“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?”
“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.