Necessarily, this abnormal growth of an impressionable young soul, began to speak for itself, in accents which would have caught the ready, willing ear of an attentive parent, had mine been such. In my twelfth year I was as much a woman as I am to-day, matured and hardened by an experience that would have blighted a more yielding and less obdurate spirit.
Convinced, that in point of fact, I was alone in the world, dependent upon my own resources for whatever little truant ray of sunshine I might get from the golden flood that illuminated the world outside me, and forced by rigid, arbitrary circumstances to train my growing convictions into many a hazardous channel, left to myself to grope among the dawning mysteries of life, that are a burden to age and experience even when lightened by the helping hand of a common sympathy, I ceased before long to struggle against these abstract foes that made a mockery of my childish strength and resistance.
For the first few years of my life, therefore, I had been my own care, my own and only friend, and oftentimes my own—but not only—enemy. Occasionally my father chatted with me, but that was mostly when I was in good humour, and would not let him get an insight into the secret workings of my busy little heart. But, even supposing I had, with a child's instinctive confidence in its parent, gone to him in my lonely hours, and thrown my hands convulsively about his neck, to tell my tale of trifling woes, what difference would it have made? Very little. He would have given me a silver coin or two, and told me to run away and amuse myself, that he was busy and could not spare his time for idle amusement. No one knew this better than I did; the memory of one such experiment tried in my very early youth will never leave my mind: it seemed to me that no future, however laden with compensating joys, could efface the dreary outlines which this childish experience had stamped upon my heart.
That day, when full of a pent-up sorrow I had boldly decided to seek comfort on my father's knee, is, and ever will be, a living, breathing present to me. In stifled sobs, I tried to tell my little tale of grief, and was about to bury my tear-stained face upon his shoulder, when he raised his eyes impatiently, and brushed away, with a peevish gesture, one of my salt tears that lay appealingly upon the smooth broadcloth covering of his arm: he chided me for crying so very immoderately, saying, he hated "little girls that cried," and drawing a silver piece from his pocket, he slipped it into my little trembling hand, and banished me from the room.
I never forgot this, from my dignified, gentlemanly father, although in my outward conduct there was nothing which insinuated the slightest reproach for the pain he had given me on that occasion.
When I left his cheerless presence, I remember going back to my play-room and throwing myself wearily into my little rocking-chair, where, with my face turned to the wall, I cried as if my baby-heart would break.
Here I rehearsed each feature of my bitter disappointment, and as my young spirit rose in proud and angry revolt against a fate that could wound me so undeservedly, I flung the wretched coin, with which my thoughtless parent sought to buy his ease and comfort from me, violently upon the floor.
Through my blinding tears I watched it roll quietly over the carpet and stop suddenly against the prostrate figure of a doll that lay at a little distance from where I sat. This incident changed the whole tenor of my rebellious thought; in the earlier part of the day I had dressed this doll in very fine clothes, intending to carry it to the house of a poor neighbor, who lived in the rear of my father's premises, and whose baby-girl was confined, through some hopeless deformity, to the narrow limits of an invalid chair.
Something prevented me from carrying out this generous design at the time, but the discarded coin unexpectedly revived my abandoned project, and turned my thoughts into a pleasant channel. I rose up and dried my eyes, and putting on my little sun-bonnet, gathered up the fashionable wax lady and the piece of despised money, and stealing down a quiet back-stairway, I went out on my mission of charity.
When I reached the home of my little invalid friend, I peered noiselessly in at the window, as was my custom, lest, perhaps, I should awaken her from one of her quiet slumbers, but this time she was not sleeping; she sat upright in her chair with pillows at her back, and her thin hair fell from her bowed head over the worn and dog-eared pages of her mother's prayer-book. It was her only other companion, besides her mother and me, and through many long, lonely hours she was wont to turn the leaves backward and forward, dwelling with the instinctive reverence of unsullied childhood, upon the homely and inartistic representations it contained of the beautiful Drama of the Redemption.