I do not deny that the cradle in which I passed the first hours of comfort and ease I have ever known, was rocked by a hand as loving as that which rested caressingly upon the royal brow of the baby Victoria. From the very first I was a peculiarly situated child, surrounded by many comforts of which the majority of well-born children are deprived, and deprived of many comforts by which lowly-born children are surrounded. I was happiest when I was too young to distinguish between pleasure and pain, and, as it were to provide for the emptiness of much of my after life, destiny willed that my memory should be the strongest and most comforting faculty of my soul.
My mother died when I was but a few days old, and thus it is that I have never known the real love or care of a true parent. Before I had celebrated my third birthday there was another Mrs. Hampden presiding over our household, but she was not my mother. This I never learned as a direct fact, in simple words, until I had grown older; but there is another channel through which truths of this sorrowful nature oftentimes find their way: strange suspicions were creeping by degrees into my heart, which with time gained great headway, and resolved themselves into a questioning doubt, whether there had not been a day when another, and a kinder face bent over my little cot, and smiled upon me with a sweetness that did not chill and estrange me from it.
I had never been told in simple words, that my own mother lay under one of those tall silent tombstones in the graveyard, where old Hannah, our tried and trustworthy servant, was wont to go at times and pray. No one had whispered to me that my father's second wife was, by right, a stranger to the most sacred affections of my young soul, but I learned the truth by myself.
When my growing heart began to seek and ask for the tender, patient solicitude, which is to the child what the light and heat of the summer sun are to the frailest tendril, no answer came to my mute appeal. My little weaknesses and childish errors were never met with that enduring forbearance which is the distinctive outgrowth of a loving maternity. My trifling joys were rarely smiled upon, my petty sorrows never shared nor soothed by that unsympathetic guardian of my youth, and so I grew up by myself in a strange sort of isolation, alienated in heart and spirit from those with whom of necessity I came in daily contact.
And yet in many ways, my fathers' wife bestowed both care and consideration upon me. My physical necessities were ever becomingly attended to. I was allowed to sit at the table with her, which privilege suggested no lack of substantial and dainty provisions, and my governess was an accomplished and very discreet lady, whom my step-mother secured after much trouble and worry; but here the limit was drawn to her self-imposed duties; having done this much she rested satisfied that she had so far outstepped the obligations of her neutral position.
When I look back upon this period from the observatory of to-day, I can afford to be more impartial in my judgments than I was in my youth and immaturity. I know now, that my father's second wife was naturally one of those selfish, narrow-hearted women, who never go outside of their personal lot to taste or give pleasure. She had not the faintest conception of what the cravings or desires of a truly sensitive nature may be, and therefore knew nothing of the possible consequences of the cold and unfeeling neglect with which my young life was blighted.
And even, had anyone told her, that her every word and action were calculated to make a deep-rooted impression upon me, she would have shrugged her shoulders pettishly, I doubt not, and declared that it was "not her fault," that "some people were enough to provoke a saint."
This was the woman whom the learned Doctor Hampden brought home to conduct his household. He had found her under the gas-light at a fashionable gathering, and was taken with her, he hardly knew why. She was not very handsome, nor very winning, and certainly, not very clever, but her family was a rare and tender off-shoot from an unquestionably ancient and time-honored aristocracy, and, in consequence, she carried her head high enough above the ordinary social level, to have attracted a still more potent attention than Dr. Hampden's.
I have heard that many a brow was arched in questioning surprise, when the engagement was formally announced, and that nothing but the ripening years of the prospective bride could have reconciled her more sympathetic friends who belonged to that class of curious meddlers that infest every society from pole to pole.
My father was undoubtedly a gentleman, and this was most condescendingly admitted by his wife's fastidious coterie. A gentleman by birth, by instinct, in dress, manners, taste, profession, and general bearing. Moreover, he was a gentleman of social and political influence, whose name had crept into journals and newspapers of popular fame: in other words, he was one of "the men" of his day, with a voice upon all public matters that agitated his immediate sphere. Wherever he went, he was a gentleman of consequence, and carried no mean individuality with him: he was that sort of a man one expects to find married and settled in life, though here conjecture about him must begin and end.