Papa's own girl: A novel

A few days later, and when nearly all the preparations for the White Mountain trip were finished, Clara expressed a desire to run home to Oakdale for three or four days. It was a lovely morning in the last days of June, and the scene was at the breakfast-table. Ella floated languidly in at the last moment, in a lovely morning-dress of white lawn, puffed and flounced, and with wide flowing sleeves that exposed well her pretty arms. At her breast she wore a knot of narrow blue ribbons and a little bouquet of fresh rosebuds. Her hair, which curled naturally, she had brushed out and passed her fingers through and through it, until it lay in innumerable fluffy ringlets and curls kept back from her face by a wide blue ribbon, fringed at the ends and tied in an elegant bow at the top of her head. “How pretty she is!” said the eyes of Albert. Ella seated herself in her place languidly, as if life were the very burden she pretended it was. “How pretty you look, Ella!” said Clara, generously. “It does not seem as if you could ever grow old.”

“Like you, for example,” said Albert, smiling.

“I know I am young enough,” replied Clara, “but I do not think I ever looked as fresh as Ella does.”

“I am sure I would exchange all the freshness that you seem to admire so much,” said Ella, “for a nose as elegant as yours.”

“Yes, I believe my nose is irreproachable,” replied Clara, smiling; “but as a child, it was certainly a pug.”

“Like mine.”

“No, yours is not that by any means. I think you should be quite satisfied with your person.”

Albert looked from one woman to the other. He knew Clara was several years younger than Ella, and yet she looked older—an effect heightened by her dress, a plain light gray with plain cuffs, and collar fastened by a bow of rich black ribbon. Albert wondered why she would wear black, when she knew he hated it. Clearly she did not study to please him, as Ella did. He did not reflect, possibly he did not know, that Clara’s little dower from her father had been exhausted, though managed with the greatest care, and that it would scarcely have permitted her to dress like Ella for a single year. Clara had never yet asked Albert for any of the money that he spent freely upon his own dress, on his friends in wines and cigars, at his club, and in many ways; and as he had several times expressed surprise at the extent of the household expenses, she had endeavored, in ways he never suspected, to reduce them. She may be blamed, but she simply could not bring herself to ask him for any money for herself. The old, perfect, childlike confidence was gone. She thought, moreover, that a husband’s duty was to set aside for the mistress of the house, a certain generous allowance for her personal and household expenses; and not dole money out week by week, to meet current expenses. It seemed to her very undignified, to say the least, and not what her father would have done, as he had proved ever since the growth of Oakdale and the increase of his practice enabled him to count on a steady income. She did not, however, attribute Albert’s course to penuriousness or selfishness, but simply to ignorance of the ideas of a wife on this subject. Time would harmonize all this, she thought, if ever the old Eden came back, with that divine mutual confidence that makes it wise to express every thought freely and frankly. So she went on from day to day managing Albert’s house with a rare skill, improved by constant experience and a quick practical intelligence, receiving his friends, gracing his table and his drawing-rooms with her sweet presence, and in return receiving such attentions from him as his nature suggested, when not absorbed by Ella’s charms, or by the claims of other friends. She learned to be a hypocrite, as many a wife has done. If she expressed the grief that was in her heart, even by a tone, a word, Albert’s pleasure was affected by it. To be sure, his course was much like that of a person holding your head under water, and then feeling injured because you are so inconsiderate as to look strangled! At times Clara felt as if she could go mad at Albert’s persistence in declaring that his love had in no way changed. A thousand words and acts and movements, proved his protestations utterly false; and between her struggle to please him by liking Ella, whom any other woman of spirit would have felt justified in hating, to attend to all the household responsibilities, to show a smiling face when her heart was breaking, to do strict justice to Albert and Ella in all her thoughts—between all these trials, no wonder she looked old beside the rosy freshness of triumphant love, that shone unclouded in Ella’s pretty face. No wonder she desired to go home to her father—to one who never misunderstood her, who never required her to conceal any thought or emotion—one whom she could please wholly, by being herself in all things. Sometimes it seemed that she could not wait one moment; that she must fly to him, whatever the result. But when she mentioned this desire on the morning in question, Albert was astounded. His gesture and words made her indignant. She compared him mentally to her father. The expression of a strong desire for anything, created in Dr. Forest an instinctive impulse to help gratify it.

“I wish much to go,” she said simply, as if that alone should be enough.

“But at this time, my dear.”

“I will return in less than a week.”

“Indeed! You would go alone! Do you suppose I can permit my wife to go home for the first visit after our marriage, without her husband? I shall go with you, of course.”

Ella winced. Here was an evidence of the husband’s pride in his position. Why, he was not fully hers, after all; and for the first time she felt jealous of the wife. Very soon after she left the room.

Later, in Clara’s room, Albert came to her, evidently to talk over the matter. She put her arms about him, and tried the little coquettish arts that used to charm him, only to find for the twentieth time, with secret mortification, that they had lost their power. Ella had the monopoly of all pretty arts now. Clara knew it, and despised herself for the foolish persistency of hoping against hope, lowering her dignity by seeking to regain anything that such a kitten as Ella Wills could win; but it would be worse than useless to show her feelings. Unhappiness was a crime in Albert’s eyes, and he had not seen a tear in hers for many a month. In answer to his question, what had given her such a sudden desire to go home, she answered, “It is not sudden. I have been thinking of it a very long time. I don’t think I am over well, and I so wish to see papa. I cannot tell you how strong the desire is.”

