Dolores

by Ivy Compton-Burnett

  Dolores heard the words, and knew their hidden meaning. She felt that the hidden meaning was as nothing.

  “I must go away,” said Perdita again, the words seeming to come more easily now once uttered. “I must go and earn my bread near your peaceful home; and when you are there, you will let me see you? You will always love me, Dolores?”

  “I shall always love you,” said Dolores suddenly; her words with their terrible inner significance causing her a feeling that seemed to be shame struggling through a deeper passion.

  Perdita rose to her feet. She was lost in herself, and could give no heed to Dolores’ pallor and silence.

  “I will leave you, my sister-friend,” she said, caressing Dolores’ hair; while her voice seemed to lose its emotional tremor. “I have troubled and bewildered you. Come to me when you are willing to be wearied; and I will tell you my plans for the future.”

  Again Dolores spoke suddenly.

  “You have plans already?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Perdita, with a swiftly checked touch of uneasiness, as though words had escaped which had better been unsaid. “I have thought of them before to-night. I have seen this coming for some time, as you must have seen it too. But its coming unnerved me.”

  She hastily left the room; and Dolores rose and walked with aimless, rapid movements. She yet lived in her own future, in a spirit of feverish grasping at it, which belonged to a creeping sense, that its supplanting was at hand. She lived in it till the conception seemed exhausted, and the reaction came without effort. Perdita’s words! They returned to her one by one, with their weight of meaning. Perdita’s soul was laid uncovered to her sight. The unquestioning repulse of what held so much in the sphere where she had her lot; the use of her helpless emotions for her voluntary ends; the grasping at a life that afforded her that which she believed she was honest in clutching! Dolores saw it as it was, fraught with covered purpose.

  And it was not only Perdita’s soul that seemed to lie quivering before her eyes. There was the other, which she would fain have forced aside, that she might be spared the torture of her own. And she surveyed it almost with passiveness. She saw these two lives, that had crossed her own, with a simple, just survey, as it was her nature to see them. She saw her own life, with its power of ordering the others, with a simple, just survey, as it was her nature to see it. But the survey, she told herself, was taken thus, merely because it was her nature. It was to beget no purpose. This which had come to her soul from the other soul—upon which the lips which had the disclosing power, were silent—where was the binding force on her, to see it as laid forth, for the imposing as a duty of the devotion of herself? But a moment, and this hour would end.

  But it was many moments that she stood with her hands clenched, and her face still and strained. The minutes were hours, and midnight had passed, before her limbs relaxed, and she pushed the hair from the brow that was lined beyond her youth. She left her room, and passed down the corridor to Perdita’s sleeping chamber. It was as she had thought. The room was lighted, and Perdita was standing in the day’s garments; her looks, as she turned to the opening door, telling of a startled pause in agitated pacing. Dolores went toward her, and stood with one of her hands on her shoulder.

  “My dear,” she said, her voice having a strange impressiveness, as though it were the voice of an older creature that had outlived passions; “before I leave this thing to your own heart, I must say a word—a word which by one as much older than yourself, in all things but years, as I am, should not be unsaid. Do nothing that may bring repentance on your later years. Do nothing in haste. I think of my brother’s early mistake, and fear for you.”

  Perdita turned her face so suddenly, that her shoulder was jerked from under Dolores’ hand. She set it back as though the movement were unthinking; and Dolores continued in the same tone, as if it had escaped her heed.

  “My dear, I may trust to your silence, and tell you my brother’s story? It will show you how an act of young rashness may alter a life. He married on a youthful impulse; and by that impulse must abide. Be on your guard lest you fall into the same error on the other side. The pity of it would be deeper.”

  “Married?” uttered Perdita. “He is not married?”

  “Yes, he is married,” said Dolores, looking away from Perdita’s face; and leaving her hand on her shoulder, as if she did not feel its trembling. “He is married to Elsa Blackwood. After his years at Oxford are over, they will make it known, and live together. His chance of an Oxford course came after their marriage, and led to its concealment. It was one of those actions on youthful impulse which order a lifetime. I want it to help you to realise, that your judgment now is for your life.”

