She closed the door with a sound; and he turned his head. His face lit up, with the swiftness of a happy knowledge that comes by a deeper power than sight. Dolores took the seat at his side, silent and cold.
He said no word; and his acceptance of a lot, in which closeness of comradeship gives countenance to speech or silence, brought a pang which seemed to shake her.
She began to speak—with a feeling that she must clutch the fiercest pain, her words and their work could cost, as the means of holding her emotions from following his.
“I am come to say—to tell you that this meeting is our last. My father has lost his wife; and he and his children have no one to look to, but me. I am needed in his home; and I must see that it is there I must feel my duty. There is one thing I ask you to do—to do for me, and for her—to give all your powers to the play.”
As he turned his sightless eyes towards her, the manner of the change on his face blanched her own. After a long silence he seemed to be trying to speak; but it was minutes before the power of utterance came.
“What?” he said, in a toneless mutter.
She repeated her sentences, word for word, in a voice that had lost its life.
He sat looking before him; and his frame relaxed; as though he were sinking passively to utter hopelessness. Suddenly he turned to her, and sat leaning towards her, as though the whole of his being were straining in question towards the whole of hers. She knew the question as if he had spoken it. There was then in all her feeling towards him no love for him?
She rose and left the room; neither breaking through the doorway, nor throwing a farewell glance at the figure at the desk; but walking slowly and helplessly, as though the meaning of movement were gone.
She went to her own study and fastened the door.
Chapter XV.
Five years had gone, unmarked by word between Dolores and Claverhouse. From the recoil and quiver of the inner soul come the issues in the world that is seen. In their differing bondage of seeming to choose to forsake, and feeling lightly forsaken; with their differing helplessness before the barrier of his blindness; with their same night-searching of their fellowship’s strange restraint, lest the one soul had read the other falsely as a mirror of itself; they lived in silence; while there grew into each heart, as a part of itself, its aching hourly questioning of the other.
At the end of five years, the utter sameness broke. At the end of five years, Soulsby—who at a word from Dolores before the years began, that marriage was against her heart, had gathered his shrinking being to himself; and gone from her sight to live for service to his friend; tongue-tied as always upon anything that could hint that he had a life of his own,—was again of good courage; and was seen in the neighbourhood of Millfield Parsonage.
Five years had gone unmarked. On the path through Millfield churchyard, that led from the road to the parsonage, there walked a man and a woman. As the man spoke, his tones fell grave and musical.
“Yes; it has been a sad life—a life full—full of such troubles as must be borne alone, and in which friendship seems of little help. It is a great grief to me—the greatest grief I have known, to watch him failing.”
“You cannot say that your friendship has been of little help,” said Dolores, unable to withhold from her voice a deep, personal gratitude.
“Some years ago I should not have said it,” said Soulsby, with his easier utterance of trouble. “But of late it has been so. I am not enough for him, as once I was. How it is I do not know. He seems to be lonely. He shows a longing for—for something or some one, of whom he never speaks. And it is not for—for his wife. At least—at least, I think I may say so. His sorrow for her was different; and it was over before this last change began. I do not understand. It is the one thing in which I have not his confidence.”
“He is really failing, is he?” said Dolores, looking away from her companion to the ruddy evening sky.
“Yes, he is failing,” said Soulsby. “He never leaves his house now; and he has given up teaching. And it is more than that. There is disease—a disease of the heart, which must be fatal. It may be soon, or in years; but it must be in the end. And he does not struggle to live. He feels his life holds nothing, now he is blind.”
“He is quite blind?” said Dolores.
“He can distinguish light and darkness—nothing more. He cannot read; and writing is no good to him—or so he says—as he cannot judge what is written. He has done very little since the issuing four years ago of his great play. It is a thing that will not bear words—that he has not power to give the time that is left him, to using his genius.”
“But do not you read to him what he has written?” said Dolores, with a note that was almost a cry in her voice. “Cannot you make what changes he wishes? I cannot see that blindness is utterly preventive of his writing.”
