“Please give me some water.”
She gives it, and asks, with a quiet voice, but with eyes and ears expectant of the answer:
“What is your name?”
“George Thorndyke, ma’am.” And Agnes knows that her own son lies before her. How anxiously, for many days and nights after this, does she devote herself to this patient! No wonder the boy grows to be very fond of her? To him she is only Mrs. Rodney, and he has connected no idea of his mother with that name, although it has been his middle name also. His father struck it out, and he does not even know his mother’s maiden name. During his illness, she, by little and little, gleans this from him—that his father is dead; that he has three sisters (she sighs to herself as she remembers the other two); that he is working with a carpenter, of whom he is learning his trade; that his “stepmother” has been always good to him, but that she is gone, since his father’s death, to live far away. This explains one thing which has puzzled her—that only his employer and fellow-workmen have come to see him in the hospital. She has feared every day that some of his family might come. One thing yet she yearns to know—does he know any thing of herself, or does he think her dead? She longs and yet dreads to know this. At last, when it is evident that he will soon be well enough to leave the hospital, she asks him if he remembers his own mother, or if he was too young when he “lost her.”
“Yes, ma’am; I remember her a very little; but I have got her picture in my pocket-book.” And he shows it to her.
“This was taken when she was very young, I should think,” says the nurse.
“Oh! yes; mother said, the day she found it, that she guessed it was a keepsake of father’s once, but that she thought I had the best right to it. She told me never to let him see it, or know I had it, and that’s the reason I got to carrying it around with me. Why, nurse, I think she had eyes like yours.”
The nurse smiles, and busies herself in such a way that her head is turned away for some moments.
“Don’t you think she was pretty, nurse? I do?” continued Thorndyke.
Thus challenged, Agnes looks critically at the little picture.