Nurse Linnet's Release (18 page)

CHAPTER
XVII
I

Africa seemed even nearer, and several sizes more menacing, to Linnet when, very nearly a full month later, she found herself occupying a cabin aboard a liner bound for Mombasa, with Diana Carey occupying the cabin next door.

Diana had said good-bye to England in a state of petulant bad humour, and had gone straight to her cabin where she declared she intended remaining until dinner that evening, because she loathed being mixed up with all the farewells and tense moments of the start of a voyage. Also she declared she had a headache and would take a couple of aspirins, and Linnet left her lying down in a housecoat on her berth while she went to unpack some of her own things next door.

But the unpacking was quickly done, and she went up on deck to watch until the last of the land had faded from sight. She couldn’t have-told anyone quite how she felt as she watched the last of the slowly receding shore-line, and knew that she was leaving her own homeland behind for the first time in her life. More than that, she was leaving someone behind who had not even said good-bye to her, and that was the man for whom her heart ached constantly these days.

He had sent her a little note which reached her about two days before she left. The note had been typical of the man.

“
I shall be following you soon
,”
he said,
“
only unfortunately it will be to a different corner of the same continent! But perhaps one day our paths will converge again. Who knows? In this life there is not much that is really surprising.

I hope you will be happy. I would like to wish you much more than mere happiness, and perhaps after all it will come your way
!”

The note was simply signed
Adrian
.

Linnet tucked it away in the very bottom of one of her suit-cases, where it would be safe, and where she would know where to look for it when an inescapable urge to read it again came over her. She had felt as if something inside her had died when she read it, but ever since the accident on the way into Hertfordshire from London she had not been feeling really and completely alive. Since her talk with Adrian in the garden of the little Hertfordshire inn something had become numb, and the part of her that was still conscious of all that was going on around her was so afraid that owing to some curious weakness on her part she was making a mistake that was affecting three lives.

Someone else who had not said good-bye to her just before she left was Guy. He had not taken at all kindly to the idea of her accompanying Diana to Rhodesia, and when she had first suggested it had threatened to be extremely awkward about it. In that case they would be married at once, he said, and he as well as Linnet would return to Rhodesia with Diana. In a
n
y case, there was not much point in delaying their marriage, for the one thing he did not desire was a fashionable wedding even if Linnet had secret yearnings for that sort of thing (which, as a matter of fact, she certainly hadn’t) and the more he thought of it the more the idea of a quick civil ceremony which would make them man and wife without any fuss, and then back to Rhodesia with Diana travelling with them if she wished for Linnet’s company, appealed to him. So much so that it was with difficulty Linnet managed to withstand the force of his arguments and retain her freedom for a little longer.

And she knew now that her freedom was the one thing she wanted to hang on to, and that the six weeks or two months away with Diana were the only hope she had of clinging on to it.

In the end Guy gave way, but with such a bad humour that life was not very easy for Linnet while she and Diana were getting ready for the trip. The week before they left Guy decided to go up to Scotland, and therefore his farewell to his
fiancé
e was said very much earlier than it need have been, and although this did not really hurt Linnet in any way, she was amazed that of all people Guy, who was so demanding—even more demanding since the accident in which she might easily have lost her life, and for which he had been responsible, without expressing very much penitence—should not want to see the last of her for several weeks, and drive her and Diana to the docks when the time came.

It amazed her so much in fact that it even made her feel a little uneasy, although why she should be uneasy she couldn’t think.

Diana dismissed Guy’s action as typical of him.

“He’s rather like a spoilt boy,” she said, “and he’s gone off on his own to sulk, and he thinks you’ll mind.”

But although Linnet didn’t greatly mind, she felt something like a complete pall of depression sweep down over her at the thought of her future life with Guy. For if a man could behave like that before marriage, how would he behave after marriage?

It was cool on deck, and she returned to her cabin and went through to inquire whether there was anything she could do for Diana. Diana replied that, as her headache was better, she might as well get up and dress, and Linnet helped her to select something to wear for the evening, and then ran her bath for her.

The dress Diana finally decided to wear was a black cocktail dress, and it made the most of her extreme fairness.

“One doesn’t really dress the first night on board,” she explained to the untravelled Linnet. “At least, seasoned travellers don’t. So, if I were you, I’d put on that green thing you look so nice in.”

