There are not a few men of his stamp in the world, and the reader I doubt not has met them as frequently as I have myself. Sometimes they are pillars of the state, leaders of political parties, with their heads full of abstract calculations and wonderful statistics. Again they are scientists, of a more or less exalted standing, artists, antiquarians, agnostics, and undertakers, and they are all harmless, respectable Benedicts, you know it without being told. You conclude it from instinctively suggested premises, and yet in resting at such an important conclusion nothing could have persuaded you to halt at the every day, half-way house of courtship.
These men impress their fellow-men with the strange belief that matrimony was for them a pre-ordained, forechosen vocation, a thing to be done systematically according to reasons and rules, and the trivial mind that would fain dwell upon a time in such methodical lives, when heart predominated over head must apologize to the world of sentiment and pass on to some less sensitive point of consideration.
My father, as I have said, was quite a consequential individual, his very white, and very stiff, and very shining shirt-front insinuated as much; his satiny black broadcloth confirmed it, and even the little silk guard, that rested consciously upon his immaculate linen, sustained the presumption. But for those and a few other reasons, he was looked upon as a man of rigid method and severe discipline, a man outside the grasp of ordinary human susceptibility, or, in more familiar terms, a man "without a heart."
I remember, on one particular occasion, when the oft-ruffled serenity of my step-mother's temperament was wonderfully agitated, that she reproached him most touchingly for the utter absence of this tender, palpitating organ; and turning towards her with a smile of the blandest amusement, he explained to her, in a tone of remonstrative sarcasm, laying two rigid fingers of one hand argumentatively in the open palm of the other, "that no man could live without a heart," that it was an essential element of existence, that its professional name was derived from the Latin cor or cordis, that it was "the great central organ of circulation, with its base directed backward towards the spine, and its point, forward and downward, towards the left side, and that at each contraction it would be felt striking between the fifth and sixth ribs about four inches from the medium line." "So you see, my dear," he concluded calmly and coldly, "that you talk nonsense, when you say I have no heart." That was my father's disposition; to suspect that any one, or anything else could hope for the privilege of making his heart beat, except this natural physical contraction, were a vain and empty surmise indeed. And yet he had been twice married; the question may suggest itself, had he ever loved? I dare say he had analysed his amative propensity thoroughly, and knew to what extent it existed within him, but when a man can reconcile himself to the belief that on the "middle line of the skull, at the back part of his head, there is a long projection, below which, and between two similar protuberances, is his Organ of amativeness," or that by which he learns "the lesson of life, the sad, sad lesson of loving," methinks he is not outraged by a public opinion which casts him down in disgust from the pedestal of respectable humanity, and this option I will leave to the reader, even though the subject in this instance be my own parent.
Whether his second wife, and the only Mrs. Hampden with whom we shall have to deal, was disappointed in her expectations of her husband, or not, is a something which I could only suspect, or at most, arrive at from the indications of appearances, as I am entirely ignorant of what the nature of such expectations may have been.
The domestic atmosphere of our home was apparently healthy, and untroubled by foreign or unpleasant elements; our surroundings were apparently comfortable, and the family apparently satisfied. What more could be desired? Critics complain of the indiscreet writer, who raises the thick impenetrable veil, which is supposed to screen a domestic, political or social grievance from the common eye of all three conditions. Even he who makes a little rend, with his own pen, for his own ambition's sake, is not pardoned, and so if every picture which the world holds up to view, presents a fair and brilliant surface, whose business may it be to ask in an insinuating tone, whether the other side is just as enchanting or not?
If the world insists upon calling an apparently happy home, happy in reality, then ours was indisputably so, but the world and I have long since ceased to agree upon matters of such a nature.
My father was married for some time to his second wife before any material change came into their lives. I took advantage of the interval and grew considerably, having proved a most opportune victim on many an occasion for my disappointed step-mother's ill-humour. This latter personage had contracted several real or imaginary disorders and absorbed her own soul, with all its most tender attributes, in her constant demand and need for a sympathy and solicitude which were nowhere to be found. Her husband had retired by degrees into the exclusive refuge of his scientific and literary pursuits, and lived as effectually apart from the woman he had married, as far as friendly intercourse and mutual confidence were concerned, as though they were strangers.
And yet, whenever Mrs. Hampden found herself well enough to go out, my father accompanied her with the most amiable urbanity; thus, from time to time, they appeared among the gay coterie to which they always belonged in name, looking as happy and contented as most husbands and wives do, who, for half a dozen years or so, have been trying one another's patience with more or less success.
Thus by a strange unfitness of things, will one unheeded uncared-for little life drift out by itself into an open sea of dangers and difficulties, with nothing more wholesome to distract it during the long lonely hours of many successive days, as they come and go, than its own morbid tendencies.