Papa's own girl: A novel

As Mrs. Buzzell was watering her house plants, a few days after the visit of the doctor’s wife, a letter arrived for her, and her eyes brightened, seeing the doctor’s handwriting in the superscription. She was very familiar with this handwriting, not from letters, indeed—nothing so romantic, but from his manifold medical prescriptions for her dyspepsia. There was no person in the world she esteemed so highly as she did Dr. Forest, and receiving a letter from him was a rare delight; yet she did not open it at once, but kept on tending her plants, which occupied a large table before the south window of her sitting-room. She did not open it hastily, probably for the same reason that has led many of us on receiving several letters, to leave the specially coveted one until the last, or perhaps until we were quite at ease and alone. At all events, Mrs. Buzzell waited until the flowers were all watered, and the stray drops of water fallen on the square of oiled cloth beneath the table carefully wiped up. Then she sat down, put on her gold-bowed spectacles, opened her letter, and read:

“My dear Mrs. Buzzell: I have wormed out of my wife this evening the object and the result of her late visit to you. I can quite understand, as I told her, why you should have refused her request.

“Now, you two women have danced in pint-pots all your lives, but with this difference: you, because the tether of your education and surroundings never permitted you to examine principles and motives of action outside of a given circumference; she, because the pint-pot fits her like a glove, and she measures the harmony of the spheres by this beautiful fit. She has never tried to breathe the broader, freer atmosphere outside, because her theory is, the pint-pot first and the universe afterward.

“By the pint-pot you know I mean society. Mrs. Forest sees plainly that no devotee of conventional morality can stand by a girl, especially one who is poor and humble in social position, and give her moral support through disgrace, without being ‘talked about’—that bugbear of little souls. Fools will say it is countenancing vice. I appeal to you because, from many sentiments I have heard you utter, I believe you capable of defying shallow criticism when you know you are right. I know you have broad and generous impulses, and you are young enough in soul and in body [this was a Bismarckian stroke of diplomacy, but the honest doctor never knew it] to obey them. You are the mother of no human child, but childless women should be the mothers of the world—sad for all its sorrows, glad for all its joys.

“Susie Dykes has more heart and brain than nine-tenths of the women I know, and if we treat her right fraternally—as I intend to do even if every one else abandons her—she will come out all right. She has not fallen yet; for she respects herself, despite this misfortune. I can say truly that I take pleasure in keeping this victim’s head above the muddy swash of conventional virtue that would wash her under.

“Will you be my real friend, and stand by me in this work? There is nothing like a good woman’s heart where such help is needed.”

The letter was well calculated to effect its purpose. There is nothing like faith in the justice and generosity of human nature, to call these qualities into action, even in the narrowest hearts. The doctor’s faith in Mrs. Buzzell made her feel equal to facing martyrdom; and then she was very proud of his appealing to her to stand by him when his own wife failed him; so without delay she put on her old gloves and her antique bonnet, shut her cat out of the house lest he should worry her canaries, and marched straight over to Dr. Forest’s, and called for Susie Dykes, without the slightest mention of the mistress of the family. Susie came down to meet her with wondering eyes. What could it mean that the staid and dignified Mrs. Buzzell should so honor her? She soon learned the object of Mrs. Buzzell’s call, and that very night, having packed all her worldly goods in two paper boxes and a bundle, she slept under the roof of her new friend.

The fact of Susie’s condition soon leaked out, and the “muddy swash,” as the doctor termed it, began to rise threateningly. Clara nobly sustained her, went every day and heard her lessons, as she had resolved to do, for having once decided upon the right course, she was indeed her father’s own girl, and there was no thought of turning back. Susie’s prompt response to Clara’s kindness, touched her heart, and gradually the friendship for her protégée grew into a deep and sincere affection, nourished by the best feelings of both.

