Nurse Lang (11 page)

“I’ve applied for a room in the Nurses’ Home,” Moira confessed, “but there won’t be a vacancy for another couple of weeks, so it may be too much for Serena—or me!” she added with a rueful smile.

“When you’ve had enough,” Elizabeth suggested almost casually, “you can move in here. There’s a bed in the box-room I can make up for you and we can soon make it habitable.”

The offer was evidently meant to be accepted in the spirit in which it was made, without fuss and without undue sentiment, but Moira tried to thank Elizabeth, all the same.

“You seem to be my safety-valve,” she smiled. “Coming here is like reaching some calm haven. It’s all so restful and—secure.”

She knew that this was what Grant felt about Elizabeth, and when he came in ten minutes later he looked as if he would very much like to stay. The marks of strain were still visible on his face, round the eyes and about his closely-set lips, but he told them that Philip was comfortable.

“Sir Archibald has gone back to London.”

Long afterwards, Moira remembered thinking of that as an encouraging sign, but she did not press Grant for further information about Philip because he looked so tired.

“You can see Phil in the morning,” he said as they drove back to the Priory. “There wouldn’t be any point in going back to the hospital now. He’s had something to make him sleep. I’ll go over and take a look at him during the night.”

“I wish I could have done something more to help,” she said impulsively. “I don’t seem to be doing so very much.”

“You did what was necessary beforehand.” He had spoken with his eyes fixed straight ahead and his hands tightened momentarily over the steering wheel as he continued: “Philip will no doubt ask more of you in the future.”

Moira’s heart turned over in an instant of sheer panic. She had nothing more to give to Philip, but how could she possibly tell Grant so at this stage? He felt that his brother needed her, that their engagement, which was no real engagement, should go on. He believed in her integrity, and knowing Philip, she could not refuse to do as he asked.

“How long will Philip be in hospital?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.” He turned the car in between the Priory gates and drove swiftly across the park. “That may be another point to consider. He is sure to want you back here as soon as he can be moved over.” Her heart contracted at something in his tone, a new coldness, a remoteness icy in its intensity, the steel of some sudden resolve which shut her out as clearly as if he had told her that intimacy or understanding would be impossible between them.

She wondered desperately if Serena had been right, after all, if the thought of another woman in his home was unbearable to him after Kerry. The memory of his voice as he had denounced Serena that first day for opening up Kerry’s room to a stranger still had the power to hurt, and she felt bewildered by the thought of Kerry and conscious of that subtle reminder of the other girl as soon as they entered the house.

“Serena will have gone to bed,” Grant said, glancing at the clock in the hall. “I’ll ring for a tray and have it sent into the library.” Suddenly Moira could not bear the thought of sharing this intimate meal with him, of coming home like this at the ending of a heavy day’s work at the hospital to the comfort of a room that was essentially his and knowing that she would never share it in the fullest sense of the word. It was too much for him to ask of her. The day had been too full of emotional upset as it was.

“I—had something to eat with Elizabeth,” she said unsteadily. “It will do till the morning.”

He looked too tired to protest, defeated almost, as he stood at the foot of the dimly-lit staircase and watched her go up, and Moira mounted the stairs as if each movement was painful to her and her limbs were weighted with lead.

CHAPTER TEN

“Your boy friend over on surgical private has sent you a note!” Flippant, yet agog at the first suspicion of romance, the small, applecheeked probationer thrust a thick blue envelope into Moira’s hands three days later as she was preparing to go off duty.

“Dear Moira,” she read.

“I didn’t see you at all yesterday, since I was apparently asleep when you came in. Why didn’t you wake me up? I have all day and all night to sleep. If they were Grant’s orders, you have my authority to disregard them!” Always that small, bitter thrust at Grant’s authority, Moira thought. “The point of all this is,” she read on, “that I want you to be sure to come this afternoon. You said you might have an hour or two-off duty and, anyway, why not take it? I want to see you. It is most important.

PHILIP.”

No endearments, just a straightforward demand typical of the Philip she had come to know, but there was a buoyancy about the phrasing which set her pulses hammering as she folded the page back into its envelope.

“Do you want me to take an answer to Mr. Melmore?” the probationer asked hopefully.