“You have not mentioned being ill, Clara;” and with the fatality of many people who wish to avoid a scene, he took the surest means to produce one, for he added, “but you have no faith in me as a physician.”

“That is very unjust, Albert.”

“If you had any faith in me, you would tell me if you had symptoms of illness.”

“Perhaps I should be more flattered if it were not necessary to tell them.”

“I do not profess to be a magician, like your father,” he said, ironically.

“This is a reflection upon my father,” replied Clara, indignantly. “It is not necessary for me to tell you what I think of it. I am not alone in the opinion that he is a very superior physician.”

“I did not mean it in the light of a reflection. I know he is a fine French scholar, and keeps himself au courant with the methods and discoveries of modern science; but of course he is a graduate of the old school.”

“The subject is painful to me, Albert. I am deeply mortified that you should institute any comparison between yourself and my father in this respect.”

“You seem pleased to treat me like a sophomore,” he said, angrily, assuming an air of superiority that could not deceive Clara. “You will pardon me for saying, that if this is good taste, it is at least unwise.”

“Unwise?” echoed Clara, with disgust. “I deny that I even dreamed of treating you with the slightest disrespect; but tell me, please, what result I ought to fear.”

“Oh, nothing; my respect, my admiration, amount to nothing, of course;” and Albert took out his cigar-case, and selecting a Havana, was about to strike a match.

“Put away your match!” said Clara. “You have not my permission to smoke in my room to-day.”

“Madame is obeyed,” he said, bowing and putting away his cigar. The tone and manner of Clara were so strangely unlike all he knew of her, that he was astonished into good-humored admiration.

“Respect is due to me from you, and all the world, until I forfeit it by ignoble conduct. Your admiration I have thought and hoped I could never lose, for no true man or woman can really love when that is gone;” and as Clara said this, she glanced at her reflection in the glass.

“I think you are right, my dear,” he said, coldly.

“It is sad for a woman to lose what little beauty she has, for I think the admiration of most men depends wholly on personal beauty.”

“No, Clara. It is happiness that most charms the lover.”

“Then, indeed, I have no chance, for I am not happy.”

“I was fool enough to think my wife ought to be happy.”

“No; the woman you love should be happy. I am proud of being your wife, as you well know, but I would gladly change my state to that of your mistress, could I regain what I feel that I have lost forever. Oh, Albert! the world seems vanishing under my feet, when I think we have come to this.”

There was something in the whole attitude of Clara, and especially in the evidence of emotions long repressed, that filled not only the husband, but the physician, with alarm and self-reproach, and he did what all men do when unusually conscious that they are murdering by inches the women who love them. He took her in his arms, covered her with kisses, wept over her, called himself unworthy of a love so divinely tender as hers, and when in some sentence Clara alluded to Ella, he begged she would not mention the name of any other woman to him. What were all the women in the world to him? He had been a brute to even seem to put any other woman before her, or to do anything to cause her the slightest pain. Clara nestled close to his heart, and sobbed herself into a blissful state of trust and hope, as Albert went on. He would never pay any marked attention to Ella since it displeased Clara.

Clara, too happy in being restored to her husband’s confidence, answered generously, and through happy tears:

“No, dear one, you must not make her unhappy by an inexplicable change of manner. Do you not think she is really in love with you?”

“There is no doubt of that,” he said, with a touch of vanity, for he was but human, and to see this woman, who had caused him so many “pangs of despised love,” now wholly and helplessly enamored of him, was a triumph bearing in it a poetic justice, a healing sweetness, impossible to resist. He had not desired that any one should occupy his heart but his wife; for theirs had been a love worth preserving in its freshness. He really desired so to preserve it; and therefore he would have been consistent if, upon the first signs of Ella’s passion for him, he had shown her something of his devotion to his wife. It might not have been gallant, according to the creed of men, but it would at least have been profoundly wise. Women instinctively yield to any securely enthroned rival; perhaps men know this, and hence they so rarely show one woman that they love any object specially, or even act in a manner that will let such fact pass for granted. This is generally true of men in whose temper there is a latent melancholy. They are passionately attracted to their opposites, to those who are gay and happy, and therefore they would fly from suffering, even when they themselves are the cause of it.

Clara found in the bliss caused by Albert’s spasmodic return to his old tenderness, an adequate compensation for deferring her visit to Oakdale. She expressed earnestly the wish to please Albert in all things.

“My darling,” he said, “you can please me always if you will remain in this sweet mood. Only be happy, and there will be no more clouds.”

“But my moods, dear one, depend upon you. How can a dethroned queen be happy? No: I mean,” she added quickly, “when her throne is in danger. You know I am not jealous and selfish. I would have all women love you, and I would stay by myself without a murmur, if you wish to ride, or walk, or flirt with them, for nature has made you very gallant and fond of the incense of admiration. I only would feel certain that I hold my old place—mine by right of loving you more than any other can, as you have always admitted. There is something in the confident air of Ella when she speaks to you in my presence, that distresses me; makes me feel that you have not shown her my true place in your heart. Have you, dearest?”

Albert knew he had not. To have said yes, would certainly have been false, and he had a repugnance to direct falsehood. The position was awkward, but he managed to satisfy Clara, and in a most heavenly frame of mind she sent him to tell Ella that she had decided to put off going to Oakdale for the present.