Read Doctor's Assistant Online
Authors: Celine Conway
The following half-hour dragged by like a nightmare. Desperately she flicked the lights and between times she made further onslaughts on the starter. Finally she sat back trembling behind the wheel. He wasn’t coming. What was she to do? How could she hope to follow her father in the dark? There was no fire-glow in the direction he had taken, nothing to guide her, and once she had left the car there would be no means of finding her way back to it. If her father turned up and found her gone, he would be frantic. Yet she could not stand much more of this.
It occurred to her that if he had succeeded in his quest, the boys he had mustered would carry some sort of light. Anxiously she got out of the car and scanned the blackness for a bobbing spark; but even the fires seemed to have dwindled and there was nothing, anywhere, to suggest a moving group of men.
Utter stillness, the sky black and velvety and mazed with low-hanging stars. Utter stillness, except for the rhythmic pulsing of drums which Laurette, in her fright, confused with her own heartbeats.
Again she sent out the pallid beams, but this time only once. For in their weak radiance she had seen a blanketed native, his face staring and startled. Palpitating, she struggled with a paralysis in her throat, but by the time, she could shout he was gone, doubtless fleeing from one of the monsters which he had thought clung only to the roads.
Quite how she got through the next few hours Laurette could never afterwards explain. She remembered realizing that something dreadful must have happened to her father, for whether he could obtain help or not, he would never have left her alone in such a place in the dark for so long. He was a soldier, and he’d have made her enjoy a night with him in the car. She also recalled getting out of the car, the creeping horror of the loneliness, and the torturing drum-beats which had ceased almost simultaneously around midnight.
After that there had been the cool night air upon her face and arms, and the regular yet uncertain movements of her legs. She had walked and climbed with the vague intention of making the river road, and at one time she had noticed a stationary car many miles away flooding the road with light. In her condition it had not struck her as odd that a car should be parked through the dark hours on that little-used road; she had imagined herself suffering from the delusion that it was her father’s car.
Dawn broke in a thick grey mist. Shivering with damp and fatigue, Laurette sank down and laid her head upon her arms. She might even have lost consciousness for a bit, for she was eventually roused by the sun’s warmth on her back, and when she sat up there were the hills all about her, green and tranquil under a deepening sky. And away over on a footpath in the neighboring hillside, a solitary motor-cyclist coasted slowly, looking alternately to the right and to the left.
Laurette stood up and waved, ran with her arms spread, her throat emitting little sobs. The rider saw her. He raised a gloved hand and shot down the path; in an incredibly short time his machine was bounding across the turf. She recognized the traffic policeman who lived in Port Quentin.
“My word, you’ve given us a fright,” he said. “Where’s your father?”
“Haven’t you ... seen him?”
The croak of her voice, her pallor and the rumpled state of her hair and dress smote him suddenly. He slung a leg back over his cycle.
“Stay just here, Miss Delaney. I’ll have a car pick you up in a jiffy.”
Laurette had no urge to move. She felt sick and weary, and so full of fear for her father that she would rather they left her here and concentrated on searching for him. But soon she looked up to see Charles Heron loping over the grass towards her.
He dropped at once to his knees at her side, drew a flask from his pocket and tipped whisky into a small metal cup. His shoulder slipped behind hers and he held the cup to her lips.
“Steady,” he said. ‘Take it slowly.”
She managed a few sips. They burned and she gasped. “My father?” she whispered.
“His car was found soon after dawn and they’re scouring that district. When you’ve recovered you can tell me what happened. It may help us to trace him.” His tones were singularly unemotional. His arm was firm across her back, his fingers hard about her elbow. “We’ve been on the job all night. When you didn’t return for dinner last night your boy got worried. At about ten he came up to us, and I questioned him, but he knew no more than that you’d gone for a drive during the afternoon. I went about fifty miles along the road in case you’d had a breakdown and were stranded. Afterwards, I guessed you’d taken one of the tracks into the reserve and would probably have to stay there the night. I kept out on the road with my lights on. Tell me something”—his voice changed slightly—“how did you and your father become separated?”
Haltingly it
came out, and when, finally, her breath
caught, he made her swallow the rest of the whisky.
“We’ll find the Captain,” he said quietly, “but I’m taking you home first.”
She sat upright. “Let me go with you. I can show you the kraal he was making for.”
“You’re flat out...”
“Please!”
She turned to him, her eyes large and dark in the whiteness of her face, her mouth quivering. He stood and lifted her to her feet.
“You can’t help except by resting,” he told her abruptly. “If he’s hurt in any way you’ll need all that nursing skill of yours. And for heaven’s sake don’t cry,” he said softly and savagely. “If you’d had the sense to lock yourself in the car we’d have found you over two hours ago. Only someone completely young and irresponsible would leave the safety of a car to wander around a native reserve during the dark hours!” He stopped, and some of the hardness went from his expression. “I’m sorry, but the very thought of a girl wilfully putting herself through such an ordeal makes a man wince. You’re going home for some food and a long sleep.”
