“My dear child, I never even saw her!”
“Has my father never spoken to you about her?”
“Only once, when I asked him how long she had been dead. He told me you lost her while you were an infant, and he told me no more. I was looking at her portrait in the study, only yesterday. I think it must be a bad portrait; your mother’s face disappoints me.”
I had arrived at the same conclusion years since. But I shrank from confessing it.
“At any rate,” Selina continued, “you are not like her. Nobody would ever guess that you were the child of that lady, with the long slanting forehead and the restless look in her eyes.”
What Selina had said of me and my mother’s portrait, other friends had said. There was nothing that I know of to interest me in hearing it repeated—and yet it set me pondering on the want of resemblance between my mother’s face and mine, and wondering (not for the first time) what sort of woman my mother was. When my father speaks of her, no words of praise that he can utter seem to be good enough for her. Oh, me, I wish I was a little more like my mother!
It began to get dark; Maria brought in the lamp. The sudden brightness of the flame struck my aching eyes, as if it had been a blow from a knife. I was obliged to hide my face in my handkerchief. Compassionate Selina entreated me to go to bed. “Rest your poor eyes, my child, and your weary head—and try at least to get some sleep.” She found me very docile; I kissed her, and said good-night. I had my own idea.
When all was quiet in the house, I stole out into the passage and listened at the door of my father’s room.
I heard his regular breathing, and opened the door and went in. The composing medicine, of which I was in search, was not on the table by his bedside. I found it in the cupboard—perhaps placed purposely out of his reach. They say that some physic is poison, if you take too much of it. The label on the bottle told me what the dose was. I dropped it into the medicine glass, and swallowed it, and went back to my father.
Very gently, so as not to wake him, I touched poor papa’s forehead with my lips. “I must have some of your medicine,” I whispered to him; “I want it, dear, as badly as you do.”