Dolores

by Ivy Compton-Burnett

  And the heritage she deemed as greatest—the opening lives she had nurtured—here indeed was a daily thing to be done—the bringing her lisping son to fairness of manhood, and the honouring his mother in his words and deeds.… And the nine-year-old Dolores, with her mother’s voice, and her mother’s face, and her fitting part in her mother’s name of sorrows!—he bowed his head over a breast that heaved; it was yet too soon for the comfort that but proved his loss.

  Chapter II.

  The parsonage lies the same in autumn sunshine. The creeper on the porch is the same in autumn blushing. The oak on the grass stands the same in stirring silence.

  But the oak stands the same after its acorns are strewn for many seasons.

  Were the tombs so many in the churchyard when last you saw it?—were the familiar ones so grey and lichen-grown? Was the moss so close on the wall which marks its bound? Was the creeper on the porch of the parsonage framing its windows with many-tinted falls? From porch to sill, and from sill to casement, it has crept through its ten years’ journey.

  A figure is walking through the churchyard towards the parsonage. A glance is knowledge. It is the figure of the Reverend Cleveland Hutton.

  Perhaps it causes surprise that he should still be expending on the village of Millfield his ecclesiastical qualities, when it is remembered that he held the steps to preferment in his hands, in his literary and dedicatory powers. It certainly caused himself surprise; not to speak of bitterness of spirit, and a tendency towards the heretical opinion—more worthy, as it is very justly observed, of a Dissenter—that the Establishment was no better than ordinary, unestablished institutions, in its blundering location of its dignities. And from certain points of view it can hardly seem judicious in Providence, and that foremost of her handmaids, the Establishment, to neglect the advance of a reverend gentleman who has written three pamphlets and dedicated two to his bishop, and not failed to write to the latter on each of the last occasions to request his permission to evince his regard in this manner. It seems so less, when she elevates to a deanery his brother, who has merely printed a booklet entitled “Some Simple Sermons on Great Subjects”—of which attributes, only the former, as the Reverend Cleveland had observed, was to be referred to himself in his creative rather than selective aspect, that is, the aspect in which he was rightly assumed to consider himself revealed—without dedicating it to any one. The folly is clearer, when the former brother has five children and the latter none; though it should perhaps be said in justice to Providence, that study of her dealings suggests, that possession of children appears to her compensation for lack of possession in other respects.

  The Reverend Cleveland’s somewhat morose and heavy countenance was more morose than usual, as he wended his way up the sloping path through the churchyard to the parsonage. He was returning from seeing off at the station his brother, the Very Reverend James—a courtesy rendered compulsory by the rarity of meeting resulting from the removal to the deanery. He was also suffering the emotions following the fraternal office of intimating to the latter, that he was aware of the source of the chief ideas in his booklet—some volumes which had been at their joint disposal in boyhood—without reward in signs of incision in the armour of gracious complacence, protecting a very reverend gentleman, taking leave of his barely reverend brother.

  But there creeps a change to his face, as he passes to the side of the churchyard which skirts the parsonage garden, and creeps at a moment when change is meet. Yes; it lies in his sight—the tombstone whose writing opens memory’s floodgates—“In remembrance of Dolores, beloved wife of Cleveland Hutton, Vicar of this Parish, who died in the thirty-sixth year of her age.”

  But do we forget what was said of the Reverend Cleveland Hutton? He is not a man apart. Do we pity a sorrow hard in time-begotten silence? Let us mark his eyes—the eyes of one fearful of breaking memory’s sleep. Some random words recur; and your thought is a thought you will not voice. But it is a thought which carries truth. There is another mistress at the parsonage.

  No; let us check the words which tremble on our lips. Let us not say them. Let us not say, “Poor human love, that it can lightly bury its dead!” Let us hold our peace, and pass on.

  Mr Hutton unlatched the gate which led to his garden from the churchyard, and walked up the gravel path to the parsonage. The voice of Mrs Hutton, who stood on the steps awaiting him—a mellowed, mature voice; for the Reverend Cleveland was not a man to succumb with improvidence to earlier maidenhood—greeted him as he came within hearing.

