Dolores, as she left the room by Perdita’s side, felt no power of hiding that which was within her with lip-spoken words. She could no longer sully the creature she loved, with the idle speech which was the alternative of silence; and silence held her. The following days of effort and renewal of friendship took from her more than they gave. Calmness and conscious courage went; and a life opened whose every day was a struggle—a life to which she clung with the grasp whose slackening speaks destruction.
More than once she came upon Claverhouse in corridor or cloister, and passed him unperceived; but she was driven at last by her sense of his knowledge of her presence to watch for him, and give him greeting.
He started at her voice—a different voice from her own,—and met her eyes with a straining, troubled look, verifying all too plainly the words that were said.
She spoke again; this time in tones that were natural, and did their service. His face lit up; and, as he took her hand, he uttered words of friendship and pleasure in the meeting. The words were few; but he did not relax his grasp as he spoke them, and they only ceased, when it was said that the hour of counselling should be resumed. He left her with the old blunt suddenness; which thrilled her as strongly as anything the meeting held, in its showing that the days of sorrow had wrought no difference.
But it was not wholly thus; and as the weeks passed, she found it. Something had gone from him—the old eager singleness of purpose; the rejoicing in a service that was thankless, if at the same time it was great; the power of leaving the world where he moved and breathed, and moving in another. The hand of sorrow was heavy yet. He yet could not see the lives of his fellows, for the stretch of emptiness that made his own. In the hours they passed together, it was the service of the teacher to the pupil he rendered. It was not as it once had been. It was she to whom his thought was given, and not himself.
But as the days passed, they carried with them that which was of them. She was gladdened by the change which was lifting the burden from another watcher’s heart. The old self returned—the old living for the chosen labour. Once more was demanded less the deepening of her own conceptions, than the true knowledge of his own. One day he laid before her some manuscript pages of a play. The writing was large and straggling, as if the hand that traced it owed little to a guiding eye.
“It is my last,” he said. “I am yet writing it. It is as yet for no one’s eyes but mine. But you may read it.”
Dolores read it; and knew that he had lived his grief to the end. His own deepest experience, which had lain covered from sympathy’s touch, was bared to the probing of the world, which had shown itself unloving. She gave it back into his hands in silence, and raised her face with the message she could not speak.
But it had to be spoken. His eyes sought hers with the groping, helpless look she was learning to shrink from meeting; and his gesture showed his need of words. The words were easily given. The forces which bound them were broken in the shock of a sleeping dread awakened.
There was a different dread to come.
The self restored as it had been before sorrow touched it, was not the self she had known. The days which had been denied to her sight, when the shadow of bereavement was looming, were not as those when it was yet unseen, and after it fell. But she learned to know them, as if she had watched them; for she watched the days that were lived now, and knew them of their image.
Of the manner and swiftness of the change she could learn nothing, save what she read into purposeless words. But now it was revealed from its hiding, it was a change which she witnessed with what she was forced to acknowledge pain. For the days of genius proud in its isolation, of neglect accepted and given, lived in the past. That which was before her now—genius indeed; but genius in the half-conventional surrounding of mingled adulation for itself, and humouring of its eccentricity seemed less great a thing. The student of men in the little crowd of these daughters of his age, was not the student standing aloof, that the ages might lie the same before him. But the change was not as it first seemed; and as she watched it, she came to see its essence—greater and less than she had thought. In the little company that paid him court, he was simply as he had ever been—blunt, austere, or responsive, as it pleased him; seeming to take the tolerance that met his moods as his due. The change was of straitened surface, but going deep. She knew its presence and its further daily growth; but demanded blindness of herself. But a moment came, which brought the knowledge, that from its earliest signs she had watched it.
She was standing with Perdita in the common library, searching through a shelf of books, when Claverhouse stepped from an alcove in the wall, and joined them. It was to herself he spoke—some trivial words on a change in their hour of meeting; and he turned away when they were spoken. But she read his groping glance aside from herself. The shadow she had seen on the floor, which had shrunk away with his figure’s passing from the alcove, she knew had lain there long.
She turned her face from her friend, and sought alone among the books.
Chapter X.
“No, you may not be wrong, Bertram; but I cannot help feeling certain that you are. Nothing but my being certain could justify my speaking.”
“Then I am quite sure you are certain,” said Bertram. “I do not ask for a surer proof, than that otherwise you would not feel justified. You see, I do know something of you, Dolores.”
“Bertram, you are old to look at the matter lightly. Another person’s life should be to you in your dealings as much as your own. My poor little helpless friend! I wish I had opposed her coming again to see us. I blame myself greatly.”
“Well, I cannot help it,” said Bertram. “Miss Kingsford knows that—that I am betrothed to Elsa. If it is as you think, I do not know that I am the object for your moral urging.”
“Bertram, I must say it for Perdita’s sake,” said Dolores. “What is there in your behaviour to Elsa, or Elsa’s to you, that speaks for your betrothal? If Perdita thinks it a mere weakening compact of your youth, that may at any time be broken, is it to be wondered at? But I am asking you to do nothing more than remember, that you owe to her what we all owe to every one.”
