Ivy Compton-Burnett: Dolores

“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, and 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.