Papa's own girl: A novel

by Marie Stevens Howland

Dan declined as politely as he could. His emotions were varied, to use a mild term, at being recommended to the charity of his own father by a great nabob, who had adopted his child, and was just at that moment starting on a European tour with that child’s mother. Dan supposed, as a matter of course, that Susie had married this man. His head was in a dazed condition, as, from behind a great tree on the edge of the Common, he saw the party emerge from the house. Susie, and the child, and Linnie received the parting embraces from Clara and the doctor, who then handed them into an open carriage. The count lingered a moment at the porch, holding Clara’s hand. Susie looked more mature, and much more beautiful to Dan than ever before, and through her tears shone a radiant happiness. The count came forward, embraced the doctor, jumped into the carriage, which immediately drove off, Min throwing kisses to the doctor and Clara till it was out of sight.

Shame, regret, self-reproach, and jealousy, gnawed at Dan’s very vitals, as he stood there, a poor, forlorn wretch, witnessing a bliss that might have been his, but for his own folly. He felt strangely attracted to the beautiful child. He could feel still her little hand patting his head, and pitying his sorrow. Surely if ever there was an exemplification of poetic retribution, Dan Forest experienced it that day.

He stood supporting himself against the old tree for some time after his father and sister entered the house, and then he went to his mother. She wept over him, and accepted without question his representation of the causes of his sad condition. According to this representation, he was the innocent victim of an untoward fate. He said not a word about gambling or drinking; and as he was certainly cadaverous in appearance from his intermittent fever, as well as from hard drinking, she attributed the effect wholly to the causes he assigned. She gave him a biscuit and a glass of wine, and then made him take a warm bath, and don the clean linen she prepared for him. While they were at lunch, the doctor came in. He looked searchingly into Dan’s face as he held his trembling hand, and the quick eye of the physician read the secret of the terrible life his son had led; but he uttered no word of reproach. He sat down to the table and listened, with Mrs. Forest and Leila, to all that Dan had to say of the beauties of California, and the scenes through which he had passed, carefully omitting those in which he had played a disgraceful part, or presenting his rôle as that of a third party. Mrs. Forest thought the state of society must be dreadful in California, and wondered that her son could live in such a moral atmosphere!

On a subsequent and private examination, the doctor found Dan’s system even more shattered than he had expected, and told him he must leave off drinking, or there was no hope for him. Dan promised faithfully to follow the regimen the doctor prescribed, seemed very reasonable and grateful for his father’s kindness, and that very day, late at night, a policeman brought him home in a beastly state of intoxication.

Poor Mrs. Forest had been touched to the heart that her only son should have returned on foot, like a beggar, to the home of his youth, and she had supplied him generously with money, a fact she now regretted. Dan, in his weakness, illustrated well the truth of the old saying, in vino veritas. He was maudlin to the last degree. He raved about his “dear child,” his “beautiful Minnie”—how she looked with the dead canary in her apron pocket, and how cruelly she had been torn from his protection by that “swell, Frauenstein,” whose head he seemed very anxious to “punch,” as he declared. Mrs. Forest was disgusted beyond measure by the low words Dan used; but the doctor studied him, as the naturalist would some strange species of animal. After Dan had wept copiously over the wrong he had suffered in being robbed by the count of Susie’s love, he ordered champagne and then “cocktails” of his mother, whom he took for the mistress of an unmentionable resort; and then the doctor managed to get him upstairs and on the bed, when he removed his boots and left him.

“How awful! How awful! What shall we do with him?” exclaimed the mother, as the doctor re-entered and threw himself on the lounge.

“I don’t know, Fannie. He’s only one step from delirium tremens. He ought to go at once to an inebriate asylum.” Mrs. Forest was shocked at the idea. “It couldn’t be so bad as that. She would have a long talk with him. Doubtless he had met old friends and they had induced him to drink.”

“My dear, he is already over the bay. His nerves are shattered. He has no power to save himself. Talk to him! I should as soon expect to stop the thunder by beating a tam-tam.”

“I know. Those are your fatalist views. You don’t believe in free-will, so of course you will say he can’t save himself.”

“What is free-will? One of our greatest scientists characterizes it as the ‘lawlessness of volition.’ The will is not a faculty. It is simply the state of mind immediately preceding action, and that state is determined by motives; by circumstances and attractions which we do not create.”