When the call came I remember that I turned from the telephone in a
romantic flutter. Though I had spoken only once to the great surgeon,
Roland Maradick, I felt on that December afternoon that to speak to him
only once—to watch him in the operating-room for a single hour—was an
adventure which drained the colour and the excitement from the rest of
life. After all these years of work on typhoid and pneumonia cases, I
can still feel the delicious tremor of my young pulses; I can still see
the winter sunshine slanting through the hospital windows over the white
uniforms of the nurses.
“He didn’t mention me by name. Can there be a mistake?” I stood,
incredulous yet ecstatic, before the superintendent of the hospital.
“No, there isn’t a mistake. I was talking to him before you came down.”
Miss Hemphill’s strong face softened while she looked at me. She was a
big, resolute woman, a distant Canadian relative of my mother’s, and the
kind of nurse I had discovered in the month since I had come up from
Richmond, that Northern hospital boards, if not Northern patients,
appear instinctively to select. From the first, in spite of her
hardness, she had taken a liking—I hesitate to use the word “fancy” for
a preference so impersonal—to her Virginia cousin. After all, it isn’t
every Southern nurse, just out of training, who can boast a kinswoman in
the superintendent of a New York hospital.
“And he made you understand positively that he meant me?” The thing was
so wonderful that I simply couldn’t believe it.
“He asked particularly for the nurse who was with Miss Hudson last week
when he operated. I think he didn’t even remember that you had a name.
When I asked if he meant Miss Randolph, he repeated that he wanted the
nurse who had been with Miss Hudson. She was small, he said, and
cheerful-looking. This, of course, might apply to one or two of the
others, but none of these was with Miss Hudson.”
“Then I suppose it is really true?” My pulses were tingling. “And I am
to be there at six o’clock?”
“Not a minute later. The day nurse goes off duty at that hour, and Mrs.
Maradick is never left by herself for an instant.”
“It is her mind, isn’t it? And that makes it all the stranger that he
should select me, for I have had so few mental cases.”
“So few cases of any kind,” Miss Hemphill was smiling, and when she
smiled I wondered if the other nurses would know her. “By the time you
have gone through the treadmill in New York, Margaret, you will have
lost a good many things besides your inexperience. I wonder how long you
will keep your sympathy and your imagination? After all, wouldn’t you
have made a better novelist than a nurse?”
“I can’t help putting myself into my cases. I suppose one ought not to?”
“It isn’t a question of what one ought to do, but of what one must. When
you are drained of every bit of sympathy and enthusiasm, and have got
nothing in return for it, not even thanks, you will understand why I try
to keep you from wasting yourself.”
“But surely in a case like this—for Doctor Maradick?”
“Oh, well, of course—for Doctor Maradick.” She must have seen that I
implored her confidence, for, after a minute, she let fall carelessly a
gleam of light on the situation: “It is a very sad case when you think
what a charming man and a great surgeon Doctor Maradick is.”
Above the starched collar of my uniform I felt the blood leap in bounds
to my cheeks. “I have spoken to him only once,” I murmured, “but he is
charming, and so kind and handsome, isn’t he?”
“His patients adore him.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve seen that. Everyone hangs on his visits.” Like the
patients and the other nurses, I also had come by delightful, if
imperceptible, degrees to hang on the daily visits of Doctor Maradick.
He was, I suppose, born to be a hero to women. From my first day in his
hospital, from the moment when I watched, through closed shutters, while
he stepped out of his car, I have never doubted that he was assigned to
the great part in the play. If I had been ignorant of his spell—of the
charm he exercised over his hospital—I should have felt it in the
waiting hush, like a drawn breath, which followed his ring at the door
and preceded his imperious footstep on the stairs. My first impression
of him, even after the terrible events of the next year, records a
memory that is both careless and splendid. At that moment, when, gazing
through the chinks in the shutters, I watched him, in his coat of dark
fur, cross the pavement over the pale streaks of sunshine, I knew beyond
any doubt—I knew with a sort of infallible prescience—that my fate was
irretrievably bound up with his in the future. I knew this, I repeat,
though Miss Hemphill would still insist that my foreknowledge was merely
a sentimental gleaning from indiscriminate novels. But it wasn’t only
first love, impressionable as my kinswoman believed me to be. It wasn’t
only the way he looked. Even more than his appearance—more than the
shining dark of his eyes, the silvery brown of his hair, the dusky glow
in his face—even more than his charm and his magnificence, I think, the
beauty and sympathy in his voice won my heart. It was a voice, I heard
someone say afterwards, that ought always to speak poetry.
So you will see why—if you do not understand at the beginning, I can
never hope to make you believe impossible things!—so you will see why I
accepted the call when it came as an imperative summons. I couldn’t have
stayed away after he sent for me. However much I may have tried not to
go, I know that in the end I must have gone. In those days, while I was
still hoping to write novels, I used to talk a great deal about
“destiny” (I have learned since then how silly all such talk is), and I
suppose it was my “destiny” to be caught in the web of Roland Maradick’s
personality. But I am not the first nurse to grow love-sick about a
doctor who never gave her a thought.
“I am glad you got the call, Margaret. It may mean a great deal to you.
Only try not to be too emotional.” I remember that Miss Hemphill was
holding a bit of rose-geranium in her hand while she spoke—one of the
patients had given it to her from a pot she kept in her room, and the
scent of the flower is still in my nostrils—or my memory. Since then—oh,
long since then—I have wondered if she also had been caught in the web.
“I wish I knew more about the case.” I was pressing for light. “Have you
ever seen Mrs. Maradick?”
