The Doctors Daughter | Page 6

ever loved? I dare say he had analysed his
amative propensity thoroughly, and knew to what extent it existed
within him, but when a man can reconcile himself to the belief that on
the "middle line of the skull, at the back part of his head, there is 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.