Part 28 (1/2)

I could not leave Mamma all alone (she wrote). I wanted to walk home with you--couldn't you see that I did? I shall expect you to come to luncheon to-morrow, and we will go wherever you like.--D.

Dolly lay awake after this for a long moonlight hour. She was living in what people call the world of feeling. She was absorbed, she was happy, but it was a happiness with a reserve in it. It was peace indeed, but Dolly was too young, her life had been too easy, for peace to be all-sufficient to her. She had found out, by her new experience, that Robert loved her, but in future that he would rule her too. In her life, so free hitherto, there would be this secret rule to be obeyed, this secret sign. Dolly did not know whether on the whole she liked the thought, or whether she resented it. She had never spoken of it, even to Robert. 'You see you have to do as you are told,' Henley sometimes said; he meant it in fun, but Dorothea instinctively felt that there was truth in his words--he was a man who held his own. He was not to be changed by an impulse. Dolly, conscious of some hidden weakness in her own nature, deified obstinacy, as many a woman has done before her, and made excuses out of her own loving heart for Henley's selfish one.

It was summer still, though August had come again; the Virginian creepers along the west wall glowed; crimson-tinted leaves fell in golden rain, the gardener swept up golden dollars and fairy money into heaps and carted them away; the geraniums put out shoots; the creepers started off upon excursions along the gravel-paths: it was a comfortable old-fas.h.i.+oned world, deep-coloured, russet-tinted, but the sun was hot still and burning, and Dolly dressed herself in white, and listened to every bell.

The day pa.s.sed, however, without any sign of Robert, or any word from him. But George walked in just as they were sitting down to luncheon. He looked very pale and yellow, and he had black lines under his eyes. He had been staying down at Cambridge, actually reading for a scholars.h.i.+p that Raban had advised his trying for. It was called the Bulbul scholars.h.i.+p for Oriental languages, and it had been founded by an enlightened Pa.r.s.ee, who had travelled in Europe in s.h.i.+ny boots and an oilskin hat, and who had been so well received at Cambridge that he wished to perpetuate his name there.

George had taken up Persian some time ago, when he should have been reading mathematics. He was fond of quoting the 'Roubaiyat' of Omar Khayyam, of which the beautiful English version had lately appeared. It was this poem, indeed, which had set him to study the original. He had a turn for languages, and a fair chance of success, Raban said, if he would only go to bed, and not sit up all night, with soda-water and wet towels round his head. This time he had nearly made himself ill, by sitting up three nights in succession, and the doctor had him sent home for a holiday.

'My dear child, what a state your complexion is in! How ill you look!'

said his mother. 'It is all those horrid examinations!'

Restless George wandered out into the garden after dinner, and Dolly followed him. She began to water her roses in the cool of the evening, and George filled the cans with water from the tank and brought them to her. Splas.h.i.+ng and overflowing, the water lapped into the dry earth and washed the baked stems of the rose-trees. George said suddenly, 'Dolly, do you ever see Raban now, and do you still snub him?'

'I don't snub him,' said Dolly, blus.h.i.+ng. 'He does not approve of me, George. He is so bitter, and he never seems satisfied.'

George began to recite--

'Ah, love! could you and I with fate conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire.

Would we not shatter it to bits, and then Remould it nearer to the Heart's Desire?

There is Robert at last, Dolly.'

Dolly looked wonderingly at her brother. He had spoken so pointedly, that she could not help wondering what he meant; but the next moment she had sprung forward to meet Henley, with a sweet face alight.

'Oh, Robert, why have you been so long coming? she said. 'Did you not get my note?'

CHAPTER XXIX.

UNDER THE GREAT DOME.

Fantasio--'Je n'en suis pas, je n'en suis pas.'

--A. de Musset.

The wedding was fixed for the middle of September. In October they were to sail.

Dolly was to be married at the Kensington parish church. Only yesterday the brown church was standing--to-day a white phoenix is rising from its ashes. The old people and the old prayers seem to be pa.s.sing away with the brown walls. One wonders as one looks at the rising arches what new tides of feeling will sweep beneath them, what new teachings and pet.i.tions, what more instant charity, what more practical faith and hope. One would be well content to see the old gates fall if one might deem that these new ones were no longer to be confined by bolts of human adaptation, against which, day by day, the divine decrees of mutation and progress strike with blows that are vibrating through the aisles, drowning the voice of the teachers, jarring with the prayers of the faithful.

As the doors open wide, the congregations of this practical age in the eternity of ages, see on the altars of to-day new visions of the time.

Unlike those of the fervent and mystical past, when kneeling anchorites beheld, in answer to their longing prayers, pitiful saints crowned with roses and radiant with light, and vanis.h.i.+ng away, visions of hearts on fire and the sacred stigmata, the rewards of their life-long penance; to-day, the Brother whom we have seen appears to us in the place of symbols of that which it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive. The teaching of the Teacher, as we understand it now, is translated into a new language of daily toil and human sympathy; our saints are the sinners helped out of the mire; our visions do not vanish; our heavenly music comes to us in the voices of the school-children; surely it is as sweet as any that ever reached the enraptured ears of penitents in their cells.

If people are no longer on their knees as they once were, and if some are afraid and cry out that the divine images of our faith are waxing dimmer in their niches; if in the Calvaries of these modern times we still see truth blasphemed, thieves waiting on their crosses of ignorance and crime, sick people crying for help, and children weeping bitterly, why should we be afraid if people, rising from their knees, are setting to their day's work with honest and loving hearts, and going, instead of saying, 'I go,' and remaining and crying, 'Lord, Lord.'

Once Dolly stopped to look at the gates as she was walking by, thinking, not of Church reform, in those old selfish days of hers, but of the new life that was so soon to begin for her behind those baize doors, among the worm-eaten pews and the marble cherubs, under the window, with all the leaden-patched panes diverging. She looked, flushed up, gathered her grey skirts out of the mud, and went on with her companion.

The old days were still going on, and she was the old Dolly that she was used to. But there was this difference now. At any time, at any hour, coming into a room suddenly she never knew but that she might find a letter, a summons, some sign of the new existence, and interests that were crowding upon her. She scarcely believed in it all at times; but she was satisfied. She was walking with her hand on Robert's strong arm.

She could trust to Robert--she could trust herself. She sometimes wondered to find herself so calm. Robert a.s.sured her that, when people _really_ loved each other, it was always so; they were always calm, and, no doubt, he was right.