Dolores

by Ivy Compton-Burnett

  “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.”

  Chapter VIII.

  “No, no; read more slowly, Sigismund. I cannot follow what it means. You used not to read to me so quickly.”

  There was a querulous, quavering note in the aged tones. The last days of the many which Janet Claverhouse had seen, had carried a change. That which sorrow had failed, and the ills of the flesh had spared to bring, was wrought by the surer force of days. The grasshopper had become a burden, and filial tendance was an added weariness.

  With the sound of the feeble voice, the son slackened and lowered his tones; but before he had turned the page, it broke in again.

  “No, no; I do not hear, Sigismund. You read in a whisper. You can shut the book; I will not listen any more. You do not try to make it easy for me. I am old; and you do not care to help me any longer.”

  Claverhouse laid down the book he had been holding closely to his eyes, and placed his hand on the shrunken fingers on the coverlet.

  “My dear old mother!” he said.

  Janet’s eyes filled with the easy tears of bodily weakness.

  “I am old, and complaining, and you do not care for me,” she said with faint sobs. “But I shall not be with you much longer. You will soon be rid of the burden of me. But when you were helpless, I never thought you were a burden.”

  Claverhouse moved his hand and was silent; and the aged creature saw that the wounding power of the words of her feebleness could not be deadened by their helpless utterance.

  “Ah! I am an ungrateful old woman,” she said, as if half-speaking her own thoughts, half-quoting those she judged to be her son’s. “I expect too much of every one. I expect them to bear with me, and suffer with me from morning till night, and give them nothing in return but more to bear with. It will be a good thing when I am gone, and my son can live his own life without the burden.”

  Claverhouse was still silent. This prostration of the vital creature, he had honoured through the years as her who had borne him, in the aged weakness of other women, was a grief with a subtle bitterness. He could almost find it in him to wish, that the end had come some seven years earlier, in a sickness which had stricken her first feebleness, and given in its passing a new hold on life.

  “My dear little mother!” he said at last, taking the tiny hand. “Weakness and weariness are hard for a spirit such as yours. But endurance, as other things, grows great in you. You need not doubt me. I know when it is weakness speaking, and when it is yourself.”

  Janet shed a few more tears, but of a quieter kind which brought a calmer mood; and then lay back on her pillows, and presently passed into sleep. The son sat by her chair, with his face towards her, but his eyes looking into space. He was sitting thus, when the door of the chamber opened, and Julia entered with a covered cup in her hand. Her look of venerating tenderness at the face on the pillow was followed by another that spoke of deeper things, as her master yielded her his seat and stole from the room. It was not till the uneven, heavy tread on the stairs was succeeded by the sound of the upper door and silence, that the expression of listening eagerness died on her face, and she seated herself to await the end of the sleep, that checked her tendance. The light slumber of age was readily broken by the change in the ministering presence. Janet awoke, and rested her eyes on the watcher at her side. After a moment she suddenly staggered to her feet, and took some struggling steps, as though continuing in action the experience of her dreaming. A gesture of her hand towards the floor above, and the movements of her lips and limbs, showed that her purpose was the old pilgrimage to the door of her son. Julia checked her gently; laid her back on the pillows, and soothed and fed her. She received the ministrations in a silence that told of inner weariness, broken by words in which complaining and gratitude were mingled. But she seemed to gain strength from the food as she swallowed it; and when the cup was set aside, her talking gladdened the humble, waiting heart with its shadowing of the old self. A colour rose to her shrunken cheeks as she spoke. It was of her son that she talked, and her desires for his comfort when her mother’s care should be lost to him. Her voice seemed to lose its high-pitched quaver, and regain its old deep tone. But she appeared to be agitated; and more than once repeated herself unwittingly, or stumbled over her words. Julia perceived the signs of change, but could not interpret their certain message; and when she sank into sleep, left her without uneasiness.

  In the upper chamber the son, in the mood of emotional ardour, which was brought him by grief in greatness, but held from begetting wrestling of spirit by its birth in the workings of nature and days, was living in a world of his own; with no knowledge of the moments, and his senses closed to the things that touched them.

  A feeble, limping footfall, growing slower and feebler with its steps, fell on his ear to stir no response in his mind, save a slumbering power of remembrance. A sound of a fall, and a long, feeble, guttural cry, mingled with the other dim impression, and wrought no further; till other sounds—another footstep, and another cry—awakened perception and memory, with the fear they brought. He rushed from his room; and on the staircase there met his sight the scene which his moment of dread had painted. He pushed the trembling Julia aside; and taking up the weightless form, bore it to the lower room, and laid it on the bed. The eyes were closed, and the limbs drooping; but something in the face showed that the mind was awake. It was the hour for the doctor’s daily coming; and the chance was well; for the man’s strong limbs were trembling. He turned to Julia with his breath quickened.

  “How dared you leave her, without fetching me to watch her?” he said.

  “I was getting the supper. The work had to be done. We always do leave her when she sleeps. I never do disturb you—she will not have it. O, my dear, my dear!” sobbed the old servant, kneeling by the bed.

