Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, March 1885Various
History
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, March 1885
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
There was an awful pause—a pause in which no one moved or breathed.
Then there came a broken voice out of my father's chair. He had not
understood, though I think he heard what I said. He put out two feeble
hands. “Phil—I think I am dying—has she—has she come for me?” he said.
We had to carry him to his bed. What struggles he had gone through
before I cannot tell. He had stood fast, and had refused to be moved,
and now he fell—like an old tower, like an old tree. The necessity
there was for thinking of him saved me from the physical consequences
which had prostrated me on a former occasion. I had no leisure now for
any consciousness of how matters went with myself.
His delusion was not wonderful, but most natural. She was clothed in
black from head to foot, instead of the white dress of the portrait.
She had no knowledge of the conflict, of nothing but that she was
called for, that her fate might depend on the next few minutes. In
her eyes there was a pathetic question, a line of anxiety in the lids,
an innocent appeal in the looks. And the face the same: the same lips,
sensitive, ready to quiver; the same innocent, candid brow; the look
of a common race, which is more subtle than mere resemblance. How I
knew that it was so, I cannot tell, nor any man. It was the other—the
elder—ah no! not elder; the ever young, the Agnes to whom age can never
come—she who they say was the mother of a man who never saw her—it was
she who led her kinswoman, her representative, into our hearts.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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