Charlotte Yonge - The Two Sides of the Shield

At last, however, she fell into a really calm sleep, and when she awoke, the room was full of light, but her watch had stopped; she had been too much tired to remember to wind it; and she lay a little while hearing sounds that made it clear that the world was astir, and she could see that preparations had been made for her getting up.

‘They shan’t begin by scolding me for being late,’ she thought, and she began her toilette.

Just as she came to her hair, the old nurse knocked and asked whether she wanted help.

‘Thank you, I’ve been used to dress myself,’ said Dolores, rather proudly.

‘I’ll help you now, missy, for prayers are over, and they are all gone to breakfast, only my lady said you were not to be disturbed, and Miss Mysie will be up presently again to bring you down.’

She spoke low, and in an accent that Dolores afterwards learnt was Scotch; and she was a tall, thin, bony woman, with sandy hair, who looked as if she had never been young. She brushed and plaited the dark hair in a manner that seemed to the owner more wearisome and less tender than Caroline’s fashion; and did not talk more than to inquire into the fashion of wearing it, and to say that Miss Mohun’s boxes had been sent from London, demanding the keys that they might be unpacked.

‘I can do that myself,’ said Dolores, who did not like any stranger to meddle with her things.

‘Ye could tak them oot, nae doubt, but I must sort them. It’s my lady’s orders,’ said Mrs. Halfpenny, with all the determination of the sergeant, her husband, and Dolores, with a sense of despair, and a sort of expectation that she should be deprived of all her treasures on one plea or another, gave up the keys.

Mrs. Halfpenny then observed that the frock which had been worn for the last two days on the railway, and evening and morning, needed a better brushing and setting to rights than she had had time to give it. She had better take out another. Which box were her frocks in?

Dolores expected her heartless relations to insist on her leaving off her mourning, and she knew she ought to struggle and shed tears over it; but, to tell the truth, she was a good deal tired of her hot and fusty black; and when she had followed Mrs. Halfpenny into a passage where the boxes stood uncorded; and the first dress that came to light was a pretty fresh-looking holland that had been sent home just before the accident, she exclaimed—

‘Oh, let me put that on.’

‘Bless me, miss, it has blue braid, and you in mourning for your poor mamma!’

Dolores stood abashed, but a grey alpaca, which she had always much disliked, came out next, and Mrs. Halfpenny decided that with her black ribbons that would do, though it turned out to be rather shockingly short, and to show a great display of black legs; but as the box containing the clothes in present wear had not come to hand, this must stand for the present—and besides, a voice was heard, saying, ‘Is Dora ready?’ and a young person darted up, put her arms round her neck, and kissed her before she knew what she was about. ‘Mamma said I should come because I am just your age, thirteen and a half,’ she said. ‘I’m Mysie, though my proper name is Maria Millicent.’

Dolores looked her over. She was a good deal taller than herself, and had rich-looking shining brown hair, dark brown eyes full of merriment, and a bright rosy colour, and she danced on her active feet as if she were full of perpetual life. ‘All happy and not caring,’ thought Dolores.

‘Now don’t fash Miss Mohun with your tricks. She has stood like a lamb,’ said Mrs. Halfpenny reprovingly. ‘There, we’ll not keep her to find an apron.’

‘I don’t wear pinafores,’ said Mysie, ‘but I don’t mind pretty aprons like this. ‘Why, my sisters had them for tennis, before they went out to India. Come along, Dora,’ grasping her hand.

‘My name isn’t Dora,’ said the new-comer, as they went down the passage.

‘No,’ said Mysie, in a low voice; ‘but mamma told Gill—that’s Gillian, and me, that we had better not tell anybody, because if the boys heard they might tease you so about it; for Wilfred is a tease, and there’s no stopping him when mamma isn’t there. So she said she would call you Dora, or Dolly, whichever you liked, and you are not a bit like a Dolly.’

‘They always called me Dolly,’ said Dolores; ‘and if I am not to have my name, I like that best; but I had rather have my proper name.’

‘Oh, very well,’ said Mysie; ‘it is more out of the way, only it is very long.’

By this time they had descended a long narrow flight of uncarpeted stairs, ‘the back ones,’ as Mysie explained, and had reached a slippery oak hall with high-backed chairs, and all the odds and ends of a family-garden hats, waterproofs, galoshes, bats, rackets, umbrellas, etc., ranged round, and a great white cockatoo upon a stand, who observed—‘Mysie, Cockie wants his breakfast,’ as they went by towards the door, whence proceeded a hubbub of voices and a clatter of knives and jingle of teaspoons and cups, a room that as Mysie threw open the door seemed a blaze of sunshine, pouring in at the large window, and reflected in the glass and silver. Yes, and in the bright eyes and glossy hair of the party who sat round the breakfast-table, further brightened by the fire, pleasant in the early autumn.

Eyes, as it seemed to Dolores, eyes without number were levelled on her, as Mysie led her in, saying—

‘Here’s a place by mamma; she kept it for you, between her and Uncle William.’

‘No, don’t all jump up at once and rush at her,’ said Lady Merrifield. ‘Give her a little time. Here, my dear;’ and she held out her hand and drew in the stranger to her, kissing her kindly, and placing her in a chair close to herself, as she presided over the teacups—not at the end, but at the middle of the table—while all that could be desired to eat and drink found its way at once to Dolores, who had arrived at being hungry now, and was glad to have the employment for hands and eyes, instead of feeling herself gazed at. She was not so much occupied, however, as not to perceive that Uncle William’s voice had a free, merry ring in it, such as she had never heard in his visits to her father, and that there was a great deal of fun and laughter going on over the thin sheets of an Indian letter, which Aunt Lily was reading aloud.

No one seemed to be attending to anything else, when Dolores ventured to cast a glance around and endeavour to count heads as she sat between her uncle and aunt. Two boys and a girl were opposite. Harry, who had come to meet them last night, was at one end of the table, a tall girl, but still a schoolroom girl, was at the other, and Mysie had been lost sights of on her own side of the table; also there was a very tiny girl on a high chair on the other side of her mamma. ‘Seven,’ thought Dolores with sinking heart. ‘Eight oppressors!’

They were mostly brown-eyed, well-grown creatures. One boy, at the further corner, had a cast in his eye, and was thin and wizen-looking, and when he saw her eyes on him, he made up an ugly face, which he got rid of like a flash of lightning before any one else could see it, but her heart sank all the more for it. He must be Wilfred, the teaser.

Aunt Lilias was a tall, slender woman, dressed in some kind of soft grey, with a little carnation colour at her throat, and a pretty lace cap on her still rich, abundant, dark brown hair, where diligent search could only detect a very few white threads. Her complexion was always of a soft, paly, brunette tint, and though her cheeks showed signs that she was not young, her dark, soft, long-lashed eyes and sweet-looking lips made her face full of life and freshness; and the figure and long slender hands had the kind of grace that some people call willowy, but which is perhaps more like the general air of a young birch tree, or, as Hal had once said, ‘Early pointed architecture reminded him of his mother.’