter with an air of elation at once nervous and laborious. “He has offered to bear the expense of a college course for Bertram. As I have told him, we know it to be the wish of your brother’s life. I am most glad and grateful.”
“Oh, so am I,” said Dolores. “It is the thing of all others that Bertram would have chosen; and I have so wished it for him.”
“Ah, James, you see what your offer means,” said the Rev. Cleveland, adjusting his tone between the morose and pathetic. “My children are good children to me. My daughter knew that I could not afford what she wished so deeply for her brother; and I have heard no word of it. My lot has been hard in many ways, but in my children I am blessed.” Mr Hutton felt an attitude of mingled pity and complacence to himself suitable to intercourse with his brother.
The Very Rev. James looked uncertain whether to be gratified by the happy direction of his bounty, or ruffled at the presence of pleasures in his brother’s portion, which were lacking to his own; and Mrs Hutton’s suggestion was opportune, that they should “walk round the garden and find the children; “who had been given hasty, covert directions to make change for the better in their apparel, and place themselves there at general avail.
The presence of the dean was oppressive in the parsonage, by the time that his nephew returned to learn his altered relation to him.
Bertram had not made known the hour of his coming; and he entered his father’s study, where voices summoned him, without word with parents or sisters. Dolores saw that his mood was the temper of strained buoyancy, which had wearied her perplexity. The dean did not choose on this occasion to leave his liberality in his brother’s treatment. He dealt with it himself, with an elaborate precision befitting its greatness, and an air of indulgence towards any impropriety, which should result in his nephew’s deportment from the shock of grasping his fortune.
Bertram’s wordless quest of beseeming response met such smiles and exchange of looks as it merited; but his answer, when it came, brought his hearers to dumb bewilderment.
“Oh, I do not know, sir. I had quite given up thoughts of going to college. I am old for it now. I—I am very grateful to you, sir; but I cannot—must not think of accepting your generosity.”
“Why, you are upset by the news, Bertram,” said Mrs Hutton, earning a grateful glance from her husband. “He has wished it so long, James, that he is quite startled by its being made possible.”
“Ah, ah, I expected as much,” said the dean, as Bertram hastened from the room.
Dolores followed her brother; but he repulsed her advance, and turned to her words an unheeding ear. For the next hours he wandered alone in the garden and lanes, avoiding speech, and turning on his heel at the sight of his uncle or his father. Dolores was deeply bewildered, but he gave her no chance of words; and the next day greater perplexity came. It was known in a troubled and almost guilt-stricken household, that he had met his uncle’s offer with becomingly grateful, but absolute refusal, on the ground of scruples of conscience, which it was not in his power to reveal.
The next days dragged by heavily. A burden of constraint seemed to lie on the parsonage. Mr Hutton showed an uncommitting moroseness; not referring to the conduct of his son, and avoiding all but conventional dealings with his brother. The Very Rev. James was an embarrassing union of courteous guestship and lofty forbearance with unthankful folly. Mrs Hutton was nervous and constrained; and Bertram forgot his spirits, and sank into unbroken depression, repulsing effort to learn his position almost with anger. The person to break the oppressiveness was the Very Rev. James. He suddenly laid aside his discomfiting bearing, and began to show Mrs Hutton courtly attentiveness, and to display great interest in her children. She responded in accordance with maternal diplomacy, treating him as an indubitable source of superior counselling; and it was known that he held to his desire to benefit his brother’s family, and was to undertake the education of his youngest boy and girls. On his leaving the parsonage, his partings carried a new geniality, which was accorded to Bertram with the rest; and the Rev. Cleveland was supplanted as escort to the station by Evelyn and Sophia.
Dolores looked into the future, questioned her duty, and saw it clear. Much in her home showed it clearer. Her father, as though he regarded the late perplexities as giving him a right to mould his habits afresh, fell back into open seeking of her fellowship; and, although while his wife was engrossed in arranging for her children, the course was safe, she felt its covered danger. Mrs Hutton’s dealings with herself put an end to anything that remained of choice. She excused her children from study for their time at home, and did all to be done for them wholly herself; neither seeking Dolores’ aid nor accepting it when offered; so that Dolores’ time was her own from dawn to dusk. Her purpose was not of the things to which Dolores was easily blind. She knew she was being shown her presence in her father’s home as no more needed. She saw her case, simply and without rebellion, as it was; spent one dark hour, looking at the little good to her kin that had cost all to herself; and set her face forward with her old faith in the just. Full happiness in her father’s lot was not a thing that must be sought. She must seek for him peace in his loneliness, the content which—albeit in blindness—he had chosen, made untroubled. She would not act without his sanction and counsel; and she told him her purpose, in words that were few but bore their meaning. As she ended, he spoke in a new tone.
“My daughter,” he said, “you are a good woman. Your mother lives on in you. I will say nothing. You know better than I. Your way will be opened for you.”
The father said words of truth. Dolores’ way was opened for her, and for a space her days were light. She needed the accustomed tribute to her fitness to teach; and her appeal brought an answer with hidden meaning. The place she might have held in the days that were behind, had met support, and was open to her need. Then thoughts of her own life came; but they were second to those of her brother’s, till the others grew to purpose.
