“And you enjoyed your day in the country, mother?” asked Michael.
She looked at him sideways and slowly. Then again, as if recollecting a task she had committed to memory, she answered.
“Yes, so much,” she said. “All the trees and the birds and the sunshine. I enjoyed them so much.”
“Bring your chair a little closer, my darling,” she said. “You are so far off. And why do you wait, nurse? I will call you if I want you.”
Michael felt one moment of sickening spiritual terror. He understood quite plainly why Nurse Baker did not want him to go near to his mother, and the reason of it gave him this pang, not of nervousness but of black horror, that the sane and the sensitive must always feel when they are brought intimately in contact with some blind derangement of instinct in those most nearly allied to them. Physically, on the material plane, he had no fear at all.
He made a movement, grasping the arm of his chair, as if to wheel it closer, but he came actually no nearer her.
“Why don’t you go away, nurse?” said Lady Ashbridge, “and leave my son and me to talk about our nice day in the country?”
“I want to talk, too, my lady,” she said. “I went with you and Lord Comber. We all enjoyed it together.”
It seemed to Michael that his mother made some violent effort towards self-control. He saw one of her hands that were lying on her knee clench itself, so that the knuckles stood out white.
“Yes, we will all talk together, then,” she said. “Or--er--shall I have a little doze first? I am rather sleepy with so much pleasant air. And you are sleepy, too, are you not, Michael? Yes, I see you look sleepy. Shall we have a little nap, as I often do after tea? Then, when I am fresh again, you shall come back, nurse, and we will talk over our pleasant day.”
When he entered the room, Michael had not quite closed the door, and now, as half an hour before, he heard steps on the stairs. A moment afterwards his mother heard them too.
“What is that?” she said. “Who is coming now to disturb me, just when I wanted to have a nap?”
There came a knock at the door. Nurse Baker did not move her head, but continued watching her patient, with hands ready to act.
Lady Ashbridge’s face was towards the door. As Sir James entered, she suddenly sprang up, and in her right hand that lay beside her was a knife, which she had no doubt taken from the tea-table when she came upstairs. She turned swiftly towards Michael, and stabbed at him with it.