Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White (books for 5 year olds to read themselves .TXT) 📕

from an official quarter.

 

“Yes, Nurse,” she said. “But I must hurry to dress.”

 

“Oh, you dress for dinner, do you?”

 

The woman’s tone was so strained—her glance so spiked—that Helen was

glad to get away.

 

“She’s jealous,” she thought. “And Miss Warren’s a coward. They’re both

weak links. I wonder what my special failing is.”

 

Like the majority of the human race, she was blind to her own faults,

and would have protested vehemently against the charge of curiosity,

although Mrs. Oates already knew the origin of several trivial mishaps.

 

When she entered her bedroom, she recoiled with a violent start, at the

sight of a black shape, which appeared to be swinging into her window.

 

Snapping on the light, she saw that she had been misled by the branches

of a tall cedar, which was being lashed by the gale. Although it seemed

so near, the tree was too faraway for any athlete to leap from it into

her room; but every gust swept the boughs towards the opening in an

unpleasantly suggestive manner.

 

“That tree looks as if it was trying to force its way in,” thought

Helen. “I’ll have to shut that window.”

 

When she fastened the casement, she noticed how the rain streamed down

the glass, like a water-spout. The garden lay below, in sodden

blackness amid the tormented landscape, over which the elements swept

mightily.

 

She was glad to draw the curtains and gloat over the contrast of her

splendid room. It contained the entire furniture of the bedroom of the

first Lady Warren. When she had exchanged it for her dwelling in the

family vault, it was still new and costly—so that time—combined with

lackof use—had done little to dim its grandeur.

 

Miss Warren, on her return from Cambridge, had made a clean sweep of her

mother’s belongings to a spare room, in preference of stark and rigid

utility; but Helen gladly accepted its superfluity of ornaments and its

color-scheme of terra-cotta and turquoise-blue, for the novelty of thick

carpet and costly fabrics.

 

The original owner’s photograph had the place of honor on the marble

mantel-shelf. It was taken probably in the ‘eighties, and represented an

amiable lady, with a curled fringe, too little forehead, and too many

chins.

 

Above her rose the mirror. Its base was heavily painted with bulrushes,

water-lilies and storks.

 

As Helen thought of the ordeal which threatened her, she wished that Sir

Robert had remained faithful to the dead.

 

“If she’d lived, she’d have been a dear old lady,” she thought. “Still,

I asked for it. You couldn’t keep me out of that room.”

 

The need to win over Dr. Parry became so urgent that she adopted

Simone’s, tactics. As a rule, she wore a sleeveless white Summer frock,

for dinner; but, tonight, she resolved to put on her only evening-dress,

for the first time. It was a cheap little gown, bought in Oxford Street,

during the sales. All the same, the artistic—if hackneyed—contrast

of its pale-green color with the flaming bush of her hair, made her smile

at her reflection in the big swinging cheval-glass.

 

“Ought to fetch him,” she murmured, as she hurried downstairs in sudden

dread, lest he should have arrived in her absence.

 

She was still faced with her problem of making her opportunity to see

him alone; for, of necessity, she was at the call of the household,

owing to the elastic nature of her duties. But she had learned how to

hide, in the commission of her work; and no S.O.S. could reach her when

she was afflicted with temporary deafness.

 

“The lobby,” she decided. “I’ll take down a damp cloth, and wipe the

dust from the palm.”

 

When she reached the landing, on the first floor, the door of the blue

room was opened an inch, to reveal a section of white and the glint of

Nurse Barker’s eye. Directly she saw that she was observed, the woman

shut the door again.

 

There was something so furtive about that secret examination that Helen

felt uneasy.

 

“She was waiting for me,” she thought. “There’s something very queer

about that woman. I wouldn’t like to be alone with her, in the house.

She’d let you down.”

 

As her instinct was always to explore the unfamiliar, she turned in the

direction of the blue room. Nurse Barker saw that her ambush was

discovered, and she opened the door.

 

“What d’you want?” she asked ungraciously.

 

“I want to warn you,” replied Helen.

 

She broke off, conscious that Nurse Barker was looking at her neck with

hungry gloating eyes.

 

“How white your skin is,” she said. “Red hair,” explained Helen

shortly.

 

As a rule, she was sorry that she did not attract general attention;

now, for the first time in her life, she shrank from admiration.

 

“Did you say you wanted to warn me?” asked Nurse Barker.

 

“Yes,” whispered Helen. “Don’t play Lady Warren too low.”

 

“What d’you mean?”

 

“She’s hiding something.”

 

“What?”

 

“If you’re as clever as she is, you’ll find out,” replied Helen, turning

away.

 

“Come back,” demanded Nurse Barker. “You’ve either said too much, or not

enough.”

 

Helen smiled as she shook her head.

 

“Ask Miss Warren,” she advised. “I told her, and got nicely snubbed for

my pains. But I felt I ought to put you on your guard.”

 

She started at the rumble of a deep bass voice from in side the blue

room.

