THE CHRISTMAS BRIDE (11 page)

She whirled around again and spoke to the scrub woman.

“What on earth are you doing in that room, Maggie, and where’s my patient?” she demanded.

“This is what I was ordered to do, Nurse, and do it quick, she said!” replied the woman, slapping her sudsy cloth down recklessly on the floor and rubbing away.

“But I don’t understand,” said the nurse. ‘I haven’t been down to breakfast but half an hour, and I left my patient in the bed eating her breakfast. What have they done with her? What happened? Who ordered this?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” replied the woman stolidly. “This was orders for the head nurse, and they was pretty snappy. There wasn’t no patient in the bed when I come. I just got here and had ta leave my breakfast half unet ta come. The bed was just like you see it when I come. I’m doin’ what I was ordered ta do.”

Miss Gowen, now thoroughly bewildered, hurried down the hall to the desk.

“Where is the head nurse?” she asked of the nurse who sat there answering the telephone. “Is she back yet?”

“She’s back with bells!” said the young nurse with a dark look. “Stole in on us all as usual and found everything all wrong! She says she’s going to report me to the board for neglect of duty, and I was only down getting medicine the doctor had ordered. She’s down in the other corridor now raising a rumpus. I wouldn’t advise you to get in her neighborhood even if you are special. She’s no respecter of persons this morning. She must have had a disappointing weekend.”

Miss Gowen set her lips and hurried down the other corridor and presently located the head nurse. She had perhaps forgotten some of the reverence due a head nurse as she approached her.

“What have you done with my special patient, Miss Grandon?” she demanded excitedly.

The head nurse swung around upon her, offended dignity in her manner.

“Oh, it’s
you
, is it, Miss Gowen? Well I wondered when you’d turn up. Just what have you been trying to put over on the hospital authorities, I should like to know? Letting a charity case in to our most expensive private room that had been under special orders for one of our best paying patients?”

Miss Gowen’s pleasant eyes flashed fire.

“I had nothing to do with letting my patient into the room,” she said. “She was there when I came on the case. I understood that she was placed there by orders for the office. I have nothing to do with that, but I have to do with looking after my patient. I was paid to see that she was specially cared for and had no excitement nor anything to exhaust her. Will you kindly tell me what you have done with her? I will go to her at once, and you can settle the other question with the people who put her there. Where is she?”

“I’m sure in don’t know,” was the cold reply. “I told her that I would give her five minutes to dress and get out of the hospital if she was able to go. If she wasn’t, I said I would have her moved to the ward, where she belonged. She seemed to think she could go, so I hope she has gone. I suppose perhaps I ought to have held her for arrest or something, but I really hadn’t time to bother with her. But how you all let a girl of that stamp get away with a thing like that is beyond my comprehension. You’ll probably have plenty of chance to explain to the office. The idea, a girl like that in that room!”

“What do you mean, a girl like that?” asked Margaret’s nurse, now thoroughly roused. “She was a lovely girl. I never saw a lovelier.”

“You being the judge!” sneered Miss Grandon. “Well, we’ll see whether the board of directors agree with you when it comes to a showdown. However, in case you haven’t been informed of the facts, she told me with her own lips that she was a charity patient and ought to be in the ward, that she had told you so, and she owned up that a strange man had brought her here, a man she never knew before, just a pickup on the street, and that he was paying for her. Perhaps she
thought
he was, I don’t know, but in this age of the world, strange men who scrape an acquaintance with a girl on the street and then bring her to a respectable hospital and visit her here aren’t to be trusted.”

“Did you dare to tell her that?”

“Dare?” said Miss Grandon with a lifting of her eyebrows. “Dare? Yes, I dared. Just please remember who you are talking to! Certainly I told her that. And some other things. I told her plenty! This isn’t a reform school, and we don’t keep our most expensive private rooms for young women who run around with strange young men who pretend they are paying for it and tell lies about memorial rooms.”

“But it is a memorial room,” said Miss Gowen breathlessly. “The bronze tablet is expected to arrive today!”

