“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——”