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?”
“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,