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,’ a
nd ‘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.
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