The Dead Secret, Wilkie Collins [best historical biographies .TXT] 📗

stranger. The doctor’s message this afternoon told me that your mistress was a friend of my poor, dear father’s. I suppose she must have known him before my time. Anyway, I feel doubly grateful to her for taking an interest in me for my father’s sake. But you can have no such feeling; you must have come here from pure good-nature and anxiety to help others. Don’t go away, there, to the window. Come and sit down by me.”

Mrs. Jazeph had risen from the trunk, and was approaching the bedside⁠—when she suddenly turned away in the direction of the fireplace, just as Mrs. Frankland began to speak of her father.

“Come and sit here,” reiterated Rosamond, getting impatient at receiving no answer. “What in the world are you doing there at the foot of the bed?”

The figure of the new nurse again interposed between the bed and the fading evening light that glimmered through the window before there was any reply.

“The evening is closing in,” said Mrs. Jazeph, “and the window is not quite shut. I was thinking of making it fast, and of drawing down the blind⁠—if you had no objection, ma’am?”

“Oh, not yet! not yet! Shut the window, if you please, in case the baby should catch cold, but don’t draw down the blind. Let me get my peep at the view as long as there is any light left to see it by. That long flat stretch of grazing-ground out there is just beginning, at this dim time, to look a little like my childish recollections of a Cornish moor. Do you know anything about Cornwall, Mrs. Jazeph?”

“I have heard⁠—” At those first three words of reply the nurse stopped. She was just then engaged in shutting the window, and she seemed to find some difficulty in closing the lock.

“What have you heard?” asked Rosamond.

“I have heard that Cornwall is a wild, dreary country,” said Mrs. Jazeph, still busying herself with the lock of the window, and, by consequence, still keeping her back turned to Mrs. Frankland.

“Can’t you shut the window, yet?” said Rosamond. “My maid always does it quite easily. Leave it till she comes up⁠—I am going to ring for her directly. I want her to brush my hair and cool my face with a little eau de cologne and water.”

“I have shut it, ma’am,” said Mrs. Jazeph, suddenly succeeding in closing the lock. “And if you will allow me, I should be very glad to make you comfortable for the night, and save you the trouble of ringing for the maid.”

Thinking the new nurse the oddest woman she had ever met with, Mrs. Frankland accepted the offer. By the time Mrs. Jazeph had prepared the eau de cologne and water, the twilight was falling softly over the landscape outside, and the room was beginning to grow dark.

“Had you not better light a candle?” suggested Rosamond.

“I think not, ma’am,” said Mrs. Jazeph, rather hastily. “I can see quite well without.”

She began to brush Mrs. Frankland’s hair as she spoke; and, at the same time, asked a question which referred to the few words that had passed between them on the subject of Cornwall. Pleased to find that the new nurse had grown familiar enough at last to speak before she was spoken to, Rosamond desired nothing better than to talk about her recollections of her native country. But, from some inexplicable reason, Mrs. Jazeph’s touch, light and tender as it was, had such a strangely disconcerting effect on her, that she could not succeed, for the moment, in collecting her thoughts so as to reply, except in the briefest manner. The careful hands of the nurse lingered with a stealthy gentleness among the locks of her hair; the pale, wasted face of the new nurse approached, every now and then, more closely to her own than appeared at all needful. A vague sensation of uneasiness, which she could not trace to any particular part of her⁠—which she could hardly say that she really felt, in a bodily sense, at all⁠—seemed to be floating about her, to be hanging around and over her, like the air she breathed. She could not move, though she wanted to move in the bed; she could not turn her head so as to humor the action of the brush; she could not look round; she could not break the embarrassing silence which had been caused by her own short, discouraging answer. At last the sense of oppression⁠—whether fancied or real⁠—irritated her into snatching the brush out of Mrs. Jazeph’s hand. The instant she had done so, she felt ashamed of the discourteous abruptness of the action, and confused at the alarm and surprise which the manner of the nurse exhibited. With the strongest sense of the absurdity of her own conduct, and yet without the least power of controlling herself, she burst out laughing, and tossed the brush away to the foot of the bed.

“Pray don’t look surprised, Mrs. Jazeph,” she said, still laughing without knowing why, and without feeling in the slightest degree amused. “I’m very rude and odd, I know. You have brushed my hair delightfully; but⁠—I can’t tell how⁠—it seemed, all the time, as if you were brushing the strangest fancies into my head. I can’t help laughing at them⁠—I can’t indeed! Do you know, once or twice, I absolutely fancied, when your face was closest to mine, that you wanted to kiss me! Did you ever hear of anything so ridiculous? I declare I am more of a baby, in some things, than the little darling here by my side!”

Mrs. Jazeph made no answer. She left the bed while Rosamond was speaking, and came back, after an unaccountably long delay, with the eau de cologne and water. As she held the basin while Mrs. Frankland bathed her face, she kept away at arm’s length, and came no nearer when it was time to offer the towel. Rosamond began to be afraid that she had seriously offended Mrs. Jazeph, and tried to soothe and propitiate her by asking questions about the management of the baby.