It was a sight that no longer demanded question or meaning glance. Miss Butler passed with a smile for Perdita, and a look, half kindly, half curious, from the one to the other. But Dolores, as she followed, had a memory of something beside. Perdita had met them with the look of studied unconsciousness, with which it was her wont to encounter eyes, when seen with her lover; and continued her talk with an easy flow of words, as though to mark their familiar communion. But as they came to the staircase, the dramatist’s tread grew uncertain; and he gave a groping gesture as if he sought guidance. Perdita made a slight, but certain sidelong movement, and passed on as though unperceiving; continuing her talk, and throwing a glance behind, as if perplexed by his slower following.
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.
Chapter XII
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.