Charlotte Yonge - The Two Sides of the Shield

‘Who has taken my jacket?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know, Miss Dollars. You’d best ask Mrs. Halfpenny.’

‘If—’ but at that moment Mysie ran in, holding the jacket in her hand. ‘I saw it in the nursery,’ she said, triumphantly. ‘Nurse had taken it to mend! Come along. Where’s your hat?’

But there was pursuit; Mrs. Halfpenny was at the door. ‘Young ladies, you are not going out of the policy in that fashion.’

‘Mamma sent us. Mamma wants us to take a note in a hurry. Only to Miss Hacket,’ pleaded Mysie, as Mrs. Halfpenny laid violent hands on her brown Holland jacket, observing—

‘My leddy never bade ye run off mair like a wild worricow than a general officer’s daughter, Miss Mysie. What’s that? Only Miss Hacket, do you say? You should respect yourself and them you come of mair than to show yourself to a blind beetle in an unbecoming way. ‘Tis well that there’s one in the house that knows what is befitting. Miss Dollars, you stand still; I must sort your necktie before you go. ‘Tis all of a wisp. Miss Mysie, you tell your mamma that I should be fain to know her pleasure about Miss Dollars’ frocks. She’ve scarce got one—coloured or mourning—that don’t want altering.’

Mrs. Halfpenny always caused Dolores such extreme astonishment and awe that she obeyed her instantly, but to be turned about and tidied by an authoritative hand was extremely disagreeable to the independent young lady. Caroline had never treated her thus, being more willing to permit untidiness than to endure her temper. She only durst, after the pair were released, remonstrate with Mysie on being termed Miss Dollars.

‘They can’t make out your name,’ said Mysie. ‘I tried to teach Lois, but nurse said she had no notion of new-fangled nonsense names.’

‘I’m sure Valetta and Primrose are worse.’

‘Ah! but Val was born at Malta, and mamma had always loved the Grand Master La Valetta so much, and had written verses about him when she was only sixteen. And Primrose was named after the first primrose mamma had seen for twelve years—the first one Val and I had ever seen.’

‘They called me Miss Mohun at home.’

‘Yes, but we can’t here, because of Aunt Jane.’

All this was chattered forth on the stairs before the two girls reached the dining-room, where Mysie committed the feeding of her pets to Val, and received the note, with fresh injunctions to come home by eleven, and bring word whether Miss Hacket and Miss Constance would both come to luncheon.

‘Oh dear!’ sighed Gillian, and there was a general groan round the table.

‘It can’t be helped, my dear.’

‘Oh no, I know it can’t,’ said Gillian, resignedly.

‘You see,’ said Mysie. ‘Yes, come along, Basto dear. You see Gill has to be—down, Basto, I say!—a young lady when.... Never mind him, Dolores, he won’t hurt. When Miss Constance Hacket and—leave her alone, Basto, I say!—and she is such a goose. Not you, Dolores, but Miss Constance.’

‘Oh that dog! I wish you would not take him.’

‘Not take dear old Basto! Why ‘tis such a treat for him to get a walk in the morning—the delight of his jolly old black heart. Isn’t he a dear old fellow? and he never hurt anybody in his life! It’s only setting off! He will quiet down in a minute; but I couldn’t disappoint him. Could I, my old man?’

Never having lived with animals nor entered into their feelings, Dolores could not understand how a dog’s pleasure could be preferred to her comfort, and felt a good deal hurt, though Basto’s antics subsided as soon as they were past the inner gate shutting in the garden from the paddock, which was let out to a farmer. Mysie, however, ran on as usual with her stream of information—

‘The Miss Hacket were sister or daughters or something to some old man who used to be clergyman here, and they are all married up but these two, and they’ve got the dearest little house you ever saw. They had a nephew in the 111th, and so they came and called on us at once. Miss Hacket is a regular old dear, but we none of us can bear Miss Constance, except that mamma says we ought to be sorry for her because she leads such a confined life. Miss Hacket and Aunt Jane always do go on so about the G.F.S. They both are branch secretaries, you know.’

‘I know! Aunt Jane did bother Mrs. Sefton so that she says she will never have another of those G.F.S. girls. She says it is a society for interference.’

‘Mamma likes it,’ said Mysie.

‘Oh! but she is only just come.’

‘Yes; but she always looked after the school children at Beechcroft before she married, and she and Alethea and Phyllis had the soldiers’ children up on Sunday. Alethea taught the little drummer boys, and they were so funny. I wonder who teaches them now! Gill always goes down to help Miss Hacket with her G.F.S. classes. She has one on Sunday afternoon, and one on Tuesday for sewing, and she is the only young lady in the place who can do plain needlework properly.’

‘Sewing-machines can work. What the use of fussing about it!’

‘They can’t mend,’ said Mysie. ‘Besides, do you know, in the American war, all the sewing-machines in the Southern States got out of order, and as all the machinery people were in the north, the poor ladies didn’t know what to do, and couldn’t work without them.’

‘Sewing-machines are a recent invention,’ said Dolores.

‘Oh! you didn’t think I meant the great old War of Independence. No, I meant the war about the slaves—secession they called it.’

‘That is not in the history of England,’ said Dolores, as if Mysie had no business to look beyond.

‘Why! of course not, when it happened in America. Papa told us about it. He read it in some paper, I think. Don’t you like learning things in that way?’

‘No. I don’t approve of irregular unsystematic knowledge.’

Dolores has heard her mother say something of this kind, and it came into her head most opportunely as a defence of her father—for she would not for the world have confessed that he did not talk to her as Sir Jasper Merrifield seemed to have done to his children. In fact she rather despised the General for so doing.

‘Oh! but it is such fun picking up things out of lesson time!’ said Mysie.

‘That is the Edge—,’ Dolores was not sure of the word Edgeworthian, so she went on to ‘system. Professor Sefton says he does not approve of harassing children with cramming them with irregular information at all sorts of times. Let play be play and lessons be lessons, he says, not mixed up together, and so Rex and Maude never learnt anything—not a letter—till they were seven years old.’

‘How stupid!’ cried Mysie.

‘Maude’s not stupid!’ cried Dolores, ‘nor the professor either! She’s my great friend.’

‘I didn’t say she was stupid,’ said Mysie, apologetically, ‘only that it must be very stupid not to be able to read till one was seven. Could you?’

‘Oh, yes. I can’t remember when I couldn’t read. But Maude used to play with a little girl who could read and talk French at five years old, and she died of water upon her brain.’

‘Dear me! Primrose can read quite well,’ said Mysie, somewhat alarmed; ‘but then,’ she went on in a reassured voice, ‘so could all of us except Jasper and Gillian, and they felt the heat so much at Gibraltar that they were quite stupid while they were there.’

This discussion brought the two girls across the paddock out into a road with a broad, neat footpath, where numerous little children were being exercised with nurses and perambulators. At first it was bordered by fields on either side, but villas soon began to spring up, and presently the girls reached what looked like a long, low ‘cottage residence,’ but was really two, with a verandah along the front, and a garden divided in the middle by a paling covered with canary nasturtium shrubs. The verandah on one side was hung with a rich purple pall of the dark clematis, on the other by a Gloire de Dijon rose. There were bright flower beds, and the dormer windows over the verandah looked like smiling eyes under their deep brows of creeper-trimmed verge-board. What London-bred Dolores saw was a sight that shocked her—a lady standing unbonnetted just beyond the verandah, talking to a girl whose black hat and jacket looked what Mysie called ‘very G.F.S.-y.’