There was one remarkable thing in Dora Mannering’s life which I have
omitted to mention, which is, that she was in the habit of receiving
periodically, though at very uncertain intervals, out of that vast but
vague universe surrounding England, which we call generally “abroad,” a
box. No one knew where it came from, or who it came from; at least, no
light was ever thrown to Dora upon that mystery. It was despatched now
from one place, now from another; and not a name, or a card, or a scrap
of paper was ever found to identify the sender.
This box contained always a store of delights for the recipient, who,
though she was in a manner monarch of all she surveyed, was without many
of the more familiar pleasures of childhood. It had contained toys and
pretty knick-knacks of many quaint foreign kinds when she was quite a
child; but as she grew older, the mind of her unknown friend seemed to
follow her growth with the strangest certainty of what would please
these advancing youthful years.
The foundation of the box, if that word may be employed, was always a
store of the daintiest underclothing, delicately made, which followed
Dora’s needs and growth, growing longer as she grew taller; so that
underneath her frocks, which were not always lovely, the texture, form,
and colour being chiefly decided by the dressmaker who had “made” for
her as long as she could remember, Dora was clothed like a princess; and
thus accustomed from her childhood to the most delicate and dainty
accessories--fine linen, fine wool, silk stockings, handkerchiefs good
enough for any fine lady. Her father had not, at first, liked to see
these fine things; he had pushed them away when she spread them out to
show him her treasures, and turned his back upon her, bidding her carry
off her trumpery.
It was so seldom, so very seldom, that Mr. Mannering had an objection to
anything done by Dora, that this little exhibition of temper had an
extraordinary effect; but the interval between one arrival and another
was long enough to sweep any such recollection out of the mind of a
child; and as she grew older, more intelligent to note what he meant,
and, above all, more curious about everything that happened, he had
changed his tone. But he had a look which Dora classified in her own
mind as “the face father puts on when my box comes".
This is a sort of thing which imprints itself very clearly upon the mind
of the juvenile spectator and critic. Dora knew it as well as she knew
the clothes her father wore, or the unchanging habits of his life,
though she did not for a long time attempt to explain to herself what it
meant. It was a look of intent self-restraint, of a stoical repression.
He submitted to having the different contents of the box exhibited to
him without a smile on his face or the least manifestation of
sympathy--he who sympathised with every sentiment which breathed across
his child’s facile spirit. He wound himself up to submit to the ordeal,
it seemed, with the blank look of an unwilling spectator, who has not a
word of admiration for anything, and, indeed, hates the sight he cannot
refuse to see.
“Who can send them, father? oh, who can send them? Who is it that
remembers me like this, and that I’m growing, and what I must want, and
everything? I was only a child when the last one came. You must
know--you must know, father! How could any one know about me and not
know you--or care for me?” Dora cried, with a little moisture springing
to her eyes.
“I have already told you I don’t know anything about it,” said Mr.
Mannering, oh, with such a shut-up face! closing the shutters upon his
eyes and drawing down all the blinds, as Dora said.
“Well, but suppose you don’t know, you must guess; you must imagine who
it could be. No one could know me, and not know you. I am not a stranger
that you have nothing to do with. You must know who is likely to take so
much thought about your daughter. Why, she knows my little name! There
is ‘Dora’ on my handkerchiefs.”
He turned away with a short laugh. “You seem to have found out a great
deal for yourself. How do you know it is ‘she’? It might be some old
friend of mine who knew that my only child was Dora--and perhaps that I
was not a man to think of a girl’s wants.”
“It may be an old friend of yours, father. It must be, for who would
know about me but a friend of yours? But how could it be a man? It
couldn’t be a man! A man could never work ‘Dora’----”
“You little simpleton! He would go to a shop and order it to be worked.
I daresay it is Wallace, who is out in South America.”
Such a practical suggestion made Dora pause; but it was not at all an
agreeable idea. “Mr. Wallace! an old, selfish, dried-up ----” Then with a
cry of triumph she added: “But they came long, long before he went to
South America. No--I know one thing--that it is a lady. No one but a
lady could tell what a girl wants. You don’t, father, though you know me
through and through; and how could any other man? But I suppose you have
had friends ladies as well as men?”
His closed-up lips melted a little. “Not many,” he said; then they shut
up fast again. “It may be,” he said reluctantly, with a face from which
all feeling was shut out, which looked like wood, “a friend--of your
mother’s.”
“Oh, of mamma’s!” The girl’s countenance lit up; she threw back her head
and her waving hair, conveying to the man who shrank from her look the
impression as of a thing with wings. He had been of opinion that she had
never thought upon this subject, never considered the side of life thus
entirely shut out from her experience, and had wondered even while
rejoicing at her insensibility. But when he saw the light on her face he
shrank, drawing back into himself. “Oh,” cried Dora, “a friend of my
mother’s! Oh, father, she must have died long, long ago, that I never
remember her. Oh, tell me, who can this friend be?”
