Grace Carden ran to the window, and saw Henry Little go away slowly,
and hanging his head. This visible dejection in her manly lover made
her heart rise to her throat, and she burst out sobbing and weeping with
alarming violence.
Mr. Carden found her in this state, and set himself to soothe her. He
told her the understanding he had come to with Mr. Little, and begged
her to be as reasonable and as patient as her lover was. But the appeal
was not successful. “He came to see me,” she cried, “and he has gone
away without seeing me. You have begun to break both our hearts, with
your reason and your prudence. One comfort, mine will break first; I
have not his fortitude. Oh, my poor Henry! He has gone away, hanging
his head, broken-hearted: that is what you have DONE for me. After that,
what are words? Air--air--and you can't feed hungry hearts with air.”
“Well, my child, I am sorry now I did not bring him in here. But I
really did it for the best. I wished to spare you further agitation.”
“Agitation!” And she opened her eyes with astonishment. “Why, it is
you who agitate me. He would have soothed me in a moment. One kind and
hopeful word from him, one tender glance of his dear eye, one pressure
of his dear hard hand, and I could have borne anything; but that drop of
comfort you denied us both. Oh, cruel! cruel!”
“Calm yourself, Grace, and remember whom you are speaking to. It was an
error in judgment, perhaps--nothing more.”
“But, then, if you know nothing about love, and its soothing power, why
meddle with it at all?”
“Grace,” said Mr. Carden, sadly, but firmly, “we poor parents are all
prepared for this. After many years of love and tenderness bestowed
on our offspring, the day is sure to come when the young thing we have
reared with so much care and tenderness will meet a person of her own
age, a STRANGER; and, in a month or two, all our love, our care, our
anxiety, our hopes, will be nothing in the balance. This wound is in
store for us all. We foresee it; we receive it; we groan under it; we
forgive it. We go patiently on, and still give our ungrateful children
the benefit of our love and our experience. I have seen in my own family
that horrible mixture, Gentility and Poverty. In our class of life,
poverty is not only poverty, it is misery, and meanness as well. My
income dies with me. My daughter and her children shall not go back to
the misery and meanness out of which I have struggled. They shall be
secured against it by law, before she marries, or she shall marry under
her father's curse.”
Then Grace was frightened, and said she should never marry under her
father's curse; but (with a fresh burst of weeping) what need was there
to send Henry away without seeing her, and letting them comfort each
other under this sudden affliction? “Ah, I was too happy this morning,”
said the poor girl. “I was singing before breakfast. Jael always told me
not to do that. Oh! oh! oh!”
Mr. Carden kept silence; but his fortitude was sorely tried.
That day Grace pleaded headache, and did not appear to dinner. Mr.
Carden dined alone, and missed her bright face sadly. He sent his love
to her, and went off to the club, not very happy. At the club he met Mr.
Coventry, and told him frankly what he had done. Mr. Coventry, to his
surprise, thanked him warmly. “She will be mine in two years,” said he.
“Little will never be able to make a settlement on her.” This remark set
Mr. Carden thinking.
Grace watched the window day after day, but Henry never came nor passed.
She went a great deal more than usual into the town, in hopes of meeting
him by the purest accident. She longed to call on Mrs. Little, but
feminine instinct withheld her; she divined that Mrs. Little must be
deeply offended.
She fretted for a sight of Henry, and for an explanation, in which
she might clear herself, and show her love, without being in the least
disobedient to her father. Now all this was too subtle to be written. So
she fretted and pined for a meeting.
While she was in this condition, and losing color every day, who should
call one day--to reconnoiter, I suppose--but Mr. Coventry.
Grace was lying on the sofa, languid and distraite, when he was
announced. She sat up directly, and her eye kindled.
Mr. Coventry came in with his usual grace and cat-like step. “Ah, Miss
Carden!”
Miss Carden rose majestically to her feet, made him a formal courtesy,
and swept out of the room, without deigning him a word. She went to the
study, and said, “Papa, here's a friend of yours--Mr. Coventry.”
“Dear me, I am very busy. I wish you would amuse him for a few minutes
till I have finished this letter.”
“Excuse me, papa; I cannot stay in the same room with Mr. Coventry.”
“Why not, pray?”
“He is a dangerous man: he compromises one. He offered me an
engagement-ring, and I refused it; yet he made you believe we were
engaged. You have taken care I shall not be compromised with the man
I love; and shall I be compromised with the man I don't care for? No,
thank you.”
“Very well, Grace,” said Mr. Carden, coldly.
Shortly after this Mr. Carden requested Dr. Amboyne to call; he received
the doctor in his study, and told him that he was beginning to be uneasy
about Grace; she was losing her appetite, her color, and her spirits.
Should he send her to the seaside?
“The seaside! I distrust conventional remedies. Let me see the patient.”
