She was standing with Perdita in the common library, searching through a shelf of books, when Claverhouse stepped from an alcove in the wall, and joined them. It was to herself he spoke — some trivial words on a change in their hour of meeting; and he turned away when they were spoken. But she read his groping glance aside from herself. The shadow she had seen on the floor, which had shrunk away with his figure’s passing from the alcove, she knew had lain there long.
She turned her face from her friend, and sought alone among the books.
Chapter X
“No, you may not be wrong, Bertram; but I cannot help feeling certain that you are. Nothing but my being certain could justify my speaking.”
“Then I am quite sure you are certain,” said Bertram. “I do not ask for a surer proof, than that otherwise you would not feel justified. You see, I do know something of you, Dolores.”
“Bertram, you are old to look at the matter lightly. Another person’s life should be to you in your dealings as much as your own. My poor little helpless friend! I wish I had opposed her coming again to see us. I blame myself greatly.”
“Well, I cannot help it,” said Bertram. “Miss Kingsford knows that — that I am betrothed to Elsa. If it is as you think, I do not know that I am the object for your moral urging.”
“Bertram, I must say it for Perdita’s sake,” said Dolores. “What is there in your behaviour to Elsa, or Elsa’s to you, that speaks for your betrothal? If Perdita thinks it a mere weakening compact of your youth, that may at any time be broken, is it to be wondered at? But I am asking you to do nothing more than remember, that you owe to her what we all owe to every one.”
Bertram whitened, and turned his face from his sister; and she was spared his reply by the entrance of Perdita.
“I am despatched as embassy to summon you both to the drawing-room. Some one has come to see your father, and Mrs Hutton is out. I only just caught a glimpse of him. He is tall, and has grey hair. Your father seemed very pleased to see him.”
“Uncle James,” said Bertram. “The pater is an excellent actor when he chooses; and for these conditions he has had some practice.”
But the figure that rose as Dolores and Perdita entered, bore merely the generic resemblance to the form of the Very Rev. James; and Mr Hutton’s tones were not of a kind to be designed for the ear of his brother.
“My daughter, it is a great pleasure to introduce Mr Soulsby. He has a double claim on our friendship. He was a contemporary of mine in my undergraduate days; and he is now the tutor of Bertram’s college. He recognised Bertram’s name, and learned from him of my whereabouts; and being in the neighbourhood for the fishing, has done me the kindness of looking me up.”
“No, no, the — the kindness is on your side. It is a great pleasure to me to renew our — our very early acquaintance,” said the guest, glancing round to see that the ladies had taken seats, before he resumed his own.
The stranger’s manner was felt as constraining by those for whom its youthful form was not discernible through it; and Mr Hutton found that his precautions for support had left him self-dependent.
“Well, Soulsby, though I have not followed you myself in your academic experience, I have a child who is on the way to doing so. My daughter here is a lecturer at one of the ladies’ colleges. I daresay you are surprised to hear it. She is certainly more like a child of yours than mine.”
“At — at which college?” said Soulsby to Dolores, with a slight bow, and a note of deprecating the suggested affinity.
Dolores answered; and the guest suddenly spoke with musical fluency.
“Then you know Claverhouse, the dramatist?”
“Yes,” said Dolores after a minute’s pause, striving to hold her face from changing.
“You were perhaps a pupil of his?” said Soulsby, with a touch of earnestness and apology for it.
“Yes, and I am still in a manner. I have had great kindness from him,” said Dolores.
For some moments the guest appeared to be eagerly on the point of speaking; and before he was successful, Mrs Hutton returned, to the relief of Dolores, who felt herself flushing and paling.
The next weeks were a passage by themselves to the master of the parsonage. He found the society of his early friend the greatest happiness. He had been the latter’s senior at Oxford, where the closing year of his own deferred and forgotten course was the first of the other’s brilliant, early experience; and Soulsby was not the person to whom afterward difference was a ground for unmindfulness of honour owed once to an academic superior. The memories common to both — and both were men in whom academic memories were strong — tended much to his advance in self-esteem; a process which could hardly have been more congenial and natural to him, and which the stationary condition of his own lot, which he had yet to look upon easily, had condemned to a painful tardiness.
But there was another reason underlying the welcome, which drew the diffident scholar daily to the parsonage. The Rev. Cleveland saw something that other eyes did not see. The grey-haired pedant, who had passed his prime without seeking the love of women, saw the child of his hidden yearning as his own eyes saw her. He lived this passage of his fatherhood as his nature guided. He built no definite hopes, and cast no glances over a self-created future; but standing aside, reconciled to the one issue or the other, he of purpose seconded the common view, that the familiar dealings of his daughter and his friend were an outcome of their characters too natural to call for question.
But the bond between Soulsby and Dolores had its binding from the hidden source. The life-interest of both was sacred to each, and was the same. The chambers of each heart, that were covered from human sight, could be opened to each other — in the one with freedom, in the other in slight but grateful part. From the moment when the common thread of their lives was known to them, it formed a growing bond. And for Soulsby it was true that the bond was more than this. The friendship of this woman, who gave of friendship as a comrade; whose venerating knowledge of what was great to himself, was free in its imparting from the womanly spells which would have held him wordless and troubled, was growing into a place of its own in the precision of his life. The father’s eyes were not deceived in what they saw.
But Dolores? As far as her life was touched they were wholly deceived. To her the presence of Soulsby was but the shadow of another. Her days grew heavy and sadly perplexed. Three lives lay ever stretched before her — her own, Perdita’s, and that to which she told herself her own was as nothing. She told herself this. Could she show herself, in deed, it was truth that she told? She was saved from darkness only by the suffering need of living the surface life, as one amongst many who were living no other. She bowed to need, as always, calmly; moved and spoke as one whose life was easy; kept her passion clothed in the guise of the feelings of a pupil for a teacher beloved; even faced the mockery of wrestling to make it thus in itself — faithful through all to her old religion of the duty she owed her kind. And now the duty went deep. It held her from forcing from herself her knowledge of Claverhouse’s love for Perdita, from grasping the persuasion that his feeling for herself was love.
When she bade farewell to Soulsby she bade it blindly; unable to do else than blindly think the thought, that what he had given was a deepening of her love in her deeper knowledge of what had given it birth. She gave him her hand, knowing nothing of what might be read into her pale silence.
That day was the day preceding their own return to the duties of the session. The farewells were made at night, by reason of early leaving on the morrow. As Dolores passed the chamber where Perdita slept, she caught a glimpse of a figure leaning against the wall, just within the half-shut door, with the hands on the heart, and the face as a face in death.