“Oh, dear, yes. They have been married only a little over a year, and in
the beginning she used to come sometimes to the hospital and wait
outside while the doctor made his visits. She was a very sweet-looking
woman then—not exactly pretty, but fair and slight, with the loveliest
smile, I think, I have ever seen. In those first months she was so much
in love that we used to laugh about it among ourselves. To see her face
light up when the doctor came out of the hospital and crossed the
pavement to his car, was as good as a play. We never tired of watching
her—I wasn’t superintendent then, so I had more time to look out of the
window while I was on day duty. Once or twice she brought her little
girl in to see one of the patients. The child was so much like her that
you would have known them anywhere for mother and daughter.”
I had heard that Mrs. Maradick was a widow, with one child, when she
first met the doctor, and I asked now, still seeking an illumination I
had not found, “There was a great deal of money, wasn’t there?”
“A great fortune. If she hadn’t been so attractive, people would have
said, I suppose, that Doctor Maradick married her for her money. Only,”
she appeared to make an effort of memory, “I believe I’ve heard somehow
that it was all left in trust away from Mrs. Maradick if she married
again. I can’t, to save my life, remember just how it was; but it was a
queer will, I know, and Mrs. Maradick wasn’t to come into the money
unless the child didn’t live to grow up. The pity of it—”
A young nurse came into the office to ask for something—the keys, I
think, of the operating-room, and Miss Hemphill broke off inconclusively
as she hurried out of the door. I was sorry that she left off just when
she did. Poor Mrs. Maradick! Perhaps I was too emotional, but even
before I saw her I had begun to feel her pathos and her strangeness.
My preparations took only a few minutes. In those days I always kept a
suitcase packed and ready for sudden calls; and it was not yet six
o’clock when I turned from Tenth Street into Fifth Avenue, and stopped
for a minute, before ascending the steps, to look at the house in which
Doctor Maradick lived. A fine rain was falling, and I remember thinking,
as I turned the corner, how depressing the weather must be for Mrs.
Maradick. It was an old house, with damp-looking walls (though that may
have been because of the rain) and a spindle-shaped iron railing which
ran up the stone steps to the black door, where I noticed a dim flicker
through the old-fashioned fanlight. Afterwards I discovered that Mrs.
Maradick had been born in the house—her maiden name was Calloran—and
that she had never wanted to live anywhere else. She was a woman—this I
found out when I knew her better—of strong attachments to both persons
and places; and though Doctor Maradick had tried to persuade her to move
uptown after her marriage, she had clung, against his wishes, to the old
house in lower Fifth Avenue. I dare say she was obstinate about it in
spite of her gentleness and her passion for the doctor. Those sweet,
soft women, especially when they have always been rich, are sometimes
amazingly obstinate. I have nursed so many of them since—women with
strong affections and weak intellects—that I have come to recognize the
type as soon as I set eyes upon it.
My ring at the bell was answered after a little delay, and when I
entered the house I saw that the hall was quite dark except for the
waning glow from an open fire which burned in the library. When I gave
my name, and added that I was the night nurse, the servant appeared to
think my humble presence unworthy of illumination. He was an old negro
butler, inherited perhaps from Mrs. Maradick’s mother, who, I learned
afterwards, was from South Carolina; and while he passed me on his way
up the staircase, I heard him vaguely muttering that he “wa’n’t gwinter
tu’n on dem lights twel de chile had done playin’.”
To the right of the hall, the soft glow drew me into the library, and
crossing the threshold timidly, I stooped to dry my wet coat by the
fire. As I bent there, meaning to start up at the first sound of a
footstep, I thought how cosy the room was after the damp walls outside
to which some bared creepers were clinging; and I was watching the
strange shapes and patterns the firelight made on the old Persian rug,
when the lamps of a slowly turning motor flashed on me through the white
shades at the window. Still dazzled by the glare, I looked round in the
dimness and saw a child’s ball of red and blue rubber roll towards me
out of the gloom of the adjoining room. A moment later, while I made a
vain attempt to capture the toy as it spun past me, a little girl darted
airily, with peculiar lightness and grace, through the doorway, and
stopped quickly, as if in surprise at the sight of a stranger. She was a
small child—so small and slight that her footsteps made no sound on the
polished floor of the threshold; and I remember thinking while I looked
at her that she had the gravest and sweetest face I had ever seen. She
couldn’t—I decided this afterwards—have been more than six or seven
years old, yet she stood there with a curious prim dignity, like the
dignity of an elderly person, and gazed up at me with enigmatical eyes.
She was dressed in Scotch plaid, with a bit of red ribbon in her hair,
which was cut in a fringe over her forehead and hung very straight to
her shoulders. Charming as she was, from her uncurled brown hair to the
white socks and black slippers on her little feet, I recall most vividly
the singular look in her eyes, which appeared in the shifting light to
be of an indeterminate colour. For the odd thing about this look was
that it was not the look of childhood at all. It was the look of
profound experience, of bitter knowledge.
“Have you come for your ball?” I asked; but while the friendly question
was still on my lips, I heard the servant returning. In my confusion I
made a second ineffectual grasp at the plaything, which had rolled away
from me into the dusk of the drawing-room. Then, as I raised my head, I
saw that the child also had slipped from the room; and without looking
after her I followed the old negro into the pleasant study above, where
the great surgeon awaited me.
Ten years ago, before hard nursing had taken so much out of me, I
blushed very easily, and I was aware at the moment when I crossed Doctor
Maradick’s study that my cheeks were the colour of peonies. Of course, I
was a fool—no one knows this better than I do—but I had never been
alone, even for an instant, with him before, and the man was more than a
hero to me, he was—there isn’t any reason now why I should blush over
the confession—almost a god. At that age I was mad about the wonders of
surgery, and Roland Maradick in the operating-room was magician enough
to have turned an older and more sensible head than mine. Added to his
great reputation and his marvelous skill, he was, I am sure of this, the
most splendid-looking man, even at forty-five, that one could imagine.