As she waited one evening in the churchyard, knowing that Bertram chose this path to the parsonage, she met Dr Cassell, on his way to her sisters in some childish ailment; and asked if he knew of her brother’s whereabouts.
“Ah, history repeats itself, does it not, Miss Dolores? There comes a time when the best sister is not enough,” said the doctor, with a wink and a gesture towards the road.
Dolores saw that comprehension was accepted, and asked no question; but waited with a sense of seeing a dawning on what had been dark.
When Bertram came up the churchyard, the dusk was gathering; and she started at the sight of the sombre figure breaking the shadows. The start was a help, and she spoke the words she had been schooling herself to utter.
“Bertram, I am going to ask you a question, and I want your answer to be true and full. So it is no longer your wish to go to Oxford, if the way should open?”
Bertram started and whitened.
“Yes,” he said in a shaky tone. “It is a small thing to wish so much, and feel so hopeless; but I do still wish it, Dolores—more than I can say in words.”
“But the reason you had for refusing to go—the reason you will not disclose—does not that remain? What meaning had your absolute refusal of my uncle’s offer? I would rather you should give up all, than do what is against your conscience.”
“What do you mean?” said Bertram. “It is not possible for me to go.”
“Yes, I think it is possible,” said Dolores, gently. “I am taking a post at my old college—I am going away from home; it will be better so, Bertram,—where the salary would enable me to give you some help; and father could do something now, with the children’s education settled. But if in some way it cannot be, we will not speak of it.”
“Dolores, I will tell you it all,” said Bertram. “I will tell you it all, and then you will know what you are doing; or I could not accept your sacrifice, much as I can accept from you. But do not speak to me while I am speaking. It began with my being so hopeless over being denied the chance to make a name as a scholar. My life seemed so narrow, and I saw no hope of its widening; and I was in despair, and made a grasp at all that was within my reach. I—I will not speak of my feeling for—for Elsa. You either know it, or you do not know it,—in either case we will not speak of it. The thing I have to tell you is—is that we are married. No; do not speak, Dolores. We met in that time when we were both away from home, by her leaving her friends before her people thought. We knew that our families would oppose, as my prospects were so poor; but we meant to disclose our marriage, and settle down at the grammar school-house, where I was to be master. Well, you understand my feelings when I returned, and was met by my uncle’s offer. My manner of meeting it is no longer a mystery. Of course, I saw my accepting it as impossible. But with the suggestion the old longing returned. It had lived so long with me; and Elsa was sorry for both our sakes, that I had given up the chance of fulfilling it. She saw the difference it would make to the lives of us both; and thought we might have kept our secret, and lived apart in our homes, as betrothed to each other, till my college years should be over. I was troubled and bewildered by her thinking I should have done differently; and I simply revealed nothing, and did nothing: and—well, that is all, Dolores. It is not less than enough, I daresay you will think.”
Bertram pressed his hands to his head, and leant against a tree, dropping his eyes to the ground.
“Then that is why you have been sometimes so excitable, and sometimes so depressed, ever since I came home?” said Dolores, too startled to think of anything but following her brother’s course.
“Yes,” said Bertram, in the tone of one simply giving a desired explanation. “I alternately worried over the passing of my youth without the chance I longed for, and yielded myself to thinking of Elsa, and our secret betrothal.”
For some moments Dolores was silent, the image of Perdita vivid in her mind.
“Well, and what now?” she said at last, in the same voice.
Bertram hesitated.
“If I could go to Oxford—you are generous, Dolores—it is the dream of my boyhood—I—I do not see why it would not be right.”
“You are married—” said Dolores.
“We have been through the marriage service,” said Bertram. “Not that that is not enough. We are married for life, of course; and I am grateful that it is so; but I cannot see that the living apart for a few years, especially as betrothed, is such a wrong thing that our prospects for life must be sacrificed. Anyhow, I do not think so, Dolores. It is my honest opinion that it is not so; and I think I have a right to decide. I am a man of three-and-twenty, and not young for my years. I have a right to act according to my honest opinions.”
Dolores was silent. The last argument was a strong one to her, and Bertram had known it in choosing it.
“I think the decision of the matter rests with me,” he repeated. “I do not see that you have a right to question my conscience. If you would offer me help if things were otherwise, I think you should offer it now.”
“Well—then be it so,” said Dolores slowly. “You are a grown man, as you say, Bertram. I may have no right to value your opinions more lightly than my own. So we will leave it so.”
“Dolores, I must ask one more thing of you,” said Bertram. “I have asked so much that I cannot hesitate. It will not count. We shall never speak of this—to others, or between ourselves. Not a word of it will pass my lips, and must not pass yours. I must have your promise. The matter concerns me solely. I have told it to you of my own will. It is a promise I have a right to exact.”
“Ah, you know me well, Bertram,” said Dolores, with a half-sad smile.
Bertram waited in silence.
“Well, up to a point, I think it may be a promise you have a right to exact,” she said. “I promise never to disclose what you have told me to-night, as long as my silence does not involve—seem to me to involve—an injury, or anything that I consider an injury, to any human being.”