“Did she! don’t make me think of them. I am quite in charity with her now. Poor Letitia, she needn’t look reproachful any longer. She has got all she wanted now.”
“Mary,” said Agnes, “you are mistaken. It is your little boy that is Lord Frogmore.”
“Tut, tut,” said Mary, with an impatient movement of her hands, “you go on like that only to worry me. Of course, I should always be kind to him if my dear lord adopted him. But adoption won’t go so far as that. No, no. I am tired of hearing of this child. Let’s speak of him no more.”
“Mary, if it were to be proved to you—by eye-witness—that he was your child?”
“Proved to me!” cried Lady Frogmore. “Should not I myself be the chief witness?”
Her smile was so perfectly satisfied in its faint indulgent compassion for her sister’s folly, and the look of uneasiness with which she turned from this perpetual repetition of a disagreeable subject was so natural that Agnes’ heart sank. “I think I must go to bed,” she added. “It has been a hard day, and even though one does not sleep, lying down is always a rest.”
“Shall I read to you, Mary, till you go to sleep?”
“No, my dear. Go to sleep yourself, Agnes. We shall both be better quiet. It will be another life to-morrow,” said Mary, dismissing her sister with a kiss. Poor Agnes went away with a heart almost too sick and sad for thought. She had failed more miserably than the rest. And she did not know now what to say or do; or whether it was best to make no further attempt, to leave everything to the action of time and the guidance of events. It is more easy to adopt the most laborious or heroic measures than to take up this passive plan of operation, and it cost Agnes a great deal to relinquish the effort to set her sister right. Would she ever learn what was right? Would she ever come to a true knowledge of what had passed? or if she did, would the discovery be accompanied by a convulsion which would again rend their life in pieces. That possibility must always be taken into consideration. At present Mary was perfectly sane, and as composed in her gentle thoughts as anyone could be. But if she were urged beyond measure; if this great fact which she ignored were to be rudely pressed upon her, what might happen? Her recovery was still new, her mind fresh fledged, so to speak; too feeble to take many flights. But how to be patient and bear with this Agnes did not know. Those who have to deal with a persistent delusion have need for double patience. It is so difficult not to think that there is perversity in it, or that the deceived person could not understand if they would. Agnes went up to the nursery and bent over Mar’s little crib, and dropped a kiss upon his forehead as soft as the touch of any mother. The child opened his eyes without anything of the startled effect of sudden waking, as if he had only shut his eyes in play. “Why do you say poor child?” he asked in his little soft voice. “Oh, my little Mar, my little Mar!” cried Agnes, and then she scolded him a little for being awake, and bade him shut those big eyes directly and go to sleep. This visit did not dry her tears, or make it more easy to think what she was to do. Indeed Agnes was less and less reconciled to the idea of submitting to Mary’s delusion as she thought it over. It would all have been so very easy otherwise! They might have lived the two together, mother and aunt, in the familiar house of which she had grown so fond during these five years, taking care of the little heir until he was old enough to go to school. His mother was his natural guardian, and so she would have been had it not been for this. It would almost have been better, Agnes thought with bitterness, if she had not recovered at all—if she had still remained with Dr. Brown. For who could tell what the Parkes might do? They would have the power in their hands. They might insist on having her removed again. They might say that still she was not sane, and to prove that a woman was sane who had forgotten the very existence of her child, how difficult would that be. Agnes was the only one in the great house who could not sleep that night. She was sorry, very sorry, too, for the loss of old Frogmore. He had been to her a kind companion, a confiding and respectful brother, and she missed him—more than anyone else who mourned for him. The thought that he was gone and taken away, and that now there would be a clearing out of all his drawers, a searching into all his secrets, his papers examined, his very wardrobe turned inside out, brought tears of sorrow, mingled with a sort of angry dismay, to her eyes. That too, if Mary had but been well, would have been spared. She would have kept the old man’s house sacred. Sorrow and contrariety and care, all the exasperating and irritating elements which make a position intolerable, mingled in the mind of Agnes; and she knew that she could not throw it off as intolerable, but must somehow support everything for the sake of Mary and of the poor little boy. Poor little boy! To think that he was Lord Frogmore, and that after his long minority was over he would be one of the wealthiest peers in England, the poor, little, forlorn child for whom nobody cared, was enough to make any kind woman’s heart overflow with the piteousness of the contrast: and he was dear and precious to Agnes as the apple of her eye.
That day she had him carefully dressed, and led him with her to Mary to make one last attempt. She had taught him with the tenderest exactitude what he was to say. It was not very much, only “Mamma, speak to Mar; dear mamma, speak to father’s little boy.” Mar said it very prettily after Agnes. His great eyes, which were so large and so sad; looked wistfully into the very heart of the woman who loved him. “Speak to father’s little boy.” She cried herself when she heard him, and did not think that any heart could resist it. She led him into Mary’s room, holding his little hand very fast to give him courage, and brought him to the side of the bed where Lady Frogmore was lying very patient and quiet, with tears in her eyes, but a faint smile upon her patient mouth. “Mary,” said Agnes, “I have brought your little Mar to see you. Your own little boy. You have never given him a kiss, not since he was a baby in the cradle.” She led him to his mother’s side, and pulled his arm to remind him of what he had to say. But Mar had forgot, or else he was too much overawed by the sight of this strange lady who was his mother. He gazed at her with his big melancholy eyes, but he could not find a word to say. Mary did not turn her head away. She looked at him not without a little emotion. “Is this the little boy,” she said, “that my dear old lord was fond of? That should always give him a claim upon me.”
“Oh, he has a claim. He has a first claim,” cried Agnes, “on his own account.”