The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) (64 page)

“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 almost 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, oh, so kind and handsome, isn’t he?”

“His patients adore him.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve seen that. Every one 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. Fate had selected him for the role, and it would have been sheer impertinence for a mortal to cross wills with the invisible Powers. 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 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, handsome as he was. 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 some one say afterward, 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 about it.” 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 clearly 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 got tired 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 10th 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 fan-light. Afterward 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 up-town 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 afterward, had been from South Carolina; and while he passed me on his way up the staircase, I heard him vaguely muttering that he “wan’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 pleasantly 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 toward me out of the gloom of one of the adjoining rooms. 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 afterward – have been more than six or seven, yet she stood there with a curious prim dignity, like the dignity of a very old 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 color. 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. Even in my haste I made a second ineffectual grasp at the plaything, which rolled, with increased speed, 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 color 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 marvellous 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 scarcely have been 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 for treatment.”

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 story 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 – by 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 afterward 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 to fetch 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—”