  “Well, dear, so you have parted from the Dean? How do you support the thought of six months in the darkness of his absence? You seem to be bearing up fairly well. Did you ever see such popish pomposity? I wonder what would be the result if they made him a bishop?”

  The Reverend Cleveland made no reply for a moment. He was not averse to laughing at his very reverend brother; but contingencies are sometimes broached, which hardly call for sanction even in jest.

  “I cannot see—from what 1 can gather from James—that a dean’s life is any more arduous or responsible than an ordinary vicar’s,” he observed, with an accent of bitterness, as he walked into his study.

  “Well, I certainly never saw James looking in better condition,” said Mrs Hutton; “not that his appearance has ever suggested his wearing himself out with toil.” The Reverend Cleveland readily saw his brother’s ampleness of frame a ground for smiling. “I wonder if he will use his leisure to write another booklet. Perhaps this time it will be ‘Great Sermons on Simple Subjects.’” The Very Reverend James’s isolated literary effort was a recognised subject in Mill-field Parsonage for spare ironic talent.

  “I can hardly imagine James writing anything great,” said Mr Hutton, yielding to some crudeness in fraternal comment.

  “Ah, my dear, you never imagined him a dean until you saw him one,” said Mrs Hutton.

  “He did not make himself a dean,” said Mr Hutton, deprecating the judgment of the actual agents implied.

  “Well—peace be to him—and to ourselves, for the time,” said Mrs Hutton. “I have had enough of him for one day. I wonder what he would feel if he could hear us. I should think his left ear must be burning.”

  “Oh, I have never known James anything but sublimely complacent,” said Mr Hutton, indicating the unlikelihood of his brother’s suffering this discomfort; and speaking as though he considered a tendency to discontent some moral tribute—a view which would have added to his own self-regard.

  Mrs Hutton laughed; and walking to the window, began to watch her children in the garden—two little daughters at play under the eye of a nurse, and a baby boy, to whose mind there seemed nothing wanting in the exercise of staggering as a source of indefinite amusement; from time to time bestowing some advice, voiced with rather unnecessary sharpness, upon the nurse’s handling of her charge. The Reverend Cleveland took up his pen, and drew some sermon paper towards him with some austerity of mien.

  Sophia Hutton was a woman of five- or six-and-forty, with the manner of carrying years which shows maturity a seemlier thing than youth. When there was added to this gift a generous dower of brunette comeliness and a gentle dignity of bearing, she appeared to the Reverend Cleveland—in the fuller bloom of ten years earlier—a fitting mistress for the stately home which preferment was to bring. For this she seemed to herself no less a fitting mistress; but confinement to a home for which she was less adapted had cost her feelings milder conflict. There was a certain discernment in her survey of things, which saved her a too disturbing perplexity on the Bishop’s philosophy in viewing the Reverend Cleveland in a merely beneficed condition. Moreover, the maidenhood attending an imperious youth having outlasted the youth, she did not compare the lot of mistress of a sufficient household only with that of the mistress of a stately one, but also with a lot where mistresship played no part. The attractions of linking her portion with the Reverend Cleveland’s had not been enhanced in her eyes by the son and daughter by an earlier
marriage. The father, whose home she ordered, had himself taken a second wife; and though her late esteem of stepmothers had not been flattering to the class, she found that their sway appeared less repellent regarded as wielded than obeyed.

  As you watch her, do you mark the something of tone and gesture which touches some familiar chord—such a chord as is touched when, after the remembrance of your friend is dim, you come upon his son grown to a similar manhood? Listen to her tones, as she leans from the window with some words to her children on her lips—to that note which holds a latent peevishness as though in wait for a purpose. Yes, it is Mrs Blackwood to whom she is bound by the bond of kin. Ten years earlier, in the days ensuing on bereavement, when the heart is grateful for pitiful human fellowship, and human fellowship is kind, the Reverend Cleveland had passed some time with his good-hearted and genial, if dissenting and emphatic, neighbour. He had met Sophia, the elder sister of his wife, and had induced her to assume the lost relation to himself. In this step she was influenced partly by reasons given, and partly by a genuine, if not a fervid, affection and esteem for the Reverend Cleveland Hutton.