The car was parked half-way down the hill, precariously balanced on a steep incline. Charles put her into the seat, took his own place and released the brake. They jolted round perilous bends, dipped sickeningly into a valley to meet one of the tracks and presently ran out on the river road.
The car was big and luxuriously upholstered. Laurette sat shrunk into her corner, wishing it had been Ben who had come upon her. Ben wouldn’t have gone all taut and angry at hearing her story. He would have understood the impossibility of her remaining cooped in the car with gnawing worries. And he wouldn’t have refused to let her join the party searching for her father either. Ben was human.
Now that some of the tension was eased, she felt emotion rising in her breast, stinging at her eyelids. When Charles spoke to her she remained dumb, staring through the window at the muddy, sun-shot river and the approaching roofs of Port Quentin. It was not till he helped her out on to the drive that she saw that the house to which he had brought her was the big, colonial mansion belonging to Mr. Kelsey.
“You ... you said you were taking me home,” she said.
“This is what I meant,” he answered. “There are three spare bedrooms.”
He pushed at her arm, but for a moment she wouldn’t move. Shakily, she held his cuff.
“Charles, supposing you ... and the others ... don’t find my father?”
“Don’t be idiotic,” he said coolly. “There are a dozen of us and squads of African boys. Get inside and stop over-working your imagination.”
To Mr. Kelsey, who came down the steps from the wide veranda, he added, “Take care of her, will you? She needs something light to eat and several hours’ rest. I’ll get away again.”
The car curved round the drive and disappeared. Mr. Kelsey fingered his distinguished brow, looked with some perplexity upon the forlorn and weary Laurette, and then patted her shoulder.
“Come along in, you silly little mouse. In the long run it’s always best to do exactly as Charles orders.”
CHAPTER FOUR
LATE that afternoon John Delaney was found in a shallow gorge between two low mountains. He was conscious, and pale with anxiety till his first question had been answered.
“Laurette’s all right,” Ben assured him. “At least, she will be as soon as she hears you’re safe. Think you could eat a sandwich and tell us how you got here?”
The reply came quickly and almost matter-of-factly. The Captain had set out for the nearest, kraal and found there only the womenfolk of the family and a very old man. They had advised him to follow a certain path which led over a bridge to another kraal. In the darkness he had missed both path and bridge and slipped over the edge of the chasm. The unexpectedness of it had given him no time to save himself a hard fall, and he couldn’t climb back because he’d doubled his leg under him. He’d nearly gone out of his mind thinking about Laurette.
His stamina was such that he jested while Charles and Ben lifted him on to the stretcher. Later, when Ben had set the fracture and gone back to his own house, and Laurette sat in a chair beside the big walnut bed, John Delaney made the trite but jovial observation that all was well that ended well.
“We’ve a lot to be grateful for,” she said soberly. “But I do wish we were in our own house.”
“I’m glad we’re not. I’m not a light weight to lift around, and I’ll be less trouble to you in other ways if we live here till I can get about. There’ll be Kelsey to chat with, and possibly Charles and I will get on with his book. It’ll be a change for you, too”—he contrived a glint of humor—“living under the same roof with the self-centred District Commissioner.”
“I shouldn’t have said that about him,” she confessed. “Even though he thought you and I were together last night; he patrolled the road on the off-chance of our seeing his lights.”
“The deuce he did! So you’re revising your opinion of him.”
‘Not exactly. I was half-dead this morning but he became really nasty. There’s no weighing up a man who will miss a night’s sleep for people who are almost strangers, and yet talk cruelly when at last he happens upon one of them.” She smiled ruefully. “While we’re here I shall have to keep out of his way as much as possible.”
Before her father could reply Mr. Kelsey knocked and
came in. From the foot of the bed he regarded the patient from beneath raised brows, and then he looked at Laurette.
“You surprising Delaneys,” he said. “Your girl has nearly as much stiffening as you have, John. Go and have your dinner, Laurette. A boy will bring your father’s.”
Laurette had little appetite, but she had no option but to obey the kindly old man. She went into the corridor, saw herself slim and straight in a long mirror framed in wrought iron and went closer to it, to see if she needed a dusting of powder. Bwazi, having received instructions to bring her a clean frock, for some reason had chosen a white one. She looked pretty bleak, Laurette thought, but she was not in a mood to care.
Quietly, she made her way to the dining-room. The door was wide, the table gleamed under the combined illumination of the dozen candles in the two branched candlesticks, and between the table and a carved Dutch dresser stood Charles appearing like someone from an old painting in the strange golden light. He had changed into a beige tropical suit which accentuated both his tan and his great height.
