The Woman Who Did

Chapter 18

Meanwhile, Dolores was growing up to woman's estate. And she was

growing into a tall, a graceful, an exquisitely beautiful woman.

Yet in some ways Herminia had reason to be dissatisfied with her

daughter's development. Day by day she watched for signs of the

expected apostolate. Was Dolores pressing forward to the mark for

the prize of her high calling? Her mother half doubted it. Slowly

and regretfully, as the growing girl approached the years when she

might be expected to think for herself, Herminia began to perceive

that the child of so many hopes, of so many aspirations, the child

pre-destined to regenerate humanity, was thinking for herself--in a

retrograde direction. Incredible as it seemed to Herminia, in the

daughter of such a father and such a mother, Dolores' ideas--nay,

worse her ideals--were essentially commonplace. Not that she had

much opportunity of imbibing commonplace opinions from any outside

source; she redeveloped them from within by a pure effort of

atavism. She had reverted to lower types. She had thrown back to

the Philistine.

Heredity of mental and moral qualities is a precarious matter.

These things lie, as it were, on the topmost plane of character;

they smack of the individual, and are therefore far less likely to

persist in offspring than the deeper-seated and better-established

peculiarities of the family, the clan, the race, or the species.

They are idiosyncratic. Indeed, when we remember how greatly the

mental and moral faculties differ from brother to brother, the

product of the same two parental factors, can we wonder that they

differ much more from father to son, the product of one like factor

alone, diluted by the addition of a relatively unknown quality, the

maternal influence? However this may be, at any rate, Dolores

early began to strike out for herself all the most ordinary and

stereotyped opinions of British respectability. It seemed as if

they sprang up in her by unmitigated reversion. She had never

heard in the society of her mother's lodgings any but the freest

and most rational ideas; yet she herself seemed to hark back, of

internal congruity, to the lower and vulgarer moral plane of her

remoter ancestry. She showed her individuality only by evolving

for herself all the threadbare platitudes of ordinary convention.

Moreover, it is not parents who have most to do with moulding the

sentiments and opinions of their children. From the beginning,

Dolly thought better of the landlady's views and ideas than of her

mother's. When she went to school, she considered the moral

standpoint of the other girls a great deal more sensible than the

moral standpoint of Herminia's attic. She accepted the beliefs and

opinions of her schoolfellows because they were natural and

congenial to her character. In short, she had what the world calls

common-sense: she revolted from the unpractical Utopianism of her

mother.

From a very early age, indeed, this false note in Dolly had begun

to make itself heard. While she was yet quite a child, Herminia

noticed with a certain tender but shrinking regret that Dolly

seemed to attach undue importance to the mere upholsteries and

equipages of life,--to rank, wealth, title, servants, carriages,

jewelry. At first, to be sure, Herminia hoped this might prove but

the passing foolishness of childhood: as Dolly grew up, however, it

became clearer each day that the defect was in the grain--that

Dolly's whole mind was incurably and congenitally aristocratic or

snobbish. She had that mean admiration for birth, position,

adventitious advantages, which is the mark of the beast in the

essentially aristocratic or snobbish nature. She admired people

because they were rich, because they were high-placed, because they

were courted, because they were respected; not because they were

good, because they were wise, because they were noble-natured,

because they were respect-worthy.

But even that was not all. In time, Herminia began to perceive

with still profounder sorrow that Dolly had no spontaneous care or

regard for righteousness. Right and wrong meant to her only what

was usual and the opposite. She seemed incapable of considering

the intrinsic nature of any act in itself apart from the praise or

blame meted out to it by society. In short, she was sunk in the

same ineffable slough of moral darkness as the ordinary inhabitant

of the morass of London.

To Herminia this slow discovery, as it dawned bit by bit upon her,

put the final thorn in her crown of martyrdom. The child on whose

education she had spent so much pains, the child whose success in

the deep things of life was to atone for her own failure, the child

who was born to be the apostle of freedom to her sisters in

darkness, had turned out in the most earnest essentials of

character a complete disappointment, and had ruined the last hope

that bound her to existence.

Bitterer trials remained. Herminia had acted through life to a

great extent with the idea ever consciously present to her mind

that she must answer to Dolly for every act and every feeling. She

had done all she did with a deep sense of responsibility. Now it

loomed by degrees upon her aching heart that Dolly's verdict would

in almost every case be a hostile one. The daughter was growing

old enough to question and criticise her mother's proceedings; she

was beginning to understand that some mysterious difference marked

off her own uncertain position in life from the solid position of

the children who surrounded her--the children born under those

special circumstances which alone the man-made law chooses to stamp

with the seal of its recognition. Dolly's curiosity was shyly

aroused as to her dead father's family. Herminia had done her best

to prepare betimes for this inevitable result by setting before her

child, as soon as she could understand it, the true moral doctrine

as to the duties of parenthood. But Dolly's own development

rendered all such steps futile. There is no more silly and

persistent error than the belief of parents that they can influence

to any appreciable extent the moral ideas and impulses of their

children. These things have their springs in the bases of

character: they are the flower of individuality; and they cannot be

altered or affected after birth by the foolishness of preaching.

