It is true there were laborers on the estate and servants in the house; but what society could the young girl find in them?
And there was her mother, retired within the citadel of her own mysterious and selfish sorrows; but what companionship could Alma find in her?
All young girls, as they develop into womanhood, yearn from their secret souls for a more perfect sympathy than they usually meet from their own family circles. This is the real cause of romantic school-girl friendships, and, alas! too frequently of other less harmless attachments.
In large and busy households, of many sisters and brothers, this aspiration is very much modified and rendered quite endurable. But the more lonely and idle the life of a young girl is doomed to be, the more intense is this secret yearning for sympathy. And if she happens to be of a poetic temperament also, the longing of her heart becomes the monomania of her mind.
Alma, with no one to converse with, no work to do, and no visits to receive or to pay, became an aspiring dreamer of beautiful dreams, impossible to be realized in this world of stern realities; for “love, still love!” was the burden of those dreams. And even as it takes a feast to satisfy the hungry, so it would have required the whole circle of human love—father’s, mother’s, sister’s, brother’s, friend’s, and lover’s—to have satisfied the craving of Alma’s starving heart. And she had none, not one atom of love, to keep that heart from perishing!
What do physicians mean by an atrophy of the heart? We all know what an atrophy of the stomach is—simply starvation for want of food. Is not an atrophy of the heart also starvation for the lack of love? He who said, “Feed my lambs,” said also, “Love one another.” And perhaps as many are perishing in this world for lack of love as for the want of food.
Alma’s was an extreme case of this sort of starvation. And small as her experience was, she had seen, heard, and read enough to discover that her own life was very different from all other lives around her. At church, every Sunday, she saw happy family parties gathered together in their family pews. After the service, in the churchyard, she saw friends and neighbors greeting each other with affection and delight. She knew that, as the grand-daughter of the celebrated Baron Elverton, and as the heiress-apparent of his titles and estates, she was entitled to fully as much consideration as any other young lady in the county. Why did she not receive it?
From casual words and chance allusions, rather than from any detailed narrative or voluntary communication from the servants, Alma had gleaned as much of the domestic history as was known to the servants themselves. And she dreamed, wondered, and speculated upon the subject of the mystery that enveloped her family.
Her father! What was it that, on the night before her birth, had driven him in an agony of horror from his home forever?
Her mother! What was it that, from the hour of Alma’s birth, had frozen that beautiful and ardent woman into the cold, hard statue that she now seemed?