When Dolly was seventeen, a pink wild rose just unrolling its petals, a
very great event occurred in her history. She received an invitation to
go and stop with some friends in the country.
The poor child’s life had been in a sense so uneventful that the bare
prospect of this visit filled her soul beforehand with tremulous
anticipation. To be sure, Dolly Barton had always lived in the midmost
centre of the Movement in London; she had known authors, artists,
socialists, the cream of our race; she had been brought up in close
intercourse with the men and women who are engaged in revolutionising
and remodelling humanity. But this very fact that she had always lived
in the Thick of Things made a change to the Thin of Things only by so
much the more delicious and enchanting. Not that Dolores had not seen a
great deal, too, of the country. Poor as they were, her mother had
taken her to cheap little seaside nooks for a week or two of each
summer; she had made pilgrimages almost every Sunday in spring or
autumn to Leith Hill or Mapledurham; she had even strained her scanty
resources to the utmost to afford Dolly an occasional outing in the
Ardennes or in Normandy. But what gave supreme importance to this
coming visit was the special fact that Dolly was now for the first time
in her life to find herself “in society”.
Among the friends she had picked up at her Marylebone day-school were
two west-country girls, private boarders of the head-mistress’s, who
came from the neighbourhood of Combe Neville in Dorset. Their name was
Compson, and their father was rector of their native village, Upcombe.
Dolly liked them very much, and was proud of their acquaintance,
because they were reckoned about the most distinguished pupils in the
school, their mother being the niece of a local viscount. Among girls
in middle-class London sets, even so remote a connection with the
title-bearing classes is counted for a distinction. So when Winnie
Compson asked Dolly to go and stop with her at her father’s rectory
during three whole weeks of the summer holidays, Dolly felt that now at
last by pure force of native worth she was rising to her natural
position in society. It flattered her that Winnie should select her for
such an honour.
The preparations for that visit cost Dolly some weeks of thought and
effort. The occasion demanded it. She was afraid she had no frocks good
enough for such a grand house as the Compsons’. “Grand” was indeed a
favourite epithet of Dolly’s; she applied it impartially to everything
which had to do, as she conceived, with the life of the propertied and
privileged classes. It was a word at once of cherished and revered
meaning—the shibboleth of her religion. It implied to her mind
something remote and unapproachable, yet to be earnestly striven after
with all the forces at her disposal. Even Herminia herself stretched a
point in favour of an occasion which she could plainly see Dolly
regarded as so important; she managed to indulge her darling in a
couple of dainty new afternoon dresses, which touched for her soul the
very utmost verge of allowable luxury. The materials were oriental; the
cut was the dressmaker’s—not home-built, as usual. Dolly looked so
brave in them, with her rich chestnut hair and her creamy complexion—a
touch, Herminia thought, of her Italian birthplace—that the mother’s
full heart leapt up to look at her. It almost made Herminia wish she
was rich—and anti-social, like the rich people—in order that she might
be able to do ample justice to the exquisite grace of Dolly’s unfolding
figure. Tall, lissome, supple, clear of limb and light of footstep, she
was indeed a girl any mother might have been proud of.
On the day she left London, Herminia thought to herself she had never
seen her child look so absolutely lovely. The unwonted union of blue
eyes with that olive-grey skin gave a tinge of wayward shyness to her
girlish beauty. The golden locks had ripened to nut-brown, but still
caught stray gleams of nestling sunlight. ’Twas with a foreboding
regret that Herminia kissed Dolly on both peach-bloom cheeks at
parting. She almost fancied her child must be slipping from her
motherly grasp when she went off so blithely to visit these unknown
friends, away down in Dorsetshire. Yet Dolly had so few amusements of
the sort young girls require that Herminia was overjoyed this
opportunity should have come to her. She reproached herself not a
little in her sensitive heart for even feeling sad at Dolly’s joyous
departure. Yet to Dolly it was a delight to escape from the atmosphere
of Herminia’s lodgings. Those calm heights chilled her.
The Compsons’ house was quite as “grand” in the reality as Dolly had
imagined it. There was a manservant in a white tie to wait at table,
and the family dressed every evening for dinner. Yet, much to her
surprise, Dolly found from the first the grandeur did not in the least
incommode her. On the contrary, she enjoyed it. She felt forthwith she
was to the manner born. This was clearly the life she was intended by
nature to live, and might actually have been living—she, the
granddaughter of so grand a man as the late Dean of Dunwich—had it not
been for poor Mamma’s ridiculous fancies. Mamma was so faddy! Before
Dolly had spent three whole days at the rectory, she talked just as the
Compsons did; she picked up by pure instinct the territorial slang of
the county families. One would have thought, to hear her discourse, she
had dressed for dinner every night of her life, and passed her days in
the society of the beneficed clergy.
But even that did not exhaust the charm of Upcombe for Dolly. For the
first time in her life, she saw something of men—real men, with horses
and dogs and guns—men who went out partridge shooting in the season and
rode to hounds across country, not the pale abstractions of cultured
humanity who attended the Fabian Society meetings or wrote things
called articles in the London papers. Her mother’s friends wore soft
felt hats and limp woollen collars; these real men were richly clad in
tweed suits and fine linen. Dolly was charmed with them all, but
especially with one handsome and manly young fellow named Walter
Brydges, the stepson and ward of a neighbouring parson. “How you talked
with him at tennis today!” Winnie Compson said to her friend, as they
sat on the edge of Dolly’s bed one evening. “He seemed quite taken with
you.”