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, you

will find soon enough he will choose his own course for himself and

depart from it.

Already when Dolly was a toddling little mite and met her mother's

father in the church in Marylebone, it had struck her as odd that

while they themselves were so poor and ill-clad, her grandpapa

should be such a grand old gentleman of such a dignified aspect.

As she grew older and older, and began to understand a little more

the world she lived in, she wondered yet more profoundly how it

could happen, if her grandpapa was indeed the Very Reverend, the

Dean of Dunwich, that her mamma should be an outcast from her

father's church, and scarcely well seen in the best carriage

company. She had learnt that deans are rather grand people--almost

as much so as admirals; that they wear shovel-hats to distinguish

them from the common ruck of rectors; that they lived in fine

houses in a cathedral close; and that they drive in a victoria with

a coachman in livery. So much essential knowledge of the church of

Christ she had gained for herself by personal observation; for

facts like these were what interested Dolly. She couldn't

understand, then, why she and her mother should live precariously

in a very small attic; should never be visited by her mother's

brothers, one of whom she knew to be a Prebendary of Old Sarum,

while the other she saw gazetted as a Colonel of Artillery; and

should be totally ignored by her mother's sister, Ermyntrude, who

lolled in a landau down the sunny side of Bond Street.

At first, indeed, it only occurred to Dolly that her mother's

extreme and advanced opinions had induced a social breach between

herself and the orthodox members of her family. Even that Dolly

resented; why should mamma hold ideas of her own which shut her

daughter out from the worldly advantages enjoyed to the full by the

rest of her kindred? Dolly had no particular religious ideas; the

subject didn't interest her; and besides, she thought the New

Testament talked about rich and poor in much the same unpractical

nebulous way that mamma herself did--in fact, she regarded it with

some veiled contempt as a rather sentimental radical publication.

But, she considered, for all that, that it was probably true enough

as far as the facts and the theology went; and she couldn't

understand why a person like mamma should cut herself off

contumaciously from the rest of the world by presuming to

disbelieve a body of doctrine which so many rich and well-gaitered

bishops held worthy of credence. All stylish society accepted the

tenets of the Church of England. But in time it began to occur to

her that there might be some deeper and, as she herself would have

said, more disgraceful reason for her mother's alienation from so

respectable a family. For to Dolly, that was disgraceful which the

world held to be so. Things in themselves, apart from the world's

word, had for her no existence. Step by step, as she grew up to

blushing womanhood, it began to strike her with surprise that her

grandfather's name had been, like her own, Barton. "Did you marry

your cousin, mamma?" she asked Herminia one day quite suddenly.

And Herminia, flushing scarlet at the unexpected question, the

first with which Dolly had yet ventured to approach that dangerous

quicksand, replied with a deadly thrill, "No, my darling. Why do

you ask me?"

"Because," Dolly answered abashed, "I just wanted to know why your

name should be Barton, the same as poor grandpapa's."

Herminia didn't dare to say too much just then. "Your dear

father," she answered low, "was not related to me in any way."

Dolly accepted the tone as closing the discussion for the present;

but the episode only strengthened her underlying sense of a mystery

somewhere in the matter to unravel.

In time, Herminia sent her child to a day-school. Though she had

always taught Dolly herself as well as she was able, she felt it a

matter of duty, as her daughter grew up, to give her something more

than the stray ends of time in a busy journalist's moments of

leisure. At the school, where Dolly was received without question,

on Miss Smith-Water's recommendation, she found herself thrown much

into the society of other girls, drawn for the most part from the

narrowly Mammon-worshipping ranks of London professional society.

Here, her native tendencies towards the real religion of England,

the united worship of Success and Respectability, were encouraged

to the utmost. But she noticed at times with a shy shrinking that

some few of the girls had heard vague rumors about her mother as a

most equivocal person, who didn't accept all the current

superstitions, and were curious to ask her questions as to her

family and antecedents. Crimson with shame, Dolly parried such

enquiries as best she could; but she longed all the more herself to

pierce this dim mystery. Was it a runaway match?--with the groom,

perhaps, or the footman? Only the natural shamefacedness of a

budding girl in prying into her mother's most domestic secrets

prevented Dolores from asking Herminia some day point-blank all

about it.

But she was gradually becoming aware that some strange atmosphere

of doubt surrounded her birth and her mother's history. It filled

her with sensitive fears and self-conscious hesitations.

And if the truth must be told, Dolly never really returned her

mother's profound affection. It is often so. The love which

parents lavish upon their children, the children repay, not to

parents themselves, but to the next generation. Only when we

become fathers or mothers in our turn do we learn what our fathers

and mothers have done for us. Thus it was with Dolly. When once

the first period of childish dependence was over, she regarded

Herminia with a smouldering distrust and a secret dislike that

concealed itself beneath a mask of unfelt caresses. In her heart

of hearts, she owed her mother a grudge for not having put her in a

position in life where she could drive in a carriage with a

snarling pug and a clipped French poodle, like Aunt Ermyntrude's

children. She grew up, smarting under a sullen sense of injustice,

all the deeper because she was compelled to stifle it in the

profoundest recesses of her own heart.