Had he been ungracious—had he been positively rude to me, I should still
have adored him; but when he held out his hand, and greeted me in the
charming way he had with women, I felt that I would have died for him.
It is no wonder that a saying went about the hospital that every woman
he operated on fell in love with him. As for the nurses—well, there
wasn’t a single one of them who had escaped his spell—not even Miss
Hemphill, who could have been scarcely a day under fifty.
“I am glad you could come, Miss Randolph. You were with Miss Hudson last
week when I operated?”
I bowed. To save my life I couldn’t have spoken without blushing the
redder.
“I noticed your bright face at the time. Brightness, I think, is what
Mrs. Maradick needs. She finds her day nurse depressing.” His eyes
rested so kindly upon me that I have suspected since that he was not
entirely unaware of my worship. It was a small thing, heaven knows, to
flatter his vanity—a nurse just out of a training-school—but to some men
no tribute is too insignificant to give pleasure.
“You will do your best, I am sure.” He hesitated an instant—just long
enough for me to perceive the anxiety beneath the genial smile on his
face—and then added gravely, “We wish to avoid, if possible, having to
send her away.”
I could only murmur in response, and after a few carefully chosen words
about his wife’s illness, he rang the bell and directed the maid to take
me upstairs to my room. Not until I was ascending the stairs to the
third storey did it occur to me that he had really told me nothing. I
was as perplexed about the nature of Mrs. Maradick’s malady as I had
been when I entered the house.
I found my room pleasant enough. It had been arranged—at Doctor
Maradick’s request, I think—that I was to sleep in the house, and after
my austere little bed at the hospital, I was agreeably surprised by the
cheerful look of the apartment into which the maid led me. The walls
were papered in roses, and there were curtains of flowered chintz at the
window, which looked down on a small formal garden at the rear of the
house. This the maid told me, for it was too dark for me to distinguish
more than a marble fountain and a fir-tree, which looked old, though I
afterwards learned that it was replanted almost every season.
In ten minutes I had slipped into my uniform and was ready to go to my
patient; but for some reason—to this day I have never found out what it
was that turned her against me at the start—Mrs. Maradick refused to
receive me. While I stood outside her door I heard the day nurse trying
to persuade her to let me come in. It wasn’t any use, however, and in
the end I was obliged to go back to my room and wait until the poor lady
got over her whim and consented to see me. That was long after dinner—it
must have been nearer eleven than ten o’clock—and Miss Peterson was
quite worn out by the time she came for me.
“I’m afraid you’ll have a bad night,” she said as we went downstairs
together. That was her way, I soon saw, to expect the worst of
everything and everybody.
“Does she often keep you up like this?”
“Oh, no, she is usually very considerate. I never knew a sweeter
character. But she still has this hallucination—”
Here again, as in the scene with Doctor Maradick, I felt that the
explanation had only deepened the mystery. Mrs. Maradick’s
hallucination, whatever form it assumed, was evidently a subject for
evasion and subterfuge in the household. It was on the tip of my tongue
to ask, “What is her hallucination?”—but before I could get the words
past my lips we had reached Mrs. Maradick’s door, and Miss Peterson
motioned me to be silent. As the door opened a little way to admit me, I
saw that Mrs. Maradick was already in bed, and that the lights were out
except for a night-lamp burning on a candle-stand beside a book and a
carafe of water.
“I won’t go in with you,” said Miss Peterson in a whisper; and I was on
the point of stepping over the threshold when I saw the little girl, in
the dress of Scotch plaid, slip by me from the dusk of the room into the
electric light of the hall. She held a doll in her arms, and as she went
by she dropped a doll’s work-basket in the doorway. Miss Peterson must
have picked up the toy, for when I turned in a minute to look for it I
found that it was gone. I remember thinking that it was late for a child
to be up—she looked delicate, too—but, after all, it was no business of
mine, and four years in a hospital had taught me never to meddle in
things that do not concern me. There is nothing a nurse learns quicker
than not to try to put the world to rights in a day.
When I crossed the floor to the chair by Mrs. Maradick’s bed, she turned
over on her side and looked at me with the sweetest and saddest smile.
“You are the night nurse,” she said in a gentle voice; and from the
moment she spoke I knew that there was nothing hysterical or violent
about her mania—or hallucination, as they called it. “They told me your
name, but I have forgotten it.”
“Randolph—Margaret Randolph.” I liked her from the start, and I think
she must have seen it.
“You look very young, Miss Randolph.”
“I am twenty-two, but I suppose I don’t look quite my age. People
usually think I am younger.”
For a minute she was silent, and while I settled myself in the chair by
the bed, I thought how strikingly she resembled the little girl I had
seen first in the afternoon, and then leaving her room a few moments
before. They had the same small, heart-shaped faces, coloured ever so
faintly; the same straight, soft hair, between brown and flaxen; and the
same large, grave eyes, set very far apart under arched eyebrows. What
surprised me most, however, was that they both looked at me with that
enigmatical and vaguely wondering expression—only in Mrs. Maradick’s
face the vagueness seemed to change now and then to a definite fear—a
flash, I had almost said, of startled horror.
I sat quite still in my chair, and until the time came for Mrs. Maradick
to take her medicine not a word passed between us. Then, when I bent
over her with the glass in my hand, she raised her head from the pillow
and said in a whisper of suppressed intensity:
“You look kind. I wonder if you could have seen my little girl?”
