The Two Sides of the Shield Part 55

'But, Dolly, you are not going to a heathen country. Your confirmation will be as much attended to in New Zealand as here.'

'Oh, but I should be confirmed with Mysie, and Aunt Lily would read with me, and help me!'

'Yes, I see.'

'Do please tell him. Aunt Jane. He heeds what you say more than any one.

Do tell him that the only hope of my being good is if I stay with Aunt Lily just these few years!'

'Ah, Dolly, that is what you really mean and care about--not the Cambridge business.'

'Of course it is. Please tell him, Aunt Jane--somehow I can't--that I was bad and foolish when I wrote all the letters he had; but now I know better, and--and--I don't want to vex him, but I shall be ever so much better a daughter to him if he will leave me with Aunt Lily, to learn some of her goodness'--and there were tears in her eyes, for these months had softened her greatly.

'My poor Dolly!' said Aunt Jane, much more tenderly than she generally spoke. 'I am very sorry for you. I do think Aunt Lily has been the making of you, and that it is very hard that you should have to be uprooted from her, just as you had learnt to value her, I will tell your father so; but honestly, I do not think it is likely to make him change his mind.'

Miss Mohun sought her brother out the next day, and told him that they had all been waiting in patience when thinking that his daughter's residence at Silverton was an unsuccessful experiment. The explosion she had predicted had come, and Dolores had been a different creature ever since, owing to Lady Merrifield's management of her in the crisis; and she added that the girl was most unwilling to leave her aunt, and that she herself thought it would be much better to leave her for a few years to the advantages of her present training, where her affections had been gained. Mr. Mohun could not see it in the same light. The intimacy with Constance Hacket was in his eyes a folly, consequent on his sister's pa.s.sion for Sunday schools and charities; and Jane, being infected with the like ardour, he disregarded her explanations. The underhand correspondence could not have been carried on without great blindness and carelessness, or, at least, injudiciousness, on Lady Merrifield's part, and there was no denying that she had trusted to a sense of honour that was nonexistent. Nor did he appreciate Jane's argument that the conquest of the heart and will had thus been far more thoroughly gained than it would have been by constant thwarting and watching. It was hard to forgive such an exposure as had taken place, or to believe that it had not been brought about by unjustifiable errors, more especially as Lady Merrifield was the first to accuse herself of them. Moreover, he had become sensible of a strong natural yearning for the presence of his only child, and he had been so much struck with his sister Phyllis's family that he sincerely believed himself consulting the girl's best interests. He was by no means an irreligious or unG.o.dly man, but he had always thought his sister Lilias more or less of an enthusiast, and he did not wish to see Dolores the same. Perhaps, indeed, the poor child's manifest clinging to her aunt and cousins made him all the more resolute to remove her before her affection should be entirely weaned from himself.

He made his headquarters at Silverton, and during the next two months modified his opinions so far as to confess to his sister Jane that Lilias was a much more sensible woman than he had believed her, and had her children well in hand. He even allowed that Dolores was improved, and owed much to her kindness; and when the first sting of the exposure was over, he could see that the treatment had been far from injudicious as regarded the girl's own character. He was even glad that warm love and friends.h.i.+p had grown up towards her aunt and cousins; but all this left his purpose unchanged; although, after the first, nothing was said about it, Dolores tried to forget it, and hoped that the sight of her going on well and peaceably would convince him of the inexpediency of disturbing her. She could not even mention it to Mysie, lest the dread should become a reality by being uttered. So no more pa.s.sed on the subject till it became necessary to take her outfit in hand, and he also wished to take her to Beechcroft, that the old family home which he regarded with fresh tenderness might be impressed on her memory.

Then, though she never durst directly oppose the fate which he destined for her, she surprised him by a violent burst of tears and sobbing, and an entreaty that he would not take her away from Aunt Lily and Mysie a moment sooner than could be helped.

She clung to everything, even to the guinea-pigs, and she was the first in the Easter holidays to beg for the 'Thorn Fortress.' Indeed, Mysie was a little shocked at her grief, as disloyal and unfilial. 'One ought not to mind going anywhere with one's father,' she said; 'we all thought it a great honour for Phyllis and Alethea.'

