bars a cage, still less can they make a fortress.” Suddenly she seemed to remember herself. “But these are but ‘wild and whirring words’,” she said, smiling. “I’m so sorry. Please don’t pay any attention to them. My disease of quoting grows worse and worse. It’s because I have no opinions of my own.”
She looked disquietingly excited and my own head swam. “That awful pressing in!” What did she . . . what could she . . . mean? A sense of dreadful menace almost stifled me, and I felt utterly estranged; but something had to be said.
“When are your theatricals to be?” I asked. “I didn’t know you were acting.”
“Acting?” she repeated. “What do you mean?”
“The nurse tells me she often hears you rehearsing in the night.”
She blushed crimson. “Oh, that!” she said. “Oh, yes! You see, I have a silly habit of reciting poetry aloud to myself, and it made me feel self-conscious to know she had overheard me, so I said I was rehearsing for some theatricals.”
“I see,” I said; but my heart sank at hearing her lie.
Then we spoke of other things, but we were both hopelessly preoccupied, and there was no life in our talk. It was almost forced, and I noted that nearly everything that Margaret said was in inverted commas. Scarcely anything passed her lips that was not a quotation. I had already observed that the more tired, strained or preoccupied she seemed, the more this was the case. When her vitality was lowered it was, to use her own words, as though she had “no opinion, emotion or impulse” of her own, but was merely a thoroughfare for the thoughts of others – as though nothing remained to hold the fort except memory.
I think it was three days later that the nurse, of her own accord, came to report to me again, and told me she considered her patient increasingly nervous and depressed. To my enquiry as to how Miss Clewer was sleeping, she answered: “Very little now.” Adding ominously, “And if you ask me, sir, I don’t think she wants to go to sleep.”
“She’s given up the theatricals anyhow, hasn’t she?” I asked, in as casual a voice as I could command.
“Given them up, sir? No, I wish to goodness’ sake she would. I really can scarcely bear to hear it; the way she screams out her part has thoroughly got on my nerves. As often as I come back along that passage, she’s going through it. I know some of her part by heart myself. I don’t believe I’ll ever be able to forget the queer words.”
“What are the words you overhear her saying?” I asked, as indifferently as I could.
“Saying? You wouldn’t call it saying if you’d heard her, sir, it’s more like yelling. As I was saying the other day, you’d never think such a gentle lady could produce such a terrifying voice. The words that she most often repeats are: ‘Let me in! Give way! What can I do without a body? What use are you making of your body? I want it! You clear out! I must be lodged! I must be lodged! I must be lodged!’ And the third time she repeats ‘I must be lodged’, her voice rises to a screech. But whatever’s the matter, sir? You’ve come over as white as a sheet!”
Murmuring that I felt faint and must get some brandy, I told her I would see her in the evening, and left the room.
My legs almost gave way as I went upstairs, and directly I reached my bedroom I turned the key in the lock, though what it was I thought might thus be debarred, God only knows.
With shaking hands, I opened the book I had been reading in bed the night before.
It was a bound copybook, filled with the faded brown of a spidery sixteenth-century writing. Margaret had long given me the freedom of her library, and on a high shelf I had found a manuscript book – a sort of irregular journal kept by an ancestress of hers, also a Margaret Clewer. I had read it far into the night. It was all interesting, and by the final heart-broken entry I had been most vividly and painfully impressed.
Were certain words really as, with horror, I remembered them, or was my memory deceiving my disturbed nerves?
Trembling, I turned the leaves until I came to the words:
The long-dead woman’s manuscript slipped from my hand and I struggled to think. Even last night the words of the dying changeling daughter had made me shiver. Now, after what the nurse had quoted, they seared my mind. Elspeth Clewer! I remembered the grey, uncommunicative grave beneath the yew tree. Its bleak reticence had impressed my imagination on my first visit to the churchyard, and now, to my mind’s eye, it was forever associated with Margaret’s prostrate, writhing body.
God grante that she lye stille! God grante that she lye stille! I snatched at a faint, fluttering hope. Perhaps Margaret was familiar with the journal I had found. If so, its grim contents would be very likely to haunt her. Might not what the nurse mistook for rehearsing have been her quoting it in disturbed sleep?
That evening I found her pale and wild-eyed. I told her of my discovery of the diary and asked if she had ever read it. She disclaimed all knowledge, and this time I knew she spoke the truth. I said it gave a strange account of an ancestress of hers, an Elspeth Clewer. Was it my fancy, or did she draw in her breath at the name?
“Oh! Does it?” she said. “Yes, I’ve heard of her. Though she died before she was twenty-three, she’s the only celebrated member of the Clewer family, for she crowded her short life with every imaginable vice and crime. I believe she was an absolute mythical monster of violence and cruelty: but, as I have often told you, I really don’t take the faintest interest in my ancestors.”
Two days later, as I sat at breakfast, the front-door bell was so violently pulled that I went to the door myself. The faithful Rebecca stood there, her face mottled with agitation. “Oh, sir! She’s been and gone and bolted!”
“Miss Clewer?” I gasped.
“No, sir,” she gabbled breathlessly. “That yere nurse, been and gone and offed it – left my poor lamb with no word to no one. Yes, when I comes along this mornin’ I finds my lady deep asleep, and, if you please, on the floor there’s a tray with broken pieces of cup and saucer and Benger’s food slopped all over the carpet. Just dropped out of Nurse’s hand, it must have been. And she couldn’t be found nowhere; clean gone she was – run off and left all her things behind her. The garden boy, he tells me he seen her tearing round the garden like as though the devil were after her. I looks in at the station, and they said she’d been there a full hour before the first train went, and looked that queer without no hat nor nothing. And my lady – she looks to go to your heart this morning – she says she calls to mind asking Nurse to fetch her a cup of Benger’s – and then she thinks she must have fallen asleep, since she doesn’t remember no more.”
Incensed with the nurse, I rang up the London association from which she came and instructed them to telephone directly she arrived. Full of foreboding I hurried to the Manor House. I found Margaret walking up and down in the garden, her face drawn and set.
“I’m sorry I’ve frightened your nurse away,” she said bitterly.
“Frightened her? You!” I tried to laugh.
“So it seems. A well-trained nurse who drops her tray and flies from the house must surely be a little upset.”
“She must have taken leave of her senses,” I said dryly. “Fortunately I know of an admirable one who happens to be free now.”
“No, thank you. No more nurses for me! I can’t say I’ve found the last one very reassuring. No, I’ve just telegraphed to lots of my friends to come down. I’ve been too unsociable lately.” She spoke defiantly, and I knew it would be no use to argue.
That afternoon I was rung up by the matron of the Nursing Association. Nurse Newson had never turned up, but on enquiry it was found she had gone to her mother, whose telephone number I was given.
“Mrs Newson speaking,” answered a painstakingly genteel voice.
I explained who I was, stating that I wished to speak to her daughter, whose amazing behaviour demanded explanation.
The voice let itself go, and unmistakable relish in a crisis was plain through its agitation.
“Oh, sir! I’m afraid you can’t speak to my daughter. She’s bad in bed, and doctor says she’s suffering from
