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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
In "The Shadowy Third, and Other Stories," Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow weaves a tapestry of Southern Gothic narratives that explore the complexities of human nature and the intricacies of societal expectations in the early 20th century. Glasgow's prose is marked by rich imagery and psychological depth, inviting readers into the minds of her characters who grapple with themes of identity, femininity, and the constraining nature of tradition. The collection evokes a haunting atmosphere, blending elements of realism with an undercurrent of the supernatural, reflective of Glasgow's preoccupation with the social mores of her time. Ellen Glasgow, a prominent American author of the early 1900s, is celebrated for her keen insight into Southern life and the struggles of women. Born into a Virginia family steeped in tradition, her personal experiences and the societal changes around her profoundly influenced her writing. Glasgow was known to challenge the status quo, advocating for women's rights and the examination of personal autonomy, themes that resonate deeply throughout this collection. I highly recommend "The Shadowy Third, and Other Stories" to readers who appreciate meticulously crafted narratives that confront the shadows of society while offering a lens into the tumultuous emotions of human experience. Glasgow's stories are not only engaging but also provide profound reflections on the cultural landscape of her era, making this collection an essential read for both enthusiasts of Southern literature and those interested in early feminist discourse.
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The Shadowy Third, and Other Stories
Table of Contents
THE SHADOWY THIRD
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?”
