"You must hire some one to sleep in the room with him," resumed the doctor.
"No, no," cried Agnes impatiently;—"no one shall wait on him but myself;—I will attend him day and night."
"And should your strength be worn out by such incessant watching, who would take care of him then?—Remember, you are but mortal."—Agnes shook her head, and was silent.—"Besides, the strength of a man may sometimes be necessary; and, for his sake as well as yours, I must insist on being obeyed."
"You shall be obeyed," said Agnes mournfully.
"Then now," rejoined he, "let me give you my advice relative to diet, medicine, and management."—This he did in detail, as he found Agnes had a mind capacious enough to understand his system; and promising to answer her letters immediately, whenever she wrote to him for advice, he took an affectionate farewell of her; and Agnes and her father, accompanied by a man whom the doctor had procured for the purpose, set off for ——.
Fanny was waiting at the cottage with little Edward to receive them,—but the dejected countenance of Agnes precluded all necessity of asking concerning the state of Fitzhenry. Scarcely could the caresses of her child, and the joy which he expressed at seeing her, call a smile to her lips; and as she pressed him to her bosom, tears of bitter disappointment mingled with those of tenderness.
In a day or two after, Agnes, in compliance with the doctor's desire, hired a small tenement very near the house in which they formerly lived; and in the garden of which, as it was then empty, they obtained leave to walk. She also procured a person to sleep in the room with her father, instead of the man who came with them; and he carried back a letter from her to the doctor, informing him that she had arranged every thing according to his directions.
It was a most painfully pleasing sight to behold the attention of Agnes to Fitzhenry. She knew that it was not in her power to repair the enormous injury which she had done him, and that all she could now do was but a poor amends; still it was affecting to see how anxiously she watched his steps whenever he chose to wander alone from home, and what pains she took to make him neat in his appearance, and cleanly in his person. Her child and herself were clothed in coarse apparel, but she bought for her father everything of the best materials; and, altered as he was, Fitzhenry still looked like a gentleman.
Sometimes he seemed in every respect so like himself, that Agnes, hurried away by her imagination, would, after gazing on him some minutes, start from her seat, seize his hand, and, breathless with hope, address him as if he were a rational being,—when a laugh of vacancy, or a speech full of the inconsistency of phrensy, would send her back on her chair again, with a pulse quickened, and a cheek flushed with the fever of disappointed expectation.
However, he certainly was pleased with her attentions,—but, alas! he knew not who was the bestower of them: he knew not that the child, whose ingratitude or whose death he still lamented in his ravings in the dead of night, was returned to succour, to soothe him, and to devote herself entirely to his service. He heard her, but he knew her not; he saw her, but in her he was not certain that he beheld his child: and this was the pang that preyed on the cheek and withered the frame of Agnes: but she persisted to hope, and patiently endured the pain of to-day, expecting the joy of to-morrow; nor did her hopes always appear ill-founded.