Dolores Read online

  “I fancy there have been—on some occasions—episodes to relieve the solemnity,” said Dr Cassell, coming to a pause, in which his friend complied this time with less alacrity; and summoning a twinkle to his eyes; his compunction on yielding to levity drowned in the flood of his ideas. “A country parson was once—leaving the churchyard, after burying one of the villagers;—and—meeting another at the gate, observed: ‘Well, Johnson, so Roberts is no longer amongst us—has joined the great majority, eh?’ and was somewhat startled at receiving the reply: ‘Oh, I don’t know about that, sir. He was a good sort of man, wasn’t he, as far as anybody could judge?’”

  Mr Blackwood laughed with good-natured heartiness, though not with full approval; for he happened to be an exception to the rule that enthusiasm for religious subjects is coupled with a tendency to pleasantry upon them. Dr Cassell walked on, trying to repress a twitch about his mouth, under a sense of having in the last minutes done himself justice.

  “Well, Doctor,” resumed Mr Blackwood after a minute’s silence—he always addressed Dr Cassell emphatically as “Doctor,” and the Reverend Cleveland Hutton as “Vicar”—“are you coming to support us at the temperance meeting next Wednesday? I am engaged to speak, you know. It was very much against my will, I am sure; but people seemed to desire that I should; and I could not refuse my services to such a cause, so I shall just do my best—and make a terrible hash of the business into the bargain, I daresay.” Mr Blackwood paused, awaiting contradiction of the conclusion of his speech, rather than an answer to its opening question; but Dr Cassell chose to give the latter.

  “No, I think not,” he replied—“I think not.”

  “Well, but come now, Doctor,” said Mr Blackwood in loud, genial tones, laying a stress upon occasional words, as was his custom in argument. “You can’t deny that the cause of Temperance is one of the finest causes in the country. There’s no possibility of expressing in words the harm that the drink does to the nation; and as for the harm it does to individuals—well, there is no need to tell a man of your knowledge of life that.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Dr Cassell, unable but to recognise something in this ending which did not call for the throwing of doubt; “but one cannot always judge—of the right and wrong of principles—by the amount of apparent good or harm resulting from them.”

  “Oh, come now, Doctor,” said Mr Blackwood, not choosing to adopt a philosophic standpoint, “you have to look at these things practically. The amount of practical benefit done by the fighting of the drink is enormous. Why, only last week, when I was visiting the place where I used to live, and where I used to give a weekly address on Temperance, an old fellow came up to me—an old Irish fellow, I think he was—a working man, and a fine-looking old fellow too; and he said: ‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘I have to thank you for something—if you call the saving of myself and my wife and the whole of my family from ruin something. I went once or twice to your addresses,’ he said, ‘and I assure you that I was a different man from that time.’” Mr Blackwood brought the fist of one hand down upon the palm of the other. “I can tell you the old fellow was grateful, and it did me good to hear him; it did that, upon my word. It was encouraging—very encouraging—I can tell you.”

  “Talking of the drink in connection with Irishmen,” said Dr Cassell, coming to a pause; and interposing quickly without regard to congratulations; “have you heard of the Irishman in the barn and his bottle of whisky?”

  “No,” said Mr Blackwood, rather weakly, as he also stopped.

  “There were two Irishmen sleeping in a barn,” said Dr Cassell, “who had laid in a bottle of whisky for their joint refreshment; and one of them, waking up—found the bottle empty, and began to—remonstrate with his comrade upon—what he assumed to be his greed. ‘Shure, Pat,’ said the other, ‘it was me own share at the bottom of the bottle, and I was obliged to pour away yours to get to it.’”

  Dr Cassell laughed heartily; and finding that his last pause had occurred at his own gate, shook hands with Mr Blackwood and walked up his garden-path, finding it needful to suppress some chuckling as he went.

