“Why, has he ever joined you in here?” said Dolores. “I thought he had nothing to do with you beyond what he could help.”
“Oh, yes; for a time he quite unbent,” said Miss Butler. “He came to the common-room four times, and we only invited him seven; and every time but twice he spoke. It was Miss Kingsford who seemed the softening influence. Once he said five things to her in one week. We were all quite proud of her.”
“Your gift of numerical exactitude would be very useful to me in my duties, Miss Butler,” said Miss Greenlow.
“It is his mother’s death that has altered him,” said Miss Cliff. “His relapse into aloofness is not the only change. I daresay time will be a help.”
“Yes, we must hope so,” said Perdita. “It is hardly time to expect him to rouse himself yet.”
“Well, I am sure one cannot help hoping so,” said Miss Lemaître. “I caught one glimpse of him last week, and have felt oppressed ever since.”
“Well, this week you must try and let him work upon you homœopathically,” said Miss Greenlow.
“And hope in general charity that I may work upon him in the same way,” said Miss Lemaître.
“A very good line of idea for curing one another of trying moods,” said Miss Dorrington.
“We can do very little for each other at times like these,” said Miss Adam. “There is only the one kind of help.”
“You knew him better than most of his students, did you not, Miss Hutton?” said Miss Cliff. “Do you think him much altered?”
“I have not spoken to him yet,” said Dolores. “Outwardly he is altered. He looks worn and much older.”
“You passed him in the corridor just now,” said Miss Adam. “I suppose he did not see you? I think he is more short-sighted than ever.”
“No; he did not see me,” said Dolores, rather faintly.
“He seems to see very little now,” said Perdita. “He spoke to me the other day, looking straight above my head, as though he thought he was looking into my face; and he said that he could not see that it was I, but that he felt I was there.”
“Yes, yes; it is a sorry business,” said Miss Butler.
“It is your spirits that are in sympathy, then,” said Miss Lemaître. “We may acquit you of calling coquettish influence to your aid in taming him.”
“Yes, you may acquit me of that,” said Perdita, smiling; “as much as you may himself.”
“Is he trying to tame you, then?” said Miss Lemaître.
“I am not aware that I require taming. If what people give me to understand is true, he is certainly different to me from to them,” said Perdita.
Miss Adam looked a little uneasily from one speaker to the other.
“I am afraid his sight is really worse,” she said, in an unnoticing tone. “Just lately he has never opened a door, without fumbling for the handle; and he seems not even to try to look for it, as though he felt his eyes were no good. One does not like to think what the end may be.”
“It would certainly be irony on the part of fate for him to lose his sight, when he could clearly be deaf and dumb without any deprivation,” said Miss Lemaître.
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.