Dolores (20 page)

“You know what is my aim?” he said, speaking low and deep.

Dolores felt herself trembling.

“Yes,” she said, barely finding utterance.

“And you know her? You are her friend, as you are mine?”

“Yes,” said Dolores.

“If you can, you will help me?” he said. “I feel helpless—I am helpless. And yet I am a man who has done and seen much. If you are able, you will help me?”

Dolores was alive to nothing beyond the look and tone.

“Oh, I will, I will,” she said, her voice the voice of one taking a vow.

“Ah! I knew you as a friend,” he said. “You have been my friend. If it were not to be—”

Dolores left him with blind steps; the surging of her feelings aroused by the last words, making her see the promise she had uttered doomed to be falsely spoken.

That day she sat alone through the evening hours, with books and papers untouched before her, and her face pressed into her hands; living, since no power she had could help her, in the future which the words, “If it were not to be—” forced before her sight. She was living in it, alive to nothing beside, save that which alone lay deeper—the knowledge that she could live in her actual life in no other. She did not hear an agitated footfall in the corridor. Her door was flung open; and before her thoughts were clear,
Perdita was on her knees at her side, hiding her face in her garments, and sobbing almost with struggles.

Dolores spoke no word; her voice seemed dead; and her question needed no utterance.

“Oh, Dolores, my friend! It is to you I must come. I cannot carry it myself. I am so utterly alone. But you will bear with me? Tell me that you will.”

Dolores answered by a movement of tenderness. She knew that the movement came without the bidding of her will. She was stunned by this sudden awakening to actual things. A jarring, formless feeling was creeping over her, that Perdita's words and actions were less helpless than they seemed.

“He has said it—as I knew—as every one knew—he must say it soon. He spoke to me—when we were alone. Oh, it was so dreadful, Dolores.”

Dolores flung her arms round the crouching form that clung to her. It seemed to herself that the action had love and hatred in it. What she suffered was something stronger than suspense.

“Oh, it is so dreadful,” sobbed Perdita. “He is so great; and it would be such a privilege to give up to him a life like mine; but I cannot, Dolores, I cannot; it is not through my own will. It is not in my power.”

Dolores was silent and still.

“I cannot,” said Perdita, raising her face. “I have prayed that I might be able; but I am not able. Speak to me, Dolores.”

Dolores uttered no sound. As never before in the years she remembered, her own life was all in all. Perdita's choice for her future was a clearing of her own. Claverhouse's sorrow was a thing for herself to heal. For the moment it had this meaning and no other.

“Speak to me, Dolores,” said Perdita, in a voice that was almost a cry.

But Dolores spoke no word.

“I cannot stay here,” went on Perdita, again hiding her face; and again giving Dolores the dim, jarring sense, that her words came as they were purposed. “I cannot stay where I must see him, and watch him day by day. I must go away. I shall go far away, where I can never meet him. I shall go and live somewhere where I can see you, Dolores; somewhere near your dear home, where you were all brothers and sisters to me; where I shall not be a creature utterly alone. I shall find there some way of earning my bread; and when you are at home, I shall see you all, and be comforted.”

Dolores heard the words, and knew their hidden meaning. She felt that the hidden meaning was as nothing.

“I must go away,” said Perdita again, the
words seeming to come more easily now once uttered. “I must go and earn my bread near your peaceful home; and when you are there, you will let me see you? You will always love me, Dolores?”

“I shall always love you,” said Dolores suddenly; her words with their terrible inner significance causing her a feeling that seemed to be shame struggling through a deeper passion.

Perdita rose to her feet. She was lost in herself, and could give no heed to Dolores' pallor and silence.

“I will leave you, my sister-friend,” she said, caressing Dolores' hair; while her voice seemed to lose its emotional tremor. “I have troubled and bewildered you. Come to me when you are willing to be wearied; and I will tell you my plans for the future.”

Again Dolores spoke suddenly.

“You have plans already?” she said.

“Yes,” said Perdita, with a swiftly checked touch of uneasiness, as though words had escaped which had better been unsaid. “I have thought of them before to-night. I have seen this coming for some time, as you must have seen it too. But its coming unnerved me.”

She hastily left the room; and Dolores rose and walked with aimless, rapid movements. She yet lived in her own future, in a spirit of feverish
grasping at it, which belonged to a creeping sense, that its supplanting was at hand. She lived in it till the conception seemed exhausted, and the reaction came without effort. Perdita's words! They returned to her one by one, with their weight of meaning. Perdita's soul was laid uncovered to her sight. The unquestioning repulse of what held so much in the sphere where she had her lot; the use of her helpless emotions for her voluntary ends; the grasping at a life that afforded her that which she believed she was honest in clutching! Dolores saw it as it was, fraught with covered purpose.

And it was not only Perdita's soul that seemed to lie quivering before her eyes. There was the other, which she would fain have forced aside, that she might be spared the torture of her own. And she surveyed it almost with passiveness. She saw these two lives, that had crossed her own, with a simple, just survey, as it was her nature to see them. She saw her own life, with its power of ordering the others, with a simple, just survey, as it was her nature to see it. But the survey, she told herself, was taken thus, merely because it was her nature. It was to beget no purpose. This which had come to her soul from the other soul—upon which the lips which had the disclosing power, were silent—where was the binding force on her, to see it as laid forth, for the imposing as a duty of the
devotion of herself? But a moment, and this hour would end.