'They are grown up!' said Dolores, 'and Aunt Lily does get into one so!

Oh, don't say there's Aunt Phyllis. I hate the very name of her.'

'She must be nice,' said Mysie, 'Whenever the 'grown-ups' are pleased with me they say I am getting like her, as if it was the best thing one could be.'

'But I don't want Mysie old and grown up, I want my Mysie now, as you are!--And you'll forget and leave off writing, like Maude Sefton.'

'Never!' cried Mysie. 'Eight across the world you will always be my own twin cousin.'

The wishes of the girl were so far fulfilled that Lady Merrifield took her to London to provide her outfit, and Mysie accompanied them. A room and its dressing-room received the three at old Mrs. Merrifield's, and the two cousins thought their close quarters ineffably precious.

Mysie was introduced to Maude Sefton, who seemed entirely unconscious of her treachery to friends.h.i.+p. 'One had so little time, and couldn't always be writing,' she said, when Dolores reproached her; 'exercises were enough to tire out one's hand!'

They also drank tea with Lady Phyllis Devereux and her governess. Fly could not pour forth questions and reminiscences fast enough about all the beloved animals at Silverton, not forgetting the little G.F.S.

nursemaid, for whom she had actually made an ap.r.o.n in her plain-work lessons. Moreover, she deemed Dolores's fate most enviable, to be going off with her father to strange countries, away from lessons, and masters, and towns. It would be almost as good as Leila on the island.

As to the Beechcroft visit, Mr. and Mrs. Mohun collected all the brothers and sisters in England there for a week, and still Mysie and Dolores were allowed to be together, squeezed into a corner of Lady Merrifield's room. It was high summer, bright and glowing, and so dry, and even the invalidish sisters, Lady Henry Gray and Miss Adeline Mohun could not object to the sitting out on the lawn, among the dragonflies, as in days of yore.

Much of old thought and feeling was then and there taken up again, and it was on one of the last evenings of the visit that Mr. Mohun, walking up and down the alley with Lady Merrifield, said--

'Well, Lily, I think my determination to take Dolly away was hasty. I cannot leave her now, but if I had understood all that I see at present, I should have been both content and grateful to have her among your children. I am afraid I have been ungracious.'

'I never thought so, Maurice. It is quite right that she should be with you, and Phyllis will do every-thing for her much better than I.'

'Poor child! I believe she is very sorry to go,' said Mr. Mohun; 'but, at any rate, she will remember Silverton as, I hope, a lasting influence on her life.'

Dolores truly believed that so it would be, and that her aunt's guidance would be always looked back upon as the turning-point of her life.

'It is my own fault,' she said, as on the last night she clung tearfully to Lady Merrifield; 'if I had behaved better I might have gone on just like one of your own.'

'You will still be in my heart like one of my own, dear child,' said Lady Merrifield. 'We know the way in which we all can hold together as one; keep to that, and the distance apart will matter the less.'

And as they watched Dolores and her father driven away to the station the next morning, Jane Mohun laid her hand on her sister's arm and said, 'You thought you had made a great failure. Lily, but is not the other side of a failure often a success?'

By-and-by came letters from Dolores. She seemed after the first to have enjoyed her journey, for, as she wrote to Lady Merrifield, in a letter, very private, and all to her own self, 'Father was so very good and kind to me, I don't know how to tell you. It was as if a little bit of mother had got into him, and now I am here I think I shall like the Mays.

Indeed, I am trying to remember your advice, and not beginning by hating everybody and thinking who they are not. Aunt Phyllis is very nice indeed, and sometimes her eyes and mouth get like Mysie's, and her voice is just exactly yours. Only she is plump and roundabout, not a dear, tall, graceful figure like my White Lily Aunt. Please don't call it nonsense, for indeed I mean it, and Aunt Phyllis does like your photograph so much. I have the whole group hung up in my room, and you over it, and I wish you all good morning every day, for I never, never, as long as I live, shall love anybody like you and Mysie.'

THE END.