As I slipped my arm under the pillow I tried to smile cheerfully down on
her. “Yes, I’ve seen her twice. I’d know her anywhere by her likeness to
you.”
A glow shone in her eyes, and I thought how pretty she must have been
before illness took the life and animation out of her features. “Then I
know you’re good.” Her voice was so strained and low that I could barely
hear it. “If you weren’t good you couldn’t have seen her.”
I thought this queer enough, but all I answered was, “She looked
delicate to be sitting up so late.” A quiver passed over her thin
features, and for a minute I thought she was going to burst into tears.
As she had taken the medicine, I put the glass back on the candle-stand,
and bending over the bed, smoothed the straight brown hair, which was as
fine and soft as spun silk, back from her forehead. There was something
about her—I don’t know what it was—that made you love her as soon as she
looked at you.
“She always had that light and airy way, though she was never sick a day
in her life,” she answered calmly after a pause. Then, groping for my
hand, she whispered passionately, “You must not tell him—you must not
tell any one that you have seen her!”
“I must not tell any one?” Again I had the impression that had come to
me first in Doctor Maradick’s study, and afterwards with Miss Peterson
on the staircase, that I was seeking a gleam of light in the midst of
obscurity.
“Are you sure there isn’t any one listening—that there isn’t any one at
the door?” she asked, pushing aside my arm and raising herself on the
pillows.
“Quite, quite sure. They have put out the lights in the hall.”
“And you will not tell him? Promise me that you will not tell him.” The
startled horror flashed from the vague wonder of her expression. “He
doesn’t like her to come back, because he killed her.”
“Because he killed her!” Then it was that light burst on me in a blaze.
So this was Mrs. Maradick’s hallucination! She believed that her child
was dead—the little girl I had seen with my own eyes leaving her room;
and she believed that her husband—the great surgeon we worshipped in the
hospital—had murdered her. No wonder they veiled the dreadful obsession
in mystery! No wonder that even Miss Peterson had not dared to drag the
horrid thing out into the light! It was the kind of hallucination one
simply couldn’t stand having to face.
“There is no use telling people things that nobody believes,” she
resumed slowly, still holding my hand in a grasp that would have hurt me
if her fingers had not been so fragile. “Nobody believes that he killed
her. Nobody believes that she comes back every day to the house. Nobody
believes—and yet you saw her—”
“Yes, I saw her—but why should your husband have killed her?” I spoke
soothingly, as one would speak to a person who was quite mad. Yet she
was not mad, I could have sworn this while I looked at her.
For a moment she moaned inarticulately, as if the horror of her thoughts
were too great to pass into speech. Then she flung out her thin, bare
arm with a wild gesture.
“Because he never loved me!” she said. “He never loved me!”
“But he married you,” I urged gently while I stroked her hair. “If he
hadn’t loved you, why should he have married you?”
“He wanted the money—my little girl’s money. It all goes to him when I
die.”
“But he is rich himself. He must make a fortune from his profession.”
“It isn’t enough. He wanted millions.” She had grown stern and tragic.
“No, he never loved me. He loved someone else from the beginning—before
I knew him.”
It was quite useless, I saw, to reason with her. If she wasn’t mad, she
was in a state of terror and despondency so black that it had almost
crossed the border-line into madness. I thought once that I would go
upstairs and bring the child down from her nursery; but, after a
moment’s hesitation, I realized that Miss Peterson and Doctor Maradick
must have long ago tried all these measures. Clearly, there was nothing
to do except soothe and quiet her as much as I could; and this I did
until she dropped into a light sleep which lasted well into the morning.
By seven o’clock I was worn out—not from work but from the strain on my
sympathy—and I was glad, indeed, when one of the maids came in to bring
me an early cup of coffee. Mrs. Maradick was still sleeping—it was a
mixture of bromide and chloral I had given her—and she did not wake
until Miss Peterson came on duty an hour or two later. Then, when I went
downstairs, I found the dining-room deserted except for the old
housekeeper, who was looking over the silver. Doctor Maradick, she
explained to me presently, had his breakfast served in the morning-room
on the other side of the house.
“And the little girl? Does she take her meals in the nursery?”
She threw me a startled glance. Was it, I questioned afterwards, one of
distrust or apprehension?
“There isn’t any little girl. Haven’t you heard?”
“Heard? No. Why, I saw her only yesterday.” The look she gave me—I was
sure of it now—was full of alarm.
“The little girl—she was the sweetest child I ever saw—died just two
months ago of pneumonia.”
“But she couldn’t have died.” I was a fool to let this out, but the
shock had completely unnerved me. “I tell you I saw her yesterday.”
The alarm in her face deepened. “That is Mrs. Maradick’s trouble. She
believes that she still sees her.”
“But don’t you see her?” I drove the question home bluntly.
“No.” She set her lips tightly. “I never see anything.”
So I had been wrong, after all, and the explanation, when it came, only
accentuated the terror. The child was dead—she had died of pneumonia two
months ago—and yet I had seen her, with my own eyes, playing ball in the
library; I had seen her slipping out of her mother’s room, with her doll
in her arms.
“Is there another child in the house? Could there be a child belonging
to one of the servants?” A gleam had shot through the fog in which I was
groping.
“No, there isn’t any other. The doctors tried bringing one once, but it
threw the poor lady into such a state she almost died of it. Besides,
there wouldn’t be any other child as quiet and sweet-looking as
Dorothea. To see her skipping along in her dress of Scotch plaid used to
make me think of a fairy, though they say that fairies wear nothing but
white or green.”
“Has any one else seen her—the child, I mean—any of the servants?”