“No,” said Soulsby, with simple sadness; “I cannot—more than a little. He does not—does not allow me. I—I am—he does not feel me in sympathy with him—in my mind, I mean. He feels I do not follow him—and indeed often I do not; and the feeling repels him. He seems to shrink from revealing to me his conceptions while they are growing. Even—even in the old days, I only heard what he chose to read to me. And—and even then, he was often impatient of what I said and thought—even before—before feebleness and privation had made him hasty.”
Dolores was silent; living in the sad picture which had grown to be a part of her consciousness. She lived in it with a heavy, simple grief. She had no wonder how the playwright in his blind and penniless age, came by daily bread and tendance; not needing to hear the words which she knew could not pass her companion’s lips. As her eyes were drawn to the fine, spare figure, with the grey hair in scantier waves, and the saddened, older face, a rush of feeling came—a rush which she had been forcing back through many days. She yielded now. She let herself watch the other picture, which lay before her mind’s vision—her own life bound with the life of this noble creature, who alone of those she knew of her kind, had given her more than she gave—her own life holding the tenderness and cherishing it had never held—carrying for the history of the first of its changed chapters, the deliverance of the greater life, that had waned too far to be knit except thus with her own. She could not but see the picture; and as she walked on, shrinking from breaking the silence whose significance she knew, her thoughts hovered round it, and drew it into the range of the possible and near.
For changes had grown in the parsonage household, in the five years in which Dolores had been its mistress. The Reverend Cleveland had buried his second bereavement more easily and finally than his first; and was a happier and less unresponsive man in his doubly widowed days. Bertram was absorbed in the fair and prosperous ordering of his own life; Cleveland, with full, and quite unemotional paternal consent, had been adopted by the Very Reverend James; and of the young sisters, Evelyn was betrothed and on the point of marriage to Herbert Blackwood, and Sophia had grown into a womanhood beyond her years, and into much of the place in her father’s heart which in the earlier time had been Dolores’.
For there was a further difference between the Mr Hutton of to-day, and the husband and father of the days of his second wife. The close of the second passage of his wedded experience, by its removal of the check upon remembrance of the first, had seemed to rob the latter of its earlier sanctity. Both were sunk in memory; and for a man of his history and years, he lived little in the past. Dolores’ place in his life was hardly larger than her sisters’; many of his old qualities, in chief his moroseness and liking for thoughtful companionship, were far less marked; and Sophia was of an age and nature to sustain easily the lightened burden, and fitly the greater dignity. Dolores felt that her will was her own; that this feebler and later promise of brightening in her path was undimmed by looming shadows. When Soulsby spoke, she felt it was her right to hear him without struggle.
“Claverhouse has not—has not done and suffered what he has, without giving me a share of
his troubles. I miss his friendship—the real friendship that once I had, deeply. I am thrown much on myself. I have never been a man of—a man of friends. I am—I am lonely. I have—I hope I may have—a hope——”
He broke off. It was not his earliest effort. The task was barely in his power.
They had reached the gate that opened from the churchyard to the road. Dolores gave him her hand. He pressed it with a deepening of his usual deprecating deference, glanced into her face as he lifted his hat, and while she passed through the bushes from his sight, remained still and bareheaded.
As she neared the parsonage garden, she saw two figures pacing with arms entwined before the porch. They were the figures of her father and Sophia; and she paused in the blooming rhododendrons, leaning on a firmly - growing branch, and watched them.
No; she was no longer essential to her father’s life. The years which carried the undoing of the life that was supreme to her thought, and held the supreme need, had seen the end of the duty whose call had been her command. Five years, and this change! The cup was not to pass from her. It must seem—it seemed—that little was done, in the place of what might have been done. But her nature remained for her help; and she was spared the wishing different what she had done hardly and sorrowing. The glimpse of the heavy figure and the youthful was pregnant with memories. Before these five years, she could not have judged otherwise than as she had judged.