Linnet took her advice, and when they made their way to the first-class dining-saloon she had reason to feel that if, so far as appearance went, she was not in the same class as Diana, at least she was not utterly eclipsed by her. And since the almost unbelievable knowledge had come her way that it was herself, and not the fascinating widow, who had captivated—or perhaps captured, was a better word—Adrian Shane Willoughby’s heart, she no longer felt even the faintest envy of Diana. She only felt immeasurably sad sometimes because she had assumed so much when a trifle less of blindness might have resulted in a happier future for herself, and perhaps for Adrian, too. Although, when the thought of him and his possible unhappiness worried her almost unbearably, and even came near to torturing her a little, she comforted herself with the thought that, so far as a man is concerned:

"Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ‘Tis woman’s whole existence!”

And for her love—the love she now knew she wanted above everything else in the world, and which might have proved so wonderful—would now always be denied her!

That first night at dinner she and Diana found themselves seated at the table with the First Officer, someone whose place remained vacant throughout the whole of the meal—or so long as they remained in the dining-saloon at any rate—an obviously rich American, who seemed to be travelling without any sort of encumbrance, and was possibly unattached, and a young couple who had just been married and were on their way to farm in Kenya.

Diana was so intrigued by the American that she decided to do her utmost afterwards to find out whether he really was unattached, and Linnet left her accepting an invitation to stroll with him on deck, as a commencement at least to the investigations she proposed to carry out concerning him.

Linnet went down into her cabin for a wrap, for the early September evening was cool, and then climbed to the boat deck, where there seemed to be few people about. She leaned on the rail and watched the dark seas stretching into a kind of immensity on all sides of her, and the few stars that were visible through flying clouds overhead. After a time the moon sailed into a patch of clear sky, and the dark waste became lighted by silvery radiance, like phosphorescence edging each uneasy wave as it rose and fell and slapped softly against the sides of the huge vessel that was ploughing its way through the night. Linnet felt the same radiance steal across her own face, and it made her both look and feel pale as a ghost in the gloom—a ghost with no thought beyond the vibrations that were going on below her, and the knowledge that every revolution of powerful screws was driving her onwards and away from one man whom she might very easily never see again in her lifetime.

She looked towards the wake of the vessel, and the white foam that was streaming out to mark its passage, and realized that it
was somewhere now far beyond that wake that the one real thing she had been born for in life had been rejected and set aside.

Sometimes she asked herself whether, if she had been less convinced that Adrian was in love with Diana, her awareness of him as the one man who could mean everything to her might have come about earlier, even in spite of Guy and his strange attraction. She recalled how much the Tropical Fevers Expert had impressed her from the beginning, how much she had liked him, how kindly and understanding and really humane she had thought him. And she remembered how hurt she had been when he had asked her to have tea with him and, before they parted had seemed to make it clear that all he really wanted from her was co-operation in his attempt to get Diana completely well again.

But now she knew that it wasn’t because of Diana that he had carried her off to tea with him that afternoon, and the knowledge made her heart glow and expand suddenly.

And then she asked herself whether that odd, compelling attraction Guy had had for her from the beginning might have been dispelled altogether, before it had a chance to become so compelling that she couldn’t resist it, if only Adrian had never even mentioned Diana during that peaceful little teatime that would always now be one of her most cherished memories.

She didn’t know, but she did know that sometimes the very thought of Adrian caused her a kind of aching grief, because but for her he wouldn’t now be planning to leave England and take up something that, looked at from the worldly point of view, and the point of view of success, was a retrograde step—something he might regret later on.

Then the thought of Guy tore at her sometimes, for there was no doubt about it she
had
been quite violently drawn towards him in the beginning, and even now the very thought of hurting him—deliberately hurting him by saying quite definitely that she couldn’t marry him—was something she found impossible to do.

Adrian was capable of taking things, and of rising above them; but Guy was an inexplicable force—someone so difficult to understand that she dared not, somehow, do anything which might lead to some reaction which would burden her conscience for life
...

She was turning away from the rail, the sudden realization that it really was very cold deciding her to go below to her cabin, when the soft sound of a footstep behind her caused her to spin round more rapidly, and for a few moments she could only think that something had become temporarily wrong with her vision, or that her recent thoughts had been so vivid that one of the characters about whom she had been thinking had been conjured up in front of her.

“Guy!” she exclaimed.

He looked so casual, and faintly careless and self-satisfied, as if he had just come up for a breath of salt-laden air on the boat deck after dinner in the main dining-saloon, and was prepared to enjoy a cigarette in the company of a fellow passenger before turning in for the night. He had just finished lighting the cigarette when she uttered his name, and he flung the match away over the rail, and then leaned against it and looked at her with the merest suspicion of a smile in his eyes.

