The Doctors Daughter | Page 5

therefore knew nothing of the possible
consequences of the cold and unfeeling neglect with which my young
life was blighted.
And even, had anyone told her, that her every word and action were
calculated to make a deep-rooted impression upon me, she would have
shrugged her shoulders pettishly, I doubt not, and declared that it was
"not her fault," that "some people were enough to provoke a saint."
This was the woman whom the learned Doctor Hampden brought home
to conduct his household. He had found her under the gas-light at a
fashionable gathering, and was taken with her, he hardly knew why.
She was not very handsome, nor very winning, and certainly, not very
clever, but her family was a rare and tender off-shoot from an
unquestionably ancient and time-honored aristocracy, and, in
consequence, she carried her head high enough above the ordinary
social level, to have attracted a still more potent attention than Dr.
Hampden's.
I have heard that many a brow was arched in questioning surprise,
when the engagement was formally announced, and that nothing but
the ripening years of the prospective bride could have reconciled her
more sympathetic friends who belonged to that class of curious

meddlers that infest every society from pole to pole.
My father was undoubtedly a gentleman, and this was most
condescendingly admitted by his wife's fastidious coterie. A gentleman
by birth, by instinct, in dress, manners, taste, profession, and general
bearing. Moreover, he was a gentleman of social and political influence,
whose name had crept into journals and newspapers of popular fame: in
other words, he was one of "the men" of his day, with a voice upon all
public matters that agitated his immediate sphere. Wherever he went,
he was a gentleman of consequence, and carried no mean individuality
with him: he was that sort of a man one expects to find married and
settled in life, though here conjecture about him must begin and end.
There are not a few men of his stamp in the world, and the reader I
doubt not has met them as frequently as I have myself. Sometimes they
are pillars of the state, leaders of political parties, with their heads full
of abstract calculations and wonderful statistics. Again they are
scientists, of a more or less exalted standing, artists, antiquarians,
agnostics, and undertakers, and they are all harmless, respectable
Benedicts, you know it without being told. You conclude it from
instinctively suggested premises, and yet in resting at such an important
conclusion nothing could have persuaded you to halt at the every day,
half-way house of courtship.
These men impress their fellow-men with the strange belief that
matrimony was for them a pre-ordained, forechosen vocation, a thing to
be done systematically according to reasons and rules, and the trivial
mind that would fain dwell upon a time in such methodical lives, when
heart predominated over head must apologize to the world of sentiment
and pass on to some less sensitive point of consideration.
My father, as I have said, was quite a consequential individual, his very
white, and very stiff, and very shining shirt-front insinuated as much;
his satiny black broadcloth confirmed it, and even the little silk guard,
that rested consciously upon his immaculate linen, sustained the
presumption. But for those and a few other reasons, he was looked
upon as a man of rigid method and severe discipline, a man outside the
grasp of ordinary human susceptibility, or, in more familiar terms, a

man "without a heart."
I remember, on one particular occasion, when the oft-ruffled serenity of
my step-mother's temperament was wonderfully agitated, that she
reproached him most touchingly for the utter absence of this tender,
palpitating organ; and turning towards her with a smile of the blandest
amusement, he explained to her, in a tone of remonstrative sarcasm,
laying two rigid fingers of one hand argumentatively in the open palm
of the other, "that no man could live without a heart," that it was an
essential element of existence, that its professional name was derived
from the Latin cor or cordis, that it was "the great central organ of
circulation, with its base directed backward towards the spine, and its
point, forward and downward, towards the left side, and that at each
contraction it would be felt striking between the fifth and sixth ribs
about four inches from the medium line." "So you see, my dear," he
concluded calmly and coldly, "that you talk nonsense, when you say I
have no heart." That was my father's disposition; to suspect that any
one, or anything else could hope for the privilege of making his heart
beat, except this natural physical contraction, were a vain and empty
surmise indeed. And yet he had been twice married; the question may
suggest itself, had he