He had shut himself up again more closely than ever--not only were there
shutters at all the windows, but they were bolted and barred with iron.
His face was more blank than any piece of wood. “I never knew much of
her friends,” he said.
“Mother’s friends!” the girl cried, with a half shriek of reproachful
wonder. And then she added quickly: “But think, father, think! You will
remember somebody if you will only try.”
“Dora,” he said, “you don’t often try my patience, and you had better
not begin now. I should like to throw all that trumpery out of the
window, but I don’t, for I feel I have no right to deprive you of ----
Your mother’s friends were not mine. I don’t feel inclined to think as
you bid me. The less one thinks the better--on some subjects. I must ask
you to question me no more.”
“But, father ----”
“I have said that I will be questioned no more.”
“It wasn’t a question,” said the girl, almost sullenly; and then she
clasped her hands about his arm with a sudden impulse. “Father, if you
don’t like it, I’ll put them all away. I’ll never think of them nor
touch them again.”
The wooden look melted away, his features quivered for a moment. He
stooped and kissed her on the forehead. “No,” he said, making an effort
to keep his lips firmly set as before. “No; I have no right to do that.
No; I don’t wish it. Keep them and wear them, and take pleasure in them;
but don’t speak to me on the subject again.”
This conversation took place on the occasion of a very special novelty
in the mysterious periodical present which she had just received, about
which it was impossible to keep silence. The box--“my box,” as Dora had
got to call it--contained, in addition to everything else, a dress,
which was a thing that had never been sent before.
It was a white dress, made with great simplicity, as became Dora’s age,
but also in a costly way, a semi-transparent white, the sort of stuff
which could be drawn through a ring, as happens in fairy tales, and was
certainly not to be bought in ordinary English shops. To receive
anything so unexpected, so exciting, so beautiful, and not to speak of
it, to exhibit it to some one, was impossible. Dora had not been able to
restrain herself. She had carried it in her arms out of her room, and
opened it out upon a sofa in the sitting-room for her father’s
inspection. There are some things which we know beforehand will not
please, and yet which we are compelled to do; and this was the
consciousness in Dora’s mind, who, besides her delight in the gift, and
her desire to be able to find out something about the donor, had also,
it must be allowed, a burning desire to make discoveries as to that past
of which she knew so little, which had seized upon her mind from the
moment when she had found the portrait turned upon its face in the
secret drawer of her father’s cabinet. As she withdrew now, again
carrying in her arms the beautiful dress, there was in her mind,
underneath a certain compunction for having disturbed her father, and
sympathy with him so strong that she would actually have been capable of
sacrificing her newly-acquired possessions, a satisfaction
half-mischievous, half-affectionate, in the discoveries which she had
made. They were certainly discoveries; sorry as she was to “upset
father,” there was yet a consciousness in her mind that this time it had
been worth the while.
The reader may not think any better of Dora for this confession; but
there is something of the elf in most constitutions at fifteen, and she
was not of course at all sensible at that age of the pain that might lie
in souvenirs so ruthlessly stirred up. And she had indeed made something
by them. Never, never again, she promised herself, would she worry
father with questions; but so far as the present occasion went, she
could scarcely be sorry, for had not she learned much--enough to give
her imagination much employment? She carried away her discoveries with
her, as she carried her dress, to realise them in the shelter of her own
room. They seemed to throw a vivid light upon that past in which her own
life was so much involved. She threw the dress upon her bed carelessly,
these other new thoughts having momentarily taken the interest out of
even so exciting a novelty as that; and arranged in shape and sequence
what she had found out. Well, it was not so much, after all. What seemed
most clear in it was that father had not been quite friends with mother,
or at least with mother’s friends. Perhaps these friends had made
mischief between them--perhaps she had cared for them more than for her
husband; but surely that was not possible. And how strange, how strange
it was that he should keep up such a feeling so long!
As Dora did not remember her mother, it was evident that she must have
been dead many, many years. And yet her father still kept up his dislike
to her friends! It threw a new light even upon him, whom she knew better
than any one. Dora felt that she knew her father thoroughly, every
thought that was in his mind; and yet here it would seem that she did
not know him at all. So good a man, who was never hard with anybody, who
forgave her, Dora, however naughty she might have been, as soon as she
asked pardon; who forgave old Mr. Warrender for contradicting him about
that orchid, the orchid that was called Manneringii, and which father
had discovered, and therefore must know best; who forgave Mrs. Simcox
when she swept the dust from the corners upon the herbarium and spoilt
some of the specimens; and yet who in all these years had never forgiven
the unknown persons, who were mother’s friends, some one of whom must be
nice indeed, or she never would go on remembering Dora, and sending her
such presents. What could he have against this unknown lady,--this
nice, nice woman? And how was it possible that he should have kept it up
in his mind, and never forgiven it, or forgotten all these years? It
made Dora wonder, and feel, though she crushed the feeling firmly, that
perhaps father was not so perfect as she had thought.
