I sighed inwardly even as I went again about the business of straightening him and the bed.
“There isn’t another on the floor, Mr. Gastin,” I said quietly. “And anyway we can’t move you in the middle of the night.”
“But I insist upon being moved,” he said, with an odd mixture of childish pettishness and adult command. What would be the result if the world at large knew these important business men as we know them! Big babies, they are, most of them!
“This room is exactly like any other room,” I said.
“I don’t like it!” he reiterated. “There’s—there’s noises.” His eyes roved about the room uneasily. “There’s noises! Sounds like whispering.”
I’ll not deny that these extraordinary words stirred my hair at its roots.
“Non—sense!” I brought out jerkily. “Nonsense! You are nervous.”
He was regarding me with shrewd little eyes. I stared back at him, trying to appear steady and at ease, but it was no use. He raised his hand to point a square forefinger at me, shaking it emphatically in my face.
“I’ll bet you ten dollars—I’ll bet you a hundred dollars, right there in my pants pocket, that this is the room!”
Fascinated, I kept my eyes on the square finger. He did not need to say what room, for I knew well what he meant. I moistened my lips.
“How about it?” he went on more briskly. “How about it? Do I win?”
And at my continued silence he chuckled, lying back again on the pillow.
“I can see that I win,” he said. He pulled the sheet up over his shoulders, and stuffed the pillow more comfortably under his head. “Now that I know what the trouble is, I can go to sleep all right,” said this amazing man. He laughed softly. “I’m no nervous woman,” he went on with a touch of swagger. “Turn out the light, will you?”
He closed his eyes with the utmost unconcern.
“The whispers won’t bother me now that I know what they are,” he said casually as I moved toward the door.
Still feeling shaken, I walked slowly along the corridor. What could the man mean?
Resolving at length to take a lesson from my patient’s sangfroid, I tried to shrug the matter away as a fancy on his part, and proceeded to take care of Sonny’s needs, applying the hot-water bottle to his throat and the camphorated oil to his feet in the coolest fashion until Sonny remonstrated with a hoarse giggle.
By three o’clock things had quieted down all over the wing. The patients were either asleep or resting and the windows dark with the blackest hour of the night. Maida was sitting at the chart desk, her white-capped head bent over Eleven’s chart, and I had gone into Sonny’s room to make sure he was all right. The whole place was as quiet and hushed as a city of the dead.
I took my thermometer and shook it vigorously. And in the very act of placing it between Sonny’s lips, I lost hold on it, dropped it and whirled facing the door. For without any warning at all a scream was rising from somewhere in the wing.
It rose and swelled to the very old roofs, choked horribly at its height and ceased.
It was a scream of stark terror!
A woman’s scream!
Somehow I got into the corridor. Maida was there, too, running toward Room 18, and I followed her.
It was Maida who reached for the light. It revealed our patient half out of bed, staring with blinking eyes at something on the other side of the bed.
We followed his gaze. Huddled there on the floor was a woman. We saw a dark cloak, a brown hand outflung and metallic waves of hair. We both leaned closer.
“It’s Corole!” cried Maida sharply.
We turned her on her back. For a horrible moment I though that Eighteen had added another victim to its list. But all at once Corole opened her eyes, sat up dazedly, saw Mr. Gastin still sitting on the edge of the bed, and at the sight her mouth opened, her eyes glared, and she pressed her hand tight across her mouth as if to prevent an outcry.
The relief of seeing that she was alive was so great that Maida sank limply to a chair and I turned in natural reaction to anger.
“What on earth are you doing here, Corole?” I asked warmly. “What happened to you? Are you hurt?”
She ignored my questions.
“Who is that?” she whispered hoarsely, pointing to the bed. There was such urgency in her tone and gesture that I replied.
“That is a new patient.”
“A new patient? Here?”
“Certainly. Why not?”
She looked at me; her eyes were green and shone.
“When did he come?”
“Late this afternoon. Why? What is the matter? Tell me what happened!”
She groped for the cloak, pulled it absently around her and rose to her feet in one long, sinuous motion.
“He frightened me,” she said. “I thought—I saw him lying there on the bed—I didn’t know you had a patient here. I thought it was—I thought—” With a visible effort she controlled herself, passed a hand across her pallid face. She looked terrible—grim, hag-ridden; her lips were blue, her face ashen and her eyes like a frantic cat’s.
And at the moment we heard hurrying footsteps in the corridor and Dr. Hajek, clutching a bathrobe around his pajamas, followed by Dr. Balman, burst into the room. Dr. Hajek had a revolver in one hand, and at sight of us he paused abruptly, his eyes met Corole’s for a long moment, and I experienced the strangest feeling that they were corresponding, without words or motions, there in front of my eyes. It was the briefest of impressions, gone before the thought had more than come to me, and I saw Dr. Hajek slowly dropping the revolver into his bathrobe pocket.
“What is it?” inquired Dr. Balman. In a few words I explained the situation, as far as I could. Dr. Balman surveyed us all