“Only old Gabriel, the coloured butler, who came with Mrs. Maradick’s
mother from South Carolina. I’ve heard that negroes often have a kind of
second sight—though I don’t know that that is just what you would call
it. But they seem to believe in the supernatural by instinct, and
Gabriel is so old and dotty—he does no work except answer the door-bell
and clean the silver—that nobody pays much attention to anything that he
sees—”
“Is the child’s nursery kept as it used to be?”
“Oh, no. The doctor had all the toys sent to the children’s hospital.
That was a great grief to Mrs. Maradick; but Doctor Brandon thought, and
all the nurses agreed with him, that it was best for her not to be
allowed to keep the room as it was when Dorothea was living.”
“Dorothea? Was that the child’s name?”
“Yes, it means the gift of God, doesn’t it? She was named after the
mother of Mrs. Maradick’s first husband, Mr. Ballard. He was the grave,
quiet kind—not the least like the doctor.”
I wondered if the other dreadful obsession of Mrs. Maradick’s had
drifted down through the nurses or the servants to the housekeeper; but
she said nothing about it, and since she was, I suspected, a garrulous
person, I thought it wiser to assume that the gossip had not reached
her.
A little later, when breakfast was over and I had not yet gone upstairs
to my room, I had my first interview with Doctor Brandon, the famous
alienist who was in charge of the case. I had never seen him before, but
from the first moment that I looked at him I took his measure almost by
intuition. He was, I suppose, honest enough—I have always granted him
that, bitterly as I have felt towards him. It wasn’t his fault that he
lacked red blood in his brain, or that he had formed the habit, from
long association with abnormal phenomena, of regarding all life as a
disease. He was the sort of physician—every nurse will understand what I
mean—who deals instinctively with groups instead of with individuals. He
was long and solemn and very round in the face; and I hadn’t talked to
him ten minutes before I knew he had been educated in Germany, and that
he had learned over there to treat every emotion as a pathological
manifestation. I used to wonder what he got out of life—what any one got
out of life who had analyzed away everything except the bare structure.
When I reached my room at last, I was so tired that I could barely
remember either the questions Doctor Brandon had asked or the directions
he had given me. I fell asleep, I know, almost as soon as my head
touched the pillow; and the maid who came to inquire if I wanted
luncheon decided to let me finish my nap. In the afternoon, when she
returned with a cup of tea, she found me still heavy and drowsy. Though
I was used to night nursing, I felt as if I had danced from sunset to
daybreak. It was fortunate, I reflected, while I drank my tea, that
every case didn’t wear on one’s sympathies as acutely as Mrs. Maradick’s
hallucination had worn on mine.
Through the day I did not see Doctor Maradick; but at seven o’clock when
I came up from my early dinner on my way to take the place of Miss
Peterson, who had kept on duty an hour later than usual, he met me in
the hall and asked me to come into his study. I thought him handsomer
than ever in his evening clothes, with a white flower in his buttonhole.
He was going to some public dinner, the housekeeper told me, but, then,
he was always going somewhere. I believe he didn’t dine at home a single
evening that winter.
“Did Mrs. Maradick have a good night?” He had closed the door after us,
and turning now with the question, he smiled kindly, as if he wished to
put me at ease in the beginning.
“She slept very well after she took the medicine. I gave her that at
eleven o’clock.”
For a minute he regarded me silently, and I was aware that his
personality—his charm—was focussed upon me. It was almost as if I stood
in the centre of converging rays of light, so vivid was my impression of
him.
“Did she allude in any way to her—to her hallucination?” he asked.
How the warning reached me—what invisible waves of sense-perception
transmitted the message—I have never known; but while I stood there,
facing the splendour of the doctor’s presence, every intuition cautioned
me that the time had come when I must take sides in the household. While
I stayed there I must stand either with Mrs. Maradick or against her.
“She talked quite rationally,” I replied after a moment.
“What did she say?”
“She told me how she was feeling, that she missed her child, and that
she walked a little every day about her room.”
His face changed—how I could not at first determine.
“Have you see Doctor Brandon?”
“He came this morning to give me his directions.”
“He thought her less well to-day. He has advised me to send her to
Rosedale.”
I have never, even in secret, tried to account for Doctor Maradick. He
may have been sincere. I tell only what I know—not what I believe or
imagine—and the human is sometimes as inscrutable, as inexplicable, as
the supernatural.
While he watched me I was conscious of an inner struggle, as if opposing
angels warred somewhere in the depths of my being. When at last I made
my decision, I was acting less from reason, I knew, than in obedience to
the pressure of some secret current of thought. Heaven knows, even then,
the man held me captive while I defied him.
“Doctor Maradick,” I lifted my eyes for the first time frankly to his,
“I believe that your wife is as sane as I am—or as you are.”
He started. “Then she did not talk freely to you?”
“She may be mistaken, unstrung, piteously distressed in mind”—I brought
this out with emphasis—“but she is not—I am willing to stake my future
on it—a fit subject for an asylum. It would be foolish—it would be cruel
to send her to Rosedale.”
“Cruel, you say?” A troubled look crossed his face, and his voice grew
very gentle. “You do not imagine that I could be cruel to her?”
“No, I do not think that.” My voice also had softened.
“We will let things go on as they are. Perhaps Doctor Brandon may have
some other suggestion to make.” He drew out his watch and compared it
with the clock—nervously, I observed, as if his action were a screen for
his discomfiture or perplexity. “I must be going now. We will speak of
this again in the morning.”
But in the morning we did not speak of it, and during the month that I
nursed Mrs. Maradick I was not called again into her husband’s study.