“Like a drink?” he asked.
“No, thank you.”
He pressed a bell. “Come and sit down, then. You must be hungry for a genuine meal.”
He seated her and took his own place opposite. A vase of heavy, exotic carnations stood between them, gargantuan blossoms red as the heart s blood. He smiled slightly through the fernery which garnished them.
“We’ll have the barrier there, shall we? Until my uncle turns up, anyway. Here comes the soup. What will you have—iced jelly or hot thick soup?”
As a conversation piece the meal was not a success. Charles made suave, impersonal remarks which occasionally masked faint mockery, but during the last twenty-four hours Laurette had experienced a surfeit of emotion. She couldn’t rise to him at all, and there was something in the atmosphere which made her yearn for the modest Delaney bungalow and her pink-and-white bedroom. She could have wept—except that not for anything in the world would she weep in front of Charles. And resolutely she reminded herself that her father was pleased to be here. Perhaps tomorrow, with this ghastly day behind her, she would feel differently.
She was trying very hard to dispose of some papaw salad when Mr. Kelsey took his seat at the table. The old man’s eyes twinkled and he rubbed his hands.
“A girl in the house, Charles. Alters the whole place, doesn’t it?”
“The patter of little feet,” was the sardonic reply. “We did it with our eyes open.”
“You mean you did it, though I’m very pleased you did. Laurette’s endured quite a lot; she can’t be fit enough to nurse her father.”
“I’ve rested most of the day,” she said. “I can look after him.”
“There won’t be much for you to do,” Mr. Kelsey assured her. “What about your work for Dr. Vaughan?”
Charles poured some wine for his uncle and filled up his own glass. “Ben can do without her for a few days,” he said.
“But he can’t,” Laurette put in quickly. “He’s too busy to do my job as well.”
“He didn’t say that.”
“Do you mean that you ... asked him?”
“I didn’t ask him anything. We merely agreed that you should not work for a while. You forget that Ben has your welfare very much at heart.”
Quite what he was implying Laurette was too spent to work out. She drank her coffee, and thought that such decisions would have to wait till tomorrow. Not for a second must she lose sight of the fact that she and her father were the guests of Charles and Mr. Kelsey.
Presently, she left the two men, went along to say good night to her father and slipped into the bedroom which had been allotted to her. It was a moderately-sized room, furnished, as were the other bedrooms, in a light masculine style. Unstained walnut, tan curtains and bed cover, and a navy blue carpet with a narrow formal border. An aloof, impersonal apartment in which Laurette felt as out of place as Charles had looked in the Delaney lounge.
Crickets were noisy outside in the grass and she could smell the salt breeze off the sea. Canary palms rustled, and she recalled the dry rattle of aloe leaves on the mountainside last night, the beat of drums. She shivered, swiftly undressed and got into the big strange bed.
The next few days were more tolerable than Laurette had anticipated. John Delaney, resigned to lying in bed, had few lone moments in which to become bored. He and Mr. Kelsey had long sessions at chess, and with Charles her father exchanged experiences in several parts of the world and discussed the pictures for the book. Laurette often prepared her father’s meals and carried them to his room, and no one objected when she ate in there with him.
By seldom visiting the dining-room, she avoided frequent contacts with Charles, and between meals she would go for walks down to the beach or across the small town to her father’s bungalow. Once she went down to Ben’s house, but though he gave her something to do, he also warned her not to be too anxious to return to the grind.
“You’ve been hard at it for five months and a short respite will do you good. Besides, you went through a bad time that night in the reserve. It shook you considerably.”
“I’m over it now,” she protested.
“Oh no, you’re not. You’ve still a hunted look, and I don’t like it. Not worrying about your father, are you?”
“You’ve said there’s no need.”
“Neither is there, though his recovery will take time and patience.”
“But, Ben, what about the piccanin whose leg we were massaging?”
He gave her his crinkly smile. “I’m still doing my bit each evening, and we’ll return to the full routine when you come back.”
“I could do that much!”
“Massage is wearing work. A week or so won’t make all that difference—the child has had this infirmity most of his life.” The smile became gently questioning. “Aren’t you happy at the Kelsey house?”
“Not very,” she answered hesitantly, “though that must sound horribly ungrateful. In any case, my father’s blissfully content.”
“That’s important, for an active man laid low.” A pause. “What is it that gets you down—Charles?”
“I suppose so.” She gave an offhand little laugh. ‘“When he’s about I feel as if I’m to be seen and not heard. The odd thing is that although it was he who insisted on our staying with Mr. Kelsey, he doesn’t really like having us there—not
me,
anyway. There’s a sort of edge to his politeness and he can’t smile without mocking.”
