Nurse Linnet's Release (17 page)

Even before Guy’s extraordinary conduct of the afternoon
...

CHAPTER
XVI
I

When she came to herself hands were being passed experimentally over her body, and a voice was speaking to her. It was a man’s voice, and she knew it, but she couldn’t think how in the world it came to be where it was. It was also so concerned that her amazement increased.

“Linnet
...
!
Oh, Linnet, my darling child, are you all right?” The voice seemed to be imploring her. “Linnet
...
!
”

Linnet opened her eyes and looked up at him. Her head was clear, and her thoughts were clear, and she knew him immediately, although she was still perplexed how he came to be there.

“I’m quite all right! Just a bit bruised
...”

“No bones broken,” Adrian Shane Willoughby told her, helping her to her feet. She felt sick for a minute as she leaned against him, and his arms supported her. They were wonderfully gentle arms.

“I’ll be all right in a minute,” she said, through her teeth. “Just give me a minute!”

“Of course!”

His hand lightly stroked her hair, and it was very restful there in his arms, but she knew she mustn’t allow herself to rest for long.

Already a horrible fear was at the back of her curiously clear mind. “Guy
...
?
” she asked.

“He’s pinned by the wheel, and unconscious, but I don’t think he’s badly injured. I can’t get him out of the car alone, but if you could help—just a little
...
”

“Of course.”

“There’s a flask of brandy in my own car. I’ll give you some of that.”

“I don’t really want it.”

“Nevertheless, you’re going to have it,” he told her, with the firmness with which he had frequently dealt with Diana.

After she had drunk a little of the raw spirit, and choked over it, she asked:

“How did you happen to come along?”

“I saw Diana and her young man friend, and they told me you were all driving down to the cottage. I decided I didn’t like the sound of it, and thought I’d come along, too.”

“Thank heavens,” she whispered.

As it happened, he didn’t need her help to get Guy out of the ruins of his wrecked car, for another car came along and its occupants readily helped him. There was an inn not many yards from the spot where the accident had taken place, and the injured man was conveyed there and the landlord quickly placed a room at their disposal. Guy’s head was bleeding from a deep cut, but otherwise he, too, had magically escaped serious injury, and when he became consc
i
ous he found himself lying comfortably in a strange four-poster bed, with the dawn light filtering into the room, and Linnet on one side of the bed watching him anxiously, while Dr. Shane Willoughby stood watching him on the other.

“This—could be Aston House,” Guy said. “Except,” he added, “that you’re not in uniform, Linnet!”

“No, and this isn’t Aston House,” the doctor replied for her, more shortly than he would normally have spoken to a patient under similar conditions—and even Linnet recognized that.

Guy’s hand reached out.

“Linnet, are you all right
...
?
”

“Perfectly all right,” she assured him, but her smile was wan, and her face was absolutely colourless.

The doctor put his hand inside her arm and drew her away from the bed.

“He’ll be all right,” he said. “The landlord’s wife is making some very hot, sweet tea for you, so come downstairs and drink it. You really ought to be put to bed yourself, but there doesn’t appear to be a vacant room here, and in any case I think you’d be better at the cottage if you can stand the drive. It’s not much more than half-an-hour’s journey away.”

“But, Guy—?” she said.

“You’re not fit to nurse him now, and we’ll get a nurse out to him. Do as I say,” he said more firmly.

She became as wax in his hands, sipping her tea obediently, sitting in an arm-chair facing him in a downstairs sitting-room, while he sat with his own hands clasped between his knees and leaned forward and watched her gravely. He watched a little colour struggle back into her cheeks, and her eyes become less dazed. She even smiled at him after a time.

“I’m feeling much better,” she said. “At one stage I thought I was going to be violently sick, but that’s past, and I’m quite all right now. What a wonder-worker tea is, isn’t it?”

“You’ll be all right in another twenty-four hours,” he told her. He looked through the window at the garden behind the inn. The dawn sky had brightened and was palpitating with colour, and the world before the sun rose appeared wondrously fresh and fair. Adrian stood up and approached the window, which was a french one, and he pushed it open and stood on a flagged path. The dawn-chorus was drawing to its close, but it still filled the air with music, and Linnet could make out a chaffinch’s note, and that unmistakable clear call of the blackbird. She remembered a morning when she was in Aston House, and a long night had just ended, and a blackbird piped below the kitchen window.