  “But—but if there is no love between them—and it is quite clear there is not—they will not—they need not live together, and spoil each other’s lives?” said Perdita, in a dry voice whose easiness startled Dolores, with her knowledge of what it covered. “Surely a mere ceremony need not carry that. It—it surely could be managed otherwise?”

  “They neither of them wish it to be otherwise,” said Dolores, in a natural, firm voice. “They have neither given their love to another, and neither has thought of it. Besides, now that Bertram’s career is so full of promise, Elsa has no regrets; and I think that Bertram is not conscious of them. I trust they will be happy in their union. That is why I have told you, Perdita; to show you that a decision of this kind is made to the end; that regrets must find no place. But you are worn out with your feelings. Good-night, my dear one. May you come to the judgment that is best for you.”

  Dolores laid an arm round the shaking form, and kissed the cold brow; and then passed from the room.

  The hours of this night, which were so often re-lived in the souls of the women who knew them the hours that bent their experience, were lived to their end by them, as by themselves. Perdita, when Dolores left her, stood for some minutes trembling and white; and then walked with feverish movements till exhaustion came to her help, and brought with the breaking dawn a sleep that was the stupor of energy spent.

  Dolores reached her room; and, with her stronger will, at once lay down; not thinking of sleep, but forcing calmness and clearness of thought, that her actions for these two, whose destinies had come to her hands, might be well for them. She looked into the future calmly; for it did not seem that the future was to be lived by herself. It was a stretch of years, whose meaning was the course of two lives through it. And she saw it clearly. Perdita’s soul was, as always, open to her scrutiny; and she knew that the pliant nature would bow to the altered lot; that the fostered instinct to live for the sight of men, would clutch at the portion which carried the bending of eyes.

  Even sooner than she had thought, the change was clear. It was a very few days after that Perdita came to her, and spoke some faltering words.

  “Dolores, I am so grateful. I see how much my folly might have led me to throw away.”

  Dolores waited and paled, before she gave her embrace, and her words of earnest wishing of good. She seemed to be stunned by a sudden rush of perception. In a moment she read many things. She read that Perdita knew the purpose of the words she had spoken on the night that lived with them both. She read that her instinct impelled her to act as if she did not know it; and to protect her dignity in her counsellor’s sight, by showing her valuing of that which was given unsought, greater than of that denied to her seeking. Moreover, for an instant the knowledge came, that before herself also there were years that must be lived.

  But the moment she dreaded as her final trial was not to come. Claverhouse gave her no word of her friend’s acceptance of his hand. She had from him as little heed as in the earliest days of their mutual dealings; and the others he had known in the college were suddenly as strangers. As the pain grew numb, and went, she found that perplexity followed in its wake. The soul to which her soul was knit, was primitive in its workings. The object of communion was gone: and hence it was ended.

 
; But Perdita was far from showing eagerness to cease her mingling with her kind. Dolores, as she watched her, learned that this surface living of her life was also its inner meaning. The feeling awakened by her bringing of this glimpse of romance into this world of women’s friendships; the unconscious deference accorded her as the holder of the homage of genius, were things that meant much. It seemed to Dolores, that the days when she lived the old routine with this sweetening, made more for her content than those when her lover’s presence demanded her staying at his side, and unwitnessed hearing of his words took the place of their naive repeating, as proofs of his love and confidence. On the whole she told little of him, though she spoke of him much. Her manner seemed meant to mark understanding a thing reserved too fully for herself, for words to be other than vain. On being asked if his work was much to her, she answered, “Everything, as it is to him”; and in response to sympathy on the trouble of his failing sight, she said with sensitive repelling of the subject, that his sight was not really failing; that, though it had long been weak, it was growing no worse; and that he saw much more than it seemed.

