The meeting with her new relation had a great effect upon Dora’s mind.
It troubled her, though there was no reason in the world why the
discovery that her mother had a sister, and she herself an aunt, should
be painful. An aunt is not a very interesting relation generally, not
enough to make a girl’s heart beat; but it added a complication to the
web of altogether new difficulties in which Dora found herself
entangled. Everything had been so simple in the old days--those dear old
days now nearly three months off, before Mr. Mannering fell ill, to
which now Dora felt herself go back with such a sense of happiness and
ease, perhaps never to be known again. Then everything had been above
board: there had been no payments to make that were not made naturally
by her father, the fountainhead of everything, who gave his simple
orders, and had them fulfilled, and provided for every necessity. Now
Dora feared a knock at the door of his room lest it should be some
indiscreet messenger bringing direct a luxury or novelty which it had
been intended to smuggle in so that he might not observe it, or
introduce with some one’s compliments as an accidental offering to the
sick man. To hurry off Janie or Molly downstairs with these good things
intended to tempt the invalid’s appetite, to stamp a secret foot at the
indiscretions of Jane, who would bring in the bill for these dainties,
or announce their arrival loud out, rousing Mr. Mannering to inquiries,
and give a stern order that such extravagances should be no more, were
now common experiences to Dora. She had to deceive him, which was, Miss
Bethune assured her, for his good, but which Dora felt with a sinking
heart was not at all for her own good, and made her shrink from her
father’s eye. To account for the presence of some rare wine which was
good for him by a little story which, though it had been carefully
taught her by Dr. Roland or Miss Bethune, was not true--to make out that
it was the most natural thing in the world that _patés de fois gras_,
and the strongest soups and essence should be no more expensive than
common beef tea, the manufacture of Bloomsbury, because the doctor knew
some place where they were to be had at wholesale rates for almost
nothing--these were devices now quite familiar to her.
It was no worse to conceal the appearance of this new and strange
personage on the scene, the relation of whom she had never heard, and
whose existence was to remain a secret; but still it was a bigger secret
than any that concerned the things that were to eat or drink, or even
Mrs. Simcox’s bills. Concealment is an art that has to be carefully
learnt, like other arts, and it is extremely difficult to some minds,
who will more easily acquire the most elaborate handicraft than the
trick of selecting what is to be told and what is not to be told. It
was beyond all description difficult to Dora. She was ready to betray
herself at almost every moment, and had it not been that her own mind
was much perturbed and troubled by her strange visitor, and by attempts
to account for her to herself, she never could have succeeded in it.
What could the offence be that made it impossible for her father ever to
meet the sister of his wife again? Dora had learned from novels a great
deal about the mysteries of life, some which her natural mind rejected
as absurd, some which she contemplated with awe as tragic possibilities
entirely out of the range of common life. She had read about implacable
persons who once offended could never forgive, and of those who revenged
themselves and pursued a feud to the death. But the idea of her father
in either of these characters was too ridiculous to be dwelt upon for a
moment. And there had been no evil intended, no harm,--only a fatality.
What is a fatality? To have such dreadful issues, a thing must be
serious, very terrible. Dora was bewildered and overawed. She put this
question to Miss Bethune, but received no light on the subject. “A
fatality is a thing that is not intentional--that happens by
accident--that brings harm when you mean nothing but good,” that
authority said.
“But how should that be? It says in the Bible that people must not do
evil that good may come. But to do good that evil may come, I never
heard of that.”
“There are many things in the world that you never heard of, Dora, my
dear.”
“Oh yes, yes, I know,” cried the girl impatiently. “You are always
saying that, because I am young--as if it were my fault that I am young;
but that does not change anything. It is no matter, then, whether you
have any meaning in what you do or not?”
“Sometimes it appears as if it was no matter. We walk blindly in this
world, and often do things unawares that we would put our hands in the
fire rather than do. You say an unguarded word, meaning nothing, and it
falls to the ground, as you think, but afterwards springs up into a
poisonous tree and blights your life; or you take a turn to the right
hand instead of the left when you go out from your own door, and it
means ruin and death--that’s fatality, and it’s everywhere,” said Miss
Bethune, with a deep sigh.
“I do not believe in it,” said Dora, standing straight and strong, like
a young tree, and holding her head high.
“Nor did I, my dear, when I was your age,” Miss Bethune said.
At this moment there was a light knock at the door, and there appeared
suddenly the young man whom Miss Bethune had met in the Square, and who
had come as the messenger of the lady who was Dora’s aunt.
“She is asking me what fatality is,” said Miss Bethune. “I wonder if you
have any light to throw on the subject? You are nearer her age than I.”
