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

constrained, whispering tones in which she had answered Mrs. Frankland’s former question. “I think I was just falling asleep in the armchair here; and I ought to have told you perhaps that, having had my troubles, and being afflicted with a heart complaint, I have a habit of sighing in my sleep. It means nothing, ma’am, and I hope you will be good enough to excuse it.”

Rosamond’s generous instincts were aroused in a moment.

“Excuse it!” she said. “I hope I may do better than that, Mrs. Jazeph, and be the means of relieving it. When Mr. Orridge comes tomorrow you shall consult him, and I will take care that you want for nothing that he may order. No! no! Don’t thank me until I have been the means of making you well⁠—and keep where you are, if the armchair is comfortable. The baby is asleep again; and I should like to have half an hour’s quiet before I change to the night side of the bed. Stop where you are for the present: I will call as soon as I want you.”

So far from exercising a soothing effect on Mrs. Jazeph, these kindly meant words produced the precisely opposite result of making her restless. She began to walk about the room, and confusedly attempted to account for the change in her conduct by saying that she wished to satisfy herself that all her arrangements were properly made for the night. In a few minutes more she began, in defiance of the doctor’s prohibition, to tempt Mrs. Frankland into talking again, by asking questions about Porthgenna Tower, and by referring to the chances for and against its being chosen as a permanent residence by the young married couple.

“Perhaps, ma’am,” she said, speaking on a sudden, with an eagerness in her voice which was curiously at variance with the apparent indifference of her manner⁠—“Perhaps when you see Porthgenna Tower you may not like it so well as you think you will now. Who can tell that you may not get tired and leave the place again after a few days⁠—especially if you go into the empty rooms? I should have thought⁠—if you will excuse my saying so, ma’am⁠—I should have thought that a lady like you would have liked to get as far away as possible from dirt and dust, and disagreeable smells.”

“I can face worse inconveniences than those, where my curiosity is concerned,” said Rosamond. “And I am more curious to see the uninhabited rooms at Porthgenna than to see the Seven Wonders of the World. Even if we don’t settle altogether at the old house, I feel certain that we shall stay there for some time.”

At that answer, Mrs. Jazeph abruptly turned away, and asked no more questions. She retired to a corner of the room near the door, where the chair-bedstead stood which the doctor had pointed out to her⁠—occupied herself for a few minutes in making it ready for the night⁠—then left it as suddenly as she had approached it, and began to walk up and down once more. This unaccountable restlessness, which had already surprised Rosamond, now made her feel rather uneasy⁠—especially when she once or twice overheard Mrs. Jazeph talking to herself. Judging by words and fragments of sentences that were audible now and then, her mind was still running, with the most inexplicable persistency, on the subject of Porthgenna Tower. As the minutes wore on, and she continued to walk up and down, and still went on talking, Rosamond’s uneasiness began to strengthen into something like alarm. She resolved to awaken Mrs. Jazeph, in the least offensive manner, to a sense of the strangeness of her own conduct, by noticing that she was talking, but by not appearing to understand that she was talking to herself.

“What did you say?” asked Rosamond, putting the question at a moment when the nurse’s voice was most distinctly betraying her in the act of thinking aloud.

Mrs. Jazeph stopped, and raised her head vacantly, as if she had been awakened out of a heavy sleep.

“I thought you were saying something more about our old house,” continued Rosamond. “I thought I heard you say that I ought not to go to Porthgenna, or that you would not go there in my place, or something of that sort.”

Mrs. Jazeph blushed like a young girl. “I think you must have been mistaken, ma’am,” she said, and stooped over the chair-bedstead again.

Watching her anxiously, Rosamond saw that, while she was affecting to arrange the bedstead, she was doing nothing whatever to prepare it for being slept in. What did that mean? What did her whole conduct mean for the last half-hour? As Mrs. Frankland asked herself those questions, the thrill of a terrible suspicion turned her cold to the very roots of her hair. It had never occurred to her before, but it suddenly struck her now, with the force of positive conviction, that the new nurse was not in her right senses.

All that was unaccountable in her behavior⁠—her odd disappearances behind the curtains at the foot of the bed; her lingering, stealthy, overfamiliar way of using the hairbrush; her silence at one time, her talkativeness at another; her restlessness, her whispering to herself, her affectation of being deeply engaged in doing something which she was not doing at all⁠—every one of her strange actions (otherwise incomprehensible) became intelligible in a moment on that one dreadful supposition that she was mad.

Terrified as she was, Rosamond kept her presence of mind. One of her arms stole instinctively round the child; and she had half raised the other to catch at the bell-rope hanging above her pillow, when she saw Mrs. Jazeph turn and look at her.

A woman possessed only of ordinary nerve would, probably, at that instant have pulled at the bell-rope in the unreasoning desperation of sheer fright. Rosamond had courage enough to calculate consequences, and to remember that Mrs. Jazeph would have time to lock the door, before assistance could arrive, if she betrayed her suspicions by ringing without first assigning some plausible reason for doing