He entered the room and found her coloring a figure she had drawn: it
was a beautiful woman, with an anchor at her feet. The door was open,
and the doctor, entering softly, saw a tear fall on the work from a face
so pale and worn with pining, that he could hardly repress a start; he
did repress it though, for starts are unprofessional; he shook hands
with her in his usual way. “Sorry to hear you are indisposed, my dear
Miss Grace.” He then examined her tongue, and felt her pulse; and then
he sat down, right before her, and fixed his eyes on her. “How long have
you been unwell?”
“I am not unwell that I know of,” said Grace, a little sullenly.
“One reason I ask, I have another patient, who has been attacked
somewhat in the same way.”
Grace colored, and fixed a searching eye on the doctor. “Do I know the
lady?”
“No. For it happens to be a male patient.”
“Perhaps it is going about.”
“Possibly; this is the age of competition. Still it is hard you can't
have a little malady of this kind all to yourself; don't you think so?”
At this Grace laughed hysterically.
“Come, none of that before me,” said the doctor sternly.
She stopped directly, frightened. The doctor smiled.
Mr. Carden peeped in from his study. “When you have done with her, come
and prescribe for me. I am a little out of sorts too.” With this, he
retired. “That means you are to go and tell him what is the matter with
me,” said Grace bitterly.
“Is his curiosity unjustifiable?”
“Oh no. Poor papa!” Then she asked him dryly if he knew what was the
matter with her.
“I think I do.”
“Then cure me.” This with haughty incredulity.
“I'll try; and a man can but do his best. I'll tell you one thing: if I
can't cure you, no doctor in the world can: see how modest I am. Now for
papa.”
She let him go to the very door: and then a meek little timid voice
said, in a scarce audible murmur, “Doctor!”
Now when this meek murmur issued from a young lady who had, up to this
period of the interview, been rather cold and cutting, the sagacious
doctor smiled. “My dear?” said he, in a very gentle voice.
“Doctor! about your other patient!”
“Well?”
“Is he as bad as I am? For indeed, my dear friend, I feel--my food has
no taste--life itself no savor. I used to go singing, now I sit sighing.
Is he as bad as I am?”
“I'll tell you the truth; his malady is as strong as yours; but he
has the great advantage of being a man; and, again, of being a man of
brains. He is a worker, and an inventor; and now, instead of succumbing
tamely to his disorder, he is working double tides, and inventing with
all his might, in order to remove an obstacle between him and one he
loves with all his manly soul. A contest so noble and so perpetual
sustains and fortifies the mind. He is indomitable; only, at times, his
heart of steel will soften, and then he has fits of deep dejection
and depression, which I mourn to see; for his manly virtues, and his
likeness to one I loved deeply in my youth, have made him dear to me.”
During this Grace turned her head away, and, ere the doctor ended, her
tears were flowing freely; for to her, being a woman, this portrait of a
male struggle with sorrow was far more touching than any description
of feminine and unresisted grief could be: and, when the doctor said he
loved his patient, she stole her little hand into his in a way to melt
Old Nick, if he is a male. Ladies, forgive the unchivalrous doubt.
“Doctor,” said she, affecting all of a sudden a little air of small
sprightliness, very small, “now, do--you--think--it would do your
patient--the least good in the world--if you were to take him this?”
She handed him her work, and then she blushed divinely.
“Why, it is a figure of Hope.”
“Yes.”
“I think it might do him a great deal of good.”
“You could say I painted it for him.”
“So I will. That will do him no harm neither. Shall I say I found you
crying over it?”
“Oh, no! no! That would make him cry too, perhaps.”
“Ah, I forgot that. Grace, you are an angel.”
“Ah, no. But you can tell him I am--if you think so. That will do him no
great harm--will it?”
“Not an atom to him; but it will subject me to a pinch for stale news.
There, give me my patient's picture, and let me go.”
She kissed the little picture half-furtively, and gave it him, and let
him go; only, as he went out at the door, she murmured, “Come often.”
Now, when this artful doctor got outside the door, his face became grave
all of a sudden, for he had seen enough to give him a degree of anxiety
he had not betrayed to his interesting patient herself.
“Well, doctor?” said Mr. Carden, affecting more cheerfulness than he
felt. “Nothing there beyond your skill, I suppose?”
“Her health is declining rapidly. Pale, hollow-eyed, listless,
languid--not the same girl.”
“Is it bodily do you think, or only mental?”
“Mental as to its cause; but bodily in the result. The two things
are connected in all of us, and very closely in Miss Carden. Her
organization is fine, and, therefore, subtle. She is tuned in a high
key. Her sensibility is great; and tough folk, like you and me, must
begin by putting ourselves in her place before we prescribe for her,
otherwise our harsh hands may crush a beautiful, but too tender,
flower.”
“Good heavens!” said Carden, beginning to be seriously alarmed, “do you
mean to say you think, if this goes on, she will be in any danger?”
“Why, if it were to go on at the same rate, it would be very serious.
She must have lost a stone in weight already.”
“What, my child! my sweet Grace! Is it possible her life--”
“And do you think your daughter is not mortal like other people? The
young girls that are carried past your door to the churchyard one after
another, had they no fathers?”
At this blunt speech the father trembled from head to foot.