He ended as if he were making a confession; and when the words were uttered, was silent.
“You must follow the impulse,” said Dolores gravely. “It is what your life holds. You are wrong in feeling that you are grasping at something which carries shame. Your having fallen short in a part of your life, if it is true that you have done so, does not justify your wasting what remains.”
“No, I will do it,” he said. “The play will be greater than it would have been. Ah, how I see what it needed!”
He made a movement as though to grasp a pencil; but suddenly a change seemed to drain the eagerness from his every limb.
“I am a broken old man,” he said, in a voice with a startling change. “Blind; so that my powers are useless, for want of the one that is common to the things that breathe.”
Dolores could find no words.
“I am blind; I cannot write. For I cannot see. I cannot read what I have written. There is no help for me.”
There was appeal in his voice so simple and strong, that Dolores answered as though it were cast in words.
“You can do what you will, with some one to read what you write, through every minute of every day. Your deprivation is great; but in your greatest need it can be filled.”
“I must tell you it all,” he said, turning to her almost solemnly. “I must tell you what I have suffered, that you may know me; that no barrier may be between your soul and mine. When misgiving grew to dread, and dread to hopelessness, what I passed through! And I could not speak of it. I could not. I had not such great strength. How could I say, ‘I cannot see. Tell me of what is before my eyes, for I am blind’—I, who could read a man’s soul in his glance — who could see as no other man saw? No; I shut myself in myself; I did the one thing I could do. These coming days of passing into darkness will be happy compared to the learning they must come. But now I have told it to you, my soul will be free. In the other days I carried a burden; for — for she would not — could not know. Let us leave each other for to-day. When we meet, we will speak of the things that will be.”
Dolores left him with a feeling she could only interpret as a great solemness. It seemed to her that the years she had lived, were the training-time for the work at hand; that this significance was the sole of her troubled experience; that had her struggles been a whit less hard, her suffering short of the fullest, she must have been too little tried and strong. A vision of the giving of her days to this great, sad-hearted creature, to whom for so long she had herself been given, brought a surging of passion that paled her lips. A straying of her thought to the future’s passing from her, as she saw it, held her trembling and afraid. She went to her own rooms under a sense of being awestruck.
On her desk there was lying a letter — a letter left by some messenger’s hand, as its cover bore a word of urgency. Sudden, inexplicable feeling gripped her, as it met her touch. As a flash, there came on her mind the day, when another of the letters with this look had turned for that time the course of her life. She had a sense of foreboding that approached to personal terror. She opened it, and read its words.
It was from the Reverend Cleveland Hutton; and it summoned her to Millfield parsonage, to the deathbed of her stepmother.
Closing her eyes to the future, and holding them closed, she spoke and wrought in strength in the next hours. She said what was needful to those who shared and ordered her life, and took the earliest journey to her home. A few hours from her reading her father’s words found her entering its doors, marking it hushed and darkened; and hastening with pitiful heart and arms outstretched and strong, to the help of those to whom all needed effort was owed, whose claim was that of kindred.
She was thankful for herself in the days that followed, that the yielding of her powers for those who suffered of her flesh and blood, held her personal life an undercurrent in the stream of the experience she saw, hidden and unheeded for all its greater depth. The sad-faced young sisters — Evelyn with her helpless sorrowing, and Sophia with her self-repression betrayed by her thought for the others who suffered; the boy, Cleveland, in his sobbing grief; and the grey-haired father, with his new loneliness, and gratitude wordless in loyalty to the dead — they were creatures whose need was a cry for her help — an unspoken claim that was clear and binding.
She looked through the future calmly. It seemed to her that her power to struggle had been worn to its death; that to suffer in secret daily, and lie in the night hours helpless under agony below the easiness of tears, was the lot that was natural for her.
It was not till the evening before her return to the college, that her father spoke of her settling to the life of mistress of his home. As he spoke, there came no change to her face. No paling or quiver of a struggle was seen. It remained, simply, a face sad in its worn youthfulness.
“You will settle down at home now, and look after us all, my-and look after us all, Dolores? That will be your duty now; and I trust you will not find it uncongenial?”
“Yes; that is what I thought, father. I see it is best,” said Dolores, understanding the instinct that checked the words, ‘my daughter.’ “You must just do as well with me as you can; and I must just do as well as I can. I shall not try and fill any one’s place.”
“Dolores,” said Sophia, “it was my dear mother’s wish, that you should be at the head of things when she was gone. She said when — when she knew she was to be taken from us, that it was the one thing, that would let her die at ease about father and us all. She told us that her message to you was that she trusted us all to you. She said it would mean to you everything, she wished she could say to you herself.”
As Sophia’s voice broke, Dolores wept with her; with a feeling that she was weeping away the surface sorrows, whose melting would uncover those that held her soul as dead.
She felt that her soul was dead, when she made her lonely journey, for the winding up of the life she dared not look back upon. She felt it was dead; and had a strange, dull gladness in feeling it; for that it might awaken was a petrifying thing. But it awoke. When she saw the bent, still figure among the familiar desks, it awoke; and she knew that her hour was come.
Claverhouse did not turn as she entered. His aspect told of the old absorption; and from time to time his hands and head moved with the old suddenness. His roughly-hewn face wore a look of calm content; and the look laid a chill on Dolores’ heart.
She closed the door with a sound; and he turned his head. His face lit up, with the swiftness of a happy knowledge that comes by a deeper power than sight. Dolores took the seat at his side, silent and cold.
He said no word; and his acceptance of a lot, in which closeness of comradeship gives countenance to speech or silence, brought a pang which seemed to shake her.
She began to speak — with a feeling that she must clutch the fiercest pain, her words and their work could cost, as the means of holding her emotions from following his.
“I am come to say — to tell you that this meeting is our last. My father has lost his wife; and he and his children have no one to look to, but me. I am needed in his home; and I must see that it is there I must feel my duty. There is one thing I ask you to do — to do for me, and for her — to give all your powers to the play.”
As he turned his sightless eyes towards her, the manner of the change on his face blanched her own. After a long silence he seemed to be trying to speak; but it was minutes before the power of utterance came.