“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.”