When I met him in the hall or on the staircase, which was seldom, he was
as charming as ever; yet, in spite of his courtesy, I had a persistent
feeling that he had taken my measure on that evening, and that he had no
further use for me.
As the days went by Mrs. Maradick seemed to grow stronger. Never, after
our first night together, had she mentioned the child to me; never had
she alluded by so much as a word to her dreadful charge against her
husband. She was like any woman recovering from a great sorrow, except
that she was sweeter and gentler. It is no wonder that everyone who came
near her loved her; for there was a mysterious loveliness about her like
the mystery of light, not of darkness. She was, I have always thought,
as much of an angel as it is possible for a woman to be on this earth.
And yet, angelic as she was, there were times when it seemed to me that
she both hated and feared her husband. Though he never entered her room
while I was there, and I never heard his name on her lips until an hour
before the end, still I could tell by the look of terror in her face
whenever his step passed down the hall that her very soul shivered at
his approach.
During the whole month I did not see the child again, though one night,
when I came suddenly into Mrs. Maradick’s room, I found a little garden,
such as children make out of pebbles and bits of box, on the
window-sill. I did not mention it to Mrs. Maradick, and a little later,
as the maid lowered the shades, I noticed that the garden had vanished.
Since then I have often wondered if the child were invisible only to the
rest of us, and if her mother still saw her. But there was no way of
finding out except by questioning, and Mrs. Maradick was so well and
patient that I hadn’t the heart to question. Things couldn’t have been
better with her than they were, and I was beginning to tell myself that
she might soon go out for an airing, when the end came so suddenly.
It was a mild January day—the kind of day that brings the foretaste of
spring in the middle of winter, and when I came downstairs in the
afternoon, I stopped a minute by the window at the end of the hall to
look down on the box maze in the garden. There was an old fountain,
bearing two laughing boys in marble, in the centre of the gravelled
walk, and the water, which had been turned on that morning for Mrs.
Maradick’s pleasure, sparkled now like silver as the sunlight splashed
over it. I had never before felt the air quite so soft and springlike in
January; and I thought, as I gazed down on the garden, that it would be
a good idea for Mrs. Maradick to go out and bask for an hour or so in
the sunshine. It seemed strange to me that she was never allowed to get
any fresh air except the air that came through her windows.
When I went into her room, however, I found that she had no wish to go
out. She was sitting, wrapped in shawls, by the open window, which
looked down on the fountain; and as I entered she glanced up from a
little book she was reading. A pot of daffodils stood on the
window-sill—she was very fond of flowers and we tried always to keep
some growing in her room.
“Do you know what I am reading, Miss Randolph?” she asked in her soft
voice; and she read aloud a verse while I went over to the candle-stand
to measure out a dose of medicine.
“‘If thou hast two loaves of bread, sell one and buy daffodils, for
bread nourisheth the body, but daffodils delight the soul.’ That is very
beautiful, don’t you think so?”
I said “Yes,” that it was beautiful; and then I asked her if she
wouldn’t go downstairs and walk about in the garden.
“He wouldn’t like it,” she answered; and it was the first time she had
mentioned her husband to me since the night I came to her. “He doesn’t
want me to go out.”
I tried to laugh her out of the idea; but it was no use, and after a few
minutes I gave up and began talking of other things. Even then it did
not occur to me that her fear of Doctor Maradick was anything but a
fancy. I could see, of course, that she wasn’t out of her head; but sane
persons, I knew, sometimes have unaccountable prejudices, and I accepted
her dislike as a mere whim or aversion. I did not understand then and—I
may as well confess this before the end comes—I do not understand any
better to-day. I am writing down the things I actually saw, and I repeat
that I have never had the slightest twist in the direction of the
miraculous.
The afternoon slipped away while we talked—she talked brightly when any
subject came up that interested her—and it was the last hour of day—that
grave, still hour when the movement of life seems to droop and falter
for a few precious minutes—that brought us the thing I had dreaded
silently since my first night in the house. I remember that I had risen
to close the window, and was leaning out for a breath of the mild air,
when there was the sound of steps, consciously softened, in the hall
outside, and Doctor Brandon’s usual knock fell on my ears. Then, before
I could cross the room, the door opened, and the doctor entered with
Miss Peterson. The day nurse, I knew, was a stupid woman; but she had
never appeared to me so stupid, so armoured and encased in her
professional manner, as she did at that moment.
“I am glad to see that you are taking the air.” As Doctor Brandon came
over to the window, I wondered maliciously what devil of contradictions
had made him a distinguished specialist in nervous diseases.
“Who was the other doctor you brought this morning?” asked Mrs. Maradick
gravely; and that was all I ever heard about the visit of the second
alienist.
“Someone who is anxious to cure you.” He dropped into a chair beside her
and patted her hand with his long, pale fingers. “We are so anxious to
cure you that we want to send you away to the country for a fortnight or
so. Miss Peterson has come to help you to get ready, and I’ve kept my
car waiting for you. There couldn’t be a nicer day for a trip, could
there?”
The moment had come at last. I knew at once what he meant, and so did
Mrs. Maradick. A wave of colour flowed and ebbed in her thin cheeks, and
I felt her body quiver when I moved from the window and put my arms on
her shoulders. I was aware again, as I had been aware that evening in
Doctor Maradick’s study, of a current of thought that beat from the air
around into my brain. Though it cost me my career as a nurse and my
reputation for sanity, I knew that I must obey that invisible warning.
“You are going to take me to an asylum,” said Mrs. Maradick.
