“But — er — it is not a question in this case of giving a different meaning; it is a question of getting back to the original meaning,” said Dr Cassell, feeling the peculiar injustice of these implications in reference to himself. “It is surely better, to take every method of getting nearer to the truth.”
“Ah, well, the Truth itself is what I care about. I don’t care about the different methods of getting near to it,” said Mr Blackwood loudly; producing in poor Dr Cassell a hardly bearable sense of seeing the fallacious point in his reasoning, but being unable in a moment to locate it. “Now, I have just been having a talk with a poor old body, who was so anxious to get a word with me, that she hardly knew what she was doing; and it was wonderful the faith and the joy she showed she had in the gospel. ‘Ah, sir,’ she said, ‘you little know what you do for us, your poorer brethren, in preaching the gospel to us; and looking after our needs in the matters where we have the greatest need — you little know it,’ she said. That is the sort of thing it does one good to hear — that is the sort of thing, that makes one feel that the Gospel is the thing that is wanted, and not interpretations, and criticisms, and things of that sort.”
Dolores, standing with her brother in hearing of this dialogue, found that the old, half-tender sense of the humour of its kind was dead within her. She was living in two worlds; darkly groping in the one for a spot of solitude, that she might in the spirit live wholly in the other. A glance down the road brought the pain of self-reproach. A heavy figure was moving slowly into sight. So not for an hour could her father still his yearning for her fellowship.
It was as she thought. He shook hands in silence with his friends; and motioning her to his side, turned at once towards the parsonage. Bertram and Elsa followed; and behind came a group of Cassells and Blackwoods; of whom the doctor had secured the reins of the talk, and was enlightening a now receptive audience, an excellent example of attentiveness being set by Mrs Cassell.
Dolores gave her power of effort to yielding her father what he needed; but on reaching her home, and meeting his wife on its threshold, she was again brought face to face with the knowledge, that seemed to render as vanity her hard faithfulness to that which she had seen as just.
“Dolores, I hope you understand that I meant what I said to you this morning. It is not my habit to say one thing, and expect people to do another. I wish work to start in earnest tomorrow. Have you looked out the children’s books, and got everything into order?”
Dolores answered, with heavy feelings hidden by her courteous tone, that all should be in order by the morning; and the following day was a pattern of many that succeeded. They were days whose trials would have been embittering, had not daily trials become as childish things. Mrs Hutton did not leave the teaching wholly to her judgment, but in theory gave the direction herself; and her unfitness for the task, and the irritable jealousy which sprang with each day into easier life, made a round of hourly friction. Bertram continued his changes of mood; and was at one time depressed and silent, at another in the spirit that carried no less of painfulness. Her father at the outset spent much of his time in her company, at first in carelessness, and then in defiance of the results in his home; but by degrees, in weariness of discord, and the poisoning of his wife’s companionship, fell back into formal recognition of his fatherhood; making his wife his apparent associate, and burying the deeper loneliness; though with a suggested wistfulness which made each glimpse of the bent grey head the begetter of a pang.
One day she received a letter from Perdita; which she read with a deeper paleness than its fellows brought, in their hope of a word of the creature who filled her heart and life, and on whom her lips were sealed. It held a request to be bidden to stay in Dolores’ home; as the writer was an orphan, poor in kindred, and this was their only chance of renewing their friendship. Dolores wondered at her little suffering in asking the favour of her stepmother. Her natural, easier feelings seemed all but dead; and the one thing of moment was the chance of staying her yearning with some scanty food. But the result of her effort seemed a rebuke. Mrs Hutton was not a stranger to remorse, for the much that clouded her stepdaughter’s days, and was often given in spite of an effort of will; and welcomed a means of making amends, and showing her sister her manner of fulfilling her stepmother’s duty.
Perdita found great favour at the parsonage, where she showed herself full of understanding. She paid Mrs Hutton a pretty deference, petted and praised the children, implied a view of her host as an eminent scholar and divine, and avoided betraying too open a preference for being with Dolores, or encroaching on the hours of her duties. Her visit showed her Bertram at his best. His spirits ceased to fluctuate, and were natural and pleasing. He seemed to have become resigned to his future, and talked of the offered post at the school with evident purpose to accept it, and even with jests of the airs he should assume, when the head of a household. In a moment of being alone with Dolores, he observed that the boys in a country school were not without lives to live, and need to be fitted for living them; and she knew she was to hear the burial words of the university dream.
She noticed that her brother earned Perdita’s prettiest dealings. With his high-bred comeliness, and the early growth to maturity in which he followed herself, he unknowing wielded spells over the woman coming with her young needs from a world of women; and Dolores looked into the future, and saw herself bound by further bonds to the friend she loved. When he left the village for a holiday, some days before Perdita’s visit ended, her quickening instinct was alive to the change in her friend, and the purpose in the guardedly sparing words she spoke of him. It was not in her nature to know content, that the love of either should be wholly her own; and she grew to think of the two with tender looking forward.
But this was too frail a tenderness for this troubled time. For herself the presence of Perdita had made darkness and hidden strife. The sacrifice of her choice, lived day by day and silently, was hard to the brink of bending her will. The parting, faced with the knowledge of the sphere of the other’s life, all but ended in failing of heart; in its conflict with the passions, from which it was a further conflict to withhold the shame of jealousy. With Dolores it was going sadly, when she forgot her brother’s life and her friend’s, and bowed beneath the living of her own.
But her experience was, as always, bent by the lighter experience of others. As she stood on the station, with her courage faltering, and her face old for her years, she was accosted by Elsa Blackwood; whose return from a visit had been timed for the reception of her luggage by the parsonage trap; and who joined her in such bright youth, that it would have been strange hearing to a watcher, that the days which had seen the lives of the two were the same. Elsa was in the lightest of her moods. She yielded her possessions, without the soberness of injunction, to the lad who was gardener and groom at the parsonage; and tripped by Dolores with a flow of prattling, which spared her the effort of words. As they neared the place of their parting, her chatter suddenly ceased.
“Why, there is my mother coming to meet us!” she said, in a voice with a studied lightness.
“Elsa, what is this?” said Mrs Blackwood, as she came into hearing. “This letter came for you from your friends this morning. I noticed the postmark, and knowing you were supposed still to be with them, opened it. It was written yesterday; and they were under the impression that you were on your journey home.”