Ben said nothing for a moment, but his long, thinnish face was thoughtful. Then: “Charles Heron is one of the godlike few who never make mistakes. I’m not being, bitter—that’s just a statement of fact. He thought you were mad to leave the car that night, and when I remarked that it was a perfectly natural reaction in a strung-up girl he said it was time you learned control and to think around a subject before acting. He’s done it for so long himself that he believes it comes easily to all mortals.”
Although he had disclaimed being bitter, there was a trace of acid in his tone. Laurette shrugged.
“I don’t mind his disapproving of me—so long as you don’t! When do you think my father will be able to get up?”
“He can sit on the veranda any time now, but he’ll need men to lift him out there. The leg will be out of action for several weeks. At the moment there’s not much I can do for him.”
The rest of that week passed uneventfully. By the weekend the breeze was soft and caressing and the small boats were out on the river and venturing past the “Gates” into the sea. The main beach, which was to the right of the headlands, was gay with umbrellas, and several weekenders had come in from Umtopo, eighty miles away beyond the mountains, to the small hotel in the single street of Port Quentin.
After breakfast on Saturday morning, Laurette went into the garden. Like most of those in the district it was thickly grown and sub-tropical, but besides flower-beds and waxy-blossomed shrubs it had a tennis court and a large lily pool into which played an ornamental fountain. To Laurette, the fountain was a mixed blessing. True, it looked cool and encouraged the lilies, but someone—probably Charles had caused the water to be primed with antiseptic to deter mosquitoes, and the odor was all-pervading. The clean, astringent scent was typical of Charles.
She had just decided to sit on a stone bench under a deodar when Mr. Kelsey appeared. The old man, upright and smart in nautical navy and white, refused to be seated till Laurette was settled.
“Well, my dear,” he said expansively, “now that we’ve proved we can get your father into a lounge suit, we’re thinking of having some friends for dinner tonight. I’ll send a boy round with invitations.”
“That’ll be nice,” she said. “Can I help in any way?”
“Kind of you to offer, but I don’t think so. The boys know what’s expected of them. Being a bachelor, I’ve had to hit upon various schemes for getting the best out of them. I never promise a bonus, but if they turn out a really good meal when I have guests they always receive extra pay. They know it, and do their utmost. You can arrange some flowers for us late this afternoon, if you will.” He was silent for several seconds. “You know, Laurette, the man who remains determinedly unmarried is foolish. He has no one with whom he comes first, and that’s bad. Your father’s marriage lasted a little over two years, but he has you—which is a great thing—and he has this boy they adopted as soon as they were married.”
“Not thinking of plunging into matrimony, are you?” she asked mischievously.
He laughed with her. “It’s too late. I was merely soliloquizing out loud because I’m always hoping, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that Charles will one day come across a woman he’d like to marry.”
“Have pity on the woman,” she murmured.
He smiled admonishment. “That’s wicked, Laurette. Charles is a fine man—the type who’s the backbone of the British Commonwealth. I know you resent his looking upon you as a child, but, after all, compared with him you are one—in my opinion a delightful specimen!”
“Thank you, Mr. Kelsey. Since we’re exchanging compliments, you’re a far nicer uncle than he deserves. Having written off Charles, shall we talk about the weather?”
There came a firm step, a thrusting aside of branches. “So you’ve written off Charles,” said his clipped voice. “This is interesting. How did you do it?”
Charles was there with his head against the dark leaves, his hands sunk into the pockets of impeccable fawn slacks and his white silk shirt open at the throat. He had been for a bathe and gave off a fragrance of sea and smoke. His look at Laurette was sharp and patronizing. She had gone scarlet.
Mr. Kelsey subsided into a deep chuckle. “Young women are devastatingly candid, aren’t ‘they? Laurette doesn’t think you should marry, Charles.”
“No?” The monosyllable was a brief jeer. “Don’t exercise your brain on my behalf, little one. You’re growing to an age when you’ll have problems of your own, and I’m sure you won’t come to me for the solutions.”
“You’re right,” she said with spirit. “If I were in a spot I’d probably need some sympathy.”
He made a tut-tutting noise. “Are you still annoyed because I didn’t hug you when I met you in the mountains the other morning?”
The picture of Charles gathering her in and crooning over her as if she were a long-lost little sister strained her gravity. She smiled, then laughed.
“I’m awfully glad you didn’t,” she said. “The night was grim enough without that sort of climax.”
“Did I say you were growing up?” he asked. “I take it back.”
She knew the remark was intended to put her where she belonged, but all at once, unaccountably, it didn’t matter in the least. Inside, she was extraordinarily pleased. She had flicked him, however, lightly, and the knowledge was like a cautious breath of relief about her heart.
This was the way to deal with Charles; never to let him realize that he had got the better of her, even though he invariably did. He had his vulnerable places. They might be fewer than other people’s and more heavily disguised, but they were there. Laurette did not question why she was glad to have come to this conclusion; but she was.