He made some foolish denial or evasion; but before he had finished I
turned from Mrs. Maradick and faced him impulsively. In a nurse this was
flagrant rebellion, and I realized that the act wrecked my professional
future. Yet I did not care—I did not hesitate. Something stronger than I
was driving me on.
“Doctor Brandon,” I said, “I beg you—I implore you to wait until
to-morrow. There are things I must tell you.”
A queer look came into his face, and I understood, even in my
excitement, that he was mentally deciding in which group he should place
me—to which class of morbid manifestations I must belong.
“Very well, very well, we will hear everything,” he replied soothingly;
but I saw him glance at Miss Peterson, and she went over to the wardrobe
for Mrs. Maradick’s fur coat and hat.
Suddenly, without warning, Mrs. Maradick threw the shawls away from her,
and stood up. “If you send me away,” she said, “I shall never come back.
I shall never live to come back.”
The grey of twilight was just beginning, and while she stood there, in
the dusk of the room, her face shone out as pale and flower-like as the
daffodils on the window-sill. “I cannot go away!” she cried in a sharper
voice. “I cannot, go away from my child!”
I saw her face clearly; I heard her voice; and then—the horror of the
scene sweeps back over me!—I saw the door open slowly and the little
girl run across the room to her mother. I saw the child lift her little
arms, and I saw the mother stoop and gather her to her bosom. So closely
locked were they in that passionate embrace that their forms seemed to
mingle in the gloom that enveloped them.
“After this can you doubt?” I threw out the words almost savagely—and
then, when I turned from the mother and child to Doctor Brandon and Miss
Peterson, I knew breathlessly—oh, there was a shock in the
discovery!—that they were blind to the child. Their blank faces revealed
the consternation of ignorance, not of conviction. They had seen nothing
except the vacant arms of the mother and the swift, erratic gesture with
which she stooped to embrace some invisible presence. Only my vision—and
I have asked myself since if the power of sympathy enabled me to
penetrate the web of material fact and see the spiritual form of the
child—only my vision was not blinded by the clay through which I looked.
“After this can you doubt?” Doctor Brandon had flung my words back to
me. Was it his fault, poor man, if life had granted him only the eyes of
flesh? Was it his fault if he could see only half of the thing there
before him?
But they couldn’t see, and since they couldn’t see I realized that it
was useless to tell them. Within an hour they took Mrs. Maradick to the
asylum; and she went quietly, though when the time came for parting from
me she showed some faint trace of feeling. I remember that at the last,
while we stood on the pavement, she lifted her black veil, which she
wore for the child, and said: “Stay with her, Miss Randolph, as long as
you can. I shall never come back.”
Then she got into the car and was driven off, while I stood looking
after her with a sob in my throat. Dreadful as I felt it to be, I
didn’t, of course, realize the full horror of it, or I couldn’t have
stood there quietly on the pavement. I didn’t realize it, indeed, until
several months afterwards when word came that she had died in the
asylum. I never knew what her illness was, though I vaguely recall that
something was said about “heart failure”—a loose enough term. My own
belief is that she died simply of the terror of life.
To my surprise Doctor Maradick asked me to stay on as his office nurse
after his wife went to Rosedale; and when the news of her death came
there was no suggestion of my leaving. I don’t know to this day why he
wanted me in the house. Perhaps he thought I should have less
opportunity to gossip if I stayed under his roof; perhaps he still
wished to test the power of his charm over me. His vanity was incredible
in so great a man. I have seen him flush with pleasure when people
turned to look at him in the street, and I know that he was not above
playing on the sentimental weakness of his patients. But he was
magnificent, heaven knows! Few men, I imagine, have been the objects of
so many foolish infatuations.
The next summer Doctor Maradick went abroad for two months, and while he
was away I took my vacation in Virginia. When we came back the work was
heavier than ever—his reputation by this time was tremendous—and my days
were so crowded with appointments, and hurried flittings to emergency
cases, that I had scarcely a minute left in which to remember poor Mrs.
Maradick. Since the afternoon when she went to the asylum the child had
not been in the house; and at last I was beginning to persuade myself
that the little figure had been an optical illusion—the effect of
shifting lights in the gloom of the old rooms—not the apparition I had
once believed it to be. It does not take long for a phantom to fade from
the memory—especially when one leads the active and methodical life I
was forced into that winter. Perhaps—who knows?—(I remember telling
myself) the doctors may have been right, after all, and the poor lady
may have actually been out of her mind. With this view of the past, my
judgment of Doctor Maradick insensibly altered. It ended, I think, in my
acquitting him altogether. And then, just as he stood clear and splendid
in my verdict of him, the reversal came so precipitately that I grow
breathless now whenever I try to live it over again. The violence of the
next turn in affairs left me, I often fancy, with a perpetual dizziness
of the imagination.
It was in May that we heard of Mrs. Maradick’s death, and exactly a year
later, on a mild and fragrant afternoon, when the daffodils were
blooming in patches around the old fountain in the garden, the
housekeeper came into the office, where I lingered over some accounts,
to bring me news of the doctor’s approaching marriage.
“It is no more than we might have expected,” she concluded rationally.
“The house must be lonely for him—he is such a sociable man. But I can’t
help feeling,” she brought out slowly after a pause in which I felt a
shiver pass over me, “I can’t help feeling that it is hard for that
other woman to have all the money poor Mrs. Maradick’s first husband
left her.”
“There is a great deal of money, then?” I asked curiously.
“A great deal.” She waved her hand, as if words were futile to express
the sum. “Millions and millions!”
“They will give up this house, of course?”
“That’s done already, my dear. There won’t be a brick left of it by this
time next year. It’s to be pulled down and an apartment-house built on
the ground.”
Again the shiver passed over me. I couldn’t bear to think of Mrs.