  Mrs Cassell came to meet him as he crossed the hall—a slender, comely woman, with a manner that was slightly mincing and slightly effusive, and seemed to involve continual effort. Dr Cassell laid his hand on her shoulder as he passed in silence to his study. He was an excellent and affectionate husband, but disposed to a tacit manner of domestic intercourse. It was not his way to broach his intellectual stores except for outsiders; and Mrs Cassell, who was an excellent and affectionate wife, wary on the points on which he was sensitive, was less in need of compassion than many supposed, judging from the strained expression of interest, which coincided on her face with the didactic spirit in her spouse. It might hardly be thought on a casual view of Mrs Cassell, that she was the woman to make a congenial and useful wife for the doctor. She was content that the mysteries of medical science should remain to her mysteries. She took scanty pleasure in general information, or for that matter in information of particular kinds; and she was little better versed in housewifely arts than he was himself. But the doctor, like some other gentlemen meeting acquaintance on a standing consistently intellectual, was not unwilling to show himself adaptable, and to deviate somewhat from his recognised line in his domestic sphere. He was not, moreover, without suspicion of the effect which might be wrought on an attitude of unquestioning belief towards himself, by a sense of being capable of sharing his mental experience; and he was rather averse than otherwise—vaguely acted upon, perhaps, by a sense of his “commercial life”—to seeing gentlewomen employed in domestic usefulness; and not seldom found occasion to observe on his rounds that his wife “took no interest in household matters.” What kind of matters Mrs Cassell did take interest in, it will hardly be worth our while to decide; since neither her husband nor her friends—not one of whom had defined ideas about them—found their intercourse with her hampered by this vagueness. It may merely be added that her religious history had coincided almost exactly—and since her marriage quite exactly—with Dr Cassell’s; and that whatever we may think of her in her conjugal character, the truest tribute of wifehood was her own, in that never in the eleven years of their childless union had Dr Cassell felt himself other than blessed.

  Another gentleman who held this fortunate view of his domestic experience was our other acquaintance, Mr Blackwood. On walking up his own garden-path, a less trim path than Dr Cassell’s—for Mr Blackwood’s union, though having the point we have noticed in common with the doctor’s, had been by no means childless,—and perceiving through the open door the figure of his wife, clad in a pinafore, passing to and fro between the dining-room and the kitchen, he told himself that nobody could wish to see a prettier picture, and hastened in to tell Mrs Blackwood the same.

  “Well, my darling” he said with stress of utterance—he generally addressed his wife and daughters in emphatic terms of tenderness; and the practice had become so habitual that its fulfilment was often mechanical—“and what do you mean by trotting about, dressed up in that gown that makes you look so young and pretty, and pretending it’s a pinafore? What do you mean by it, eh?”

  Mrs Blackwood, whose brightness of temperament and wifely affection were prone to meet the too frequent fate of excellent qualities, and be disguised by superficial peevishness, hardly felt this a fitting comment upon uncongenial exertion, and continued trotting and made no response.

  “Why, my love” said Mr Blackwood with loud solicitude, “have you been running about, and working yourself to death, so that you haven’t a word for your husband? Come—leave all that alone for this afternoon, and let me hear something pretty.”

  Mrs Blackwood disappeared into the kitchen without replying; laid away the pinafore in one of the drawers of the dresser; and returned to the dining-room with a smile of welcome for her husband.

