I was thunderstruck. Never for an instant had I suspected that there was more between them than such commonplace, matter-of-fact friendship as may exist between a medical man and those whom he attends. Mr. Stanford was the doctor one of the servants had run for when my father died. He had attended us during the preceding year, and he had prescribed for mother and me since, so that at this date we had known him six years. He was a widower and childless, and lived within ten minutes’ walk of our house. Occasionally he had looked in upon us, and sat during an evening for an hour or so; sometimes he had dined with us and we with him; but never had I observed any sort of behaviour in him or mother to hint at what was coming—at what, indeed, had now come.
I should be needlessly detaining you from my own story to repeat all that passed between my mother and me on this occasion. I was beside myself with anger, mortification, jealousy—for I was jealous of my father’s memory, abhorred the thought of his place being taken in his own house and in the affection of the wife whom he had loved, by such a man as Mr. Stanford. Nay, but it would have been all the same had Mr. Stanford been the greatest nobleman or the first character in Europe. I should have abominated him as an intruder, and have yearned for the hands of a man to toss him out o’ window should he dare to occupy a house in which my father was as real a presence to my heart as though he were still alive and could kiss me and make me presents and carry me away out of the gloomy streets into the shining holiday road of the river.
My mother reproached me, and pleaded and wept. The weakness of her poor heart, God rest her, was very visible at this time. She clung to me and held me to her, imploring me, as her only child, to consider how lonely she was, how sadly she stood in need of a protector, how good it would be for us both to have Mr. Stanford to watch over us! I broke away from her with a wet scarlet face and heaving bosom, and told her that if Mr. Stanford took my father’s place I would cease to love or even to think of her as my mother. We both cried bitterly, and raised our voices and talked together as most women would at such a moment, not knowing what each other said. I do not condemn myself. I look back and hold that I was right to stand up for the memory of my beloved father, even to rage as I did against my mother’s resolution to marry Mr. Stanford. I wondered at her; indeed, I was shocked. I was young and ardent and romantic, had a girl’s notions of the loyalty of love and the obligations of keeping sacred the memory and the place of one who had been faithful and tender, who had nobly done his duty to his wife and child.
CHAPTER III
HER MOTHER DIES
At the age of seventeen I considered myself qualified to form a judgment of men, and I was amazed and indeed disgusted that my mother should see anything in Mr. Stanford to please her. He and my father were at the opposite ends of the sex, as far removed as the bows from the stern of a ship. He was a spare and narrow man, pale as veal, in complexion sandy, the expression of his countenance hard and acid, his eyes large and moist and the larger and moister for the magnifying spectacles he wore. But my mother would have her way, and a week after she had given me the news of the doctor’s offer they were privately married.
My life from this date was one of constant and secret unhappiness. I could never answer Mr. Stanford with any approach to civility without a violent effort. He strove at first to make friends with me, then gave up and took no more heed of me than had I been a shadow at the table or about the house. Yet, sometimes, I would make him pretty rudely and severely feel that he was an intruder, an abomination in my sight, a scandalous illustration of my mother’s weakness of nature; and that was if ever he opened his lips about my father. I never suffered him to mention my father’s name in my presence. He might be about to speak intending to praise, designing every manner of civility toward the memory of the dead; I minded him not; if he named my father I insulted him, and on two or three occasions forced him to quit the table, so strong and fiery was the injurious language I plied him with. My mother wept, threatened to swoon, did swoon once, and our home promised to become as wretched and clamorous as a lunatic asylum.
As an example of my hatred, not so much of the man as of his assumption of my father’s place: he brought his door-plate and his lamp from his house, and when I saw his plate upon the door that my father used to go in and out of I ran to a carpenter who lived a few streets off, brought him back with his tools, and ordered him to remove the plate, which I threw into the kitchen sink for the cook to find and report to her master.
Well, at the end of ten months, my mother died in childbed. The infant lived. It was a girl. My mother died; and when I went to her bedside and viewed her dead face, sweet in its everlasting sleep, for the look and wear of ten or fifteen years seemed to have been brushed off her countenance by the hand of death, I thought to myself: if she has gone to meet father, how will she excuse herself for her disloyalty? And then the little new-born babe that was in the next room began to cry, and I came away from that death-bed with tearless eyes and sat in my bedroom, thinking without weeping.