The Big Book of Ghost Stories Page 5

  “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 suit-case 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 door-way, 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 up-stairs 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 down-stairs 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 affairs 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 new 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 ago. They had the same small, heart-shaped faces, colored 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 mustn’t tell any one?” Again I had the impression that had come to me first in Doctor Maradick’s study, and afterward 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 sitting up among 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 thought 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 after a moment in which 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 some one 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 of going up-stairs and bringing the child down from her nursery; but, after a moment’s thought, 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 down-stairs, I found the dining-room deserted except for the old house-keeper, 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.