The Other Linding Girl (6 page)

“I’m not proposing to rat on anyone!” The other man took a quick step backwards, evidently not finding Nigel Seton’s expression reassuring. “I’m glad enough to be out of it, for the time being—”

“For keeps.” Nigel Seton’s tone was almost gentle, but oddly dangerous. “If you must go fooling around with someone, choose someone your own age, who is unattached. But for now—just get home and to bed, and don’t run across me for the next few weeks, if you can help it.”

“But I—I want to know how Hester is.” Keith Elman made an obvious effort to assert what he seemed to think were his rights.

“I don’t know how Hester is,” was the grim retort.

“But can’t I wait and find out?”

“No.”

“It’s what an interested friend would do—if that’s the role you want to cast me for.”

“He might also go home when he could no longer be of use. You’re going home, young man—and
now.
I'm not risking your cracking up, once my brother-in-law starts asking more questions.”

“O-oh.” The force of that argument obviously had its weight. “Then—all right, I’ll go. But I must know later. I must know how she is!”

“There’ll be something in the papers, I don’t doubt,” Nigel Seton said callously. “Look in the Stop Press tomorrow morning. And now—get moving.”

Keith Elman got moving.

The other man did not even turn to watch him go. He stood where he was, staring down moodily at the highly polished table, with its stack of periodicals. Then, as there was the distant sound of the front door closing, he gave an impatient sigh, turned at last—and saw Rachel “Hello—” He came slowly forward until he stood before her in the glow from the fire. “I didn’t realise you were there.”

“No? They put me in here to wait.”

“I see. Then—” he frowned slightly—“you heard what I said to young Elman?”

“Yes, of course. Should I have stopped you?”

“N-o. You had to be told some time, because we need your partial co-operation. Your overhearing that conversation saves further explanation.”

“But why are you doing it? Why take the responsibility for that worthless young man?”

“Because someone has to get Hester out of this mess,” was the curt reply. “And she’s my concern. It’s a—family affair, if you like.”

“My uncle will blame you bitterly,” Rachel protested.

“My shoulders are broad enough to take it.” He shrugged them slightly, as though testing their capacity to take burdens, and grinned unexpectedly.

“Aren’t you being impossibly quixotic?”

“No, of course not, I’m being severely practical,’ he declared. “Much the simplest explanation—other than the truth—is that
I
should have been driving
my
car.”

“Why? I mean why, in the middle of a ball, should you take your own sister for a drive?”

“She said she was bored—hot—had a headache—and wanted ten minutes of fresh air. Why shouldn’t her indulgent brother oblige her?”

“I don't know—’ Rachel frowned doubtfully. “It seems feeble somehow, altogether too simple.”

“No, no.” He laughed. “That’s the value of it. Simple, but impossible to disprove. That's what an explanation should always be. I learned that from a man who worked in Intelligence during the war. I remember his saying, “If you have to tell a lie, tell a simple one. People have died because they couldn’t resist adding artistic details to an otherwise dull but incontrovertible story.”

“O-oh,” Rachel found herself shivering slightly. And then, as though by an association of ideas, she asked, “Is she very badly hurt, Nigel?”

“I think so—yes.”

“Then you’re taking on a very heavy responsibility, surely? Suppose she—dies?”

“She won’t,” he replied, with cool confidence.

“How do you know? Have they told you—?”

“We Setons are indestructible,” he retorted, with a glance of such gay, laughing arrogance that she was suddenly reminded of his own position.

“You certainly don’t lack confidence,” she said, a trifle severely. “Is that what makes you take risks yourself?”

“Risks?”

“Oliver Mayforth told me what you really do.” And then she burst out, with a sudden indignation which surprised herself, “Why did you pretend to me that you were a ne’er-do-well? a sort of

aimless playboy?”

“Did I say that?” He looked amused.

“You implied it. You said you lived by your wits.”

“Oh—” He laughed. “It was an extension of meaning that I couldn’t quite resist when you looked so grave and severe. Do you mind?”

“No,” said Rachel hastily, though she did. “But you said it on the telephone too—that first time I spoke to you. I wasn’t looking grave and severe then, and you couldn’t have seen me, anyway.”

“That’s true.” He looked reflective. “I think that was more for your uncle’s benefit that time. He’d just been upbraiding me for a rootless, irresponsible young man. And then you—or your father—came on the phone, and presently he handed the conversation over to me and— oh, I suppose it was just a bit of private nonsense, Rachel. Though I don’t doubt,” he added wryly, “that your uncle would largely agree with the term as applied to me.”

“But why?” Rachel pressed. “If you’re really hardworking and—and heroic—”

“I’m not heroic, you silly child!” He looked almost annoyed. “I just do a job of work in my own way.”

“Oliver Mayforth said you took risks,” Rachel insisted obstinately.

“Don’t we all?” he replied lightly.

“He said you took more than most.” She refused to be put off.

“Does it matter?” He smiled down at her in the firelight. “For good or ill, the safe, conventional paths are not for me. That’s really what your uncle dislikes about me, I think. He regards me as gifted—in what I'm sure he would describe as an erratic and undirected way. He was very anxious for me to follow the orthodox paths of medicine, and was even willing to use his influence and his patronage, in his rather pompous way—”

“He’s not pompous,” interrupted Rachel loyally.

“Well, perhaps I’m prejudiced,” he said good-humouredly. “Anyway, I wasn’t prepared to be Sir Everard Linding’s well-trained stooge—”

“Did you tell him so—in so many words?” Rachel sounded shocked.

“It’s possible. I wasn’t a model of tact in my younger days,” he conceded amusedly. “Perhaps I didn’t choose my words well. Anyway, I went my own way, and without his blessing.”