And then there was this lady to think of--her mother’s friend, who had
kept on all this time thinking of Dora. She would not have been more
than a baby when this benefactress saw her last, since Dora did not
remember either mother, or mother’s friend; yet she must recollect just
how old Dora was, must have guessed just about how tall she was, and
kept count how she had grown from one time to another. The beautiful
dress was just almost long enough, almost fitted her in every way. It
gave the girl a keen touch of pleasure to think that she was just a
little taller and slighter than her unknown friend supposed her to
be--but so near; the letting down of a hem, the narrowing of a seam, and
it would be a perfect fit. How foolish father must be to think that Mr.
Wallace, or any other man, would have thought of that! Her mother’s
friend--what a kind friend, what a constant friend, though father did
not like her!
It overawed Dora a little to think if ever this lady came home, what
would happen? Of course, she would wish to see the girl whom she had
remembered so long, whom she had befriended so constantly; and what if
father would not permit it? It would be unkind, ungrateful, wrong; but
what if father objected, if it made him unhappy? Dora did not see her
way through this dreadful complication. It was sufficiently hard upon
her, a girl at so early an age, to become the possessor of a beautiful
dress like this, and have no one to show it to, to talk it over with;
nobody even to tell her exactly how it fitted, to judge what was
necessary for its perfection, as Dora herself, with no experience, and
not even a good glass to see herself in, could scarcely do. To hide a
secret of any kind in one’s being at fifteen is a difficult thing; but
when that secret is a frock, a dress!--a robe, indeed, she felt it ought
to be called, it was so exquisite, so poetical in its fineness and
whiteness. Dora had no one to confide in; and if she had possessed a
thousand confidants, would not have said a word to them which would seem
to involve her father in any blame. She put her pretty dress away,
however, with a great sense of discomfiture and downfall. Perhaps he
would dislike to see her wear it, even if she had ever any need for a
beautiful dress like that. But she never had any need. She never went
anywhere, or saw anybody. A whole host of little grievances came up in
the train of that greater one. She wondered if she were to spend all her
life like this, without ever tasting those delights of society which she
had read of, without ever knowing any one of her own age, without ever
seeing people dance, or hearing them sing. As for performing in these
ways herself, that had not come into Dora’s mind. She would like, she
thought, to look on and see how they did it, for once, at least, in her
life.
When she had come to this point, Dora, who was a girl full of natural
sense, began to feel instinctively that she was not in a good way, and
that it would be better to do something active to clear away the
cobwebs. It was evening, however, and she did not know exactly what to
do. To go back to the sitting-room where her father was reading, and to
sit down also to read at his side, seemed an ordeal too much for her
after the excitement of their previous talk; but it was what probably
she would have been compelled to do, had she not heard a heavy step
mounting the stairs, the sound of a knock at the door, and her father’s
voice bidding some one enter.
She satisfied herself presently that it was the voice of one of Mr.
Mannering’s chief friends, a colleague from the Museum, and that he was
safe for a time not to remark her absence or to have urgent need for
her. What now should Dora do? The openings of amusement were small. Mrs.
Hesketh had been exhausted for the moment. It must be said that Dora was
free of the whole house, and that she used her _petites entrées_ in the
most liberal and democratic fashion, thinking no scorn of going
downstairs sometimes to the funny little room next to the kitchen, which
Mrs. Simcox called the breakfast-room, and used as her own sanctum, the
family centre where her grandchildren and herself found refuge out of
the toils of the kitchen. The kitchen itself remained in the possession
of Jane; and Jane, like her mistress, occasionally shared the patronage
of Miss Dora. To-night perhaps she wanted solace of another kind from
any which could be given her on the basement story. It is not often that
a young person in search of entertainment or sympathy has all the
gradations of the social system to choose from. The first floor
represented the aristocracy in the establishment at Bloomsbury. It was
occupied by a Scotch lady, a certain Miss Bethune, a somewhat
harsh-featured and angular person, hiding a gentle heart under a grim
exterior; but a little intolerant in her moods, and not always sure to
respond to overtures of friendship; with a maid not much less unlike the
usual denizens of Bloomsbury than herself, but beaming with redness and
good humour, and one of Dora’s chief worshippers in the house. When the
girl felt that her needs required the sympathy of a person of the
highest, _i.e._, her own class, she went either boldly or with strategy
to the drawing-room floor. She had thus the power of drawing upon the
fellowship of her kind in whatever way the temper of the time adapted it
best for her.