Suddenly feeling the need of air she stood up and moved to the doctor’s elbow. He looked down at her and smiled and put an arm about her, guiding her over the lawn to a white painted garden seat.

“Come and sit down here,” he said, “just for a short while. It’s cool, and you’ll find it more reviving than that stuffy room.”

As he sat beside her on the bench she seemed to hear his voice imploring her again, as it had implored her while she was still only partly conscious. She wished she could be certain that it was not just a figment of a disordered imagination that had caused her to hear him uttering words she couldn’t really believe he would have uttered—to her! And yet
...

“
Oh, Linnet, my darling child, are you all right
...?”
were the words she was almost certain he had used, and looking at him sideways in the clear, cool light of dawn, with the first finger of sunrise gilding his brown hair, and turning those silvery strands at his temples to burnished gold also, something inside her seemed all at once to grow and expand, and it was just as if scales fell from her eyes.

If there had never been any Guy Monteith—if she had met him before she met Guy, there would never have been any confusion in her heart or mind! She would have known, from the moment the searchlight quality of his blue eyes swept over her—engulfed her!—that beside him all other men were as nothing
...
!
And even if he had not really had eyes for her, if Diana had been his main thought, as now no longer seemed certain, then it just wouldn’t have mattered or made any difference.

She would have gone on worshipping him from afar
...
!

She sat clasping her hands tightly together in her lap, and she wondered whether it was the accident—something resulting from the shock of the accident that had cleared her mind, just as the fresh, calm scents of the new-born day were reviving her physically, and put everything that had puzzled her into such extraordinarily lucid perspective that whatever happened to her in the future she would never have any doubts about one thing at least.

All at once he turned and looked at her. His eyes were grave and questioning, just as if they had been discussing something, the solution to which was important to him—although, as a matter of fact, they had been silent for close upon five minutes.

“Linnet,” he said, “are you still quite sure you want to marry him?”

Linnet did not appear surprised by the question. But she did look disturbed by it.

“I must marry him,” she answered. “I’ve said I will and I—must!”

“Why?”

“Because—” She made a little helpless gesture with her hands—“because I couldn’t possibly let him down!”

“Although he’s the wrong man for you, and you know it? Although you’ll never be happy with him
...
!
I don’t even think you’ll be remotely happy! You’re the wrong type altogether to cope with anyone like Guy Monteith. He’ll take all you’ve got to offer him, and he’ll depend on you, and he won’t be able to do without you—but you’ll get nothing but his constant repentance, and in time that will become wearisome! I could have told you all this in the beginning, but you wouldn’t have listened to me then.”

“I didn’t even know you—you were interested enough to—to want to warn me!” she said, looking away across the garden.

“I was interested from the very moment I saw you—and that wasn’t at Aston House!” He watched her eyes come back to him from a pergola smothered in Dorothy Perkins, and they were large, and wondering, and faintly disbelieving. “It was at St. Faith’s.”

“I—I never saw you at St. Faith’s,” she heard herself stammering.

“No. But I saw you
—and
remembered you!”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, barely above a whisper, and looked down again at her hands.

“I remembered you—and thought about you often! And met you again on the night that fellow Monteith was faced with a second crisis in a couple of days. Do you remember you made me some tea?”

“Yes.” She remembered also what he had said about the tea. She remembered him quoting: “
Noir comme le diable, Chaude comme
l
'enfer
.”

He smiled rather faintly, as if her thoughts were an open book to him, and he knew what she was recalling. And this time it was he who completed the quotation.

“And because you made the tea it was also:
‘
Pur comme un ange, Doux comme
l’
amour
’!”

Linnet felt the rising sun warm and sweet upon her face, and something that was also warm and sweet stirred about the region of her heart.

“I thought you were interested in Mrs. Carey,” she said.

“In Diana?” His eyebrows lifted.

“Yes.”

“So I am. But only as a patient—and a god-daughter of Sir Paul Loring’s. He wanted me to do the best I could for her. I think I’ve done all that’s really necessary, and she’ll get along very well without me now.”

