“You’ve been gone long, Magda,—so long,” she said, “and my head has ached so for you.”
“But I’ve come now to stay always. I have found the baby, too. Let me tell you about it,” Magdalen replied, controlling her own emotions with a mighty effort, and keeping as calm and composed as it was possible for her to do. “I’ll make it like a story,” she said; and Laura listened very quietly while Magdalen, beginning at the funeral of Mrs. Clayton, went over the whole ground correctly, until she reached the cars and the boy who took the baby.
Then she purposely deviated from the truth, and said it was a woman to whom the child was given.
“No, no, not a woman,” Laura exclaimed, vehemently. “It was a boy, and I sat with him, and my head was all in a snarl. I fell when I got out of the stage in Cincinnati, and struck it a heavy blow on the pavement, and it set to buzzing so loud.”
Here was something of which Magdalen had never heard; the blow on the head would account for the culmination of the queer fancies which must have been gathering in Laura’s brain for months and years, and which broke out suddenly into decided insanity. If that were true she could understand better than she did before why she had been abandoned; but she did not stop then to reason about it. She was too anxious to keep her mother to the point, and when she paused a moment she said to her, “You fell and hurt your head on the pavement, and then got into the train.”
“Yes, the next day, or the next, I don’t know which, my head ached so, and I didn’t know anybody to tell, and I had baby to care for, and I thought the Grand Duchess would get her as she did Alice, and shut me up, and the boy looked good and true, and I gave her to him, and got out and thought I’d run away, and there was another train standing there, and I took it and went I don’t know where, nor what else, only I was back in Cincinnati again, and after a great while got here to the Grand Duchess, with the baby safe as safe could be. My head was sore a long time, but I did not tell them about the blow for fear they’d say I was crazy, but they said it just the same.”
She was getting excited, and anxious to make the most of the present opportunity, Magdalen took up the story herself, and told what the boy did with the child, and how he called her Magdalen, after the same lady for whom Mrs. Grey had named her, and how the child grew to a woman, and came out at last to Beechwood, sent there by Heaven to find her sister, and minister to her poor mother, who did not know her at first, but who would surely know her now.
“Don’t you, mother; don’t you know I am your daughter Magdalen?”
For an instant Laura seemed to comprehend her. There was a perplexed look on her face, then her lip began to quiver and her tears to come, and throwing her arms around Magdalen’s neck, she said, “Mother, mother, you call me that as Alice does. You say you are the baby, and Arthur said so too. I wish I could remember, but I can’t. Oh, I don’t know what you mean, but you make me so happy!”
And that was Magdalen’s success, with which she tried to be satisfied, hoping there might come a time when the cloud would lift enough for her to hear her mother call her daughter, and feel that she knew what she was saying.