Mrs. Simcox and the girls downstairs, and Mrs. Hesketh above, would have
been lost in raptures over Dora’s new dress. They would have stared,
they would perhaps have touched with a timid finger, they would have
opened their eyes and their mouths, and cried: “Oh!” or “La!” or “Well,
I never!” But they would not have understood. One’s own kind, Dora felt,
was necessary for that. But as it was evening, and Miss Bethune was not
always gracious, she did not boldly walk up to her door, but lingered
about on the stairs, coming and going, until, as was pretty sure to
occur, Gilchrist, the maid, with her glowing moon face and her sandy
locks, came out of the room. Gilchrist brightened immediately at the
sight of the favourite of the house.
“Oh, is that you, Miss Dora? Come in and see my lady, and cheer her up.
She’s not in the best of spirits to-night.”
“Neither am I--in the best of spirits,” said Dora.
“You!” cried Gilchrist, with what she herself would have called a
“skreigh” of laughter. She added sympathetically: “You’ll maybe have
been getting a scold from your papaw".
“My father never scolds,” said Dora, with dignity.
“Bless me! but that’s the way when there’s but wan child,” said Miss
Bethune’s maid: “not always, though,” she added, with a deep sigh that
waved aloft her own cap-strings, and caught Dora’s hair like a breeze.
The next moment she opened the door and said, putting her head in:
“Here’s Miss Dora, mem, to cheer you up a bit: but no’ in the best of
spirits hersel’".
“Bless me!” repeated Miss Bethune from within: “and what is wrong with
her spirits? Come away, Dora, come in.” Both mistress and maid had, as
all the house was aware, curious modes of expressing themselves, which
were Scotch, though nobody was aware in Bloomsbury how that quality
affected the speech--in Miss Bethune’s case at least. The lady was tall
and thin, a large framework of a woman which had never filled out. She
sat in a large chair near the fire, between which and her, however, a
screen was placed. She held up a fan before her face to screen off the
lamp, and consequently her countenance was in full shadow. She beckoned
to the girl with her hand, and pointed to a seat beside her. “So you are
in low spirits, Dora? Well, I’m not very bright myself. Come and let us
mingle our tears.”
“You are laughing at me, Miss Bethune. You think I have no right to feel
anything.”
“On the contrary, my dear. I think at your age there are many things
that a girl feels--too much; and though they’re generally nonsense,
they’re just as disagreeable as if they were the best of sense. Papa a
little cross?”
“Why should you all think anything so preposterous? My father is never
cross,” cried Dora, with tears of indignation in her eyes.
“The better for him, my dear, much the better for him,” said Miss
Bethune; “but, perhaps, rather the worse for you. That’s not my case,
for I am just full of irritability now and then, and ready to quarrel
with the tables and chairs. Well, you are cross yourself, which is much
worse. And yet I hear you had one of your grand boxes to-day, all full
of bonnie-dies. What a lucky little girl you are to get presents like
that!”
“I am not a little girl, Miss Bethune.”
“No, I’ll allow you’re a very big one for your age. Come, Dora, tell me
what was in the box this time. It will do you good.”
Dora hesitated a little to preserve her dignity, and then she said
almost with awe: “There was a dress in it".
“A dress!” cried Miss Bethune, with a little shriek of surprise; “and
does it fit you?”
“It’s just a very, very little bit too short,” said Dora, with pride,
“and just a very, very little bit too wide at the waist.”
“Run and bring it, and let me see it,” cried the lady. “I’ve no doubt in
the world it fits like a glove. Gilchrist, come in, come in, and see
what the bairn’s got. A frock that fits her like a glove.”
“Just a very, very little too short, and a very, very little too wide in
the waist,” said Dora, repeating her formula. She had flown upstairs
after the first moment’s hesitation, and brought it back in her arms,
glad in spite of herself to be thus delivered from silence and the sense
of neglect.
“Eh, mem,” cried Gilchrist, “but it must be an awfu’, awfu’ faithful
woman that has minded how a lassie like that grows and gets big, and
just how big she gets, a’ thae years.”
“There ye are with your moral!” cried the mistress; and to Dora’s
infinite surprise tears were on her cheeks. “It’s just the lassie that
makes all the difference,” said Miss Bethune. She flung the pretty dress
from her, and then she rose up suddenly and gave Dora a hasty kiss. “Put
it on and let me see it,” she said; “I will wager you anything it just
fits like a glove.”