  The resemblance between Mrs Blackwood and Mrs Hutton went deeper than what is meant by “a strong family likeness;” and consists of a film of suggestions insistent on the stranger’s eyes, but unheeded by those which have long seen it transparent. They were sisters in the fullest sense—clearly of the same stock and strain. They were, in a word, in that stage of affinity where, with human creatures as with other complex things, contact is another word for clashing. For it happens with character as colours, that, though different examples may make a grateful whole, two shades of the same are likely in touching to offend. Mrs Hutton had the quickness of feeling and intelligence which marked Mrs Blackwood, and greater depth in both; though hardly sufficient to warrant her contempt of her sister’s shallowness. Mrs Blackwood’s tendency to jealousy and peevishness had also its place in her sister, and was also rooted to further depth; though under this head the latter did not insist upon the difference. The strain of kindliness which nature had implanted in both—perhaps with a firmer and more generous hand in Mrs Hutton—had grown in Mrs Blackwood under the influence of Mr Blackwood, and her own endeavour to live her religion in her dealings, into a consistent effort to attain to charity which might almost claim the name. In Mrs Hutton it had found itself in conflict with a talent for hitting on the foibles of her kind with a causticity which passed for wit, and a mingling of wit itself; had found the struggle for supremacy vain; and now held to a suppressed existence. Mrs Hutton had a greater dignity of presence and a truer culture than Mrs Blackwood, and did not fail to recognise the latter’s deficiency; not seldom entertaining the Reverend Cleveland by mimicry of her sister “speaking” at a temperance meeting, or talking for display with gesticulation.

  Now, as a person of observation, and knowledge of human nature in its subtler aspects, for example, as acted upon by difference in religious views and sameness of blood, are you disposed to dark surmise on the relations of the houses of Blackwood and Hutton; or wondering how long it had been since relations between them existed? In this thing you may take heart. Their ground of intercourse never presented clefts on its surface, though the ensuing stratum was at times volcanic. As far as the masters of the families went, the intercourse was so entirely on the surface, that this covered eruptiveness did not affect it. Mr Blackwood combated Mr Hutton’s leanings to ritual, and urged him to stronger influence on the side of temperance, in unfaltering defiance of years and lack of result, affording to himself enjoyment unutterable, and only moderate annoyance to the latter, whose feelings were not so impervious to blunting influence. He regarded his mission as a high and significant one, and reported the degree of his success to the doctor in a serious spirit. The Reverend Cleveland enjoyed at his pleasure his neighbour’s masculine fellowship; and maintained towards him an easy goodwill; whose basis in his view of himself as a man of erudition of the more abstruse and higher order, as opposed to the doctor’s practical knowledge, did not render it strong to the inconvenient extent of showing him an unsuitable subject for Mrs Hutton’s mimicry.

  Of the intercourse between Mrs Hutton and Mrs Blackwood an equally easy account can hardly be given. The local view of them was as an affectionate pair of sisters; and it was a current remark how “nice” it was, that they should spend their married life so near each other. But their intercourse was not confined to the safe, if easily exhaustible, sphere of the surface; and in its more perilous province sustained upheavals which would have threatened the exposed exterior, had not they been of that subtle kind to which open notice is forbidden. For example, when they met one day in the village, they expressed content that their ways coincided, and in making their farewells showed a cordial affection, which, however rarefied, was not in the least degree transparent. But if we suppose it was transparent, our knowledge will go further; for in a very few minutes the jar had come, the note of discord been struck. It was Mrs Blackwood who struck it. She neglected to show enthusiasm over an account by Mrs Hutton of a eulogy in a church paper of one of the Reverend Cleveland’s pamphlets; and when Mrs Hutton was goaded to exaggerate the terms, made it known that she had read the paragraph, and corrected her sister’s version. This was more than could be supported by flesh and blood—from flesh and blood of kindred substance; and hence the sisters’ dialogue was charged with hidden currents. It became a series of thrusts with verbal weapons seemingly innocent, but carrying each its poisoned point. Before they parted, Mrs Hutton had observed with candour and humility, that she recognised now how bigoted she had once been in her views upon Wesleyanism, and of how much higher a type church-people really were; and that intercourse with a university man made one so different, that it was quite an effort to associate with people of another order. Mrs Blackwood had let fall the casual opinions, that no woman who did not marry before thirty knew marriage in its truest sense; and that Dolores was clearly a great comfort to her father—of course she brought back the old days to him.