“No—no, I’ll be going over myself shortly.”

She was acknowledging Philip’s demand, but it was almost as if she were obeying Grant as she caught up her red-lined cloak and made her way to the surgical wing.

It was the normal visiting hour and Serena was seated at Philip’s bedside. It was the first time she had been permitted to visit her cousin since his operation and Moira knew that she resented the fact.

“Are you off duty, Nurse?” she asked coldly. “Or does Grant make exceptions of the hospital staff?”

“Considering Moira and I are engaged,” Philip pointed out, “she was naturally first to come along. It can’t matter all that much, Serena. You’ll be sick of the sight of me lying here before I’m on my feet again, apparently!”

He was all impatience, and Moira drew in a quivering breath as Serena rose to go.

He lay staring up at the ceiling for a moment or two, as if he were turning some preconceived plan over in his mind, and then he turned to her and said:

“I’ve asked Grant to buy you an engagement ring.”

“Oh—no!”

The swift protest had left her lips before she could stay it, and he asked, surprised:

“Why not? It doesn’t look as if I’m going to be able to get to town for some time to come, and Grant offered to get me anything I needed.”

“But—this is different.” She tried to keep her voice calm, but in spite of her efforts it rose on a thin note of urgency. “This isn’t like buying anything in the ordinary way.”

How could she possibly convince him when what she really meant was that she could not bear Grant to buy that ring, choosing it cold-bloodedly as another chore thrust upon him by his brother’s inability to do things for himself.

It was a week before Grant went to London and he did not mention the purchase of the ring to her until then.

“Have you time off?” he asked one morning at breakfast when she went down early to find him still seated at the table in the morning-room window. “I’m going up to Wimpole Street for a consultation and Philip has asked me to buy you an engagement ring.”

Moira knew that she should have been prepared for this, but she had allowed her emotions to govern her thoughts and had no calm answer ready to give him. When she remained silent he looked across the table at her, smiling whimsically.

“Does it embarrass you so much?” he asked. “I thought you would have taken that in your stride, considering that it means so much to Philip.”

If there had been faint cynicism behind the remark she was in no mood to grapple with it.

“It’s not—the sort of thing one generally expects someone else to do,” she informed him in a choked undertone. “I—would rather wait.”

“Which would disappoint your fiancé.” He gave her a long, searching look. “Philip appears to be particularly adamant about this, as if he almost expected you to change your mind, and I always thought the fair sex were prone to the outward show of an engagement. What shall it be? Diamonds or emeralds?”

“Whatever you wish.”

He raised dark, surprised brows.

“My dear girl,” he said smoothly, “my wishes have absolutely nothing to do with this. I’ll have the family jeweller send a few brave specimens down for you to choose from,” he said when he turned at the door. “If they don’t happen to fit that can be remedied, of course. The stone is the important thing, I suppose.”

He had gone before she could answer him, and she did not see him again that day.

She had, however, made up her mind to leave the Priory, and to this end she walked briskly through the town and up Sadler’s Hill to Elizabeth’s flat, only to find it deserted.

In the morning she learned that Grant had spent the night at the hospital.

“There were two emergency operations,” the maid told her when she went down to breakfast, “and Mr. Grant did not come in. He left this for you.” She placed a bulky package at Moira’s elbow. “He said he might not see you before he went to London again.”

The parcel was unaddressed, but it had been wrapped up with scrupulous care, and she fumbled at the tape with shaking fingers, tearing away the top cover to reveal a second wrapping of corrugated paper sealed with cerise wax.

Shaken and quivering on the verge of tears, she had to bite her teeth into her lower lip before she could control her voice sufficiently to refuse the maid’s solicitous offer of a second cup of coffee, and when the girl reluctantly left the room at last it was seconds before she undid the wrapping and sat looking down at half a dozen small ring boxes with a well-known jeweller’s monogram on the lids.

She clicked them open, one by one, revealing six exquisite rings that winked back at her mockingly in the early-morning light, all of them cold, pale diamonds in magnificent settings with the exception of the sixth and last. When she opened it she knew instinctively that it would have been Grant’s choice if this ring had meant anything personal to him. The big, square-cut emerald held fire and warmth and a depth which even the finest of the diamonds lacked, but she could not bring herself to put it on her finger.

