The Doctors Daughter | Page 6

a long projection, below which, and between two similar protuberances, is his Organ of amativeness," or that by which he learns "the lesson of life, the sad, sad lesson of loving," methinks he is not outraged by a public opinion which casts him down in disgust from the pedestal of respectable humanity, and this option I will leave to the reader, even though the subject in this instance be my own parent.
Whether his second wife, and the only Mrs. Hampden with whom we shall have to deal, was disappointed in her expectations of her husband, or not, is a something which I could only suspect, or at most, arrive at from the indications of appearances, as I am entirely ignorant of what the nature of such expectations may have been.
The domestic atmosphere of our home was apparently healthy, and untroubled by foreign or unpleasant elements; our surroundings were apparently comfortable, and the family apparently satisfied. What more could be desired? Critics complain of the indiscreet writer, who raises the thick impenetrable veil, which is supposed to screen a domestic, political or social grievance from the common eye of all three conditions. Even he who makes a little rend, with his own pen, for his own ambition's sake, is not pardoned, and so if every picture which the world holds up to view, presents a fair and brilliant surface, whose business may it be to ask in an insinuating tone, whether the other side is just as enchanting or not?
If the world insists upon calling an apparently happy home, happy in reality, then ours was indisputably so, but the world and I have long since ceased to agree upon matters of such a nature.
My father was married for some time to his second wife before any material change came into their lives. I took advantage of the interval and grew considerably, having proved a most opportune victim on many an occasion for my disappointed step-mother's ill-humour. This latter personage had contracted several real or imaginary disorders and absorbed her own soul, with all its most tender attributes, in her constant demand and need for a sympathy and solicitude which were nowhere to be found. Her husband had retired by degrees into the exclusive refuge of his scientific and literary pursuits, and lived as effectually apart from the woman he had married, as far as friendly intercourse and mutual confidence were concerned, as though they were strangers.
And yet, whenever Mrs. Hampden found herself well enough to go out, my father accompanied her with the most amiable urbanity; thus, from time to time, they appeared among the gay coterie to which they always belonged in name, looking as happy and contented as most husbands and wives do, who, for half a dozen years or so, have been trying one another's patience with more or less success.
Thus by a strange unfitness of things, will one unheeded uncared-for little life drift out by itself into an open sea of dangers and difficulties, with nothing more wholesome to distract it during the long lonely hours of many successive days, as they come and go, than its own morbid tendencies.
Necessarily, this abnormal growth of an impressionable young soul, began to speak for itself, in accents which would have caught the ready, willing ear of an attentive parent, had mine been such. In my twelfth year I was as much a woman as I am to-day, matured and hardened by an experience that would have blighted a more yielding and less obdurate spirit.
Convinced, that in point of fact, I was alone in the world, dependent upon my own resources for whatever little truant ray of sunshine I might get from the golden flood that illuminated the world outside me, and forced by rigid, arbitrary circumstances to train my growing convictions into many a hazardous channel, left to myself to grope among the dawning mysteries of life, that are a burden to age and experience even when lightened by the helping hand of a common sympathy, I ceased before long to struggle against these abstract foes that made a mockery of my childish strength and resistance.
For the first few years of my life, therefore, I had been my own care, my own and only friend, and oftentimes my own--but not only--enemy. Occasionally my father chatted with me, but that was mostly when I was in good humour, and would not let him get an insight into the secret workings of my busy little heart. But, even supposing I had, with a child's instinctive confidence in its parent, gone to him in my lonely hours, and thrown my hands convulsively about his neck, to tell my tale of trifling woes, what difference would it have made? Very little. He would have given me a silver coin or two, and told