  The old days! They were old indeed to Dolores; when her early memories were stirred by the signs that they were present with another than those who had known them. But she hardly saw her lot as holding ground for sorrowing, or rebelled against its barrenness of fellowship, and constraint before the watchful eyes for food for jealousy. It was not her way to pass sentence on men and women. Her sense of kinship with her kind was deep to pain; holding her shrinking from judgment, and pitiful of the much that embittered even the gladsome portion. She saw it her part to ease the burdens her stepmother bore with the hardness of rebellion; setting this before her as a duty; which, if it called for her highest effort, neither tried her past her strength, nor merited esteem of self in its doing. For the keynote of Dolores’ nature—as it had been of her mother’s before her—was instinctive loyalty of service to that rigorous lofty thing, to which we give duty as a name; a stern, devoted service, to duty interpreted as that which was the best which conditions could demand; an unfaltering, unquestioning, it may soon be said, unreasoning service, which showed her in a crisis no place for conflict or conscious sacrifice, but simply laid a course before her as that which was due from herself to her kind. Thus she was equal to the hardness of watching her stepmother’s days and her own through her stepmother’s eyes, and of accepting her father’s formal dealings as the best for the saving of them all.

  For the Reverend Cleveland had learned the dread of domestic friction, and the moulding of his doings for his wife’s witnessing of them. It was a lesson which nine years earlier he would not have confessed the power to learn. Unthought-of conditions bring out unthought-of powers; and he took what his lot gave him, forbearing to throw away what it yielded in vain struggling for what was denied. But let it not be thought that his wife was a virago or termagant, or that he was not the master of his home. Mrs Hutton was merely an irritable, jealous, sensitive woman; and none knew better that, her husband’s home was a sphere where the latter was mast
er. A ponderous, remote man, mentally and bodily disposed to heaviness, he lived his domestic routine in a manner which told little in covering much. He showed himself blind to things that awakened his resentment, but experienced more than his family guessed. From time to time he would combat the domestic spirit in days which the household dreaded in accord, and which it was an unspoken family law that no one should heed. He would openly seek the companionship of Dolores—who, living in the emotions under which he sustained, and his wife submitted to, this subtly militant temper, was by far the saddest sufferer,—would even speak of his earlier wedded experience; not referring to the change in his course, but intending it to carry its lesson. Mrs Hutton regarded these periods as the standing trial of her lot; and lived them with a sense of rebuke, and a keener sense of perplexity; not perceiving that the smothered smouldering of months had simply reached ignition point and broken into flames. It is a proof that her husband’s was the really dominant spirit, that she was docile while they endured, and less prone for some time after to peevish jealousy.

  The eldest son of the parsonage—Dolores’ companion in the life that was woven only in name with the others of the same scene—was a lesser cause of discord. Mrs Hutton was one of the women, to whom masculine failings have a strong excuse in being masculine; and as far as his relations with his father went, there was little to awaken jealousy in a breast where it was the most overbearing of inmates. Mr Hutton was not in the least disposed to an over-genial view of a lusty young piece of male flesh under his roof, growing into added lustiness in dependence on his daily efforts. He was rather addicted to comment on the necessity of putting youthful opportunities to the utmost profit, as young men were not to be supported by their fathers all their lives. The son was a self-absorbed, silent lad, old for his seventeen years; with an easily kindled zeal for the excellent; and a fainter something of Dolores’ instinct of fellowship with thinking things, which had led him to fix his ambitions on teaching. He had a straitened lot. His days were spent at a school in a neighbouring town, and his evenings in pacing the lanes with a book. He regarded his father and stepmother with one of those minglings of feeling which grow from family communion—alternating between affection and resentful dislike. He took scanty notice of the little half-brother and sisters, and reserved what his nature held for Dolores, under whose eye he was approaching an upright and reason-governed manhood.