The jewels remained a blur of light on the white cloth, presenting her with the inevitability of her engagement to Philip and Grant’s determination to carry it through to its logical conclusion. What did it matter which ring she chose? She could not look at one of them without feeling that it would remain an ever-present challenge to her hidden love for the man who had chosen them for her, and finally she gathered them all up into the paper parcel again and carried them with her across to the hospital.

All day she was conscious of them lying at the back of her locker, securely hidden away until she could take them to Philip, but she knew that she would have begged Grant to relieve her of the task if only she had met him.

She did not meet him, however, nor could she find Elizabeth, whom she might have asked for advice, and so she took the rings to Philip when she went off duty at six o’clock.

“I wondered when you were coming,” he said in greeting. “Grant mentioned that he had brought some rings down from London last night,” he added, eyeing the parcel under her arm with a lively grin. “He seems to have given you quite a choice.”

She spread the ring boxes out on the bed cover before him without a word, tilting them so that he could see them as he lay on his back.

“I think you should settle for the emerald,” he said when she finally produced it. “It’s the color of your eyes when you’re angry!”

“You’ve never seen me angry,” she said in a voice that was meant to be light. “And no eyes could be quite that deep, pure green.”

“Which seems to settle the choice of the ring!” he declared. “You like its depth and purity and it reminds me of your eyes! What could be a better reason for keeping it than that? I wonder, though, why Grant chose it?”

Moira felt too choked by emotion to answer him.

“I’ve told Grant that you will expect some sort of celebration on the day you wear it for the first time,” Philip ran on, “but it’s going to be rather awkward with me in here.”

“Need we worry about a party at all—till you come home, I mean?” Moira asked, feeling guilty at the overwhelming sense of relief which had swept through her when Philip had not insisted upon her wearing his ring then and there. “It would be a happier arrangement all round.”

He laughed at that.

“You still want to keep it a strictly family affair, I see,” he said. “Which reminds me that Grant always had a tremendous sense of family, too. I suppose that’s why he promised to look after me,” he mused. “My father always felt that I might do something reprehensible one day, but I’ve often wondered if it’s quite fair of older people who are dying to leave such a burden on younger shoulders. I might and I might not have got on quite well without Grant’s supervision, but it’s cost him a packet, one way and another, to keep that promise.”

“When one makes a promise,” Moira said huskily, “one is always prepared to keep it.”

“I suppose that’s logical enough,” he said, singling out the emerald and watching as she wrapped up the other rings. “Will you see that Grant gets these back safely?”

She nodded.

“I’ll be very careful.”

“Have you tried on the emerald?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“What’s the matter? Do you consider it unlucky or something, or is it just that you feel the bargain should be sealed with a lovers’ kiss beforehand?”

“Don’t—joke about it, Phil!”

“There’s no reason why we shouldn’t kiss, is there?”

“No.”

A kiss to seal a bargain! Why should she be thinking of another kiss, haunted by its memory, feeling a tropic wind on her cheeks and the touch of a man’s lips, strong and demanding, against her own?

“It’s a strange sort of engagement, I suppose,” Philip mused as she knelt down beside his bed, “but once I’m on my feet again I’ll make it all up to you, Moira.”

She had never heard that note in his voice before, a sort of brusque tenderness which reminded her agonizingly of Grant.

“Perhaps I should go now, Phil,” she said when he had kissed her for a second time. “You should be asleep.”

“When I get out of here,” he returned whimsically, “I shall have had enough sleep to last me for a lifetime!”

She had dinner in the hospital canteen and walked across the park to the Priory with the parcel of rings under her arm and the emerald in her handbag. She would take the rings to her own room till the morning, she decided as she let herself in, but before she had crossed the hall a door opened ahead of her and Grant stood in the shaft of light from the heavy chandelier in the library.

“Will you come in here a minute?” he asked. “I have something to say to you.”

“I see that you got the parcel I left for you this morning,” he observed in what was surely his normal voice, steely and impersonal and decisively to the point. “Have you found something in it to please you?”