The two young people looked at each other. Dora, though she was only
sixteen, was more of a personage than the young Gordon whom she had not
seen before. She looked at him with the condescension of a very young
girl brought up among elder people, and apt to feel a boundless
imaginative superiority over those of her own age. A young man was a
slight person to Dora. She was scarcely old enough to feel any of the
interest in him which exists naturally between the youth and the maiden.
She looked at him from her pedestal, half scornful beforehand of
anything he might say.
“Fatality?” he said. “I think it’s a name people invent for anything
particularly foolish which they do, when it turns out badly: though they
might have known it would turn out badly all the time.”
“That is exactly what I think,” cried Dora, clapping her hands.
“This is the young lady,” said young Gordon, “whom I used to help to
pack the toys for. I hope she will let me call her Miss Dora, for I
don’t know her by any other name.”
“To pack the toys?” said Dora. Her face grew blank, then flashed with a
sudden light, then grew quite white and still again, with a gasp of
astonishment and recognition. “Oh!” she cried, and something of
disappointment was in her tone, “was it--was it _she_ that sent them?”
In the commotion of her feelings a sudden deep red followed the
paleness. Dora was all fancy, changeableness, fastidiousness,
imagination, as was natural to her age. Why was she disappointed to know
that her yearly presents coming out of the unseen, the fairy gifts that
testified to some love unknown, came from so legitimate a source, from
her mother’s sister, her own nearest relation--the lady of the other
day? I cannot tell how it was, nor could she, nor any one, but it was
so; and she felt this visionary, absurd disappointment go to the bottom
of her heart. “Oh,” she repeated, growing blank again, with a sort of
opaque shadow closing over the brightness of her eyes and clouding her
face, “so that was where my boxes came from? And you helped to pack the
toys? I ought to have known,” said Dora, very sedately, feeling as if
she had suddenly fallen from a great height.
“Yes,” said Miss Bethune, “we ought to have thought of that at once. Who
else could have followed with such a faithful imagination, Dora? Who
could have remembered your age, and the kind of things you want, and how
you would grow, but a kind woman like that, with all the feelings of a
mother? Oh, we should have thought of it before.”
Dora at first made no reply. Her face, generally so changeable and full
of expression, settled down more and more into opaqueness and a blank
rigidity. She was deeply disappointed, though why she could not have
told--nor what dream of a fairy patroness, an exalted friend, entirely
belonging to the realms of fancy, she had conceived in her childish
imagination as the giver of these gifts. At all events, the fact was so.
Mrs. Bristow, with her heavy crape veil, ready to fall at any moment
over her face, with the worn lines of her countenance, the flush and
heat of emotion, her tears and repetitions, was a disappointing image to
come between her and the vision of a tender friend, too delicate, too
ethereal a figure for any commonplace embodiment which had been a kind
of tutelary genius in Dora’s dreams all her life. Any one in actual
flesh and blood would have been a shock after that long-cherished,
visionary dream. And young Gordon’s laughing talk of the preparation of
the box, and of his own suggestions as to its contents, and the picture
he conjured up of a mystery which was half mischievous, and in which
there was not only a desire to please but to puzzle the distant
recipient of all these treasures, both offended and shocked the girl in
the fantastic delicacy of her thoughts.
Without being himself aware of it, the young man gave a glimpse into the
distant Southern home, in which it would appear he had been brought up,
which was in reality very touching and attractive, though it reduced
Dora to a more and more strong state of revolt. On the other hand, Miss
Bethune listened to him with a rapt air of happiness, which was more
wonderful still--asking a hundred questions, never tiring of any detail.
Dora bore it all as long as she could, feeling herself sink more and
more from the position of a young princess, mysteriously loved and
cherished by a distant friend, half angelic, half queenly, into that of
a little girl, whom a fantastic kind relation wished to pet and to
bewilder, half in love and half in fun, taking the boy into her
confidence, who was still more to her and nearer to her than Dora. She
could not understand how Miss Bethune could sit and listen with that
rapt countenance; and she finally broke in, in the very midst of the
narrative to which she had listened (had any one taken any notice) with
growing impatience, to say suddenly, “In the meantime father is by
himself, and I shall have to go to him,” with a tone of something like
injury in her voice.
“But Gilchrist is there if he wants anything, Dora.”
“Gilchrist is very kind, but she is not quite the same as me,” said
Dora, holding her head high.
She made Mr. Gordon a little gesture, something between farewell and
dismissal, in a very lofty way, impressing upon the young man a sense of
having somehow offended, which he could not understand. He himself was
very much interested in Dora. He had known of her existence for years.
She had been a sort of secret between him and the wife of his guardian,
who, he was well aware, never discussed with her husband or mentioned in
his presence the child who was so mysteriously dear to her; but bestowed
all her confidence on this subject on the boy who had grown up in her
house and filled to her the place of a son. He had liked the confidence
and the secret and the mystery, without much inquiring what they meant.
