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 predestined
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 respectworthy.
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-Waters’ 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.