Bertram whitened, and turned his face from his sister; and she was spared his reply by the entrance of Perdita.
“I am despatched as embassy to summon you both to the drawing-room. Some one has come to see your father, and Mrs Hutton is out. I only just caught a glimpse of him. He is tall, and has grey hair. Your father seemed very pleased to see him.”
“Uncle James,” said Bertram. “The pater is an excellent actor when he chooses; and for these conditions he has had some practice.”
But the figure that rose as Dolores and Perdita entered, bore merely the generic resemblance to the form of the Very Rev. James; and Mr Hutton’s tones were not of a kind to be designed for the ear of his brother.
“My daughter, it is a great pleasure to introduce Mr Soulsby. He has a double claim on our friendship. He was a contemporary of mine in my undergraduate days; and he is now the tutor of Bertram’s college. He recognised Bertram’s name, and learned from him of my whereabouts; and being in the neighbourhood for the fishing, has done me the kindness of looking me up.”
“No, no, the—the kindness is on your side. It is a great pleasure to me to renew our—our very early acquaintance,” said the guest, glancing round to see that the ladies had taken seats, before he resumed his own.
The stranger’s manner was felt as constraining by those for whom its youthful form was not discernible through it; and Mr Hutton found that his precautions for support had left him self-dependent.
“Well, Soulsby, though I have not followed you myself in your academic experience, I have a child who is on the way to doing so. My daughter here is a lecturer at one of the ladies’ colleges. I daresay you are surprised to hear it. She is certainly more like a child of yours than mine.”
“At—at which college?” said Soulsby to Dolores, with a slight bow, and a note of deprecati
ng the suggested affinity.
Dolores answered; and the guest suddenly spoke with musical fluency.
“Then you know Claverhouse, the dramatist?”
“Yes,” said Dolores after a minute’s pause, striving to hold her face from changing.
“You were perhaps a pupil of his?” said Soulsby, with a touch of earnestness and apology for it.
“Yes, and I am still in a manner. I have had great kindness from him,” said Dolores.
For some moments the guest appeared to be eagerly on the point of speaking; and before he was successful, Mrs Hutton returned, to the relief of Dolores, who felt herself flushing and paling.
The next weeks were a passage by themselves to the master of the parsonage. He found the society of his early friend the greatest happiness. He had been the latter’s senior at Oxford, where the closing year of his own deferred and forgotten course was the first of the other’s brilliant, early experience; and Soulsby was not the person to whom afterward difference was a ground for unmindfulness of honour owed once to an academic superior. The memories common to both—and both were men in whom academic memories were strong—tended much to his advance in self-esteem; a process which could hardly have been more congenial and natural to him, and which the stationary condition of his own lot, which he had yet to look upon easily, had condemned to a painful tardiness.
But there was another reason underlying the welcome, which drew the diffident scholar daily to the parsonage. The Rev. Cleveland saw something that other eyes did not see. The grey-haired pedant, who had passed his prime without seeking the love of women, saw the child of his hidden yearning as his own eyes saw her. He lived this passage of his fatherhood as his nature guided. He built no definite hopes, and cast no glances over a self-created future; but standing aside, reconciled to the one issue or the other, he of purpose seconded the common view, that the familiar dealings of his daughter and his friend were an outcome of their characters too natural to call for question.
But the bond between Soulsby and Dolores had its binding from the hidden source. The life-interest of both was sacred to each, and was the same. The chambers of each heart, that were covered from human sight, could be opened to each other—in the one with freedom, in the other in slight but grateful part. From the moment when the common thread of their lives was known to them, it formed a growing bond. And for Soulsby it was true that the bond was more than this. The friendship of this woman, who gave of friendship as a comrade; whose venerating knowledge of what was great to himself, was free in its imparting from the womanly spells which would have held him wordless and troubled, was growing into a place of its own in the precision of his life. The father’s eyes were not deceived in what they saw.
But Dolores? As far as her life was touched they were wholly deceived. To her the presence of Soulsby was but the shadow of another. Her days grew heavy and sadly perplexed. Three lives lay ever stretched before her—her own, Perdita’s, and that to which she told herself her own was as nothing. She told herself this. Could she show herself, in deed, it was truth that she told? She was saved from darkness only by the suffering need of living the surface life, as one amongst many who were living no other. She bowed to need, as always, calmly; moved and spoke as one whose life was easy; kept her passion clothed in the guise of the feelings of a pupil for a teacher beloved; even faced the mockery of wrestling to make it thus in itself—faithful through all to her old religion of the duty she owed her kind. And now the duty went deep. It held her from forcing from herself her knowledge of Claverhouse’s love for Perdita, from grasping the persuasion that his feeling for herself was love.
When she bade farewell to Soulsby she bade it blindly; unable to do else than blindly think the thought, that what he had given was a deepening of her love in her deeper knowledge of what had given it birth. She gave him her hand, knowing nothing of what might be read into her pale silence.
