The old days! They were old indeed to Dolores; when her early memories were stirred by the signs that they were present with another than those who had known them. But she hardly saw her lot as holding ground for sorrowing, or rebelled against its barrenness of fellowship, and constraint before the watchful eyes for food for jealousy. It was not her way to pass sentence on men and women. Her sense of kinship with her kind was deep to pain; holding her shrinking from judgment, and pitiful of the much that embittered even the gladsome portion. She saw it her part to ease the burdens her stepmother bore with the hardness of rebellion; setting this before her as a duty; which, if it called for her highest effort, neither tried her past her strength, nor merited esteem of self in its doing. For the keynote of Dolores’ nature — as it had been of her mother’s before her — was instinctive loyalty of service to that rigorous lofty thing, to which we give duty as a name; a stern, devoted service, to duty interpreted as that which was the best which conditions could demand; an unfaltering, unquestioning, it may soon be said, unreasoning service, which showed her in a crisis no place for conflict or conscious sacrifice, but simply laid a course before her as that which was due from herself to her kind. Thus she was equal to the hardness of watching her stepmother’s days and her own through her stepmother’s eyes, and of accepting her father’s formal dealings as the best for the saving of them all.
For the Reverend Cleveland had learned the dread of domestic friction, and the moulding of his doings for his wife’s witnessing of them. It was a lesson which nine years earlier he would not have confessed the power to learn. Unthought-of conditions bring out unthought-of powers; and he took what his lot gave him, forbearing to throw away what it yielded in vain struggling for what was denied. But let it not be thought that his wife was a virago or termagant, or that he was not the master of his home. Mrs Hutton was merely an irritable, jealous, sensitive woman; and none knew better that, her husband’s home was a sphere where the latter was master. A ponderous, remote man, mentally and bodily disposed to heaviness, he lived his domestic routine in a manner which told little in covering much. He showed himself blind to things that awakened his resentment, but experienced more than his family guessed. From time to time he would combat the domestic spirit in days which the household dreaded in accord, and which it was an unspoken family law that no one should heed. He would openly seek the companionship of Dolores — who, living in the emotions under which he sustained, and his wife submitted to, this subtly militant temper, was by far the saddest sufferer, — would even speak of his earlier wedded experience; not referring to the change in his course, but intending it to carry its lesson. Mrs Hutton regarded these periods as the standing trial of her lot; and lived them with a sense of rebuke, and a keener sense of perplexity; not perceiving that the smothered smouldering of months had simply reached ignition point and broken into flames. It is a proof that her husband’s was the really dominant spirit, that she was docile while they endured, and less prone for some time after to peevish jealousy.
The eldest son of the parsonage — Dolores’ companion in the life that was woven only in name with the others of the same scene — was a lesser cause of discord. Mrs Hutton was one of the women, to whom masculine failings have a strong excuse in being masculine; and as far as his relations with his father went, there was little to awaken jealousy in a breast where it was the most overbearing of inmates. Mr Hutton was not in the least disposed to an over-genial view of a lusty young piece of male flesh under his roof, growing into added lustiness in dependence on his daily efforts. He was rather addicted to comment on the necessity of putting youthful opportunities to the utmost profit, as young men were not to be supported by their fathers all their lives. The son was a self-absorbed, silent lad, old for his seventeen years; with an easily kindled zeal for the excellent; and a fainter something of Dolores’ instinct of fellowship with thinking things, which had led him to fix his ambitions on teaching. He had a straitened lot. His days were spent at a school in a neighbouring town, and his evenings in pacing the lanes with a book. He regarded his father and stepmother with one of those minglings of feeling which grow from family communion — alternating between affection and resentful dislike. He took scanty notice of the little half-brother and sisters, and reserved what his nature held for Dolores, under whose eye he was approaching an upright and reason-governed manhood.
A favourable time for a glimpse of the brother and sister is a midsummer evening of the year, whose autumn saw things as they are shown with the Hutton family. It was the day of Dolores’ final coming from school; and the trap which formed the provision of its kind at the parsonage had been driven to meet her by her brother; the father’s tutored domestic instinct precluding any form of personal eagerness on his daughter’s return to his roof. She was to pass the summer at the parsonage, and enter in the autumn a college for women. She seconded her stepmother’s view that her future support should not be expected of her father, and was to be fitted for the teaching to which she looked forward with her brother. We may watch her, as she walks up the country road — a tall, rather gaunt-looking woman — for the nameless suggestions of girlhood had lingered but a little while with Dolores, — angular and large of limb; with a plainness of dress that almost spoke of heedlessness, and a carriage not without dignity in its easy energy of motion. Her face is turned to her brother’s, lit up with humour and life; a face with a healthful sallowness of skin, exaggerated aquiline features, and grey eyes innocent of beauty of lash or colour, looking under nervous eyebrows, and a forehead already showing its furrows. She was fresh from the modern public school, where as student and student — teacher she had grown from the early maturity of the girl of thirteen to tolerant womanhood. It had been a helpful sphere for her early needs — rich in fellowship, in nurture for the charity which mellowed her nature’s primary sternness. It was not without cost that she put away what it gave, as childish things, and crossed its bound with her face held to the future.
With her face held thus, she greeted her brother with the humorous affection of their long comradeship; uttered no word of the day as lived by herself; and lent her ear to his tale of the home routine; showing his father’s and stepmother’s lots as they were to themselves, and summoning an eagerness for his boyish hopes which should prove that there was one who cared for them greatly. For Dolores in her dealings with others suppressed any pain that was her own; and had only cheer for the creatures she saw as having no need of further saddening. Her brother found that she filled the wants of his life; and in giving his troubles of the present and hopes for the future to her keeping, hardly knew that her present and future were things of which he heard little; or that her life held its own crushed sorrows, and duties that were hard and binding.