THE great alienist sat down at his desk, and having emptied his mind of all other impressions, held it up like a dipper for his new patient to fill. Large, blond, and handsome, she was plainly accustomed to being listened to. Before she had fairly undone her furs and folded her hands within her muff, the doctor’s lateral vision had told him that, whatever her problems, it was not about her own nervous system that she had come to consult him.
Not too quickly her story began to take shape. Her household, her husband, her four children—three small boys and an older daughter, a girl of seventeen....
“My only thought has been my children, Dr. Despard.”
“Your only thought, Mrs. Royce?”
She assented. The daughter was the problem—the daughter of seventeen.
“She and I have been such friends; I have always been a friend to my children, I hope, as well as a parent. And Celia’s little arrangements, her clothes and her small parties, have been as much my interests as hers—more, perhaps. The bond between us has been peculiarly close until the last year or so. Lately a rebellious spirit has begun to develop. I have tried to make allowances, but naturally there are certain questions of manners and deportment—small but important—about which one cannot yield. I am almost ashamed to confess how unaffectionate are the terms that we have reached. The situation will strike you as a strange one between a mother and daughter——”
He shook his head. “You are by no means the only mother and daughter whose relations are unsatisfactory.”
“Ah, the young people of to-day!” she sighed. “What is the matter with them, with the age, Dr. Despard? They are so hard, so individualistic. I myself was one of a large family, and we lived in the house with my grandparents and aunts. My life was made up of little duties for older people—duties I never thought of questioning. They were a pleasure to me. But if I ask Celia to go on an errand for me—or even to attend to something for herself—I am met by the look of a martyr or a rebel. But that is not the worst. At times, Dr. Despard, her language to me is violent—is—actually profane. I cannot help looking on this as an abnormal manifestation. At last I saw her case was pathological. No nice girl swears at her mother, and”—Mrs. Royce smiled—“my daughter is a nice girl.”
It seemed to him that Mrs. Royce must be a very nice mother indeed. Soft, serious, and eminently maternal, she appealed profoundly to all his bachelor ideals.
“And your husband?” he asked. “How does he get on with his daughter?”
“Admirably,” she returned warmly; “they hardly see each other.”
He glanced quickly at her to see if her intention were humorous, but something mechanical in her smile had already warned him that her mind was bent on other of life’s aspects than the comic. Now she was quite serious, and he replied with equal gravity:
“It is often the solution.”
They decided, at length, that he was to spend a few days with them in the country. To bring the girl to his office would be useless. He would find her a gentle, well-behaved little creature, perhaps too much interested in her books. The exigencies of the children’s education kept the Royces in town during the week, but they spent Saturday and Sunday at the old Royce place on the Hudson. Here Despard promised to come at the first opportunity.
She thanked him, and held out a strong, firm hand.
No, he thought when she had gone, he could not understand a girl’s swearing at such a mother—at once so affectionate and so intelligent, for, with pardonable egotism, Despard reckoned her bringing the problem to him a proof of rare domestic intelligence. Most women would have made it the subject of anger or tears.
He himself held no special brief for youth. The younger generation did not attract him. His own nephews and nieces never made him return disgusted to his loneliness, but rather raised his enjoyment of his solitude.
Before he admitted his next patient he stood a moment contemplating the sacrifices made by a parent. “It’s stupendous, it’s too much,” he thought; and smiled to think that, if he had married, a child of his might now be conducting him to a doctor’s office, for of the two he would undoubtedly have been the first to swear.
After a week particularly crowded with the concerns of other people Despard arrived, at high noon of a day in early April, at the Royces’ place. Never, he thought, had he seen peace so clearly embodied. A dense, fresh lawn sloped down to the hazy river; splendid old trees were everywhere; the serious stone house had been built with the simple notions of comfort that existed a hundred years ago.
Mr. Royce, who met him at the station, seemed a peaceful sort of person, too—a man whose forebears had been more like fairy god-parents than ordinary ancestors, for they had given him a handsome, healthy body, a fair fortune, a respected name, and, best of all, an unquestioning belief in all the institutions of his own time, such as matrimony, the ten commandments, and the blessings of paternity.
Despard turned the conversation toward the daughter, but was soon aware that he was getting a mere echo of Mrs. Royce’s opinions.
“The child has worked herself into an abnormal frame of mind,” said her father.
“You draw this from your own observations?”
“Well, more from her mother’s. I leave that sort of thing to my wife. She has great cares, great responsibilities. She takes life almost too seriously.” He sighed. The next instant his face lighted up in pointing out to Despard a giant chestnut-tree just saved from a blighting disease. For a few minutes he spoke on the subject with extraordinary vividness.
Despard was quick to recognize expert knowledge, and Royce, with something approaching a blush, admitted that he did understand the care of native trees. “I have sometimes thought of writing a book about it,” he said timidly.
“You certainly should.”
“Ah, it’s so difficult to find time.”
Despard smiled. Who had leisure if this favored being had not? He himself, without one hour in the twenty-four that he could call his own, was already at work on his third.
He met the whole family assembled at luncheon: a pale German governess, three little boys, and the dark-eyed Celia, sweet-mouthed but sullen-browed.
Despard, who had had no breakfast, thought more than he would have confessed about the victuals set before him. Any family ought to be amiable, he thought, on food at once so simple and delicious. His opinion of Mrs. Royce rose still higher.
Within the next hour he came to the conclusion that, in spite of his extended knowledge of American interiors, he had never before been in a really well-appointed house—a house, that is, where one wise and affectionate person directed every detail. Mrs. Royce, he found, knew every aspect of her home. She not only knew her flowers almost as individuals, but she knew the vase and the place where each appeared to the best advantage. She knew better than her husband which chair he liked, where he kept his cigars, and which little table would be best at his elbow. Nor was her consideration confined to her own family. She had thought of a tired doctor’s special needs. She had given him “a little room, where he could be quiet and get a glimpse of the river.”
Shut in this room, not so very little after all, he walked to the writing-table to make a memorandum. It had more than once happened to him to find, in a house accounted luxurious, only a dry, encrusted inkstand in the spare room. Not so here. Never was ink so fluidly, greenly new; never was blotting-paper so eagerly absorbent. He noticed, besides three sizes of paper and envelopes, that there were cable blanks, telegraph blanks, and postal cards, as well as stamps of all varieties.
It was not Despard’s habit to notice life quite as much in detail as this, but now it amused him to pursue the subject. Luxury he knew; but this effective consideration he rated as something higher.