They meant, he supposed, a family quarrel, such as that which had
affected all his own life. Such things are a bore and a nuisance; but,
after all, don’t matter very much to any but those with whom they
originate. And young Gordon was not disposed to trouble his mind with
any sort of mystery now.
“Have I said anything I should not have said? Is she displeased?” he
said.
“It matters very little if she is displeased or not, a fantastic little
girl!” cried Miss Bethune. “Go on, go on with what you are saying. I
take more interest in it than words can say.”
But it was not perhaps exactly the same thing to continue that story in
the absence of the heroine whose name was its centre all through. She
was too young to count with serious effect in the life of a man; and yet
it would be difficult to draw any arbitrary line in respect to age with
a tall girl full of that high flush of youth which adopts every
semblance in turn, and can put all the dignity of womanhood in the eyes
of a child. Young Gordon’s impulse slackened in spite of himself; he was
pleased, and still more amused, by the interest he excited in this lady,
who had suddenly taken him into her intimacy with no reason that he knew
of, and was so anxious to know all his story. It was droll to see her
listening in that rapt way,--droll, yet touching too. She had said that
he reminded her of somebody she knew--perhaps it was some one who was
dead, a young brother, a friend of earlier years. He laughed a little to
himself, though he was also affected by this curious unexpected interest
in him. But he certainly had not the same freedom and eloquence in
talking of the old South American home, now broken up, and the visionary
little maiden, who, all unknown herself, had lent it a charm, when Dora
was gone. Neither, perhaps, did Miss Bethune concentrate her interest on
that part that related to Dora. When he began to flag she asked him
questions of a different kind.
“Those guardians of yours must have been very good to you--as good as
parents?” she said.
“Very good, but not perhaps like parents; for I remember my father very
well, and I still have a mother, you know.”
“Your father,” she said, turning away her head a little, “was devoted to
you, I suppose?”
“Devoted to me?” he said, with a little surprise, and then laughed. “He
was kind enough. We got on very well together. Do men and their sons do
more than that?”
“I know very little about men and their sons,” she said hastily; “about
men and women I maybe know a little, and not much to their advantage.
Oh, you are there, Gilchrist! This is the gentleman I was speaking to
you about. Do you see the likeness?”
Gilchrist advanced a step into the room, with much embarrassment in her
honest face. She uttered a broken laugh, which was like a giggle, and
began as usual to fold hems in her apron.
“I cannot say, mem, that I see a resemblance to any person,” she said.
“You are just a stupid creature!” said her mistress,--“good for nothing
but to make an invalid’s beef tea. Just go away, go away and do that.”
She turned suddenly to young Gordon, as Gilchrist went out of the room.
“That stupid woman’s face doesn’t bring anything to your mind?” she
said hastily.
“Bring anything to my mind?” he cried, with great surprise. “What should
she bring to my mind?”
“It was just a fancy that came into mine. Do you remember the scene in
_Guy Mannering_, where Bertram first sees Dominie Sampson? Eh, I hope
your education has not been neglected in that great particular?”
“I remember the scene,” he said, with a smile.
“It was perhaps a little of what you young folk call melodramatic: but
Harry Bertram’s imagination gets a kind of shock, and he remembers. And
so you are a reader of Sir Walter, and mind that scene?”
“I remember it very well,” said the young man, bewildered. “But about
the maid? You said----”
“Oh, nothing about the maid; she’s my faithful maid, but a stupid woman
as ever existed. Never you mind what I said. I say things that are very
silly from time to time. But I would like to know how you ever heard
your mother was living, when you have never seen her, nor know anything
about her? I suppose not even her name?”
“My father told me so when he was dying: he told Mr. Bristow so, but he
gave us no further information. I gathered that my mother---- It is
painful to betray such an impression.”
She looked at him with a deep red rising over her cheeks, and a
half-defiant look. “I am old enough to be your mother, you need not
hesitate to speak before me,” she said.
“It is not that; it is that I can’t associate that name with
anything--anything--to be ashamed of.”
“I would hope not, indeed!” she cried, standing up, towering over him as
if she had added a foot to her height. She gave forth a long fiery
breath, and then asked, “Did he dare to say that?” with a heaving
breast.
“He did not say it: but my guardian thought----”
“Oh, your guardian thought! That was what your guardian would naturally
think. A man--that is always of an evil mind where women are concerned!
And what did she think?--her, his wife, the other guardian, the woman I
have seen?”
“She is not like any one else,” said young Gordon; “she will never
believe in any harm. You have given me one scene, I will give you
another. She said what Desdemona said, ‘I do not believe there was ever
any such woman’.”
“Bless her! But oh, there are--there are!” cried Miss Bethune, tears
filling her eyes, “in life as well as in men’s ill imaginations. But not
possible to her or to me!”