She came round the end of the desk and put the parcel down among his books.

“The others are there,” she said huskily. “Philip chose the emerald.”

“Surely you were entitled to that decision,” he remarked. “I always understood that it was the feminine prerogative.”

“It is,” she said, “in the usual way. Don’t think I’m not grateful for all you have done, Grant,” she hurried on because she knew that he must have heard the quiver in her voice. “It is a lovely ring and I shall always—treasure it.”

“That seems natural ‘in the usual way’,” he mocked. “Did Philip put it on for you?”

His cynical curiosity bit deeply, but she felt too tired to retaliate. “No,” she said quietly. “He thought we might wait until we could have some sort of celebration later on.”

“Which makes you the proud possessor of an emerald you can’t wear,” he observed. “Too bad of Philip! Did he tell you that it was the color of your eyes?”

She drew back, hurt beyond endurance by the mockery in his voice and the memory of Philip’s laughing remarks.

“At least he was sincere!” she cried.

He looked up, and she imagined that there was a tiny flame of anger in his eyes, but his voice was level and cold when he answered her.

“And you think that I am not? Sincerity has many disguises, I believe, not all of them recognizable, or so it would seem. But no matter!” He turned back to the desk, locking the parcel of rings away in a drawer without opening it. “I shall take these back to London with me in the morning.”

Casually, almost, he opened another drawer from which he drew a long, flat case. It was made of dull blue morocco leather and fastened with a curious filigree clasp which he slid back with a swift movement of his strong fingers.

“There’s—something else,” he said, all the banter and mockery suddenly gone out of his voice. “My mother left these in my possession to be passed on at the appropriate moment. They are her pearls, and I believe they are rather fine.”

He opened the case to reveal a gleaming necklace of beautifully milky jewels lying on a bed of rich, dark velvet, but Moira had difficulty in seeing them for the sudden tears that blinded her.

“I couldn’t take them,” she said in a choked whisper. “They weren’t meant for me. Your mother must have intended you to give them to your wife, to the girl you would one day marry—”

When she could not finish the sentence he put the case down on the desk before her and turned to the fire, pushing a log into place with the toe of his shoe.

“They belong to you,” he said, “so why not accept them? I shall never marry.”

“It would only distress you to see me wearing the pearls,” she said heavily.

It was the first time she had made any direct reference to his unhappy love affair and it was several minutes before he lifted his head to answer her. He came slowly back to the desk and stood looking down at her before he spoke.

“I shall get used to that,” he said. “I want you to have them. They were in the nature of a sacred trust.”

Another promise! Moira felt her heart contract as he lifted the pearls from their velvet bed and undid the clasp, noticing almost subconsciously that its central stone was a small, clear emerald like the stone in Philip’s ring.

Grant held the necklace out, waiting to clasp it about her neck, and she turned within the circle of his arms so that he could fasten it securely at the back. For one blinding, irresistible second she let her thoughts go to the past, a high table-land above a palm-fringed coast and the kiss of a tropic wind against her cheek. If she reached up now she could touch his hands, grasp them with shaking fingers and draw them passionately toward her lips. All the agony of longing that had been stemmed in her for weeks flooded to the surface in that wild moment of utter madness and she could almost feel the strength of his arms about her, crushing her to him again, kissing her as he had kissed her once before with the scent of tropic flowers in their nostrils and the warmth of the tropic sun beating down upon their heads.

She knew that he must be aware of the trembling of her body as he fastened the clasp, but his hands were cool and steady as he finished his task. She stood quite still, unable to turn, unable to face him, and suddenly his hands came down heavily on her shoulders and he pressed them gently as he said:

“My mother was a very generous person, Moira. Her pearls can only bring you happiness.”

She could not thank him after that, she could only stand there with his priceless gift about her neck and pray that she might be worthy of it, as worthy as the woman who had first worn it.

She did not see Grant at all the following day, nor the day after, and she was kept too busy in the physiotherapy wing to spend more than an hour with Philip at the regulation visiting times.

When she showed him the pearls he looked surprised.

Moira could not tell him all that his brother had said, but she made the nearest compromise.

“He seemed to want me to have them. They were your mother’s.”