The doctor looked grave.
"That's a bad history, certainly. Do you know how the father's malady started?"
"Why, yes. It was the effect of a wound in the head received when he was a young man out in America, in the war with Mexico in '46."
"That isn't the sort of mania that is likely to come down from father to son," said the doctor, "if his brain was perfectly sound before, and the recurrent mania the result of an accident."
"Well, so I've understood. And the matter has never troubled me at all until lately, when I have begun to detect certain morbid tendencies in Dudley, and a general change which makes me hesitate to trust him with the happiness of my daughter."
"Can you give me instances?" asked the doctor, although he began to feel sure that whatever opinion he might express on the matter, Mr. Wedmore would pay little attention to any but his own.
"Well, for you to understand the case, I must tell you a little more about the lad's father. He and I were very old friends—chums from boyhood, in fact. When he came back from America—where he went from a lad's love of adventure—he made a good marriage from a monetary point of view; married a wharf on the Thames, in fact, somewhere Limehouse way, and settled down as a wharfinger. He was a steady fellow, and did very well, until one fine morning he was found trying to cut his throat, and had to be locked up. Well, he was soon out again that time, and things went on straight enough for eight or nine years, by which time he had done very well—made a lot of money by speculation—and was thinking of retiring from business altogether. Then, perhaps it was the extra pressure of his increased business, but, at any rate, he broke out again, tried to murder his wife that time, and did, in fact, injure her so much that she died shortly afterward. Of course, he had to be shut up again; and a man named Edward Jacobs, a shrewd Jew, who was his confidential clerk, carried on the business in his absence. Now, both Horne and his wife had had the fullest confidence in this Jacobs, but he turned out all wrong. As soon as he learned, at the end of about twelve months, that Horne was coming out again, he decamped with everything he could lay his hands on; and from the position of affairs you may guess that he made a very good haul. Well, poor Horne found himself in a maze of difficulties; in fact, his clerk's fraud ruined him. Everything that could be sold or mortgaged had to go to the settlement, and when his affairs had been finally put straight, there was only a little bit left, that had been so settled upon his wife that no one could touch it. He made a good fight of it for a little while, with the help of a few old friends, but, in the end, he broke down again for the third time. But he escaped out of the asylum and went abroad, without seeing his friends or his child, and a few months afterward the announcement of his death in an American asylum was sent by a correspondent out there. Happily there were no difficulties about securing the mother's money for the son, and it was enough to educate the boy and to give him a start; but, of course, he had to begin the world as a poor man instead of a rich one. Perhaps that was all the better for him—or so I thought until lately."
"And what are these signs of a morbid tendency that you spoke of?" asked the doctor.
"Well, in the first place, after being almost extravagant in his devotion to my daughter, Doreen, he now neglects her outrageously—comes down very seldom, writes short letters or none. Now, my daughter is not the sort of girl that a sane man would neglect," added Doctor Wedmore, proudly.
"Certainly not," assented the doctor, inwardly thinking that it was much less surprising than it would have been in the case of one of his own girls.