  But it was not through any of this, that Dolores’ heart misgave her. It was at a moment when her thoughts were not of Perdita, when her will was passive, exhausted by its long struggling. One day, when she was going up a staircase at the side of Miss Butler, talking of daily duties with the yielding of surface thought to surface things, which was gaining from custom a strange easiness, she saw the two figures coming down the corridor.

  It was a sight that no longer demanded question or meaning glance. Miss Butler passed with a smile for Perdita, and a look, half kindly, half curious, from the one to the other. But Dolores, as she followed, had a memory of something beside. Perdita had met them with the look of studied unconsciousness, with which it was her wont to encounter eyes, when seen with her lover; and continued her talk with an easy flow of words, as though to mark their familiar communion. But as they came to the staircase, the dramatist’s tread grew uncertain; and he gave a groping gesture as if he sought guidance. Perdita made a slight, but certain sidelong movement, and passed on as though unperceiving; continuing her talk, and throwing a glance behind, as if perplexed by his slower following.

  Dolores felt a throb that had a fiercer than the bitterness of jealousy. So service could only be accepted, never rendered. That was deemed a shame, which she had renounced as a privilege sacred beyond her lot. What of that great, suffering nature and its burden? Into what keeping had she given it?

  But there was no place in Dolores’ soul, for remorse for that which was wrought with pain for the sake of conscience. Misgiving, in bringing anguish to her spirit, could bring it no cloud. The great life flung by an ignorance on the brink of bereavement—the young life rushing in darkness to its undoing!—the yielding the light she had to yield, was owed without question. She could not have done other than she had done.

  But she went and stood alone for many hours.

  Chapter XII.

  The marriage of Claverhouse and Perdita consisted in visible deed of little beyond the ceremony. They were people poor in friends, and poorer in kin. The weeks that preceded it Perdita spent in the parsonage at Millfield.

  Poor Perdita! The reality of joy she had sought, had shadows behind it to be grasped. She clutched at the stimulant of living before Bertram’s eyes, as the woman chosen of the man of genius. She looked at herself through the days as it were through his sight; and found her words, and even her thoughts of the life that was at hand, moulded for the consciousness in which she saw herself mirrored. Dolores knew how it was; and forced the knowledge from her.

  Perdita was married by the Rev. Cleveland in the Millfield church. Claverhouse stayed in the village for a time before; spending the nights at the inn, and the days in wandering in the lanes and fields, alone or with his betrothed. To Dolores these weeks were such, that years were to pass, before she could follow their memory without finding her thoughts repulsed by unfaceable pain. She had thought the struggle behind her, fixed and graven on the hours of that night, which seemed as large a part of her life as all the years before. But through the minutes and hours it lived with her, in the darker form of conflict with the unworthiness of remorse that it had been sustained. For the stimulus of selfless effort gone, its moral exaltation dead, it was bitter to live and look for hard, empty days, with no human knowledge or pity of the accepted bitterness.

  On the eve of the marriage she sought her farewell with her friend; and the words had for neither less of weight, for the coming witnessed parting of the morrow.

  “You will always be in my thoughts, Perdita,” she said, with the unconscious impressiveness’ which came to her voice with strength of feeling. “You will let me hear from you through your husband?” The last words came calmly. Dolores in her actual dealings was strong.

  “Oh, you will not have trouble in getting Sigismund to talk about me,” said Perdita. “It would be different if you wanted him to talk about something else. I tell him I shall keep my friends away from him, when I value their goodwill. Other people may have the power of getting tired of me, even if he is without that gift himself.”

  Dolores was silent. The further purpose of these words seemed to set a barrier between her soul, and the weaker soul it yearned over. The face of the bride of the morrow was pale and sharpened in the waning light.

  A great flood of emotion came over her—her dominating love of her kind gathered into a single channel; misgiving for this bending creature on the brink of an untried, unchosen lot; questioning of what it held for her young needfulness—a flood in which her own life was carried as a straw on waters; and she opened her arms, and gathered Perdita into a strong embrace.

  “My dear one, may all go well with you. May you find yourself fitted for what is before you, and able to need only what is given.”