“Oh, so he put something over on you, too, did he? It seems to me you are old enough to have a little sense and judgment after all these years of nursing. I begin to see why they never made you a head nurse!”

Miss Gowen grew white with anger, and her eyes grew dark with indignation for an instant. Then she turned and strode away down the hall to the stairs and disappeared, while Miss Grandon watched her with a supercilious smile and then remarked to a young intern who had been near enough to hear the altercation, “Ah! I thought that would finish her! Did you ever happen to hear why she never went back to St. Luke’s after that case of the man who took the wrong medicine? Well, I guess if the facts were looked into, we’d be surprised. I have heard whispers, but I wouldn’t like to say.”

But Miss Gowen had already forgotten the sneering insinuations, the stinging tones of the woman who had been her enemy for several years back because of the preference of a rich patient. She flew down the stairs, not waiting for the elevator, and hurriedly located the young nurse who had been in Miss Grandon’s place during her absence. When found, this nurse had a look like a scared rabbit but admitted that Miss Grandon had been furious with her, and she denied any knowledge of the vanished patient.

Miss Gowen inquired wildly of every nurse and attendant who had been around during the last half hour, but none of them had see Margaret McLaren, except a man down in the front office who thought he had seen a young woman come down the stairs a few minutes ago and slip hurriedly out of the street door.

The nurse went out in the street, up and down wildly, in her uniform, the cold wind blowing her hair untidily around her face, but there was no sign of her patient.

She dashed back into the hospital and interviewed all the nurses on her hall, but no one had seen Margaret leave, and all she gained was a glowing account from a couple of nurses who happened to overhear the conversation between Miss Grandon and the patient.

At last, filled with chagrin and embarrassment, Miss Gowen took her way to the telephone booth and tried to call up Greg.

Now Greg had arisen early, for he realized that he had many things to set in order if he was to be honestly a businessman before he took on a secretary in earnest. He had spent much time in his room formulating plans, for he felt strongly that this girl would be suspicious of him if his mind appeared to be in chaos regarding his business. Indeed, he had spent much of the night thinking things out, tossing on his hotel bed and sighing for the quiet of his wilderness shack. How could any man think in a noisy place like this? Thunder of trains, clang of trolley cars, whirr of motors, bang, bang, bang of fire engines, whistles of sirens. He didn’t remember that home used to be so noisy. And then he recalled that he hadn’t been near his old home yet. Well, that could wait till he got this girl settled. Then, later, he would go and look up little old Maple Street and the white cottage where he and his mother used to live. If it was for sale, perhaps he would buy it and go and live there. Probably it would be quiet down around Maple Street. It used to be. But now he had much to do. He felt that the first and most important thing was to get that tired, sad little girl located in a comfortable room and somehow provide her salary in advance so that she would be relieved from financial worry. He could see that was the thing that was troubling her above all else. Perhaps it was almost time to send some more money to those old people who had written her that pitiful little letter he had read.

So he had taken out pencil and notebook and set down in order exactly what he had decided to do and what he meant to say to the girl about her salary. That was the most difficult matter he would have to deal with, for he foresaw that the girl would not be willing to be befriended. Whatever he did must be perfectly legitimate and reasonable. After much deliberation, he decided to find out the normal salary for high-class work of various kinds and pay her a salary that would be a sort of an average of them all. He would need help in so many different ways. Buying a house, furnishing it. Surely people paid big salaries for such work. He had read about that in a stray magazine that dealt with farm and garden and country houses and their decorations. It had called the workers in that line interior decorators. He would find out what interior decorators usually received. He was sure the girl, from her whole dainty appearance, had good taste and would be worthy of a good salary for that. Whatever he offered must be reasonable, or he felt instinctively she would take alarm and have none of him.

He ate a hasty breakfast and betook himself to the big department stores where he sought out heads of departments and asked a lot of questions, setting down facts in his notebook that he might be able to show her what was the normal price for certain service. Therefore it happened that when the little French telephone instrument in his hotel room rippled out ring after ring, it fell upon silent, unresponsive air, and word came back to the hospital booth, “They do not answer. Shall I keep on ringing?”