“Well,” he said, “don’t look so surprised! I am flesh and blood! And you didn’t honestly think I’d let you go off to Rhodesia without me, did you?”

“But—” She opened her mouth to say something more, but the words would not come. He put a hand to the collar of her coat and lifted it higher about her slender throat.

“It’s cold up here,” he told her. “You mustn’t catch a chill. Let’s go down to your cabin and talk in comfort.”

“No.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, darling!” He smiled at her gently. “I am the man you’re going to marry, and you’re not a Victorian miss whose chaperone has got mislaid. Besides, Diana’s next door to you, isn’t she? And you can always shout for her if you feel there’s any danger!” He laid a hand on her wrist. “Come along, sweetheart.”

“No. No,” she repeated, freeing her wrist and backing away from him a little. “Not until you’ve given me an explanation of how and why you’re here.”

“I’ve already told you why I’m here—because I wouldn’t let you go off to Rhodesia without me! Diana knew I had no intention of just calmly saying good-bye to you for a couple of months, and she at least won’t be at all surprised to see me. As to how I’m here, well, that’s quite simple, too. I merely booked at the same time as Diana, in order to be sure that I wouldn’t have to travel out in a different boat—or fly out, if that had become necessary!—and when you thought I went up to Scotland I simply went to London to await the sailing date. All that, as you must see, was really simple.”

“It would have been simpler to have said that you wished to come with us, and then there would have been no necessity for you to invent a trip to Scotland.”

“I agree it would have been pleasanter from my point of view,” he answered, studying her over the glowing tip of his cigarette. “As it is, I’ve had to do without you for more than a week, and I’ve felt a little uneasy in case you really thought I was taking such a casual farewell of you.”

“It never occurred to me that you could—could behave in such an extraordinary fashion!” she told him.

“Didn’t it?” He flung the cigarette over the rail, and she almost winced as she thought of it coming into contact with the cold sea, and that tiny warm spark being extinguished by the dark waste. “But I had an idea you were not altogether averse to leaving me behind for a few weeks—perhaps to get our relationship into clearer perspective in your own mind!—and I was not at all sure that if I suggested accompanying you you would have thought it a good plan, particularly as it has occurred to me that we could get married in Rhodesia! No fuss, no relatives—only the consent of your parents, which I already have, and then we could begin a honeymoon which will go on for the rest of our lives!”

He moved purposefully nearer to her, and she saw his hands come out to grasp both of hers this time, and with the feeling all at once that she was an animal who had been deliberately trapped she strove to retreat still farther from him, but was stopped by the rail.

“Guy, I simply don’t understand you!” she told him, still striving to hold him off.

“Never mind, my precious, I understand you!” he answered, and she thought he laughed a little hollowly. “With someone like Adrian Shane Willoughby cropping up every time you need him—even in the early hours of the morning—to put together the pieces which might have been all that was left of you in a car crash!—I have to be a little careful in my thinking and planning! No man but me, my sweet,” his arms imprisoning her so that they actually hurt her, “is going to possess you, and you might as well get that fact well into your little head! Even if you asked me to release you from our engagement I wouldn’t—you’ll never be free of me, so you might as well marry me at once. We could even be married on board!”

“I wouldn’t think of it. What would my parents say—?”

“Does it matter?”

“Your own mother?”

“Nobody matters, except us! You and I
...
!
We’re the only two who really do matter!”

“I think your views are impossibly selfish,” she managed to say stiffly, while she sought to avoid his determined lips. “You think of no one but yourself, and I don’t think you ever have
...
!
All your life you must have been obsessed with yourself, and what
you
wanted to
do!
I don’t think it even matters to you at all what I want to do
...
!
”

“Oh, yes, it does, darling,” he assured her, and she felt his lips close hungrily over hers. As soon as he could speak he continued. “And until a few weeks ago you did love me quite a lot—you even admitted to loving me! But now, all at once, you’ve changed, and because of that I’ve got to make sure of you. I am going to make sure of you, Linnet, because you’re the one thing I really want in life, and without you I don’t honestly believe that I could contemplate living with any equanimity. In fact I don’t believe I could contemplate living at all!”

He stared over her head at the dark sea, and she felt his arms straining her up against him.

“Linnet, my sweet, you’re in my blood, you’re as essential to me as the air I breathe,
and without you I would not go on living
...!”
The last words were uttered with a curious kind of finality; and then with one of his somewhat amazing changes he put her from him and looked at her almost gently.