III
Soon it was no longer possible to pretend that Aunt Tessie was not getting worse and worse. Her constant, irrelevant allusions to plots, and poisonings, and wicked people, had become a fixed delusion.
She really thought that everyone at Melrose was conspiring against her life, and she would allow no one, except Emma, to do anything for her.
It was a mercy, Mrs. Lambe often told herself, that Emma was such a good little thing. She was so willing, and never seemed to grudge the time and trouble that she was obliged to spend over cleaning Aunt Tessie’s apartments and tidying up after her. She would even listen, respectfully and yet compassionately, to Aunt Tessie’s long, rambling denunciations and accusations.
“Poor old lady!” Maude once overheard Emma saying to another servant. “She’s a lady just the same, for all she’s gone queer, and I behaves towards her like I would to any other lady, that’s all.”
“Funny kind of a lady that makes a face at a servant, as she did at me this morning.”
“She never done that to me, nor nothing the least like it,” said Emma stoutly.
It was only too true that Aunt Tessie was very rude to all the maids except Emma, and sometimes to Edgar and Maude as well. As she grew worse, she seemed to forget all their kindness and generosity, and to look upon them as being her enemies.
Mrs. Lambe would not let the little girls go near her any more, and the nurse had orders to keep them away from Miss Lambe “until she grew better.”
Aunt Tessie, however, did not grow better.
The doctor, an old friend of Edgar Lambe’s, advised them to have a nurse for her, if they were still determined to keep her on at Melrose, instead of sending her to one of the many excellent establishments that he could have recommended.
“Nothing in the least like an institution or—or asylum. Simply a nursing home where Miss Lambe would have entire freedom and every possible comfort, but would yet receive the constant medical supervision that her unfortunate condition renders necessary.”
But Edgar Lambe remained obstinate. Aunt Tessie had been very good to him in the past, and he had always said that she should be his special charge. He would not send her away to any nursing home, however highly recommended.
He was, however, quite willing that a professional nurse should be installed at Melrose. The expense, he said, was nothing, if it would make things easier for Maude and be of advantage to Aunt Tessie.
The presence of Nurse Alberta certainly fulfilled both these requirements.
She was an intelligent, pleasant-looking woman of five- or six-and-thirty, with none of the pretensions so often associated with her class. She had meals with Aunt Tessie, in the latter’s big, comfortable sitting-room, and slept in a little room adjoining hers. Both of them were waited upon by Emma.
Aunt Tessie nowadays made no difficulty about not coming to the dining-room. Her crazy old mind had fastened upon the idea of poison, and Emma and Nurse Alberta were the only people from whom she would accept food or drink.
The nurse told Emma, with whom she became quite friendly by dint of constant association, that the “persecution mania” was a very common symptom amongst those who were mentally deranged.
“They always think that everybody’s against them,” she declared cheerfully, “even those who do most for them. Look at this poor old lady, for instance! She thinks Mr. and Mrs. Lambe are plotting against her, and I’m sure they’re goodness itself to her, and have been for years, I should think. No expense grudged, and everything done to make her comfortable. Why, most people would have had an own mother sent away by this time and put under restraint—and Miss Lambe is only an aunt. No real relation at all, as you may say, to Mrs. Lambe. Really, I do think Mrs. Lambe’s behaved wonderfully, and I’m sure she finds it a strain.”
Nurse Alberta was quite right. Mrs. Lambe did find the presence of Aunt Tessie in the house a great strain, even now.
In her heart, she was terribly afraid that the old aunt, who had so rapidly passed from one distressing stage to another, might suddenly become a real danger to those around her.
She thought of Ena and Evelyn and shuddered. Very often, she woke in the night and crept out to the landing, trembling, to listen at the night-nursery door.
One day, when Nurse Alberta had been in the house for some time, Mrs. Lambe felt so wretched and so much unstrung by her state of now chronic nervousness, that she detained the doctor after his habitual visit to Aunt Tessie, and timidly spoke to him of her own symptoms.
He listened very attentively, asked her several questions, and finally made a suggestion which Mrs. Lambe saw at once ought to have occurred to her earlier.
She was going to have another child.
It was over five years since Evelyn’s birth, and she had somehow never expected to have any more babies, but both Mr. and Mrs. Lambe were honestly pleased.
They hoped for a son.
It was this discovery that led to the modification of Edgar Lambe’s views about Aunt Tessie. Obviously, the presence of the unfortunate old lady subjected Maude to a continual strain that might easily become more and more severe as time went on.
The doctor, privately consulted by Mr. Lambe, admitted that in his opinion it was not quite fair on Mrs. Lambe, in her condition, to keep the aggressive, turbulent invalid in the house with her. And it wasn’t as if Aunt Tessie herself really benefited by it, either. She was far past appreciating any kindness or attention shown to her now. Her idée fixe was that everyone at Melrose excepting poor little Emma, the maid, was plotting against her in some way, and seeking to poison her.
Mr. Lambe listened, nodding his head, his red, heavy-jowled face puckered with distress. It went against the grain with him to invalidate the boast of years—that Aunt Tessie should always share his home—and yet in his heart he felt that the doctor was right.
Aunt Tessie was past minding or knowing, poor soul—and Maude and their unborn son must come first.