And now her life was her own. As she stood leaning on the cold bough, with the damp earth under her feet, her hands clasped together, and her worn, woman’s face towards her childhood’s home, there were simple, pitiful feelings mingling with those which lay too deep for herself to name them. No; it was not only the brightening of the darkened end of the life which was the meaning of her own—not only the living for the noble fellow-creature who sought her for herself;—it was the other things of which her lot had been empty;—daily cherishing, little hourly signs of a heart’s homage, the glances of those who knew her early years, and deemed her unsought of men, and grateful that the shelter of her father’s roof was ungrudging. It was such things as these, that left the others beneath, and struggled to the surface. For there are times when the heart is hungry, and cries out for the simplest sustenance as stay for its need.
Chapter XVI.
The Blackwoods had bidden their friends to an evening mildly convivial; and Mr Blackwood, twirling his moustache in survey of his drawingroom, had a sense that he was doing a pleasant thing which he could ill afford, and which was therefore generous as well as pleasant. In Mrs Blackwood, who sat with a very upright bearing and a studied air of ease, which seemed to clash with each other, the sense of pleasantness was rather painfully subordinate to that of the ill-affording; and there were further misgivings to give complication to qualms. The Huttons and Cassells were to be supplemented, not merely by Mrs Merton-Vane; whose acceptance of Blackwood good-fellowship was sufficiently rare—being limited to cases when Mr Hutton was known to be included in the company—to be held momentous; but by Soulsby; upon whom Mr Blackwood had pressed his invitation, without reference to authority more domestic than his own impulse, and with genial insistence unhampered by a sense of acquaintance resting on a single meeting, or of the guest’s probable experience of evening hospitality.
Mr Hutton had suffered some unperturbing amazement, that this chance of convivial experience had commended itself to his friend; and Mrs Merton-Vane, to whom in confidence he admitted his view, easily entered into it. Mr and Mrs Blackwood, with the true instinct of hospitality—which is known to feel astonishment an unfitting attitude to the doings of guests,—had not yielded to surprise over any case of welcome extended to the pleasure they offered.
“Well, Vicar!” said Mr Blackwood; “I am glad to see you here with all your flock. And a fine flock it is, too—as fine as my own; and I couldn’t say more to please—to please any one you please. I couldn’t indeed.”
Mr Hutton’s eyes sought the available chairs, rather than Mr Blackwood’s face; and his reply seemed lost in a heavy taking of a seat, though his expression was well disposed.
“Well, you are a fine pair of girls!” said Mr Blackwood, taking the hands of Sophia and Evelyn. “I shall be proud of having one of you for my daughter-in-law. I shall indeed. I shouldn’t mind if I was to have you both——”
“Herbert, come dear,” said Mrs Blackwood, in her half-reproving, conjugal tones; “here is Mrs Merton-Vane.”
“I am glad to see you, Mrs Merton-Vane,” said Mr Blackwood, very loudly, as though in amend for his involuntary disregard. “How are you?”
“I am pret-ty well, thank you, Mr Blackwood,” said Mrs Merton-Vane, implying that her qualified words had allusion to her widow’s weeds. “I felt I could not refuse your kindness, though I feel inclined to shut myself up, away from ev-er-y-one. But it does not do to give way to feelings like that too much, does it?”
“No, no, it doesn’t do, Mrs Merton-Vane; it doesn’t do,” said Mr Blackwood.
“How do you do, Mrs Cassell?” said Mrs Blackwood. “We were all beginning to wonder if anything had prevented your coming.”
“How do you know we were, mother? We have none of us said so,” said Elsa.
“Oh, no, thank you, Mr Blackwood. It was John; he would be so long dressing,” said Mrs Cassell, throwing an arch look at her husband, which he ignored with no failing in goodwill.
“Well, doctor!” said Mr Blackwood, advancing. “Well, doctor, how are you?”
“I am—well, thank you,” said Dr. Cassell.
“Why, Mr Soulsby!” said Mr Blackwood; “I am glad to see you here. I am glad to see you here at last; I am indeed. Come, find a seat. Do not treat us as strangers, I beg of you, after our having been neighbours at intervals for all these years.”
