Papa's own girl: A novel

by Marie Stevens Howland

“Oh, I have got such a fearful pain in my diaphragm!” Miss Marston laughed, not fully comprehending the malice of the young minx, but the rest were very grave. Leila was impatient over mysteries, and clearly there was something in the air on this particular morning, so she soon began to probe the silence.

“I declare this breakfast is as solemn as a Quaker funeral,” she said; and as no one made any remark, she asked where Susie was.

“She is quite ill this morning, my dear,” answered the doctor; “quite ill. I hope you and Linnie will try to take her place until she is better.”

“I will, papa,” replied Linnie; “and I will help nurse her too, for I think Susie is really nice.” Then there was silence again until Leila exclaimed, “Dear me! They say everybody have their skeleton closet. I thought we were an exception, as we keep ours right out fairly in the light. Why, it’s an age since I saw him. I must go up in the garret and give the old darling a ‘gyrate,’ as we used to say. Do you remember, Clara?”

“I remember many things,” replied Clara, with a dignity that was perhaps a little sophomorical.

“O, do we? How antique we are getting.”

“Yes; I remember, for example, that there is a certain young lady who will probably go on repeating a certain grammatical solecism until she is gray,” answered Clara, alluding to Leila’s “everybody have.” Leila made an indiscriminate onslaught upon grammars generally, during which the doctor was called away to his patients, and the breakfast ended.

During the day Mrs. Forest, and subsequently Clara, visited Susie’s room; but in both cases Susie seemed disturbed, and disinclined to enter upon the details of her illness, and declared she wanted nothing. She thanked them for their kindness, and once, upon some gentle word from Mrs. Forest, she hid her eyes, which had filled with tears. Dinah was the only welcome presence to the poor girl during that long, sad day, and for obvious reasons.

Early in the evening Dr. Delano called, and made himself very agreeable to all the ladies, and especially so to Clara, a little later, when they had a long tête-a-tête on the old south-facing veranda. The sunset had been magnificent, and as Dr. Delano was quite seriously enamoured with Clara, he was gay, poetic, appreciative—everything that could charm her—but she could say little in reply to his fervid eloquence, for she had the disadvantage of being immeasurably in love, and consequently felt a certain awkwardness, a triumph to Dr. Delano, growing sweeter and sweeter every hour. It was her first romance. It was his—well, not his first, certainly. That was an early attachment to Ella Wills, his father’s ward, and this night he told Clara the story of that romance, showing her, of course, beyond a shadow of doubt, that that was a very insignificant passion—“as water unto wine,” was the way he characterized it—comparing it to his present deeper and dearer love. Do not lovers, not always, but very generally, tell this same old fib? The truth was, he had adored Ella with all a boy’s enthusiasm, and she had flirted with him persistently—“outrageously,” Miss Charlotte Delano, the doctor’s sister, declared—and had escaped heart-free herself. So when he came to tell her in words that his heart was under her feet, she affected the most innocent surprise, and hoped she had not led him to suppose, etc., etc. In the end she somehow won his respect, for he did not curse her, as rejected lovers do, at least in most novels. She wept very lavishly, for she meant to keep him in reserve, and marry him finally, if no more brilliant offer occurred, or if ever in danger of becoming an old maid—that terror of women who have no serious object in life. When Dr. Delano first began to mention Clara in his letters to his sister Charlotte, which he did once as “the noblest and sweetest of mortal women,” Ella felt personally affronted, and commenced at once to speculate on the chances of winning him back, not once asking herself if this “noblest and sweetest woman” had not already acquired rights over the heart once so lightly rejected. She had not seen him since his return from Europe, where he had spent three years in completing his medical education.

Ella always played the kitten, though she was no longer a child, and a very Methuselah, if age could be numbered by her conquests. She had no heart to speak of, and less conscience, but she impressed every male creature with a sense of childish, artless innocence. She was a brunette, petite, with dark short ringlets about her small head, a peach bloom on her cheeks, and a babyish, pouting mouth, whose sweetness Albert Delano had found difficult to forget, or even to recall without regret, until he had found in Clara something infinitely superior to the sweetness and prettiness that had so charmed him in earlier days. This something he hardly comprehended, though he owned its power to a certain extent. It was soul, for want of a better name—a moral sweetness, a divine, emotional sensitiveness, and a straightforward honesty of purpose, that made you conscious, last of all, that she was beautiful in person and exceedingly graceful in every movement.