Repairing to Aldborough to establish an agency, I met with a letter from Captain Kirke, to the hotel keeper at that place, offering a reward to discover your friends, and being one of them, I trust I made a point to come to town and present myself forthwith.
MAG. It was very kind of you, and I thank you, deeply thank you, since it was by your means my dear Norah came to comfort me.
WRAG. Who comes to-day to take you home with her to her pleasant retreat in the Isle of Wight.
MAG. Yes; and 'tis near the time she promised to be here.
VOICE OF NORAH (off at back). My sister is in her room, you say?
MAG. Ah, she is there! Norah, dear, come in! (NORAH enters D. in F., and crossing to MAGDALEN, embraces her eagerly.)
NORAH. Dearest Magdalen! and how do you feel to-day?
MAG. Is it necessary to ask me? Do you not see I am almost well?
NORAH Friends of yours?
WRAG. Yes, Mrs. Bartram, old friends and sincere ones; allow me also to add, I am an old friend of your family, and connection, in fact, of your ever dear lamented mother--Captain Horatio Wragge,--you must have heard her speak of me--and Mrs. Wragge, allow me to present her. Stand straight, madam, I desire you; more to the right--more still.
MRS. W. Yes, dear.
WRAG. You may have heard of me also in connection with my well-known pill, to be had in neat boxes, name upon the wrapper, price thirteen-pence-halfpenny, Government stamp included, accompanied by portrait of a patient, who you might have blown away with a feather before she took the pill, and whom you are now simply requested to look at in the form before you. Stand straight, madam, I command you. Good morning to you, madam; good morning, my dear Mrs. Vanstone. I trust the Isle of Wight will completely effect your cure. If not, pray remember as a last resource--you can always command my pill. Good morning.
[Exit with MRS. WRAGGE, D. in F.
NORAH. And now, dearest, we are alone, tell me of him of whom I most wish to hear, and of whom as yet you have said so little--this stranger who has preserved you; whom accident brought to your door as you were about to be carried from it insensible, and who at once took upon himself the charge of every expense till your recovery.
MAG. Yes, dear.
NORAH. And, as your recovery was proceeding, who crowned this kindness by instituting inquiries about your friends, which, after months of separation, brought me again, darling, to your side.
MAG. I can only repeat, that our dear father and his own were brother officers, and----
NORAH. And is a mere paternal intimacy to account for all this kindness? Where had this person known you?
MAG. He had seen me when I was at Aldborough.
NORAH. But that's a year ago, and you have told me he has only recently returned from a voyage to China. To have remembered you so well, and to have shown you all this sympathy? Ah, Magdalen, there is but one explanation of this man's conduct--he loves you.
MAG. (drooping her head). Norah!
NORAH. I should have judged so by even the minor attentions he has paid you. He was not content to provide you with a doctor and a nurse, he takes apartments in the house in order that he may be near you; he passes hours by your side when you are able to sit up; he brings you books and fruit and pictures?
MAG. I--I own it.
NORAH. And has all this devotion had no effect? Ah, dearest, your letter betrayed something more than the state of his feelings, they exhibited an undisguised admiration of this man.
MAG. And is it to wondered at? Ah, Norah, if you but knew him--a man so unlike all the men I had ever met; so true an instance of a sailor; so simple and yet so intelligent; so child-like in his tastes and feelings, and yet so manful in his sense of duty. At first it was with mere curiosity that I used to listen to his history, which, out of respect to him, I asked him to relate--the detail of his strange adventures in all parts of the world; his escape from mutiny and shipwreck, and all the terrors of the deep, made doubly vivid by the simple and earnest way in which he told them. I could not help looking at his hand and thinking, that hand that has rescued the drowning, and seized men mad with mutiny, to force them back to duty, now can shift the pillows of the sick so tenderly she hardly knows they have been moved, and mix her lemonade, and peel her fruit, more delicately and neatly than she could do it for herself.
NORAH. Well, love?
MAG. But if curiosity was the first feeling, it soon gave place to a worthier one. This entire unconsciousness in all his details of his own heroism throughout his dangers, the artless modesty, with which he described act after act in his life of dauntless endurance and devoted courage, without an idea that they were anything more than the plainest acts of duty, to which he was bound by the pursuit he followed, raised him to a place in my estimation, man had never held till then? Ah, Norah, it did more, his life became a mirror to me, in which I saw, and shrunk whilst seeing, the selfish littleness of my own.
NORAH. You loved him, Magdalen?
MAG. Such was my punishment, I loved him, only to feel how wholly unworthy I was of him.
NORAH. Nay!
MAG. I said--did he know my history, were he told my story in return, would he not shrink from its sad selfishness, almost as much as I do now myself?
NORAH. And what did you then?
MAG. I saw there was but one course; but one repayment I could offer him for the worthier feelings he had aroused, and that was to tell him everything. It might cost me his respect; but at least it would ensure my own.
NORAH. And you did so?
MAG. Yes! I told him that before we parted. He had a claim, the strongest claim of any one, to know how I came in this house, unknown to all my friends, and how it was I had fallen so low, and as I could not tell him that without the entire story of my life----
NORAH. He wished to hear it?
MAG. No, no! ever generous, he refused; he wished to know nothing which would pain me to tell; but I besought him to hear me; I even begged him to give me courage for the task.