Chapter VII
The village lay in its silent, unprogressing peacefulness — meeting Dolores as it had met her four years earlier, on the threshold of her womanhood. Now that womanhood seemed old. Those four bright, troubled years, which had left this early world the same! As she spoke and moved beneath the pressure of her pain, she found herself simply dwelling through a dream on their difference, had nothing been sought but the sameness. But the living beneath her pain was not that which was before her. It was the living above it: and she found she had hardly faced what she had freely chosen — the suffering living of this visible, unmeaning, demanding round. For there were other things that were the same.
“Oh, Dolores, I cannot be thankful enough, that you have come home for good,” said Bertram. “In a life that grows more hopeless with every day, it seems the last straw to have nobody to make a companion of.”
“Why, Bertram, what is the trouble?” said Dolores.
“Nothing, beyond what you know. But it is enough to feel one’s youth slipping away; and have no chance of doing what must be done then or never; and which will spoil one’s life if it is not done.”
“Oh, Bertram, is it so impossible that you should go to college?” said Dolores. “Cannot you or father see any way, in which it could be managed?”
“I can see a way very well,” said Bertram. “Simply by the mater’s making a little effort against expense for a few years. But father cannot — is not allowed to see it; and I can drudge on in a schoolroom of bumpkins, when a course at Oxford would open a career. It is not a light matter to me, Dolores. I am nearly two-and-twenty; and the years for it will be gone. One cannot begin one’s life too late. But not a farthing further is to be wasted on me. Father takes credit to himself for having kept me sheltered and fed, while I should have starved or died of exposure, if he had not.”
“I suppose his income is really very much less,” said Dolores, in nervous uncertainty how to respond. “This fall in the tithes has made such a difference. He cannot do things for the younger ones, as he once intended.”
“But they are not living the best years of their youth,” said Bertram. “It does seem that some sort of effort might be made, to save the whole of my life. Father and the mater think that so long as I can just support myself, so as to be off their hands, I am not to be troubled about.”
Dolores moved in silence. She felt a bewilderment in this forcing upon her of bitterness other than that of her own, which had filled her world. She looked about her, as one troubled in a dream. The familiar road seemed laden with suggestions of the old, monotonous round; the gabled parsonage was in sight. It was with an effort that added paleness to the set lines of her lips, that she crushed her despair in the denial of a lonely hour, for her sympathy’s release; and set her face to the unknowing, family greetings.
“Why, Dolores, you are looking very pale and thin,” said Mrs Hutton. “You do not look so after you have been at home for a few weeks.”
“She needs a rest,” said Mr Hutton, who could not repress an unwonted buoyancy, in welcoming the return with academic honours of the child of his hidden tenderness. “The news of your place on the lists gave me great pleasure, my daughter.”
“Will you be glad to be settled at home, Dolores, or would you rather be at college?” said Mrs Blackwood, who was calling with her husband and children, and whose presence had determined her sister’s words. “Which life do you prefer?”
“I have had many happy days at both,” said Dolores. “I should not compare them.”
“Do you think you will like teaching your sisters and brother?” pursued Mrs Blackwood, who had had a difference with Mrs Hutton earlier in the day. “With the home duties that are sure to crop up, you will get very little time to yourself.”
“I am fond of teaching,” said Dolores; “and I have no especial pursuits to make me anxious for much spare time.”
“You are a very good sister, and a very good daughter,” said Mrs Blackwood; “and I think we may say a very good stepdaughter too.”
“My dear Carrie, you need not talk as if teaching three intelligent children were a condition of slavery,” said Mrs Hutton. “We did not heap advantages on Dolores, for her to make no use of them. She really ought to be teaching away from home.”
“My dear, that would be a foolish arrangement from your point of view,” said Mrs Blackwood.
“Well, Bertram, what does your sister think of your new prospects?” said the Rev. Cleveland, interposing with a note of weariness.
Bertram, who had been talking in lowered tones to Elsa, looked up as if reminded of something jarring.
“Oh, I have not mentioned them to her, sir,” he said.
Mr Hutton was silent; and Bertram continued in a casually bitter tone, in answer to Dolores’ question.
“Oh, I have been offered a higher post at the grammar-school — the mastership of a house that takes boarders; so that I can settle down to give up my life to farmers’ sons, and their welfare — mental and bodily.”
“It is not a question of giving up your life,” said the Rev. Cleveland. “Promotion is not tabooed any more to you than to other men.”
“It is tabooed to me, as much as to other men with no qualifications, sir,” said Bertram.
“My dear Bertram, learning is not only to be had at Oxford and Cambridge,” said Mrs Hutton. “I am getting tired of this harping on that subject. You talk as if learning were a thing to be bought with pounds, shillings, and pence. Books are the same all the world over, surely. You have plenty of spare time; and you are not a baby. There is no reason why you should not give yourself as good an education, as any one need have.”
“I have given myself as good a one already, as most people have,” said Bertram. “I should have thought I need not tell you, that it is not only that, that Oxford and Cambridge give — are supposed to give, if you like, — it comes to the same thing. No good post is open to a man, who is not turned out of one or the other. Any man understands that.”
“Yes; to hear Uncle Cleveland talk, one would think his years at Oxford were the only time in his life he found worth living,” said Elsa.
“But, really, though I suppose the atmosphere and ancient associations of Oxford and Cambridge must influence all that one reads and thinks in them, the learning in itself must always be the same, must it not?” said Lettice.
“Letty, your habit of talking as one possessed by an imbecile spirit, has been wearying to me from your cradle,” said Elsa. “I am sorry to see it growing upon you.”
“Ah, there is a great deal of truth in anything that Letty says, I have no doubt,” said Mr Blackwood, preferring passive conviction, as less exacting than active judgment. “I have no doubt of that.”
Elsa resumed her talk with Bertram without yielding her father a glance; and neither gave heed to the general company, until Mrs Blackwood’s awakening to the need for leaving; which occurred at a discomfiting point in argument with her sister, and was proof against pressure of hospitality.
Bertram escorted the guests to the door; and on his return, Dolores was struck by a difference in him. He was buoyant, as she had known him only in unwitnessed moments of the younger time. His spirits lasted till the parting for the night; and apart from their giving of perplexity, in their bearing on the mood they followed, they seemed to sit on him strangely. To-day she had power to follow what she saw, only through sorrow’s dazing sense of living the unreal; but the memory was to grow into meaning.
Poor Dolores! She wrestled along in the silent hours that night — holding to her own nature in the wrestling; neither weeping nor rising to pace the ground; but lying with dry eyes and worn face, and hands clutching the coverings tensely. When the morning grew light, she rose schooled for her lot.