Maradick’s old home falling to pieces.
“You didn’t tell me the name of the bride,” I said. “Is she someone he
met while he was in Europe?”
“Dear me, no! She is the very lady he was engaged to before he married
Mrs. Maradick, only she threw him over, so people said, because he
wasn’t rich enough. Then she married some lord or prince from over the
water; but there was a divorce, and now she has turned again to her old
lover. He is rich enough now, I guess, even for her!”
It was all perfectly true, I suppose; it sounded as plausible as a story
out of a newspaper; and yet while she told me I felt, or dreamed that I
felt, a sinister, an impalpable hush in the air. I was nervous, no
doubt; I was shaken by the suddenness with which the housekeeper had
sprung her news on me; but as I sat there I had quite vividly an
impression that the old house was listening—that there was a real, if
invisible, presence somewhere in the room or the garden. Yet, when an
instant afterwards I glanced through the long window which opened down
to the brick terrace, I saw only the faint sunshine over the deserted
garden, with its maze of box, its marble fountain, and its patches of
daffodils.
The housekeeper had gone—one of the servants, I think, came for her—and
I was sitting at my desk when the words of Mrs. Maradick on that last
evening floated into my mind. The daffodils brought her back to me; for
I thought, as I watched them growing, so still and golden in the
sunshine, how she would have enjoyed them. Almost unconsciously I
repeated the verse she had read to me:
“If thou hast two loaves of bread, sell one and buy daffodils”—and it
was at this very instant, while the words were still on my lips, that I
turned my eyes to the box maze, and saw the child skipping rope along
the gravelled path to the fountain.
Quite distinctly, as clear as day, I saw her come, with what children
call the dancing step, between the low box borders to the place where
the daffodils bloomed by the fountain. From her straight brown hair to
her frock of Scotch plaid and her little feet, which twinkled in white
socks and black slippers over the turning rope, she was as real to me as
the ground on which she trod or the laughing marble boys under the
splashing water. Starting up from my chair, I made a single step to the
terrace. If I could only reach her—only speak to her—I felt that I might
at last solve the mystery. But with the first flutter of my dress on the
terrace, the airy little form melted into the quiet dusk of the maze.
Not a breath stirred the daffodils, not a shadow passed over the
sparkling flow of the water; yet, weak and shaken in every nerve, I sat
down on the brick step of the terrace and burst into tears. I must have
known that something terrible would happen before they pulled down Mrs.
Maradick’s home.
The doctor dined out that night. He was with the lady he was going to
marry, the housekeeper told me; and it must have been almost midnight
when I heard him come in and go upstairs to his room. I was downstairs
because I had been unable to sleep, and the book I wanted to finish I
had left that afternoon in the office. The book—I can’t remember what it
was—had seemed to me very exciting when I began it in the morning; but
after the visit of the child I found the romantic novel as dull as a
treatise on nursing. It was impossible for me to follow the lines, and I
was on the point of giving up and going to bed, when Doctor Maradick
opened the front door with his latch-key and went up the staircase.
“There can’t be a bit of truth in it.” I thought over and over again as
I listened to his even step ascending the stairs. “There can’t be a bit
of truth in it.” And yet, though I assured myself that “there couldn’t
be a bit of truth in it,” I shrank, with a creepy sensation, from going
through the house to my room in the third storey. I was tired out after
a hard day, and my nerves must have reacted morbidly to the silence and
the darkness. For the first time in my life I knew what it was to be
afraid of the unknown, of the unseen; and while I bent over my book, in
the glare of the electric light, I became conscious presently that I was
straining my senses for some sound in the spacious emptiness of the
rooms overhead. The noise of a passing motor-car in the street jerked me
back from the intense hush of expectancy; and I can recall the wave of
relief that swept over me as I turned to my book again and tried to fix
my distracted mind on its pages.
I was still sitting there when the telephone on my desk rang, with what
seemed to my overwrought nerves a startling abruptness, and the voice of
the superintendent told me hurriedly that Doctor Maradick was needed at
the hospital. I had become so accustomed to these emergency calls in the
night that I felt reassured when I had rung up the doctor in his room
and had heard the hearty sound of his response. He had not yet
undressed, he said, and would come down immediately while I ordered back
his car, which must just have reached the garage.
“I’ll be with you in five minutes!” he called as cheerfully as if I had
summoned him to his wedding.
I heard him cross the floor of his room; and before he could reach the
head of the staircase, I opened the door and went out into the hall in
order that I might turn on the light and have his hat and coat waiting.
The electric button was at the end of the hall, and as I moved towards
it, guided by the glimmer that fell from the landing above, I lifted my
eyes to the staircase, which climbed dimly, with its slender mahogany
balustrade, as far as the third storey. Then it was, at the very moment
when the doctor, humming gaily, began his quick descent of the steps,
that I distinctly saw—I will swear to this on my deathbed—a child’s
skipping-rope lying loosely coiled, as if it had dropped from a careless
little hand, in the bend of the staircase. With a spring I had reached
the electric button, flooding the hall with light; but as I did so,
while my arm was still outstretched behind me, I heard the humming voice
change to a cry of surprise or terror, and the figure on the staircase
tripped heavily and stumbled with groping hands into emptiness. The
scream of warning died in my throat while I watched him pitch forward
down the long flight of stairs to the floor at my feet. Even before I
bent over him, before I wiped the blood from his brow and felt for his
silent heart, I knew that he was dead.
Something—it may have been, as the world believes, a misstep in the
dimness, or it may have been, as I am ready to bear witness, an
invisible judgment—something had killed him at the very moment when he
most wanted to live.