  “How came she to go to the staircase?” said Claverhouse, leaning against the wall for support. “It is years since she has been there alone. She must have been wandering; but, even so, how did it come to her mind?”

  The eyes of the aged woman opened, and turned to Julia’s face; and one tiny, shrunken hand made a gesture pitifully imperious in its bare achievement. Julia had raised her head to speak; but she bent it at once—the last office of her long obedience,—and wringing her hands, continued sobbing. The doctor’s entrance brought silence, and the words that were awaited and dreaded.

  “Yes, it was the end. The fall on the stairs was due to a kind of paralytic spasm. It was possible there had been some wandering of mind. The cause of all was age. There was nothing to be done save quiet watching and tendance as long as they were needed.”

  And they were not needed long. A spell of unconsciousness followed; and in the early hours of the morning the final stillness came. For the farewell of the mother and the son there was no word spoken; but Julia, in her daily dwelling on the last knowing moment, knew—though in the silence of the loyalty that did not die with death—that the years of selfless service had had no unfitting end.

  Claverhouse stood for long, gazing on the shrunken form stretched on the bed. His mood was one of exalted emotion that was almost congenial. The many years of the powerful life had closed—had joined the infinitude of unwritten history. It was still—the heart of many struggles; still in the unutterable dignity of having worn itself out. His was an exalted grief. He moved away, and seated himself at the fireside; sought about him for paper and pencil, and began to write. Julia crept from the room; and going to the upper chamber, gathered up the papers that lay half-written on the table, and carried them to the room of death. As she passed the bedside in leaving it, her look at the face on the pillow showed that it was not for one alone that she rendered the ministering action. Claverhouse wrote by the light of the fire, till dawn suppl
anted the service of its dying embers; and at last fell, pencil in hand, into sleep. When he awoke, the last ministrations had been given to the dead; the bed and the body were disposed as was fitting; and Julia was standing at the bedside, smoothing the coverings with her wrinkled hand, as though loth to acknowledge finished the last act of her life’s service. Claverhouse rose to his feet, and came to her side. She gave a glance at his face; and then covered her own and burst into weeping. He walked from the room without giving her a word, and passed to the living chamber. With the wrought-up feelings which came with the awakening from a short sleep after a long weariness, he could ill bear with the reminder that other eyes had wept, and other hands wrought, while slumber stayed his own. As he opened the door, a tall, grey-haired figure turned from the fireplace.

  “Soulsby!” he said, peering forward as though he had felt, but not yet perceived, the presence. “When did you come? You have heard then? How long have you waited?”

  “I—I came about an hour ago,” said the nervous, musical tones. “I—I came really to inquire. I—I did not—did not know before. The old servant told me you were asleep; and I waited till you should wake. I—-”

  “You are a good friend, Soulsby,” said Claverhouse. “I should be lonely indeed but for you. I shall always be lonely without you now. Yes; so it is over. Julia has told you; so I will not. Ah, well! it was to come; and it is a marvel that it did not come sooner; but it must be as it must be, now it has come. I am alone now.”

  He walked to the chimney-piece and leaned his head against it. His face was older.

  “Yes—you would like me to go?” said Soulsby, making a movement towards the door.

  “No, no; stay,” said Claverhouse. “I am not broken down, and I shall not be. I shall go on in the old way—living and working. It is what is left to me.”

  He laid his hand on the bell; and Julia brought the morning meal with a readiness that showed it in waiting for the summons; and fulfilled her duties and those of her mistress in her wonted unobtrusive silence; nothing but her features’ traces of tears and watching speaking of the change in the household whose needs were her life. But the change was great. It was not till the burial was past, that it seemed to come; but when it came it was great. Before the burial Claverhouse was quietly himself. His friend spent many hours of each day with him; and they talked, as was their wont, of his work, reading and discussing it together. He showed interest and gratitude, and gave little sign of sorrow; seeming to avoid imposing on his friend too great a share of his burden: but there seemed a restlessness about him, as if he was in waiting for something that was to come and bring a change. The something came surely, and as surely brought its change. It was the knowledge of his altered lot; and on the day of the burial it came.

  They were heavy days which followed. It was not that they were marked by wrestling or passionate grief. The watcher of men knew the natural and timely as they were, and as such he met them. But they brought loneliness—the loneliness which his life-purpose of human study made tragedy for him; and which, while believing himself the loneliest of men, he had never known; and they brought the understanding, that the hard endurance of the neglect of his race had been softened by the human sympathy of his close lot into easiness. He wandered in house and streets, unable to concentrate his powers, in a restlessness that at once wore him with its scanty respite, and held him in dread of the relieving spells of the old losing himself in his labour, as bringing each another waking to the change.

