I would have given anything then to get away. I felt sure he knew me. That veil had got to come off. Delaying, I fumbled with it, dreading to meet his eyes when my own were uncovered. As I cried and fumbled, my hands trembling in earnest, the veil caught in the trimmings, and he got up to help me. His face was softening, he looked sympathetic again. Then he didn’t know me after all? or, was he carrying the sorry jest as far as he could? The veil at last removed, I looked up in his face—afraid of him, and ready to cry at what I had done. We gazed at each other for an instant, and then—I saw such a look of astonishment as I have seldom seen—he had not suspected me at all!
He was so overwhelmed with mortification that my own mortification vanished, and I confessed that I had been on pins and needles most of the time, fearing it was he who was getting the joke on me. What gales of laughter went up from that office! We had such a hilarious time we almost forgot to summon Dr. Carson who was impatiently waiting outside.
Dr. Fenton made me promise to try the same trick on Dr. James, the new interne, on my return to the hospital. He did not dream of asking me to keep it from Laidlaw; he declared they would have to admit that I had wiped out all our old scores. And when I told the story to Laidlaw, how delighted he was! though he could hardly credit that Fenton, knowing me so well, could have been so long deceived.
“How could he—your voice, your hands, your eyes, even with veil and spectacles—incredible!” Yet he revelled in it—that demure, prudish “Little Arnold” would do such a thing. “You! You!—we thought we knew Little Arnold, but we didn’t.”
He was tickled at Fenton’s suggestion that I try the thing on James, and eager for me to start at once, begging me to let him be near to see the fun. But I only half promised, fearing I could not carry it through if any one in the secret were about.
One night when I knew he and James were to be in the office, telling them I expected to be occupied most of the evening, so would not myself be down as usual, I borrowed some toggery from a patient, and arrayed myself in my widow’s garb; and, slipping out by a side door, came in just before dusk at the front gate, hobbling across the lawn and up to the hospital in plain sight of the young doctors sitting in the office window.
College and Hospital are in the same enclosure, and outdoor Dispensary patients were expected to be taken care of over at the College; we of the hospital-staff, being supposed to refer all cases applying there to the Dispensary department. But knowing that James was eager for obstetric work, and that he would be likely to snap up any he could, I hoped by my tale to get him out as far as the street with me (to attend my daughter in confinement) before he should discover my identity.
Jack, the bell-boy, came to the door: Might I see the house-doctor? “Which one?” he asked—“the medical or the surgical doctor?” If Laidlaw, who was the surgical interne, came, I should be undone; he would know me, and I could not keep in character with him looking on; so I said, “Oh, the medical—don’t say anything to any one but him.”
The boy lit the gas in the waiting room and went for Dr. James. I quickly turned it low.
James came, curious and important. Using the Irish brogue and the expressions used by Dispensary patients, I explained that my daughter was in labour and that I wanted him to hurry as fast as ever he could to save her life. He was not at all suspicious. But not yet having had an obstetric case, and learning that it was a primipara (first birth), he anticipated trouble, and was averse to tackling it alone. I knew of what he was thinking, so feigning impatience, related symptoms which would impress him with the need of haste. Would he come, or not? Yes, he would come, but he must take the house-surgeon also, as he might need assistance with instruments.