“And have you—justified your decision?”

“He wouldn’t think so, Rachel.”

“But do
you
think so?” she pressed him.

“I don’t know, my dear. If one chooses a lone road, one never does know until the end is reached. If it proves to have led nowhere—then everyone can say, with great satisfaction, that it was a wild goose chase anyway. But if it leads to some entirely new discovery—” he paused and laughed softly—“ah, well, that’s a very different matter.”

“And meanwhile,” Rachel said slowly, “Uncle Everard thinks you’re wasting your time?”

“I’m afraid so.”

There were a few moments of silence, while Rachel digested what he had said and rearranged her views somewhat. Then she asked, almost diffidently,

“What is your line of research?”

“I don’t think you’d understand very well, even if I tried to explain,” he said, though not at all patronisingly. “It’s the kind of thing that most popular newspapers would probably lump together under the term ‘atomic treatment’, but that wouldn’t be a very accurate description. It is, however, something quite out of line with orthodox surgery—winch makes it even more improbable and unacceptable to your uncle.”

“And is it—dangerous, your work?”

“It can be, if you do the wrong thing.” He smiled.

She would have liked to ask more. But at that moment there was an interruption, which switched them back so completely to the crisis of the evening that Rachel was surprised to find that she could have been so completely absorbed in something else, even for so short a time. The door opened, and Sir Everaid himself came into the room.

“Uncle!” Rachel jumped up and ran to him, everything else forgotten at the sight of his pale, drawn, but admirably calm face.

“Rachel, my dear—” He seemed surprised to her there. “You should be at home, in bed. I’m afraid I had forgotten all about you.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter! And I’m all right,” Rachel assured him, touched by his concern for her in the midst of his own troubles. “Come and sit down.” She took him affectionately by the arm and urged him towards the chair by the fire which she had just vacated.

It was a measure of his distress, however well controlled, that he let her put him into it

“Please tell me—” fearful though she was, Rachel had to put the question—“how is Hester?”

“Shell be all right, I think” Sir Everard passed his hand over his face and, for the first time, it occurred to Rachel that he was, like her father, an elderly man.

“Oliver had the sense to get hold of Ventris immediately, and he operated right away. Thank heaven
someone
was there to act with responsibility.” He did not look at Nigel as he said that, but Rachel heard the slight tremor of anger in his voice and knew who must be the object of that barely controlled indignation. It distressed her more than she would have believed possible, and only by biting her lip hard could she restrain her eager defence. Instead, she said gently,

“Uncle, can’t you come home now and rest?”

‘No, no, my dear. I am staying here for what’s left of the night.”

“Oh—? Then you won’t be operating tomorrow?”

“Of course I shall be operating tomorrow—or rather, later this morning,” he retorted irritably. “Matron is giving me a room here, so that I can rest and be fit. But I couldn’t be anywhere else while Hester is still so ill.”

He made the statement so simply that there was no arguing with it, and Rachel felt her heart go out to him for his devotion. Her sympathies were sorely tried the next moment, however, when he turned to Nigel and said curtly,

“Can I trust you to take Rachel home safely?”

“Yes, certainly,” replied Nigel, with exemplary self-control. “It will have to be by taxi in any case, you know.”

Even this oblique reference to his damaged car seemed to make Nigel still farther an object of wrath. Sir Everard looked at him with positive dislike.

“Well, take care of her,” he growled, “I’m sorry your first evening ended so badly, my dear.”

“Oh, Uncle, as though that mattered!” Rachel leaned, forward and kissed his worn handsome cheek with real affection. “Don’t worry about me. I’m the least of your cares at the moment.”

He smiled faintly at that, returned her kiss and said, “You are a great comfort, child.”

Then, as though aware that this was a good exit line, he took his departure, without glancing at his brother-in-law.

“Shall we go?”asked Nigel. “I expect there’ll be a taxi on the all-night rank.”

“Is it near enough to walk?”

“Oh, yes. Only five or six minutes, if you prefer that” Rachel said she did prefer that, and they went out of the Nursing Home, into the silent, moonlit street, where the tall houses threw long shadows, and a cat, slipping silently between area railings, was the only sign of life. She must have been more

tired than she knew, for she stumbled slightly once, and he took her arm in a firm, warm clasp and said, ‘You should have let me call a cab.”

Rachel shook her head, started to say something, and then found that the reaction from her evening had suddenly become so overwhelming that she was humiliatingly near tears.

“What’s the matter, Rachel?” He was quick to sense her distress. But she merely shook her head again, without attempting to reply.

He did not press her, and very soon they came to her uncle’s house, where he opened the front door with his key, and stood aside for her to go in. ‘You’ll find you can put out the hall light from the upper landing,” he told her. “Good-night, Rachel.”

“B-but aren’t you coming in?” She turned to him quickly, in inexplicable dismay.

“No.”

“Where are you going, then? Back to the Nursing Home?”

“No. I’m going to my own place.”

“But I thought you were staying here for the night?”

“Yes, I was. But your uncle has decided that he doesn’t want me to come into his house any more.”

“He—’’ She put the back ofher hand against her mouth and stared at him in horror. “Did he say—that?”

‘Yes.” His tone suggested that they should keep the conversation on an unemotional level, but it had the opposite affect on Rachel.

“Oh, how unfair! How—Oh, I can’t have things happen like that. This is too much!” And suddenly all the distress and strain of the evening combined to defeat her last shred of self-control, and she began to cry, standing there on the doorstep.

“My dear girl!”

“It’s a shame,” sobbed Rachel, divided between horror at her own absurd behaviour and indescribable dismay at the injustice of everything. “You hadn't a thing to do with it, really. It was that stupid little rotter, Keith Elman, and—and—”