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!”