The touch awoke him, and starting up he stared wildly at her, while
some memory of the past seemed to be struggling through the misty
clouds, obscuring his mental vision.
“Who are you, lady? Who, with eyes and hair like hers?”
“I’m the `madam’ from Aikenside,” Agnes said, quite loudly, as Flora
passed the door. Then when she was gone she added, softly: “I’m Sarah.
Don’t you know me? Sarah Agnes Morris.”
It seemed for a moment to burst upon him in its full reality, and to
her dying day Agnes would never forget the look upon his face, the
smile of perfect happiness breaking through the rain of tears, the
love, the tenderness mingled with distrust, which that look betokened
as he continued gazing at her, but said to her not a word. Again her
hand rested on his forehead, and taking it now in his he held it to the
light, laughing insanely at its soft whiteness; then touching the
costly diamonds which flashed upon him the rainbow hues, he said:
“Where’s that little bit of a ring I bought for you?”
She had anticipated this, and took from her pocket a plain gold ring,
kept until that day where no one could find it, and holding it up to
him, said: “Here it is. Do you remember it?”
“Yes, yes,” and his lips began to quiver with a grieved, injured
expression. “He could give you diamonds, and I couldn’t. That’s why you
left me, wasn’t it, Sarah—why you wrote that letter which made my head
into two? It’s ached so ever since, and I’ve missed you so much, Sarah!
They put me in a cell where crazy people were—oh! so many—and they said
that I was mad, when I was only wanting you. I’m not mad now, am I,
darling?”
His arm was around her neck, and he drew her down until his lips
touched hers. And Agnes suffered it. She could not return the kiss, but
she did not turn away from his, and she let him caress her hair, and
wind it around his fingers, whispering: “This is like Sarah’s, and you
are Sarah, are you not?”
“Yes, I am Sarah,” she would answer, while the smile so painful to see
would again break over his face as he told how much he had missed her,
and asked if she had not come to stay till he died.
“There’s something wrong,” he said; “somebody dead, and seems as if
somebody else wanted to die—as if Maddy died ever since the Lord
Governor went away. Do you know Governor Guy?”
“I am his stepmother,” Agnes replied, whereupon Uncle Joseph laughed so
long and loud that Maddy awoke, and, alarmed by the noise, came down to
see what was the matter.
Agnes did not hear her, and as she reached the doorway, she started at
the strange position of the parties—Uncle Joseph still smoothing the
curls which drooped over him, and Agnes saying to him: “You heard his
name was Remington, did you not—James Remington?”
Like a sudden revelation it came upon Maddy, and she turned to leave,
when Agnes, lifting her head, called her to come in. She did so, and
standing upon the opposite side of the bed, she said, questioningly:
“You are Sarah Morris?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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