7 best short stories by Ellen Glasgow. Ellen Glasgow

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