Dolores by Ivy Compton-Burnett

interpreted as that which was the best which conditions could demand; an unfaltering, unquestioning, it may soon be said, unreasoning service, which showed her in a crisisno place for conflict or conscious sacrifice, but simply laid a course before her as that which was due from herself to her kind. Thus she was equal to the hardness of watching her stepmother’s days and her own through her stepmother’s eyes, and of accepting her father’s formal dealings as the best for the saving of them all.
    For the Reverend Cleveland had learned the dread of domestic friction, and the moulding of his doings for his wife’s witnessing of them. It was a lesson which nine years earlier he would not have confessed the power to learn. Unthought-of conditions bring out unthought-of powers; and he took what his lot gave him, forbearing to throw away what it yielded in vain struggling for what was denied. But let it not be thought that his wife was a virago or termagant, or that he was not the master of his home. Mrs Hutton was merely an irritable, jealous, sensitive woman; and none knew better that, her husband’s home was a sphere where the latter was master. A ponderous, remote man, mentally and bodily disposed to heaviness, he lived his domestic routine in a manner which told little in covering much. He showed himself blind to things that awakened his resentment, but experienced more than his family guessed. From time to time he would combat the domestic spirit in days which thehousehold dreaded in accord, and which it was an unspoken family law that no one should heed. He would openly seek the companionship of Dolores—who, living in the emotions under which he sustained, and his wife submitted to, this subtly militant temper, was by far the saddest sufferer,—would even speak of his earlier wedded experience; not referring to the change in his course, but intending it to carry its lesson. Mrs Hutton regarded these periods as the standing trial of her lot; and lived them with a sense of rebuke, and a keener sense of perplexity; not perceiving that the smothered smouldering of months had simply reached ignition point and broken into flames. It is a proof that her husband’s was the really dominant spirit, that she was docile while they endured, and less prone for some time after to peevish jealousy.
    The eldest son of the parsonage—Dolores’ companion in the life that was woven only in name with the others of the same scene—was a lesser cause of discord. Mrs Hutton was one of the women, to whom masculine failings have a strong excuse in being masculine; and as far as his relations with his father went, there was little to awaken jealousy in a breast where it was the most overbearing of inmates. Mr Hutton was not in the least disposed to an over-genial view of a lusty young piece of male flesh under his roof, growing into added lustiness in dependenceon his daily efforts. He was rather addicted to comment on the necessity of putting youthful opportunities to the utmost profit, as young men were not to be supported by their fathers all their lives. The son was a self-absorbed, silent lad, old for his seventeen years; with an easily kindled zeal for the excellent; and a fainter something of Dolores’ instinct of fellowship with thinking things, which had led him to fix his ambitions on teaching. He had a straitened lot. His days were spent at a school in a neighbouring town, and his evenings in pacing the lanes with a book. He regarded his father and stepmother with one of those minglings of feeling which grow from family communion—alternating between affection and resentful dislike. He took scanty notice of the little half-brother and sisters, and reserved what his nature held for Dolores, under whose eye he was approaching an upright and reason-governed manhood.
    A favourable time for a glimpse of the brother and sister is a midsummer evening of the year, whose autumn saw things as they