Dolores (21 page)

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.

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 the 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.

As they drove to the dwelling in the narrow street, which had not the power to strike him as it was, for its sufficing through the years to his mother and himself—he grasped her hand.

“We are home—at the home we are to share together,” he said. “Welcome, my little one.”

Poor Perdita! Her pliant nature had been bending in the last hour to the lot that was at hand. She had been picturing with dawning of hope the untried experience of ordering a household, and knowing herself the mark of glances as the mate of the genius. Her eyes, gazing through the dusk as the wheels slackened, took on a half-frightened look; and remained fastened on the scene before them. Her husband's touch and tones recalled her to the moment's needs.

As one in a dream, she felt her feet on the narrow pavement. As one in a dream, she saw a bent figure hasten down the steps, with eyes that seemed to miss herself for their rivetted gaze on the figure in the carriage. As one in a dream, she stood, and looked, and was silent. Claverhouse stooped from the carriage gropingly, with his hands on the sides of its doorway; but missed the step, and violently stumbled as he gained a footing on the pavement. Perdita felt herself pushed aside; and saw the old servant
spring to support his staggering form; while, still as through a dream, she heard a startled utterance.

“Ah!—See!—move, madam. He is not safe without watching.”

It was only the happening of a moment. The next, her husband was standing at her side; and Julia was speaking some words of respectful greeting, as if the disturbance had been unreal. But Perdita, as she walked up the jagged steps into the narrow dwelling, felt a sense of being jarred so deep and complex, that she could hardly sustain it; and in the dim passage she stood with the eyes of a tortured dumb creature, speaking no word, and making no movement towards chamber or staircase. Her husband, though his eyes were turned to her face, saw nothing in it that was not well. But other eyes saw.

“You are tired, madam,” said Julia. “You will be glad of some rest.”

“Yes, yes, she is weary,” said Claverhouse. “Come upstairs with us, Julia, and show your mistress how things are done for her. Come, little one. We shall not have you weary long.”

He mounted the staircase with the ungainly quickness which marked his movements on ground he knew, and which brought another change to Perdita's eyes, as they saw it for the first time. She followed slowly, and without words. As she entered the room prepared for
them, she found him standing just within the door, turning his head with eager groping.

“Ah! this room!” he was saying. “It has seen much, Julia! Where my mother was lying a year ago! A year ago.”

Julia made no reply, but her face said much; and Perdita, in hearing these words of an unmeaning past, felt the pang of a sufferer awaking from darkened days with memory dead. She was jarred by an intuitive knowledge, that the silence of the old servant was considerate feeling for herself.

“Perhaps you will show me what is needful, Julia; and then we will not trouble you further,” she said; speaking with courteous, cold authority, but with a knowledge that the sentence was to be numbered in her store of memories, as the first she had uttered under her own roof.

Julia gave one glance at the wan young face; and then spoke with respectful brevity, put some keys into Perdita's hand, and left the room. As she moved about the kitchen, her face was as neutral as if she felt herself watched. Her thoughts would have borne any searching in their worthiness of the years behind her. No unloving feeling assailed her for this young creature, who was to straiten her world in straitening her place in her master's lot. In her faithfulness she closed her heart against it; and even had pity not come to her with help, would have
held it closed. But the pity did not only help. As she attended the husband and wife at their evening meal, noted their words and their silence, and watched the sharpened face of the bride of a day, her heart misgave her for both. And there came a different pity, with a different, deeper pang. It was only her eyes that saw that the face was sharpened. Her long dread was growing surely into a swift and certain sorrow.

“Well, Julia,” said Claverhouse, as the meal went its way, “I see you are still a good housewife. I am bringing my little one into safe keeping. I can trust you to care for her, when I am earning the bread?”

Julia's mute signs of submission were ready and full. No service for her master was hard.

“Well, my pretty one,” said Claverhouse to Perdita, “you are weary to-night. You are a tender nursling for us to care for. Julia, it is the second charge you will have fulfilled for me.”

Julia's face showed momentary lighting; but she moved about in silence.

Perdita made an effort to lay aside her weary unresponsiveness. She leaned from her place at the table's head, and laid her hand in her husband's.

“Ah, my little one,” he said, returning the caress. “There is only one whom I could see in that place. I could say no more to you.”

The tone was too much for Perdita's overwrought feelings. Her lips trembled and her eyes filled; and she sat with her eyes bent on her plate. Her husband smiled into her face, but could not mark its change, and Julia seemed not to see it. Till the end of the meal the silence was unbroken—the silence that was an easy, daily thing to the one—so different to the other.

When Julia was clearing the table, there was a knock at the outer door.

Claverhouse sprang to his feet, and was about to answer the summons; but Julia was before him in the passage, with unconscious eagerness to be spared his groping for the fastenings. The tall, grey-headed figure hesitated to cross the threshold.