“It is Mrs Merton-Vane,” said Mr Hutton, in a tone with a rather peculiar easiness.
They had reached the parsonage door. They looked into each other’s faces. Their hands met; and Dolores gave her father an embrace of earnest wishing of good. Then she went to her room, and stood at the window.
No thoughts of her altered future or her father’s came. One sentence seemed to be burning itself on her soul. “So it was for nothing that she had left him.” Her father’s cheering — for these two months! — was other than her own. Ah, that he had told her in time — that either had known — that both had known — what there was to know! Her face grew old and hard; and, as never before in her life, she felt her heart fail.
It was long before weeping came, to give the sad courage of looking forward. There was this left to her — to work, and pity, and be just.
When she sought her father, she found him sitting in his study, quiet and ponderous. A knowledge of the gulf between them came almost invincibly repelling, as she met his look and words, and read his belief that her time had been given to household dealings. She took the seat that faced him, and spoke with her hands laid out on the table clasped, and her eyes drooping.
“Father, it is better that I should leave your home for good before your marriage. I shall take up teaching again. I think of spending a time with Sophia and her husband; and looking for suitable work from there. So your way will be clear of all impediments. I was the last and the chief one, was I not? “She ended with a touch of playfulness, and met her father’s eyes with a smile, unconscious of the look in her own.
But the Rev. Cleveland saw it; and, though its meaning was hidden from him, it pierced his heart with pain that was heavy with the past. As he rose and hastened from the room, a word came muttered and helpless in the voice of an old man — a word which his daughter heard, and knew as not uttered as her own name—“Dolores!”
A few weeks later there was another mistress at the parsonage. The marriage took place at a neighbouring parish, where Mrs Merton-Vane was staying with some friends. Dolores came to witness it with her married sisters and their husbands, as a one-time member of the household returned for presence at its festival. Many times before the parting, she felt the wisdom of the course she had chosen. The new Mrs Hutton’s manner to herself had a coldness that was absent from her words to the sisters, who had given up claim to their father’s roof; and her father gave her the same unemotional greeting and parting that he yielded them all; having assumed the veil over his deeper feelings, which he was to wear for the remainder of his days.
The wedding was an hour of uneasiness for all who saw it, in spite of the countenance given it by the sons and daughters of the earlier marriages. The guests adapted their deportment to their common, unflattering sense, that the purpose of their presence was simply the disproving the occasion a ground for sensitive feelings. Dr Cassell hardly opened his lips; and rested his eyes on the little gold cross, which Mr Hutton still saw reason for including in his daily equipment, with a doubtful aspect of regarding ritualism and third marriages as having some subtle and repellent connection; not so much as moving his eyes, when Elsa nudged him, and begged for the anecdote he had told at the last wedding. Mr Blackwood’s “Well, Vicar, good-bye. You have every good wish from us all for many years of happiness,” had a forced, unemphatic ring: and Elsa’s words, “Oh, Uncle Cleveland, I am sure you ought to be quite ashamed of having three wives! It is a good thing you did not live in the time, when the clergy were not allowed to marry. I suppose I ought not to call you uncle any longer?” had the unwonted effect of provoking a less ready smile on the face of Mr Hutton, than of any other of her hearers.
When it was over, Dolores returned to Oxford with Soulsby and Sophia. In the evening she wandered alone in the graveyard, where there stood the tombstone which drew her to read its words: “In sorrowing remembrance of ‘Perdita,’ wife of Sigismund Claverhouse”; and below the simple inscription, “Also of Sigismund Claverhouse, husband of the above.” As she wandered, she was startled by a touch and voice at her elbow.
“Is it—? Yes it is. It is Dolores!”
“Felicia?” said Dolores, with surprise and welcome. “After all this time?”
“More in name than in nature, after seven years of nurturing the youthful mind for daily bread,” said the voice whose familiar qualities carried so much. “But in both at this moment. How pleasant to see you, Dolores I Why have you kept me so long without your address?”
“Because you have kept me for the same time without yours,” said Dolores, finding herself with the old, light, student manner. “On your conscience be the guilt; for you knew my father’s address, which would have found me always.”
“I knew it was some vicarage somewhere, but I forgot the rest. And I had some doubt whether ‘The Vicarage’ would reach you. I daresay ‘The Hovel’ would not have reached me. If it would have, why did you not write?”
“I did write,” said Dolores; “but the letter was returned. It seems that your family moved soon after I saw you last.”
“Oh yes; no doubt. As often as the rent of one house is too large to be paid, we move to another. It is the series of steps to ‘the House.’”
“How little you have changed!” said Dolores, looking down at the merry face, as a tender woman might look at a child.
“And you have changed more than a little?” said Felicia, her tone betraying for the first time that she had grown older. “You look as if you had had trouble, Dolores. What have you been doing these last years; and what made you give up your post at the college? To think of our meeting like this, at poor Perdita’s grave! I am teaching here, and came to look at it. But what of yourself? You are not married or a widow, I suppose?”
“I have been at home,” said Dolores. “I gave up the post, because my father needed me. No, I have not been married.”
“My father needs me too,” said Felicia. “But he needs my help with the rent more. He told me I was one of this world’s heroines; and I see I am not a heroine in any more interesting world. But I can tell you of some one who is going to be married. Miss Butler!”
“Is that so?” said Dolores. “She said nothing of it in her last letter. I hear from her two or three times a year.”
“It all came to pass very suddenly,” said Felicia. “I suppose no one who recognised such worth, would waste time in making his position secure. I had always looked on Miss Butler as wedded to the classics. I wonder who will succeed to her post. But don’t let us part as suddenly as we met. When can I see you again?”
“Will you come with me now?” said Dolores. “I am spending a time here with a married sister; and there is welcome for my friends.”
They turned from the tombstone side by side — these women whose ways had met, and parted, and met.
Chapter XXI
“Miss Butler has not asked any of us to be her bridesmaids,” said Miss Greenlow. “Can it be regarded except as an omission?”
“No,” said Miss Cliff. “To grudge us such crumbs as are available for us of matrimonial privileges! It is a sad example of friendship.”
“Very sad,” said Miss Dorrington. “A great blow to one’s faith in things.”
“And to one’s hope and charity,” said Miss Cliff; “the former especially.”
“I undertake to act more tactfully, when I am in a similar position,” said Miss Greenlow.
“A universal vote of thanks to Miss Greenlow,” said Miss Cliff.