Miss Gowen had Mr. Sterling paged through the lobby, halls, dining room, and writing rooms, but they said he could not be found. She was fairly frantic and ran back to her own hall, routing out the head nurse again, demanding more information about the disappearance of her patient.

The head nurse was coldly sarcastic and calmly triumphant, and when Greg finally arrived on the scene and went up to the room as had been arranged, leaving his taxi waiting outside, he found an agitated Miss Gowen, his box of violets still in her hand, confronting an icy superior outside the door of the room. There were tears on Miss Gowen’s cheeks, angry tears, baffled tears, and a look of frantic despair in her eyes.

“There he is now!” he heard her say, and the head nurse turned to look haughtily at the man who had dared to invade her sacred precincts and disarrange her order of things.

“She’s
gone
!” said Miss Gowen to Greg, suddenly smothering her agitated face in her handkerchief.

“Gone?” said Greg, the look in his face that used to come there when he discovered an enemy had been among the cattle. “Gone?”

“Yes, gone!” said Miss Gowen, catching her breath in a kind of a sob. “I suppose you’ll blame me, but I never dreamed any such thing could happen. They drove her out while I was at breakfast. They told her this wasn’t a memorial room and you had lied to her. They said awful things to her and told her to get up and get out if she was able. They said you weren’t an honorable man and that she was not decent if she let you come here to see her!”

Miss Gowen was excited, of course. She knew that the head nurse was standing right there beside her with the power of her position, able to smash her own reputation to smithereens, and yet she poured forth the tale hot from her angry heart. This man should know the truth whatever happened.

“Who did that, Miss Gowen?” asked Greg, his voice coldly steady, his gray eyes alert, his firm jaw set in a way that made him a formidable foe. “Who dared to tell her that?” Greg’s voice somehow resembled the blue of steel in a gun pointed straight at a vital part.

Then up spoke the head nurse with her most important air. “I did!” she said coldly. “I am the head nurse. It was my business to see that there were no interlopers. I discovered that someone had put over a gigantic fraud on the hospital, and I made it very plain to the girl who had presumed to accept a private room that she was not wanted there. I offered to have her moved to the ward, where she belonged, if she was unable to leave the building, but she declined most ungraciously. I gave her to understand that respectable girls did not let strange men off to pay large sums to keep them in luxury—”

Greg’s eyes were fixed upon Miss Grandon now, and there seemed to be a point of light in them that made them burn like fires. Miss Gowen watched him startled. She wondered if the head nurse realized how angry he was. Suddenly he put up his hand and interrupted the hard cold explanation.

“I see!” he said in the stern tone a much older man might have used. “You need not say anything more now. We’ll deal with that afterwards. The point is where is Miss McLaren now? Don’t let’s waste anymore time!”

Three nurses and an intern had gathered up the hall listening. The doors of two rooms had been opened, and heads poked out to see what the trouble was, and across the hall the special nurse came out and joined the group further up the hall.

Just at that point, a doctor arrived on the scene, the doctor who had taken the case when Margaret McLaren had been brought in, and behind him walked a white clad man from the office below with a workman in his wake, who carried a large bronze plate.

“This is the room,” said the white clad attendant to the workman, pointing toward the open door of the room where Margaret had been such a short time before. “The plate is to be on the door,” he said.

“Yes,” said the workman, putting down his kit of tools and looking questioningly toward the group gathered right in his path. “I measured it for the door panel. I guess you’ll havta ask these folks ta move.”

“What’s all this?” asked the head nurse sharply, swinging around upon the workman.

“Just a bit of work to be done here, Miss Grandon,” explained the attendant. “It won’t take long. Only a matter of a few screws. There won’t be any noise connected with it.”

“But I don’t understand!” said the head nurse sharply. “What work could be necessary? I haven’t ordered anyone up here to work.”

The doctor stepped forward pleasantly, yet with an air of authority, to explain.