The Doctors Daughter | Page 7

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 me to run away and
amuse myself, that he was busy and could not spare his time for idle
amusement. No one knew this better than I did; the memory of one
such experiment tried in my very early youth will never leave my mind:
it seemed to me that no future, however laden with compensating joys,
could efface the dreary outlines which this childish experience had
stamped upon my heart.
That day, when full of a pent-up sorrow I had boldly decided to seek

comfort on my father's knee, is, and ever will be, a living, breathing
present to me. In stifled sobs, I tried to tell my little tale of grief, and
was about to bury my tear-stained face upon his shoulder, when he
raised his eyes impatiently, and brushed away, with a peevish gesture,
one of my salt tears that lay appealingly upon the smooth broadcloth
covering of his arm: he chided me for crying so very immoderately,
saying, he hated "little girls that cried," and drawing a silver piece from
his pocket, he slipped it into my little trembling hand, and banished me
from the room.
I never forgot this, from my dignified, gentlemanly father, although in
my outward conduct there was nothing which insinuated the slightest
reproach for the pain he had given me on that occasion.
When I left his cheerless presence, I remember going back to my
play-room and throwing myself wearily into my little rocking-chair,
where, with my face turned to the wall, I cried as if my baby-heart
would break.
Here I rehearsed each feature of my bitter disappointment, and as my
young spirit rose in proud and angry revolt against a fate that could
wound me so undeservedly, I flung the wretched coin, with which my
thoughtless parent sought to buy his ease and comfort from me,
violently upon the floor.
Through my blinding tears I watched it roll quietly over the carpet and
stop suddenly against the prostrate figure of a doll that lay at a little
distance from where I sat. This incident changed the whole tenor of my
rebellious thought; in the earlier part of the day I had dressed this doll
in very fine clothes, intending to carry it to the house of a poor
neighbor, who lived in the rear of my father's premises, and whose
baby-girl was confined, through some hopeless deformity, to the
narrow limits of an invalid chair.
Something prevented me from carrying out this generous design at the
time, but the discarded coin unexpectedly revived my abandoned
project, and turned my thoughts into a pleasant channel. I rose up and
dried my eyes, and putting on my little sun-bonnet, gathered up the

fashionable wax lady and the piece of despised money, and stealing
down a quiet back-stairway, I went out on my mission of charity.
When I reached the home of my little invalid friend, I peered
noiselessly in at the window, as was my custom, lest, perhaps, I should
awaken her from one of her quiet slumbers, but this time she was not
sleeping; she sat upright in her chair with pillows at her back, and her
thin hair fell from her bowed head over the worn and dog-eared pages
of her mother's prayer-book. It was her only other companion, besides
her mother and me, and through many long, lonely hours she was wont
to turn the leaves backward and forward, dwelling with the instinctive
reverence of unsullied childhood, upon the homely and inartistic
representations it contained of the beautiful Drama of the Redemption.
Such things, though seemingly trifling to relate, at this remote period,
when the sinful and foolish vanities of the world have crowded
themselves in between me and my cherished memories of that holy
epoch, I now regard as the true and unmistakeable key-note of my after
life.
For, was it not to little Ella Wray I first assumed the attitude of the
worldling: subscribing to the laws and exigencies of conventionality
before I had suspected the existence of such an influence? When she
praised me, and thanked me, and urged me to be grateful to the kind
Father who had willed my surroundings to be those of comfort and
prosperity, what did I do? Good reader! I smiled half consciously, and
thus sanctioned her belief in my domestic happiness. I veiled the
sorrow that dwelt in my young heart with the shadows of a borrowed
playfulness, and I sullied the baby innocence of