Dolores by Ivy Compton-Burnett Read Free Book Online

peace, and pass on.
    Mr Hutton unlatched the gate which led to his garden from the churchyard, and walked up the gravel path to the parsonage. The voice of Mrs Hutton, who stood on the steps awaiting him—a mellowed, mature voice; for the Reverend Cleveland was not a man to succumb with improvidence to earlier maidenhood—greeted him as he came within hearing.
    â€œWell, dear, so you have parted from the Dean? How do you support the thought of six months in the darkness of his absence? You seem to be bearing up fairly well. Did you ever see such popish pomposity? I wonder what would be the result if they made him a bishop?”
    The Reverend Cleveland made no reply for a moment. He was not averse to laughing at his very reverend brother; but contingencies are sometimes broached, which hardly call for sanction even in jest.
    â€œI cannot see—from what 1 can gather from James—that a dean’s life is any more arduous or responsible than an ordinary vicar’s,” he observed, with an accent of bitterness, as he walked into his study.
    â€œWell, I certainly never saw James looking in better condition,” said Mrs Hutton; “not that his appearance has ever suggested his wearing himself out with toil.” The Reverend Cleveland readily saw his brother’s ampleness of frame a ground for smiling. “I wonder if he will use his leisure to write another booklet. Perhaps this time it will be ‘Great Sermons on Simple Subjects.’” The Very Reverend James’s isolated literary effort was a recognised subject in Mill-field Parsonage for spare ironic talent.
    â€œI can hardly imagine James writing anything great,” said Mr Hutton, yielding to some crudeness in fraternal comment.
    â€œAh, my dear, you never
imagined
him a dean until you saw him one,” said Mrs Hutton.
    â€œHe did not make himself a dean,” said Mr Hutton, deprecating the judgment of the actual agents implied.
    â€œWell—peace be to him—and to ourselves, for the time,” said Mrs Hutton. “I have had enough of him for one day. I wonder what he would feel if he could hear us. I should think his left ear must be burning.”
    â€œOh, I have never known James anything but sublimely complacent,” said Mr Hutton, indicating the unlikelihood of his brother’s suffering this discomfort; and speaking as though he considered a tendency to discontent some moraltribute—a view which would have added to his own self-regard.
    Mrs Hutton laughed; and walking to the window, began to watch her children in the garden—two little daughters at play under the eye of a nurse, and a baby boy, to whose mind there seemed nothing wanting in the exercise of staggering as a source of indefinite amusement; from time to time bestowing some advice, voiced with rather unnecessary sharpness, upon the nurse’s handling of her charge. The Reverend Cleveland took up his pen, and drew some sermon paper towards him with some austerity of mien.
    Sophia Hutton was a woman of five- or six-and-forty, with the manner of carrying years which shows maturity a seemlier thing than youth. When there was added to this gift a generous dower of brunette comeliness and a gentle dignity of bearing, she appeared to the Reverend Cleveland—in the fuller bloom of ten years earlier—a fitting mistress for the stately home which preferment was to bring. For this she seemed to herself no less a fitting mistress; but confinement to a home for which she was less adapted had cost her feelings milder conflict. There was a certain discernment in her survey of things, which saved her a too disturbing perplexity on the Bishop’s philosophy in viewing the Reverend Cleveland in a merely beneficedcondition. Moreover, the maidenhood attending an imperious youth having outlasted the youth, she did not compare the lot of mistress of a sufficient household only with that of the mistress of a stately one, but also