Dolores

by Ivy Compton-Burnett

  Chapter XIII.

  The nine months of Perdita’s wifehood had worn to their end. Perdita lay as still and sorrowless, as her child who had never breathed.

  Soulsby, as he stood on the steps of the darkened dwelling, looked on the shrouded windows with feelings he could not name. The close of this passage in his friend’s experience, which seemed already to have fallen back into a past whose life was in memory, was a bewildering, constraining thing. Would the old days return—with unwitnessed fellowship and unmarked words; as if the suffering eyes had never wearied of unheeded watching, and the sweet, faint tones had never struggled to be steady? He worked his hands nervously, as a step sounded in the passage.

  “I—I did not know whether—whether the sad message was a request for my coming or not. I thought that—that I might just come to inquire, and either go or stay, as it was best. Can you—you will tell me what I should do?”

  “Ah, sir! come in, if you please; come in,” said the old servant; making a sign towards the living-room, as she spoke in a toneless voice. “He sits in there alone hour after hour. He has never uttered a word, except to ask me if the poor young creature seemed happy in the time she lived with us. And, indeed, she never opened her lips to say she wasn’t; so proud to the end as she was, and such a spirit as there was in that weak body. Yes; go in, sir; go in. I fear he is taken, as after the mistress died, with looking back on things, and wishing they had all been different; and it will be a sad thing for him, if it is so, sir.”

  Soulsby entered the room, and paused just inside the doorway, as if to accept notice or repulsion, as either might meet him.

  Claverhouse was standing by the chimney-piece. He did not turn, but moved as though he felt his presence; and beckoning him forward with a sidelong gesture, spoke without looking towards him.

  “Soulsby, it was a wrong thing that I did—that taking a young creature’s youth, and burying it. It is a thing for which I must live and die sorrowing. The memory of these months, as she lived them and suffered in them—for whether or no she knew it, she must have suffered—suffered starvation of her growing nature—must be always with me.”

  He talked on; and Soulsby listened in silence, except for needful response, and at times a restraining or remonstrant word. There was a feeling upon him, that he was living the experience for the second time. A similar hour after Janet’s burial was present with him, in spite of an effort to repel it. Each word and look of his friend seemed in a strange manner familiar; and he found himself looking, without the bidding of his will, over the days that must be darkened, to the further inevitable time, when the cloud should surely have passed.

  But there was different and sadder to come.

  The following day he came as he was bidden, to fulfil this new demand on his unwearying friendship. With characteristic shrinking from breaking the silence of the dwelling of death, he entered the house without knock or ring.

  The playwright was sitting with his arms stretched out on the table, and his head bowed over them. His friend was struck by a difference from the yesterday. His face was set in lines of hopeless misery, which on a face marked thus with the years and their burden, was tragic; and he gave no sign of knowing that his solitude was broken. On the table before him, almost covered by both his hands, was what seemed to be a small, black notebook.

  After a minute’s waiting, Soulsby moved to the door; and Claverhouse suddenly spoke, in a voice that was almost a cry.

  “No, do not leave me—do not leave me. Do not leave me alone in my outer life, as I am in the other.”

  Soulsby returned to the hearth, and stood for some moments silent. When at last he spoke, he shrank at the sound of his own voice.

  “Are you not—I think—are you not dwelling too much on the trouble? It—it is, I think, your nature to do so. It—it is—is it not a time for the exercise of will?”

  Claverhouse made a sound and movement of the intense irritation, which comes from the breaking of thought that leads to a climax at once intensely shrunk from and sought; but Soulsby, at cost to himself, held to his purpose.

  “What of the play—the play you have just finished? I have not heard it read as—as a whole. If—if you could lose yourself for a time in some other interest, you—you would be able to look more fairly at the trouble itself.”

  The playwright started to his feet, as if a thought had given him strength. He burst from the room, with something of the old suddenness of action which was leaving him as the failing of his sight demanded caution in movement; and Soulsby heard that his steps on the stairs had their old uneven violence. In a minute he returned, with a pile of manuscript; and Soulsby fought with a feeling that approached to anger, for the helpless young creature, whose life was lost with trivial things as one of them. The words he heard brought a startled feeling, that grew to a sense almost of guilt.

  “Soulsby, this play is the master-work of my life. It is to be put to the deepest use in my life. You will never read it, or hear it read. It will be buried with her. I can make one sign of what I shall never put in words. I shall not live, feeling that I have given nothing in return for what I have taken.”