A pink spot of pleasure glowed on Dolly’s round cheek to think that a
real young man, in good society, whom she met at so grand a house as
the Compsons’, should seem to be quite taken with her.
“Who is he, Winnie?” she asked, trying to look less self-conscious.
“He’s extremely good-looking.”
“Oh, he’s Mr Hawkshaw’s stepson, over at Combe Mary,” Winnie answered
with a nod. “Mr Hawkshaw’s the vicar there till Mamma’s nephew is ready
to take the living—what they call a warming-pan. But Walter Brydges is
Mrs Hawkshaw’s son by her first husband. Old Mr Brydges was the squire
of Combe Mary, and Walter’s his only child. He’s very well off. You
might do worse, dear. He’s considered quite a catch down in this part
of the country.”
“How old is he?” Dolly asked, innocently enough, standing up by the
bedside in her dainty white nightgown. But Winnie caught at her meaning
with the preternatural sharpness of the girl brought up in immediate
contact with the landed interest. “Oh, he’s of age,” she answered
quickly, with a knowing nod. “He’s come into the property; he has
nobody on earth but himself to consult about his domestic
arrangements.”
Dolly was young; Dolly was pretty; Dolly’s smile won the world; Dolly
was still at the sweetest and most susceptible of ages. Walter Brydges
was well off; Walter Brydges was handsome; Walter Brydges had all the
glamour of a landed estate, and an Oxford education. He was a young
Greek god in a Norfolk shooting-jacket. Moreover, he was a really good
and pleasant young fellow. What wonder, therefore, if before a week was
out, Dolly was very really and seriously in love with him? And what
wonder if Walter Brydges in turn, caught by that maiden glance, was in
love with Dolly? He had every excuse, for she was lithe, and beautiful,
and a joyous companion; besides being, as the lady’s maid justly
remarked, a perfect lady.
One day, after Dolly had been a fortnight at Upcombe, the Compsons gave
a picnic in the wild Combe undercliff. ’Tis a broken wall of chalk,
tumbled picturesquely about in huge shattered masses, and deliciously
overgrown with ferns and blackthorn and golden clusters of
close-creeping rock-rose. Mazy paths thread tangled labyrinths of
fallen rock, or wind round tall clumps of holly-bush and bramble. They
lighted their fire under the lee of one such buttress of broken cliff,
whose summit was festooned with long sprays of clematis, or “old man’s
beard”, as the common west-country name expressively phrases it.
Thistledown hovered on the basking air. There they sat and drank their
tea, couched on beds of fern or propped firm against the rock; and when
tea was over, they wandered off, two and two, ostensibly for nothing,
but really for the true business of the picnic—to afford the young men
and maidens of the group some chance of enjoying, unspied, one
another’s society.
Dolly and Walter Brydges strolled off by themselves toward the rocky
shore. There Walter showed her where a brook bubbled clear from the
fountain-head; by its brink, blue veronicas grew, and tall yellow
loosestrife, and tasselled purple heads of great English eupatory.
Bending down to the stream he picked a little bunch of forget-me-nots,
and handed them to her. Dolly pretended unconsciously to pull the
dainty blossoms to pieces, as she sat on the clay bank hard by and
talked with him. “Is that how you treat my poor flowers?” Walter asked,
looking askance at her.
Dolly glanced down, and drew back suddenly. “Oh, poor little things!”
she cried, with a quick droop of her long lashes. “I wasn’t thinking
what I did.” And she darted a shy glance at him. “If I’d remembered
they were forget-me-nots, I don’t think I could have done it.”
She looked so sweet and pure in her budding innocence, like a
half-blown water-lily, that the young man, already more than two-thirds
in love, was instantly captivated. “Because they were forget-me-nots,
or because they were _mine_, Miss Barton?” he asked softly, all
timorousness.
“Perhaps a little of both,” the girl answered, gazing down, and
blushing at each word a still deeper crimson.
The blush showed sweet on that translucent skin. Walter turned to her
with a sudden impulse. “And what are you going to do with them _now_?”
he enquired, holding his breath for joy and half-suppressed eagerness.
Dolly hesitated a moment with genuine modesty. Then her liking for the
well-knit young man overcame her. With a frightened smile her hand
stole to her bodice; she fixed them in her bosom. “Will that do?” she
asked timidly.
“Yes, that _will_ do,” the young man answered, bending forward and
seizing her soft fingers in his own. “That will do very well. And, Miss
Barton—Dolores—I take it as a sign you don’t wholly dislike me.”
“I like you very much,” Dolly answered in a low voice, pulling a
rock-rose from a cleft and tearing it nervously to pieces.
“Do you _love_ me, Dolly?” the young man insisted.
Dolly turned her glance to him tenderly, then withdrew it in haste. “I
think I _might_, in time,” she answered very slowly.
“Then you will be mine, mine, mine?” Walter cried in an ecstasy.
Dolly bent her pretty head in reluctant assent, with a torrent of inner
joy. The sun flashed in her chestnut hair. The triumph of that moment
was to her inexpressible.
But as for Walter Brydges, he seized the blushing face boldly in his
two brown hands, and imprinted upon it at once three respectful kisses.
Then he drew back, half-terrified at his own temerity.