That day was the day preceding their own return to the duties of the session. The farewells were made at night, by reason of early leaving on the morrow. As Dolores passed the chamber where Perdita slept, she caught a glimpse of a figure leaning against the wall, just within the half-shut door, with the hands on the heart, and the face as a face in death.
Chapter XI.
Dolores returned to the little emotionless world where she had her lot, sustained—since sustaining was her need—by the hope that what she had seen had its being only in her eyes. She knew it was not as she hoped; but had not strength to carry the knowledge.
And it was not as she hoped. Other sight than her own saw the change. Perdita was the mark of the glances of many eyes, and the words of many lips. Poor Perdita! She could not but know a feverish joy, in this feeling herself seen the one of these many bright souls, which had earned homage where any heed was of price; and she did not shrink from the giving of her ear to words, or her eyes to the meeting of glances. To her nature bending was easy, and she bowed to present force. But beneath, no less than Dolores, she lived a hidden life. It was not that the hidden life was as Dolores’. It had no place for struggle or searching of self. But it held a passion—a passion which for all its difference, was enough to bend her yielding soul. She bowed before it; and the visible life bore signs of what was within. It was said that she could not yield what was sought to the man of genius, and that her sufferings were sore in her helpless giving of pain. Words of sympathy and pity were spoken.
Dolores heard them; and saw that as far as they were knowing, they were true. But she could give her thought to her friend only at times and hardly. Her own experience was growing vexed to the utter clouding of her soul. She lived in wavering between two states—demanding and different,—the state of being borne, conscious and struggling, on her passion’s flood; and that which followed as reaction, and seemed a sort of exhaustion of her nature, in which she questioned the two lives other than her own, which were threatened by the same undoing.
Her hours with Claverhouse laid bare the change in him before her. The old self was again dead—the old dramatist spirit. Again he was as teacher to pupil. Again he was living his own human life. One day, as she rose to leave him, he suddenly laid his hand on her arm. His eyes, with a piercing expression pitiful with their straining to fulfil their purpose, seemed groping for her own.
“You know what is my aim?” he said, speaking low and deep.
Dolores felt herself trembling.
“Yes,” she said, barely finding utterance.
“And you know her? You are her friend, as you are mine?”
“Yes,” said Dolores.
“If you can, you will help me?” he said. “I feel helpless—I am helpless. And yet I am a man who has done and seen much. If you are able, you will help me?”
Dolores was alive to nothing beyond the look and tone.
“Oh, I will, I will,” she said, her voice the voice of one taking a vow.
“Ah! I knew you as a friend,” he said. “You have been my friend. If it were not to be—”
Dolores left him with blind steps; the surging of her feelings aroused by the last words, making her see the promise she had uttered doomed to be falsely spoken.
That day she sat alone through the evening hours, with books and papers untouched before her, and her face pressed into her hands; living, since no power she had could help her, in the future which the words, “If it were not to be—” forced before her sight. She was living in it, alive to nothing beside, save that which alone lay deeper—the knowledge that she could live in her actual life in no other. She did not hear an agitated footfall in the corridor. Her door was flung open; and before her thoughts were clear, Perdita was on her knees at her side, hiding her face in her garments, and sobbing almost with struggles.
Dolores spoke no word; her voice seemed dead; and her question needed no utterance.
“Oh, Dolores, my friend! It is to you I must come. I cannot carry it myself. I am so utterly alone. But you will bear with me? Tell me that you will.”
“He has said it—as I knew—as every one knew—he must say it soon. He spoke to me—when we were alone. Oh, it was so dreadful, Dolores.”
Dolores flung her arms round the crouching form that clung to her. It seemed to herself that the action had love and hatred in it. What she suffered was something stronger than suspense.
“Oh, it is so dreadful,” sobbed Perdita. “He is so great; and it would be such a privilege to give up to him a life like mine; but I cannot, Dolores, I cannot; it is not through my own will. It is not in my power.”
Dolores was silent and still.
“I cannot,” said Perdita, raising her face. “I have prayed that I might be able; but I am not able. Speak to me, Dolores.”
Dolores uttered no sound. As never before in the years she remembered, her own life was all in all. Perdita’s choice for her future was a clearing of her own. Claverhouse’s sorrow was a thing for herself to heal. For the moment it had this meaning and no other.
“Speak to me, Dolores,” said Perdita, in a voice that was almost a cry.
But Dolores spoke no word.
“I cannot stay here,” went on Perdita, again hiding her face; and again giving Dolores the dim, jarring sense, that her words came as they were purposed. “I cannot stay where I must see him, and watch him day by day. I must go away. I shall go far away, where I can never meet him. I shall go and live somewhere where I can see you, Dolores; somewhere near your dear home, where you were all brothers and sisters to me; where I shall not be a creature utterly alone. I shall find there some way of earning my bread; and when you are at home, I shall see you all, and be comforted.”
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