The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) (65 page)

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 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 borderline 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 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 afterward, 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 colored 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 doty – 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 up-stairs 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 toward 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, of course, 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 – had been focused 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 splendor 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.