The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) (66 page)

“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 seen Doctor Brandon?”

“He came this morning to give me his directions.”

“He thought her less well to-day. He has even 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 his 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 other woman recovering from a great sorrow, except that she was sweeter and gentler. It is no wonder that every one 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 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 down-stairs 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 was reading, Miss Randolph?” she asked in her soft voice; and then 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 armored and incased in her professional manner, as she did at that moment.

“I am glad to see that you have been 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 get ready, and I’ve kept my car waiting for you. There couldn’t be a nicer day for a little trip, could there?”

The moment had come at last. I knew at once what he meant, and so did Mrs. Maradick. A wave of color 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 gray 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 windowsill. “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 slowly open and the little girl run across the room to her mother. I saw her 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 phantasmal 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 afterward 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 weaknesses 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 fittings 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 seen 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.