When they had arisen from their, knees, she again addressed Agnes in a tone of cheerful sweetness, such as she had exhibited in her happier days.
“Agnes, now for our task; and indeed you must perform it with care. Remember that you are about to dress the most beautiful girl in Europe. What a fair cast-away am I, Agnes?”
“I hope not a cast-away, Jane; but I shall dress you with care and tenderness, notwithstanding.”
“Every day I must dress in my best, because when Charles returns, you know it will be necessary that I should justify his choice, by appearing as beautiful as possible.”
“Give the innocent her own way,” said her father; “give her, in all that may gratify the child, her own way, where it is not directly wrong to do so.”
Agnes and she then went up to her room, that she might indulge in that harmless happiness, which the fiction of hope had, under the mercy of God, extracted, from the reality of despair.
When the ceremony of the toilette was over, she and her sister returned to the parlor, and they could notice a slight tinge of color added to her pale cheek, by the proud consciousness of her beauty. The exertion, however, she had undergone, considering her extremely weak and exhausted state of of health was more than she could bear long. But a few minutes had elapsed after her reappearance in the parlor, when she said—
“Mamma, I am unwell; I want to be undressed, and to go to bed; I am very faint; help me to bed, mamma—and if you come and stay with me, I shall tell you every thing about my prospects in life—yes, and in death, too; because I have prospects in death—but ah,” she added, shuddering, “they are dark—dark!”
Seldom, indeed, was a family tried like this family; and never was the endurance of domestic love, and its triumph over the chilling habit of affliction, more signally manifested than in the undying tenderness of their hearts and hands, in all that was necessary to her comfort, or demanded by the childish caprices of her malady.
On going upstairs, she kissed them all as usual, but they then discovered, for the first time, in all its bitterness, what a dark and melancholy enjoyment it is to kiss the lips of a maniac, who has loved us, and whom we still must love.