 

“Is that the girl?”

 

“Yes, my lady,” replied Nurse Barker. “Do you want to see her?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“I’m sorry.” Helen spoke quickly. “I can’t stop now. I’ve got to help

with the dinner.”

 

Nurse Barker’s eyes glittered with a sense of power.

 

“Why are you so afraid of her?” she sneered.

 

“You’d be afraid, too, if you knew as much as I do,” hinted Helen.

 

Nurse Barker grasped her by the wrist, while her nostrils quivered.

 

“The dinner can wait,” she said. “Miss Warren’s instructions are that

Lady Warren must be humored. Come in.”

 

Helen entered the blue room with a sinking heart. Lady Warren lay in

bed, propped up with pillows. She wore a fleecy white bed-jacket. Her

shock of grey hair was neatly parted in the middle, and secured with

pink bows. It had obviously been Nurse Barker’s first job to deck her

patient out, like sacrificial lamb. Helen knew that some grim sense of

humor had made the old lady submit to the indignity. She was luring on

the nurse to a sense of false security, only to make the subsequent

disillusionment the harsher.

 

“Come here,” she said, in a hoarse whisper. “I want to tell you

something.’”

 

Helen felt herself gripped and drawn downwards, so that Lady Warren’s

hot breath played on her bare neck.

 

“A girl was murdered in this house,” said Lady Warren.

 

“Yes, I know.” Helen spoke in a soothing tone. “But why do you think

about it? It happened so long ago.”

 

“How do you know?” rapped out Lady Warren.

 

“Mrs. Oates told me.”

 

“Did she tell you that the girl was thrown down the well?”

 

Helen remembered that in Mrs. Oates’ version, a more gory method was

employed. The well figured in the suicide incident. It struck her that

Mrs. Oates had exaggerated the truth, in order to achieve the

sensational interest of a murder.

 

“Perhaps it was an accident,” she said aloud.

 

Lady Warren lost her temper at the attempt to calm her.

 

“No,” she bellowed, “it was murder. I saw it. Upstairs, from a window.

It was nearly dark, and I thought it was only a tree in the garden.

Then—the girl came, and it moved, and threw her in… I was too

late. I couldn’t find a rope… Listen.”

 

She drew down Helen’s head almost on to the pillow.

 

“You are that girl,” she whispered.

 

Helen felt as though she were listening to a forecast of her own fate;

but she caught Nurse Barker’s eye in an attempt to delude her that she

was humoring the invalid, in professional style.

 

“Am I?” she said lightly. “Well, I’ll have to be very careful.”

 

“You little fool,” panted the old woman. “I’m warning you. Girls get

murdered in this house. But you sleep with me. I’ll take care of you.”

 

Suddenly Helen thought she might trap her to reveal the hiding-place of

the revolver. “How will you do it?” she asked,

 

“I’ll shoot him.”

 

“Fine. But where’s your gun?”

 

Lady Warren looked at Helen with a gleam of crocodile cunning in her

eyes.

 

“I haven’t a gun,” she whined. “I had one once, but they took it away.

I’m only a poor old woman. Nurse, she says I have a gun. Have I?”

 

“Of course not,” said Nurse Barker. “Really, Miss Capel, you’ve no

right to irritate the patient.”

 

“Then I’ll go,” declared Helen thankfully. She added, in an undertone,

“You asked me a question, just now. You’ve had your answer. You know now

what to look for.”

 

At the door, she was arrested by Lady Warren’s bass bellow.

 

“Come back, tonight.”

 

“Very well, I will,” she promised.

 

To her surprise her nerves were quivering from the episode, as she went

down into the hall.

 

“What’s the matter with me?” she wondered. “I believe I shall go goofy

if the doctor doesn’t get me out.”

 

She looked anxiously at the grandfather’s clock. Dr. Parry lived several

miles away, so he always paid his last call at the Summit, in order to

get back to his dinner.

 

He had never been so late before. A slight foreboding stole over Helen

as she listened to the fury of the storm. When Miss Warren drifted by,

like a woman in a dream, she appealed to her.

 

“The doctor’s late, Miss Warren.”

 

Miss Warren looked at the clock. She was already dressed for dinner, in

her usual mushroom lace gown.

 

“Perhaps he’s not coming,” she said indifferently.

 

Helen gave a gasp of dismay. With the egotism of an employer, who never

connected a young girl with an independent existence, Miss Warren

believed that Helen’s concern was on account of the family.

 

“My mother’s condition is static,” she explained, “although the end is

inevitable. Dr. Parry has given us instructions how to act, in case of

sudden failure.” “But why shouldn’t he come tonight?” insisted Helen.

 

“He always comes.”

 

“The weather,” murmured Miss Warren.

 

A rush of wind crashing against the corner of the house illustrated her

meaning with perfect timing. Helen’s heart turned to water at the sound.

 

“He won’t come,” she thought. “I shall have to sleep in the blue room.”