In the plants of Mrs. Buzzell’s sitting-room, in her garden, and in the woods behind her house, there was ample means for botanizing, though at first it was a hard task for Susie to study. The mental effort required to distinguish the monocotyledonous and the dicotyledonous in the specimens she and Clara gathered, seemed a mockery to her over-burdened soul; but the struggle paid well. In a few weeks she became deeply interested in all her studies, and her rapid progress astonished her little circle of friends. Meanwhile, she carefully tended Mrs. Buzzell’s plants, which after a time began to respond to the knowledge she had acquired of their nature and different wants, and day by day she took some new responsibility of household cares from Mrs. Buzzell, who, after a month, could not have been induced to part with Susie. She took the whole charge of the wardrobe of the coming waif, and the hard lines about her mouth softened with the new, strange pleasure in the work that awakened memories of nearly forty years before, when, as a young wife, she had once, with loving care, prepared numerous tiny articles for a baby that never wore them. They had lain ever since, packed away in camphor, and no one had ever known the secret but her husband, now dead many years. Many times she had been tempted to give them to this or that friend, but her generosity could not quite overcome a sense of shame that women always experience over a useless work of this kind; yet she dreaded to have them found after her death, and there was a soft spot somewhere in her old heart, that would not let her destroy them. One day, therefore, with many misgivings, she unpacked with Susie the antique, camphor-scented trunk, and told the little history of her early married years, delighted only that Susie did not laugh at her. The idea of the serious little Susie laughing at any human disappointment, was simply absurd. She only said:

“It was too bad, when you were married to one you loved, and the baby would have been so welcome.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Buzzell, kindly, “we’ll make this baby welcome in spite of everything. We can’t understand all God’s ways; and who knows but this may be a trial that will lead you nearer to Him who judges hearts not as men judge, but as one who made them, and knows all their secret springs?”

This little experience, which to Mrs. Buzzell seemed a most important confidence, tended to develop all the dormant softness and tenderness of her nature; and one day the little, old baby-wardrobe was brought down, and her own wrinkled hands washed out the odor of camphor and the yellow of forty years.

As Susie’s fate had been so well provided for, and especially as Miss Marston’s visit was drawing to its close, Dan again appeared on the scene. In fact he could no longer keep away from this woman who had captured him, body and soul. He thought of her all the time, and the fear that she might not return his love, made his days and nights wretched. It was a new experience for Dan. Grief did not sit gracefully upon him at all. It was an enemy whose blows his “science” could not parry, and it made him furious, without leading him to reflect that he had caused a thousand-fold keener heart-aches to poor Susie (even apart from the special wrong he had done her by deserting her at a time when no man of sensibility ever shows that his heart is growing cold), for we can never suffer from failing to win love, as from the loss of it when it has become necessary, not only to our happiness, but even to the rendering of life tolerable. In his selfishness, Dan thought no suffering could equal his, and he determined to know his fate before Miss Marston left Oakdale.

One evening, therefore, he dressed himself with extraordinary care, and sallied forth in the direction of his father’s house. As he drew near, he heard Miss Marston’s adorable voice in the parlor, and instead of ringing at the front door, he went around to the veranda, and waited until the song ceased. Even then he had not the courage to approach her—she might come out, he thought, and be pleased by finding him there. Meanwhile he drank in greedily the sweet half-melodies, half-harmonies, evoked by her beautiful fingers, as they strayed over the key-board of the piano without any special aim, for she was evidently alone and “fancy free.” Pretty soon he recognized a kind of phantasy upon an old Scotch ballad, and then her voice swelled out in the first two lines of “Comin’ thro’ the Rye,” and then stopped. Again she commenced:

This verse she sang entire. “Why this special verse?” asked Dan’s heart, for it was in the state when clinging to straws is perfectly natural. At this juncture he made bold to enter by the French window, which was open, and stood beside her. She attempted to rise, but he prevented it, begging her to keep on playing—he had something to say to her, which could be fittest said to music.

“So it is coming,” thought Miss Marston. “How shall I stave it off?”

If Dan had only read her thoughts as easily as she read his, he would not have made the headlong plunge into a declaration of love, as he did, without a moment’s pause. Miss Marston quickly interrupted him.

“You do me honor, Mr. Forest,” she said, rising and looking him calmly in the face; “but——”

Dan was half mad. He thought he detected contempt in the way she pronounced the word “honor.” He thought some one had been “poisoning her mind” against him—by the truth in his case—and scarcely knowing what he was saying, he blurted out this fear—thus, by a stroke of poetic justice, revealing what the prudent Mrs. Forest had taken such infinite pains to conceal.

“Indeed!” exclaimed Miss Marston, coldly. “I never dreamed that, young as you are, you could be so old in iniquity. I should much like to be able to respect you for the sake of your estimable family; but if this is so, and I see the truth of it in your face, let me give you a word of advice: I am some years older than you are, and I think I know human nature well enough to assure you that you will never win the love of any true woman while basely deserting another, whose happiness”—and she added in a low, withering tone, as she turned to leave the room—“and whose honor you have placed in your hands.” The door closed behind her, and Dan, in speaking of his sensations years after, remarked that you could have “knocked him down with a feather.”