“Come up to the fire, Mr Soulsby,” said Mrs Blackwood.
“Why, Soulsby? Still at your old tricks of unpunctuality?” said Mr Hutton, knowing himself regarded as accosting the friend of his early days.
“I—I—you are most kind. No, no, no; this place is—is what I should choose, thank you,” said Soulsby; managing to glance round the room, rest his eyes on Dolores, and push his fingers through his hair, in the second before he took his seat.
“Why, Mr Soulsby, I hear that you and Mr Hut-ton were boys to-geth-er,” said Mrs Merton-Vane, leaning forward.
“Yes; yes, yes. At least—that is to say, we were at Oxford at the same time,” said Soulsby.
“Now, Mr Soulsby, what do you think of this double wedding we are all going foolish over?” said Mr Blackwood; indicating the four young people concerned, with confidence in their hold upon any man’s interest. “Brother and sister, to brother and sister. A pretty thing, won’t it be?”
“Brother and sister, to brother and sister?” broke in Dr Cassell. “Brother and sister, to sister and brother, I believe?”
“Ah, yes, doctor; ah, yes, that’s the coupling,” said Mr Blackwood. “Well, what do you think of it, Mr Soulsby?”
“Oh—certainly—a very—a very pleasant arrangement,” said Soulsby; throwing one swift glance at Elsa and Evelyn, as though feeling definite scrutiny a discourtesy, and clasping and unclasping his hands.
Dolores, who was watching Bertram, saw him make a gesture as though in response to a sign; and Elsa suddenly rose, and confronted her father.
“You can leave Bertram and me out of Mr Soulsby’s ‘pleasant arrangement,’ father,” she said, in a reckless voice with a quiver of laughter. “We have fulfilled our part early, to save so much complication.”
Mr Blackwood looked easily uncomprehending; but Mrs Blackwood leaned forward.
“What do you mean, Elsa? Say what you mean plainly, and at once.”
“Oh, Elsa, Elsa, you hussy, what now, what now?” said the Reverend Cleveland.
“Remember that you are speaking to Mrs Hutton, if you please, Uncle Cleveland,” said Elsa.
“Oh, Elsa, how naughty of you! “said Mrs Blackwood, mingling the f
eminine attributes of swift comprehension and shrill tearfulness. “Now you have spoilt it all—the double wedding and everything. You never think of any one but yourself. You never have been anything but a disappointment to us from your babyhood. I shall be ashamed to tell any one. I shall never be able to speak of it. And my eldest daughter’s marriage too! It is too bad. But I suppose it is all my fault, for allowing you and Bertram to be about so much alone. If you had had another mother.…”
“Oh, my darling, come, come. Young people will do foolish things sometimes. Why, you and I were on the point of doing something very much like it, about sixty years ago, if you remember. But it will be a bad thing, if you are going to fret about it. Come, come, now.” Mr Blackwood crossed over to his wife, and awaited further revelations with his arm round her shoulders.
“Sixty years ago!” said Mrs Cassell, looking round with a smile. “Well, it isn’t quite so long ago, that we were nearly culprits in the same way, is it, John?”
“Bertram, my son, should not the explanation come from you?” said Mr Hutton, as the doctor’s voice gave no sign of breaking the silence.
“Yes, sir, certainly,” said Bertram, going to Elsa and taking her hand. “It is just as—as my wife has said. We have no excuse to make; except that young people, as my father-in-law has observed, will do foolish things sometimes. We must plead that we are not—are not considered to be—mature.” Bertram spoke with a faint note of cynical bitterness.
“You are instead—considered to be”—said Dr Cassell, leaning forward and smiling, “a little pre-mature.”
“Ah! So I am a father-in-law. So I am. I had not thought of that,” said Mr Blackwood, as though taking some personal credit.
“Oh, de-ars!” said Mrs Merton-Vane. “How could you do such a naughty thing? De-ar, de-ar!”
“They may not be mature; but they are—universally agreed to be—a little pre-mature,” said Dr Cassell, a little more urgently, arresting no eye but Mrs Cassell’s.
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