  She was a small, sharp-featured woman, with an energy of manner and movement which belied a delicate form, an
d hair whose early greyness made a comelier background for her pale, fair cheeks than their one-time duskier framing. She was a woman of some quickness of feeling and intelligence, and some lack of depth in both; with a reverence for intellect and desire to be held intellectual. Her confidence in her right to such a repute had resulted in a tendency to talk for the display of the wideness of her reading and knowledge—of neither of which this predication could be made—in a spirit of exaltation above mere exactness, which her family’s unsceptical attitude had not tended to counteract; and a proneness to exaggerate, which Mr Blackwood would combat with playful affection, incurring considerable peevishness. Her zeal for religion and temperance did not fall short of her husband’s; was indeed, as we have seen, the parent source from which the stream of his enthusiasm flowed. It was by no means an unheard-of thing, for her to “speak” herself upon one subject or the other; and in the building in the field she was a highly-thought-of character. In former days, before variation of income in inverse proportion to children had driven them to the large house with the small rent at Millfield, and before the art of oratory had become Mr Blackwood’s second nature—it had been rather foreign to his first nature—it had been her custom to assist him in the preparing of his speeches, and even to coach him in their delivery; for she had a natural bent towards declamation; and in her earlier married life had belonged to a debating society, and on one occasion proposed the motion and carried it with much distinction. The effects of this life upon her were in the same direction as upon her husband. The disposition to talk for the display of information had grown—though it happened that the information had not sustained a similar process. She had developed a tendency to raise her voice and gesticulate in argument; and on subjects on which her opinions were strong, to assume to her auditors a relation didactic rather than conversational. When she met Dr Cassell, with whom she had stock points of difference, she would take up a discussion where it was left, without heed to things intervening, and without ascertaining whether he desired its resumption. The views of her in Millfield varied with their holders even more than such views are wont. The general rustic opinion of her was as an affable and clever lady, but calling for less respect—at any rate less outward show of it—than one whose husband did not descend to geniality with cottagers. The teetotallers who formed her especial following, being mostly of her own or husband’s conversion, subjoined—even if they were churchgoers, and could not but recognise her secondary quality to Mrs Hutton—some enthusiastic reverence; and the liquid-needers of the other school a slighter proportion of defiance. The factions of church people and Wesleyans—to take the religious attitude as unwrought upon by secular influence—had respectively a tendency to shake their heads over the spiritual darkness she shared with her husband, and an esteem for her as a union of the graces of womanhood with a masculine capacity for the demands of public life. Dr Cassell thought her a woman of conspicuous intellect; and was in no degree troubled on the score of masculine dignity in meeting her in argument on equal terms. Mr Hutton did not part her in his mind from her husband. He regarded the two as a couple of gentle-people by birth, pursuing as their ruling object the conversion of themselves to the other human order, and looked on this line of effort in the natural attitude of a ritualistic clergyman born in the earlier half of the nineteenth century, and holding a classical degree and conservative opinions. He did not fail to resent their assumption of religious authority; but hardly felt upon it with the bitterness which might be feared; for he was endowed with somewhat phlegmatic sensibilities; and, moreover, held the view that the preferment of a powerful divine rested on diplomatic dealings with his bishop, rather than his standing in the country parish, which was yielding him its tithes for the time in return for spiritual watchfulness.

  “Well,” said Mr Blackwood, as he seated himself in one of the easy-chairs by his dining-room fireplace, and turned his face to his wife, who had taken the other, “a funeral is a solemn thing. I don’t know of anything that upsets and unmans me in the same way. As I said to Cassell when we were coming along, whatever religion we have, and whatever opinions we have on anything else, a funeral is the same for us all.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs Blackwood, in her rather high-pitched, but sufficiently pleasing tones; “it makes us realise that we are all pilgrims on the same journey. In whatever direction our paths in life are set, we must all come to the river at last.”

  “Poor Hutton!” returned Mr Blackwood, leaning back in his chair and twisting his moustache. “Poor Hutton! His will be a lonely life enough after this, I am afraid—a lonely life enough; at least until little Dolores is old enough to fill her mother’s place. It went to my heart to see him to-day—I can tell you that it did. He looked ten years older, and entirely broken down.”

  “And the poor children too—it goes to my heart to think of them,” said Mrs Blackwood, wiping from her eyes the tears that were always responsive to her will. “Poor little girl and boy!—to lose their mother just when they are beginning to need her.”

  “Yes, yes, we can’t understand these things,” said Mr Blackwood;. “we can’t understand them. We can only cling to our faith, and believe that everything is ordained for the best.”

  “Did you say you walked home with Dr Cassell, dear?” said Mrs Blackwood after a minute’s pause, not finding any hitch in the transition to easier feeling.

  “Yes, we walked together as far as his house,” said Mr Blackwood, falling in with the change without reluctance; “and I made another attempt—though a very feeble attempt, I admit—to enlist him on the side of Temperance. He would make a valuable recruit—a valuable recruit.” Mr Blackwood lingered on this expression as though content with it. “The influence he would have about the neighbourhood would be immense.”