  He set the papers on the table, and fingered them as though composing them to lie as he said; and Soulsby looked on with eyes troubled and incredulous, living the experience as a dream.

  The blind man felt the unbelief, whose signs were hidden from him. He suddenly swept up the papers, sprang to the grate, and thrust them on the dying fire. The embers leapt into life; and as a flaring, crackling sound told its hopeless tale, Soulsby darted forward with some agitated words. But he held his ground with unyielding strength; and by the time his friend had forced a passage, the moments had done their work. The flames were flickering to their death, and the sparks vanishing from their grey, trembling bed.

  He watched them vanish with the strange gaze, at once straining and half - exultant, of growing blindness following something of a nature to be still discernible. When the last was gone, he knelt and gathered the ashes in his hands; his eyes held closely to the grate, his fumbling fingers touching them as things of price. A softening came like a spasm over his face, as he rose with his hands helpless with their crumbling burden, and his dim eyes caught the white expanse of a cloth which Soulsby had snatched from the table, and held to receive them. He yielded them at once; and glanced from his friend to the grate, with a groping wistfulness eloquent in its mute appeal. In a moment Soulsby was on his knees, gathering with his shapely hands the remaining cinders to their last vestige. He put them with the others; and stood with a set face of sorrow, as the dramatist folded the cloth, and spoke his parting words.

  “They will be buried with her, Soulsby. It is well that you drove me to burn it. How could I have known with my blindness that my words were obeyed? And with it and her, will be buried the happiness that might have remained to me. So it is as it should and must be. I will leave you for to-day. Through the hours of tonight I must sit at her side.”

  He left the room, carrying the folded cloth in both his blackened hands; and Soulsby took a step backwards, and looked after him with his fingers pressed to his forehead. As he moved back, his eye was caught by the note-book on the table. His hand mechanically sought it, and his eyes went down its open page. He started, and flung it from him as if it had stung him.

  It was Perdita’s diary—the record of her hand of the hidden history of her wifehood.

  Chapter XIV.

  “No,” said Dolores; “I cannot think as you do. I cannot think that the way to honour the memory of one who was loved, is to make one’s own life emptier. I am sure she would not feel it so. Surely the effort of rising above a life of passive remorse, and filling the days with striving, would be a better tribute.”

  “Passive remorse!” said Claverhouse, pressing his elbows on the desk.

  “I mean that it achieves nothing,” said Dolores. “Or, rather, as you were thinking, it has achieved harm. Why should you not set some object before you
—some purpose to fulfil—as your token of your sorrow?”

  “I will do it,” said Claverhouse, rising and clenching his hands. “I will fling myself into the writing—the re-writing of the old play. In both of its forms—and in both of its fates, it will have been, as you say, my token of my sorrow for her—for her sufferings—of which I was the cause.”

  “I am glad,” said Dolores, with her unconscious impressiveness; “more glad than I can say in words.”

  “But I must tell you the truth,” he broke out. “I feel I must tell you all things. It is my wish to write the play—my—my longing, the one thing I desire. I feel that my remorse, the remorse that made the year after her death a hell to me, is lost in the old purpose. It has fallen back into a part of my past life—a part of the experience that has added to my knowledge of men. It has happened with it, as with everything I have ever felt.”

  “Time must blunt the edge of feeling,” said Dolores. “Surely it is not right to clutch at a grief. The grief that came in spite of yourself, is as it is. You will not add to its meaning by seeking it. Love and grief are different things. It is only a tribute to the one, that it outlives the other.”

  “But I do not know if it does outlive it,” he said, his tone almost querulous. “I do not know if I ever felt love for her. What I felt was something different.”

  “It must have been something very near it,” said Dolores, gently. “What you have suffered must have had its root in love.”

  “Ah! what I suffered! That year! I weary you with my dwelling on it; but I must tell you fully once. The memory of it, unless it is shared, burdens me; gives me a feeling almost of guilt; and there is no one but you—and Soulsby, my good friend—to whom I can speak.”

  “It is my greatest joy—if I have helped you,” said Dolores.

