I believe you know that when a young
man he had eloped with and married one of his scholars, the daughter of a
rich and proud family, who discarded her. For years she was a stranger to
them, until her husband had won a name and handsome fortune for himself:
then she was taken into favor again, her husband's distinction in the
scientific world being supposed to add lustre to the family name. Alas for
us! it was a favor that has cost us dear. I was their only child. When my
sweet, pretty mother lay dying she left to me, her sixteen-year-old child,
my dreamy, unworldly father as a legacy. "Take care of him: he knows no
guile, and your uncles will wrong him if they can," she said. And they
did, or one of them. Ere the bitter agony of my mother's death had enabled
him to return to his duties, it was discovered that one of her brothers
had forged his name and literally stripped him of everything.
Of course, then he went to work again to earn our daily bread--not with
his old love or ability, but in an inert, feeble way that was pitiful to
see. I think from the day my mother was buried he was dying. Some people,
you know, die hard--some part with life lightly, as if it was a faded robe
they shook off to don a brighter one. Others--my father was one, and I am
like him--see one by one their trusts, their hopes, their loves die: then
with a deathly throe sunder themselves from life.
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