"Where's dad?"
"He went round to the 'Arms.' He said he felt quite shaky."
Jenny sat mute and hopeless. Would her mother never recognize her? Would she die in the belief that she was neither loved nor appreciated?
Chapter XXXI: A Document in Madness
ASHGATE Asylum was a great gray accumulation of stone, standing at the head of a wide avenue of beech trees on a chalky ridge of the Chiltern Hills. Here in a long ward lay Mrs. Raeburn, fantasies riding day and night through the darkness of her mind.
Jenny and May used to go once a fortnight to visit her sad seclusion. In a way it was a fruitless errand of piety, for she never recognized her daughters, staring at them from viewless eyes. Nobody else in the family made the slow, dreary journey through the raw spring weather. To be sure every fortnight Charlie intended to go; but something always cropped up to prevent him, and as he was unable to realize the need for instancy, he finally made up his mind to postpone any visit to the early summer, when, as he optimistically announced, it would no doubt be time to fetch his wife home completely cured.
Jenny and May used to be met at the railway station by the Asylum brougham, which would bear them at a jogging pace up the straight melancholy avenue and set them down by the main entrance beside which hung the huge bell-chain whose clangor seemed to wake a multitude of unclean spirits. Often, as they walked nervously over the parquet of the lobby ample as a cloister, and past a succession of cheerful fire-places, Jenny would fancy she heard distant screams, horrid cries, traveling down the echoing corridors that branched off at every few paces. The nurse who was directing them would talk away pleasantly without apparent concern, without seeming to notice those patients allowed a measure of liberty. Jenny and May, however, could hardly refrain from shrieking out in terror as they shivered by these furtive, crouching shapes whose gaze was concentrated on things not seen by them. In the long ward at whose extreme end their mother's bed was situated, these alternations of embarrassment and fear became even more acute. Nearly all the occupants of the beds had shaved heads which gave them, especially the gray-haired women, a very ghastly appearance. Many of them would mutter audible comments on the two girls as they passed along, comparing them extravagantly to angels or to long-lost friends and relatives. Some would whimper in the terrible imagination that Jenny and May had arrived to hurt them. The girls were glad when the battery of mad eyes was passed and they could stand beside their mother's bed.
"Here are your daughters come all this long way to see you, Mrs. Raeburn," the nurse would announce, and "Well, mother," or "How are you now, mother?" they would shyly inquire.
Mrs. Raeburn could not recognize them, but would regard them from wide-open eyes that betrayed neither friendliness nor dislike.
"Won't you say you're glad to see them?" the nurse would ask.