  “It was a dark time,” said the dramatist, in quick, low tones of shrinking, as though the subject still held unfaceable pain. “Day after day, and every hour of each day, I went through her feelings—the feelings I knew—I had learned—were hers, in the nine months she was with me, from our marriage till her death. I clutched at the knowledge of them. I felt myself straining after it; that I might as it were endure them myself, and show myself their endurance was bearable. The moment of her seeing her home—of first knowing her lot—and all the others—I have spent days in grasping after each. And the deadness which came, when it seemed that my soul was exhausted—and the awaking from it! He shuddered, and put his hand before his eyes.

  Dolores was silent, waiting; and he continued in an easier manner, as though narrating what was past the helping of emotions.

  “But the times of exhaustion began to come oftener—more easily, as I now understand; and the awaking had the numbness of having been lived many times. At first I barely felt the change; but now I look back and see it. I have reached the feeling, I have had at the end of all my sorrows—though I thought this was not as the others, and would have no end—the feeling of almost rejoicing in my understanding of it, and of longing to—to create some creature with the same experience.”

  He ended as if he were making a confession; and when the words were uttered, was silent.

  “You must follow the impulse,” said Dolores gravely. “It is what your life holds. You are wrong in feeling that you are grasping at something which carries shame. Your having fallen short in a part of your life, if it is true that you have done so, does not justify your wasting what remains.”

  “No, I will do it,” he said. “The play will be greater than it would have been. Ah, how I see what it needed!”

  He made a movement as though to grasp a pencil; but suddenly a change seemed to drain the eagerness from his every limb.

  “I am a broken old man,” he said, in a voice with a startling change. “Blind; so that my powers are useless, for want of the one that is common to the things that breathe.”

  Dolores could find no words.

  “I am blind; I cannot write. For I cannot see. I cannot read what I have written. There is no help for me.”

  There was appeal in his voice so simple and strong, that Dolores answered as though it were cast in words.

  “You can do what you will, with some one to read what you write, through every minute of every day. Your deprivation is great; but in your greatest need it can be filled.”

  “I must tell you it all,” he said, turning to her almost solemnly. “I must tell you what I have suffered, that you may know me; that no barrier may be between your soul and mine. When misgiving grew to dread, and dread to hopelessness, what I passed through! And I could not speak of it. I could not. I had not such great strength. How could I say, ‘I cannot see. Tell me of what is before my eyes, for I am blind’—I, who could read a man’s soul in his glance—who could see as no other man saw? No; I shut myself in myself; I did the one thing I could do. These coming days of passing into darkness will be happy compared to the learning they must come. But now I have told it to you, my soul will be free. In the other days I carried a burden; for—for she would not—could not know. Let us leave each other for to-day. When we meet, we will speak of the things that will be.”

  Dolores left him with a feeling she could only interpret as a great solemness. It seemed to her that the years she had lived, were the training-time for the work at hand; that this significance was the sole of her troubled experience; that had her struggles been a whit less hard, her suffering short of the fullest, she must have been too little tried and strong. A vision of the giving of her days to this great, sad-hearted creature, to whom for so long she had herself been given, brought a surging of passion that paled her lips. A straying of her thought to the future’s passing from her, as she saw it, held her trembling and afraid. She went to her own rooms under a sense of being awestruck.

  On her desk there was lying a letter—a letter left by some messenger’s hand, as its cover bore a word of urgency. Sudden, inexplicable feeling gripped her, as it met her touch. As a flash, there came on her mind the day, when another of the letters with this look had turned for that time the course of her life. She had a sense of foreboding that approached to personal terror. She opened it, and read its words.

  It was from the Reverend Cleveland Hutton; and it summoned her to Millfield parsonage, to the deathbed of her stepmother.

  Closing her eyes to the future, and holding them closed, she spoke and wrought in strength in the next hours. She said what was needful to those who shared and ordered her life, and took the earliest journey to her home. A few hours from her reading her father’s words found her entering its doors, marking it hushed and darkened; and hastening with pitiful heart and arms outstretched and strong, to the help of those to whom all needed effort was owed, whose claim was that of kindred.

  She was thankful for herself in the days that followed, that the yielding of her powers for those who suffered of her flesh and blood, held her personal life an undercurrent in the stream of the experience she saw, hidden and unheeded for all its greater depth. The sad-faced young sisters—Evelyn with her helpless sorrowing, and Sophia with her self-repression betrayed by her thought for the others who suffered; the boy, Cleveland, in his sobbing grief; and the grey-haired father, with his new loneliness, and gratitude wordless in loyalty to the dead—they were creatures whose need was a cry for her help—an unspoken claim that was clear and binding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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