But Linnet was not so sure of that, and in her heart she pitied the widow, even if the feeling she had had for Adrian Shane Willoughby was nothing more than an infatuation. At the same time she was wholeheartedly glad that he was safe from the danger of linking his life with a woman of Diana’s uncertain temperament. And then she recalled that she herself was not safe from linking hers with just such an inexplicable character, and all at once a faintly ragged little sigh was torn up from the roots of her being. Instantly the man beside her became all anxiety and concern.

“I ought not to keep you out here talking like this. You’ve had a ghastly experience, and I ought to drive you home. Are you really feeling all right?” capturing one of her hands and holding it closely between both his own. “Oh, Linnet, when I found you lying so still beside the road like that, I—” But he could not go on, only his face told her a great deal. It told her so much that her heart grew heavy and wistful within her, and the eyes she lifted to him were heavy and wistful, too, more than ever like shadowed purple violets.

She recalled the comfort of his arms when he had found her beside the road—the wonderful, soothing comfort of his voice when he had assured her that she had no bones broken.

Life with such a man would be like living surrounded by comfort and security, and a happiness such as she had never known!

He felt her small fingers cling for a moment to his, and then she withdrew them deliberately.

“And nothing I can say will make you change your mind?” he asked, his voice almost unrecognizable because it was suddenly so husky.

She shook her head without uttering a word.

“Not even if I tell you that I love you far, far more than the man you’re going to marry?”

“Don’t!” she said.

He regarded her with faintly agonized eyes.

“Linnet, you don’t really love him, do you? At least let me know the truth about that!”

“No, I—I only thought I did!”

“But not now?”

“No.
No
,”
she repeated, with a kind of impassioned emphasis.

“And do you love me at all?”

Again she looked up at him, and her eyes were deep pools of wonder and enchantment.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Oh, yes,” and her hands came out to him again with a gesture she could not prevent herself from making.

But he merely stood up and drew her from the bench so that for a few moments they were standing very close to one another, while the garden all around them became bathed with golden light, the mellow red bricks of the ancient inn behind them shone like rubies in the sunshine, and dewdrops sparkled like diamonds in the short grass that whispered about their ankles. Linnet knew she would remember this moment all her life, and that it was a moment to be savoured, just as the song of the lark that had soared into the clear sky above their heads was something to be savoured, and imprisoned, and held captive for the rest of her life.

“We must go in,” Adrian said, after a long moment of silence. And then all at once his voice became cool and professional. “I’ll get a nurse for your Guy, and if necessary get him into a local hospital. But I think he’ll probably be able to return to his own home in a day or so. He’s lucky he didn’t kill himself—and he’s even more lucky he didn’t kill you!”

As they walked slowly back along the path to the house he told her in a casual kind of voice:

“I don’t suppose I shall see very much of you in the future, because even if you don’t go out to Rhodesia with Diana you’ll be going out quite soon with your husband, and I’ve decided to a
c
cept an appointment that’s been offered me abroad. I’ve been undecided about it for some time, but now I’m not undecided any longer.”

“Oh!” Linnet exclaimed, and looked up at him quickly. “What kind of an appointment is it?”

He stood aside for her to enter the little sitting-room, with its artificial flowers inside glass cases, and far too much heavy furniture, where they had sat before, and he enlightened her.

“I don’t think I’m really cut out for the life I’ve been leading lately, and this new job will give me a wider interest. I’ve always been much more interested in research than anything else, and a research station is just my cup of tea. If I get things speeded up I can probably leave England in about a month.”

“To take charge of a medical research station?”

“Yes.”

“Where?” she asked, feeling her throat tightening.

“Oh the west coast of Africa—a part of the world that used to be known as the white man’s grave, but isn’t any longer.” He smiled down at her. “In fact, I believe it’s quite pleasant now.”

“Yes.” But her throat tightened still more, and for a moment so many conflicting emotions rushed up over her that she hardly knew what to do. Africa
...
!
How it was continually thrusting itself upon her life these days
...
!

First Diana, who had returned from Africa with a disease she had contracted, and then Guy, who was on leave
...
And then Diana asking her to return with her to Rhodesia; and now Adrian talking about giving up his present life and joining a research station on the west coast of Africa
...
!