But it was many moments that she stood with her hands clenched, and her face still and strained. The minutes were hours, and midnight had passed, before her limbs relaxed, and she pushed the hair from the brow that was lined beyond her youth. She left her room, and passed down the corridor to Perdita's sleeping chamber. It was as she had thought. The room was lighted, and Perdita was standing in the day's garments; her looks, as she turned to the opening door, telling of a startled pause in agitated pacing. Dolores went toward her, and stood with one of her hands on her shoulder.

“My dear,” she said, her voice having a strange impressiveness, as though it were the voice of an older creature that had outlived passions; “before I leave this thing to your own heart, I must say a word—a word which by one as much older than yourself, in all things but years, as I am, should not be unsaid. Do nothing that may bring repentance on your later years. Do nothing in haste. I think of my brother's early mistake, and fear for you.”

Perdita turned her face so suddenly, that her shoulder was jerked from under Dolores' hand. She set it back as though the movement were unthinking; and Dolores continued in the same tone, as if it had escaped her heed.

“My dear, I may trust to your silence, and tell you my brother's story? It will show you how an act of young rashness may alter a life. He married on a youthful impulse; and by that impulse must abide. Be on your guard lest you fall into the same error on the other side. The pity of it would be deeper.”

“Married?” uttered Perdita. “He is not married?”

“Yes, he is married,” said Dolores, looking away from Perdita's face; and leaving her hand on her shoulder, as if she did not feel its trembling. “He is married to Elsa Blackwood. After his years at Oxford are over, they will make it known, and live together. His chance of an Oxford course came after their marriage, and led to its concealment. It was one of those actions on youthful impulse which order a lifetime. I want it to help you to realise, that your judgment now is for your life.”

“But—but if there is no love between them—and it is quite clear there is not—they will not—they need not live together, and spoil each other's lives?” said Perdita, in a dry voice whose easiness startled Dolores, with her knowledge of what it covered. “Surely a mere ceremony need not carry that. It—it surely could be managed otherwise?”

“They neither of them wish it to be otherwise,” said Dolores, in a natural, firm voice. “They
have neither given their love to another, and neither has thought of it. Besides, now that Bertram's career is so full of promise, Elsa has no regrets; and I think that Bertram is not conscious of them. I trust they will be happy in their union. That is why I have told you, Perdita; to show you that a decision of this kind is made to the end; that regrets must find no place. But you are worn out with your feelings. Good-night, my dear one. May you come to the judgment that is best for you.”

Dolores laid an arm round the shaking form, and kissed the cold brow; and then passed from the room.

The hours of this night, which were so often re-lived in the souls of the women who knew them the hours that bent their experience, were lived to their end by them, as by themselves. Perdita, when Dolores left her, stood for some minutes trembling and white; and then walked with feverish movements till exhaustion came to her help, and brought with the breaking dawn a sleep that was the stupor of energy spent.

Dolores reached her room; and, with her stronger will, at once lay down; not thinking of sleep, but forcing calmness and clearness of thought, that her actions for these two, whose destinies had come to her hands, might be well for them. She looked into the future calmly; for it did not seem that the future was to be lived
by herself. It was a stretch of years, whose meaning was the course of two lives through it. And she saw it clearly. Perdita's soul was, as always, open to her scrutiny; and she knew that the pliant nature would bow to the altered lot; that the fostered instinct to live for the sight of men, would clutch at the portion which carried the bending of eyes.

Even sooner than she had thought, the change was clear. It was a very few days after that Perdita came to her, and spoke some faltering words.

“Dolores, I am so grateful. I see how much my folly might have led me to throw away.”

Dolores waited and paled, before she gave her embrace, and her words of earnest wishing of good. She seemed to be stunned by a sudden rush of perception. In a moment she read many things. She read that Perdita knew the purpose of the words she had spoken on the night that lived with them both. She read that her instinct impelled her to act as if she did not know it; and to protect her dignity in her counsellor's sight, by showing her valuing of that which was given unsought, greater than of that denied to her seeking. Moreover, for an instant the knowledge came, that before herself also there were years that must be lived.

But the moment she dreaded as her final trial was not to come. Claverhouse gave her no word
of her friend's acceptance of his hand. She had from him as little heed as in the earliest days of their mutual dealings; and the others he had known in the college were suddenly as strangers. As the pain grew numb, and went, she found that perplexity followed in its wake. The soul to which her soul was knit, was primitive in its workings. The object of communion was gone: and hence it was ended.

But Perdita was far from showing eagerness to cease her mingling with her kind. Dolores, as she watched her, learned that this surface living of her life was also its inner meaning. The feeling awakened by her bringing of this glimpse of romance into this world of women's friendships; the unconscious deference accorded her as the holder of the homage of genius, were things that meant much. It seemed to Dolores, that the days when she lived the old routine with this sweetening, made more for her content than those when her lover's presence demanded her staying at his side, and unwitnessed hearing of his words took the place of their naive repeating, as proofs of his love and confidence. On the whole she told little of him, though she spoke of him much. Her manner seemed meant to mark understanding a thing reserved too fully for herself, for words to be other than vain. On being asked if his work was much to her, she answered, “Everything, as it is to him”;
and in response to sympathy on the trouble of his failing sight, she said with sensitive repelling of the subject, that his sight was not really failing; that, though it had long been weak, it was growing no worse; and that he saw much more than it seemed.

But it was not through any of this, that Dolores' heart misgave her. It was at a moment when her thoughts were not of Perdita, when her will was passive, exhausted by its long struggling. One day, when she was going up a staircase at the side of Miss Butler, talking of daily duties with the yielding of surface thought to surface things, which was gaining from custom a strange easiness, she saw the two figures coming down the corridor.

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.