Mrs. Barr took the pen from Catharine’s hand, walked to a window, and became very thoughtful for some time. She was a widow with sufficient means for an humble independent support. They had been ample once; but she had given them with a free hand year after year, till but little was left. Her life had been full of benevolence, but she was very lonely, notwithstanding. What if she adopted this young person! The thought became more and more pleasant. She, who had been all her life childless, might gain the benefits and happiness of motherhood by uniting this young creature’s destiny with her own. She went back to the table where Catharine was sitting, and placed the pen in her hand.
“Sign it Catharine Barr, if you like the name and will take me for a mother,” she said, “for, henceforth, I consider you as my own child. There is no one on earth to question my right, and it will be a relief to these proud friends of yours.”
Catharine threw her arms around the old woman’s neck, and kissed her soft cheek in grateful silence. Then she took up the pen again, and wrote Catharine Barr plainly as she could through the tears that were filling her eyes. So from that day Catharine knew what it was to have a firm friend, and a tender mother, and in this way her identity was lost alike to those who had sought her so anxiously and to those who gladly forgot her.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
ELSIE, THE LUNATIC.
There was one person in that institution to whom Catharine warmly attached herself at first sight. She was a middle-aged woman, possessed of a wild sort of beauty, which might have been loveliness in youth, and was now wonderfully picturesque. She had been a long time insane; sometimes in a madhouse, violent and refractory; sometimes in private institutions, always especially cared for, as the rich provide for their unfortunates; but never, until now, surrounded with home-like elegances, and attentions so delicate, that they did not seem to be watchful.
This woman occupied a little parlor and bedroom close to that in which Catharine slept. She was under no visible restraint, for the inmates only recognized their keepers as servants, and felt complimented by their devoted attention. One day, in passing Catharine’s door, she saw her bending over the table, toiling patiently over a drawing, which she was forced to work out, with no help save that of her own genius. Something, either in her attitude or countenance, arrested the woman, who turned, and, after peering into the room to make sure that no one else was there, stole in so noiselessly that Catharine was unconscious of her presence, until she felt her breath floating across her cheek.
“Get up, that’s all wrong.”
Catharine started from her chair in some alarm. The woman sat down, seized upon a pencil, and went to work with the spirit and dash of an artist. That which Catharine had been striving to accomplish, she achieved with a few movements of the hand, creating a perspective here, a middle distance there, and livening up the foreground with a figure or two that fairly startled the girl, as she saw them grow into a vraisemblance of humanity under her gaze.
All at once, the woman looked up, and Catharine remarked the wonderful beauty of her eyes, now widening with pleasure.
“He stood exactly so, that night,” she said, “touching one of the figures with her pencil. I—no, I’m not here. It is that terrible woman. How dare you let her come near him?”