  For a moment Perdita’s arms returned the clasp with all their feebler strength; as if the pressure of the throbbing hearts were the disburdening of the one upon the other of all to which outpouring was denied. Then she drew herself away, with the constraint of the returning to her surface life.

  “Well, we have had our good-bye,” she said. “To-morrow it will be our duty to spare our friends the trial of wedding-day emotions. There is really no need for a real good-bye. We are not to spend our lives a thousand miles from each other. You must often come and stay with us. Good-night, dear Dolores.”

  She left the room without meeting Dolores’ eyes; and Dolores stood, confronting the future, as a stretch of years in which she herself had nothing to seek.

  The next day Claverhouse and Perdita were married. The marriage, for all its strangeness, hardly seemed to call for questioning or wondering words. Its unwontedness seemed in fitness with all that pertained to it. The service was conducted with unmoved demeanour by the Rev. Cleveland. It was witnessed by the Hutton family, and such dwellers in the district as were drawn by curiosity or the heaviness of time. The farewells, by Claverhouse’s wish, were said at the church; and they were hardly spoken, when the bridal pair set out on their homeward journey.

  “Well, that was a queer thing!” said Mr Blackwood, as he overtook Dr Cassell in the road; the outdoor calls of gentlemen betraying them at times into the curiosity which is really a feminine attribute. “An out-and-out queer thing that was; there’s no doubt of that. How a young and pretty woman can tie herself up for life to an old, blind bookworm like that, is quite beyond me; I must say that it is.”

  Dr Cassell came to a pause.

  “I think that as a rule—in these cases—there is something on the woman’s part, that—explains the attraction of the man for her—a reverence for learning, or something of that kind; so that the feeling between them is more that of teacher and pupil, than of husband and wife. I should think that is so in this case, very possibly.”

  “Ah, yes, doctor, very likely, very likely,” said Mr Blackwood, twirling his moustache; “but I can’t understand it myself, and that’s th
e truth. I shouldn’t like one of my girls to be up to that sort of thing. I should have something to say; I should indeed.” Mr Blackwood shook his head, and parted with the doctor with a sense of paternal qualifications.

  Perdita and her husband entered on their journey with few words. Perdita’s feelings were strange for those of the wife of an hour. Through the day she had borne herself for Bertram’s sight, and watched herself through it. Even now, as she travelled to her home, she was picturing his thoughts of her—the woman entering her life with the man endowed beyond other men, who had chosen her of other women. A sudden knowledge of the tenor of her thoughts seemed to lay the future bare—the future chosen for the eyes of men, and hidden from those eyes. What must her days hold? Unwitnessed service to him who had chosen her, in passion that was not the passion of his life; who sat at her side, in the first silence of the marriage-bells, with his eyes turned from herself, and his being in a world that did not hold her. And to the creature who filled her life, she was as dead. Tears burned in her eyes, and her fragile hands were clenched. Believing herself unheeded, she hardly strove to smother sobs.

  “Why, my little one!” said the deep voice at her side; “you have no sorrow you are hiding?”

  “Oh, no, no,” said Perdita, trembling. “Only—weddings—any great change in anything—always unnerves me. I am so easily moved. I am not like you—strong like men are. I have no trouble hidden. I am not unhappy.”

  “No? I thought not, my little one,” said Claverhouse, bending to look into her eyes. “You must have no troubles. They are not for lives like yours.”

  He laid his hand for a moment on her quivering frail one; and then looked away, and seemed to sink into thought. His vain searching of her eyes had been less a look of anxious question, than of eagerness to meet them dimmed by tears. His love had brought him no knowledge of her. She had yet to give him a glimpse of the self, that was a needing, suffering self like other selves. She was almost a shadowy creature to him—a creature of surface life and elusive being, to be left to her own light lot without watching or question. From toil for her bread, unfitted for her tenderness, he had taken her to comfort unbought of weariness. For himself, in his empty hours, there would be the filling of newly-felt, natural needs. It was well for them both.