  “I don’t think he would have as much influence as you have, dear,” said Mrs Blackwood, with the note of peevishness which was prone to creep into her voice. “You have such a wonderful talent for gaining influence over people. I have never seen it in the same way in anybody else. It is a real gift. I am sure no one else would have a chance of succeeding where you have failed.” Mrs Blackwood’s conjugal and maternal jealousy had gone beyond the stage in which it is a pardonable attribute of wifehood and motherhood.

  “Ah, I don’t know about that,” said Mr Blackwood; “I don’t know about that, my darling. One can only do one’s best; and I don’t suppose for a minute that my best is anything to boast of. But I think I may say that for the cause of Temperance I have done it. I think I may say that.”

  “I am sure you may,” said Mrs Blackwood, with soothed appreciation.

  It is perceived that Mr and Mrs Blackwood have put from their minds the trouble at the parsonage, with the easy sinking of compassion in the opposite emotion reflexively applied, which may be observed a power common to people stirred towards their fellows’ “conversion,” and ordinary, unevangelistic human kind. But the trouble in the parsonage lay not less heavily, as it stood in its sad sameness with the years in which the presence lost to it had ordered its life. The gabled house was the same; the broad path leading to the highroad was the same; the narrow path leading to the churchyard, the single oak on the lawn, the autumn - tinted creeper swathing the house in crimson wrappings—they were all the same. Even the scene in the porch was one which its rustie woodwork had often witnessed. The Reverend Cleveland Hutton and the Reverend James Hutton were taking farewell of each other.

  It was an old experience to the Reverend Cleveland—this standing on his threshold in an early hour of the evening, and giving God-speed to his brother, the no less Reverend James. His living was at such a distance from his brother’s, as to bring it about that their dealings were conducted through frequent visits of a few hours’ length. This system of fellowship was fortunate in regard not merely to the distance; for the feelings between them happened to be those which before and since their time have existed between brothers and sisters in their maturer years; and consisted of a moderately
strong mutual regard, and a tendency—also mutual, but rather more than moderately strong—to continual petty irritation; affections to which frequency of intercourse and its speedy ending were fitted.

  So strong was the sense of doing simply what was wonted, that the Reverend Cleveland crossed his hall with his consciousness deadened to his grief, and merely oppressed by a vague knowledge of a burden. With the opening of the door of his study, there even came a shadow of the old relief, which was accustomed to mark his return to his wife from the fraternal farewell—generally with the purpose of disburthening his mind of its pent-up comment on the various dispensable qualities of the Reverend James. The next moment, with the sense of the difference carried to-day in his brother’s companionship, there came the rush of understanding—the first true knowledge that the responding face was gone, that the listening ear was gone; that through all the stretch of years before him, with all their days and weeks and hours, he must speak and move with words and movements which were hollow forms to his thought. For it is a heavy time when the buoyant spirit is bowed, and cries against its own delusion, that it will wake to the same wrestling upon all its days. The time is not fit to return to watch its working, until it meets the reactive power that bears it through its history.

  The Reverend Cleveland Hutton girded himself in the spirit and faced his lot. They lay before him—the darkened years, empty of the presence of Dolores. Well, he would struggle through them as Dolores would have had him struggle. He would rise each day with the resolve to live its hours as a tribute to her; he would enter each year with the resolve to live its days as a tribute to her. In that future time—poor Cleveland Hutton! there was a part of him which his sorrow had left untouched,—when he should have dedicated a pamphlet to his bishop—after, of course, he had written it; and preferment should have resulted from it, or rather from its dedication; and he should look from an elevation in the Establishment upon the Reverend James presiding yet over the spiritual interests of a country parish—a prospect in which he felt a strong fraternal confidence and a stronger fraternal satisfaction,—he would look back on all he had excellently done, and feel that the having lived the years as though Dolores were at his side, almost brought Dolores back to him.