When once he had fairly made up his mind to it, Edgar Lambe could not help feeling a certain relief. He, too, in his own way, had suffered on those dreadful occasions when Aunt Tessie had insisted upon appearing downstairs, and had made his friends and his family uncomfortable by her strange, noisy eccentricity. Even nowadays his daily visit to her room was a miserable affair. It gave her no pleasure now to see the nephew for whom she had once done so much, and who had done so much for her in return. She classed him with her imaginary enemies.
It was very difficult for Edgar Lambe, who was not at all an imaginative man, not to feel irrationally wounded by those wild accusations of enmity. He could scarcely be brought to understand that poor Aunt Tessie’s floods of foolish vituperation had, in themselves, no meaning at all.
“But she was always devoted to me,” he said, half resentfully and half piteously. “I can’t make it out at all. You’d think that even now she’d be able to—to distinguish a bit between me and the wretched cook or charwoman. But no, she abuses us all alike, and seems to think we’re all in league to do her in.”
“It’s part of her illness, Mr. Lambe,” said Nurse Alberta soothingly. “You know, she really is quite cracky, poor old lady.”
The “arrangements,” as the doctor called them, were made as speedily as possible, since they were naturally distressing to everybody, and Mr. and Mrs. Lambe went themselves to see Aunt Tessie’s new quarters, and to talk to the charming lady at the head of the establishment, and get special permission for Nurse Alberta, to whom Aunt Tessie was used, to take her there and remain with her for some time until she grew accustomed to it all.
“Fires in her room, of course, and any extras that she may fancy,” said Mr. Lambe impressively. “Expense is of no consideration at all. I shall send round a comfortable couch for the sitting-room this afternoon.”
He did so, and Mrs. Lambe added two or three fat cushions, and a decorated lampshade and waste-paper basket, such as she liked in her own drawing-room.
When Aunt Tessie was told that she was going away from Melrose for a time, she was delighted.
“Then I can relish my food again,” she said rather coarsely.
“There’s never any knowing what they’re all up to here.”
That remained her attitude up to the very last. She dumped them all together as objects of her aggrieved resentment. Edgar, Maude, the two little girls, the impassive, well-behaved servants.
But when she said good-bye to Emma the night before she was to go away, Aunt Tessie squeezed her hand hard, and gave her some money and several ornaments and little trinkets from her own possessions.
Soft-hearted Emma cried, and hurried away to the sitting-room to find Nurse Alberta. “I just can’t bear to listen to her, poor old lady, saying I’m the only one as never tried to do her a mischief,” she sobbed.
“You’re a silly girl to take on so,” said the nurse good-naturedly. “Why, she’ll be ever so well looked after where she’s going, and there’s good money being spent on her comforts, I can tell you, and Mr. Lambe won’t let that be wasted. It isn’t like some poor looneys, that get put away and not a soul of their own people ever goes near them to see how they’re getting on. She’ll be kept an eye on, you may be very sure, and it’ll be best for all parties to have her under another roof, really it will.”
“Oh yes, I know!” said Emma.
“It isn’t even as if she wanted to stay, you know, Emma. She’s turned dead against them, like cases of her sort often do. Look at the way she spoke to you about your being the only one that didn’t want to poison her, or some such rubbish.”
There was a pause.
“Nurse,” said Emma suddenly, “do mad people know as they’re mad?”
“They say not,” indifferently returned Nurse Alberta, biting a thread off her piece of needlework. “Why, Emma?”
“Because—well, me and Cook got to talking last night about poor Miss Lambe, and—I can’t say it how I mean,” Emma rambled on confusedly, “but Cook would have it that people as go off their heads—well, they are off their heads. They don’t look at anything like we do any more—it’s sort of all upside down to them. But I didn’t think it was like that—well, at any rate not with Miss Lambe.”
“Why not?” said Nurse Alberta.
She looked interested and Emma was encouraged.
“I thought, perhaps,” she said timidly, “that the inside of her poor mind is still like everybody’s else’s, in a way, only she can’t get the thoughts to come out right. And I thought, perhaps, that when she said all that about them wanting to poison her, it was only her—her mad sort of way of saying that she’d felt, all along, they really wanted her to go away. And that would be why she said I was the only person that she was safe with. Because I never did want her to go away. The master and mistress and the young ladies may have felt like that. Of course, it’s been ever so trying for them, I know, having her here like that—and the girls downstairs, they wanted her to go. But I never did, and I wondered if perhaps that was what she sort of felt, only she couldn’t explain it right, and so it came out that way—in all her talk about being poisoned, and that.”
Emma stopped and looked rather wistfully at the nurse.
“You’ll think I’m balmy myself, talking like that. And I can’t explain what I mean a bit well. It’s not as if I’d been educated like you——”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Nurse Alberta, smiling. “I think I understand what you mean, Emma. According to your notion, the poor old lady feels and thinks pretty much the same as we do, but she’s lost the trick of communicating her feelings and her thoughts. They—they get lost in transmission, so to say.”
“You do put it well, Nurse!” said Emma admiringly.
Nurse Alberta looked gratified. “I don’t know,” she said modestly. But she was herself rather pleased by the sound of the phrase that she had used, and could not resist repeating it.
“It’s a bit far-fetched, perhaps, but there’s certainly something in what you say, Emma,” she observed, biting off another thread. “Lost in transmission—that’s the idea—lost in transmission!”
TIME WORKS WONDERS