  And there was sadder than this. He fell to dwelling on the years of his sonhood, and those of his mother’s life which had been of his ordering; and his mind, with its habit of analysis of feeling, and giving of significance to human experience, was a soil where there sprang into early life, and throve on a bare nurture, the dire growth of remorse. His mother’s aged years, with the bounding of their joys in himself, and what seemed to his instinct of bereavement their scant repayment in filial duty, were ever before him—a never-exhausted source of pain. His hours with Soulsby were less a relief for himself, than an unacknowledged burden for his friend; and were worthy of their afterward honouring in his memory, as a tribute to the faithfulness that had no power of faltering. At one time he was sad and silent, and impatient of break on his troubled pondering; at another eager to dwell by the hour upon his mother’s fading years, thirsty for reminders of all that spoke for her content. For weeks it was in this way with him; and then there came the beginning of a change. It was not the wonted change of the end of a struggle through a sorrow—the passing from the old self crushed by grief, to a different self in which the grief is woven. It seemed to be rather a passing from the grief itself to the surveying of it. His talk with Soulsby showed it. He had hitherto shrunk from probing in words the deepest of his own feelings. Now he began to speak of them; and as though less with a desire to assuage their pain, than to gain understanding of them. At times he seemed to be striving to recall them in their early bitterness, not so much through love’s recoiling from the acknowledgment of their deadening, as from a yearning to grasp them in their essence. The dramatist-spirit was grappling with itself, that it might gauge its fellows.

  One evening Soulsby waited long in the darkening room for the coming of his friend—at one time an almost daily experience; now, as he thought, but a chance happening, pregnant with sobering reminder. But it was not as he thought. When the playwright appeared, he came quickly towards him, and began to speak without heeding the need for greeting—another thing once habitual, but coming now as another echo of the fuller past. He was wearing his ragged working garb, which met Soulsby’s sight for the first time since Janet’s death.

  “Ah, Soulsby,” he said, “it is a strong thing—sorrow!—that in which remorse feeds on nothing, and solitude grows to loneliness. I have shown it as it is to-night. I have not suffered what was strange to me, and gone no further. I have shown its ways as I have known them.”

  Soulsby went from the humble dwelling under a great thankfulness for his friend. The creative spirit no longer lay crushed beneath its burden. It had risen above it; and was even lifting it to carry it forward, as an addition to the richness that was its own.

  Chapter IX.

  “I wonder if it would be any good to ask Mr Claverhouse to join us again,” said Miss Butler. “I think he must have been designed for the proving exception to the rule that man is a social creature. I suppose advances are of no avail, if it has really been arranged like that.”

  “In that case, I wonder he was allowed to join us at all,” said Miss Lemaître. “A pure piece of carelessness in the higher sphere, I suppose.”

  “Miss Kingsford, you will have to set your spells to work again,” said Miss Dorrington, her eyes going from Miss Butler to Miss Lemaître, with twinkling appreciation of the words of both.

  “Why, has he ever joined you in here?” said Dolores. “I thought he had nothing to do with you beyond what he could help.”

  “Oh, yes; for a time he quite unbent,” said Miss Butler. “He came to the common-room four times, and we only invited him seven; and every time but twice he spoke. It was Miss Kingsford who seemed the softening influence. Once he said five things to her in one week. We were all quite proud of her.”

  “Your gift of numerical exactitude would be very useful to me in my duties, Miss Butler,” said Miss Greenlow.

  “It is his mother’s death that has altered him,” said Miss Cliff. “His relapse into aloofness is not the only change. I daresay time will be a help.”

  “Yes, we must hope so,” said Perdita. “It is hardly time to expect him to rouse himself yet.”

  “Well, I am sure one cannot help hoping so,” said Miss Lemaître. “I caught one glimpse of him last week, and have felt oppressed ever since.”

  “Well, this week you must try and let him work upon you homœopathically,” said Miss Greenlow.

  “And hope in general charity that I may work upon him in the same way,” said Miss Lemaître.

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sp; “A very good line of idea for curing one another of trying moods,” said Miss Dorrington.

  “We can do very little for each other at times like these,” said Miss Adam. “There is only the one kind of help.”

  “You knew him better than most of his students, did you not, Miss Hutton?” said Miss Cliff. “Do you think him much altered?”

  “I have not spoken to him yet,” said Dolores. “Outwardly he is altered. He looks worn and much older.”

  “You passed him in the corridor just now,” said Miss Adam. “I suppose he did not see you? I think he is more short-sighted than ever.”

  “No; he did not see me,” said Dolores, rather faintly.

  “He seems to see very little now,” said Perdita. “He spoke to me the other day, looking straight above my head, as though he thought he was looking into my face; and he said that he could not see that it was I, but that he felt I was there.”

  “Yes, yes; it is a sorry business,” said Miss Butler.

  “It is your spirits that are in sympathy, then,” said Miss Lemaître. “We may acquit you of calling coquettish influence to your aid in taming him.”

  “Yes, you may acquit me of that,” said Perdita, smiling; “as much as you may himself.”

  “Is he trying to tame you, then?” said Miss Lemaître.

  “I am not aware that I require taming. If what people give me to understand is true, he is certainly different to me from to them,” said Perdita.

  Miss Adam looked a little uneasily from one speaker to the other.

  “I am afraid his sight is really worse,” she said, in an unnoticing tone. “Just lately he has never opened a door, without fumbling for the handle; and he seems not even to try to look for it, as though he felt his eyes were no good. One does not like to think what the end may be.”

  “It would certainly be irony on the part of fate for him to lose his sight, when he could clearly be deaf and dumb without any deprivation,” said Miss Lemaître.