A Nightingale in the Sycamore

by Jane Beaufort

  But every morning, when she hung out of her window and inhaled the scents from her herb garden, and smelled the damp fragrance of the river, Virginia wondered whether being sensible would really solve all her problems. Midge, for instance... Who would look after him while she was tapping a typewriter in an office? And would Midge continue to be the small, brown, sturdy bundle of live-wire he was now if he lived in a flat in a town? What would he do with himself when he wasn’t at school, and what would she do with herself when she had no garden to walk in in the cool of the evenings, and no river to sit by in the heat of the day? No interest in life!...

  To be worth living life must offer some sort of interest, otherwise it becomes a sort of death-in-life. It ceases to be even worth living.

  Virginia sighed, as she always sighed at this hoar, when her thoughts took the turn which never provided her with a satisfactory answer to problems which could not be ignored. Ah, well, perhaps Mr. Cummings was right! ... And she went on her way to the bathroom.

  To her surprise, as she passed the door of the room wherein the unknown invalid lay, Iris came out, her finger to her lips.

  “He’s still asleep!” she said, and although it was very early in the morning she looked as fresh as a daisy.

  CHAPTER THREE

  There was no doubt about it, Iris was the beauty of the family. She had a delicate egg-shell-china loveliness that was deceptive, because she was as strong as a mountain pony. She was as slender as a willow-wand, with all the girlish curves she ought to have, and large eyes so extraordinarily, translucently blue that after gazing into them for a short while strangers were affected by a sensation like swimming about in blue water.

  Her hair was her most striking feature, and" she wore it in a pale cloud to her shoulders, sometimes caught back with a ribbon the same colour as her eyes, or very occasionally the colour of her dress. This morning, being clad in pale pink linen, freshly washed and ironed, she had her hair tied up with a ribbon a somewhat deeper pink than her dress, and Virginia realised, looking at her with interest, that this was a concession to the role she had taken on temporarily as nurse. She imagined it heightened her appearance of efficiency, because nurses never wore their hair floating about their shoulders.

  “Don’t make a noise,” she cautioned her elder sister. “We mustn’t have him disturbed,” looking back anxiously towards the bed.

  “My dear child,” Virginia replied, looking faintly surprised, for it was unlike Iris to take any pleasure in being out of her bed at this hour, and usually she flapped around in a dressing-gown until she smelled the bacon cooking, “I’m not in the least likely to make a noise. I sat with your unknown hero until you took over at four this morning, and that was quite a number of hours. And I don’t think I did anything to make him restless in that time.”

  “Well, I’m not saying you did,” Iris half apologised, in an even more elaborate whisper. “But he’s sleeping so peacefully it would be a pity to wake him.”

  “I quite agree,” Virginia replied, and she, too, turned to look at the bed.

  Iris’s expression grew almost awed.

  “He’s so good-looking, isn’t he?” she breathed. “It’s funny to think we don’t know who he is. He could be a film star, of course, but his face isn’t familiar. But his pyjamas and things are all most frightfully expensive.” Virginia had had the utmost difficulty in getting her sister out of the room while she and her faithful daily, Mrs. Banks, had somehow got the victim of the accident between the sheets, but even so Iris’s eyes had popped at the sight of heavy silk underwear, and the contents of a suitcase that was definitely pigskin. “His hands fascinate me,” she declared, venturing to touch one very lightly where it hung over the side of the bed. “They look as if he’s never done a stroke of work in his whole life.”

  “Well, that’s hardly a worthwhile commendation,” Virginia commented. But even so she was inclined to agree with her sister that this unknown who was occupying her tiny best guest-room, with its chintz and its few really good pieces of period furniture, had a very striking pair of hands. Not only were they long and sensitive and beautifully formed, but they looked as if their owner made a kind of habit of caring for them; and yet at the same time they were quite masculine hands, attached to virile wrists.

  Once, when he had been rather restless during the night, he had flung out a hand and caught hold of her arm, and his grip had almost hurt her. It had been difficult to detach without disturbing him.

  “He seems to be sleeping very peacefully,” she said. “So, if you like, you can slip down to the kitchen and put the kettle on. If he wakes up suddenly he may fancy a cup of tea.”

  But Iris looked doubtful.

  “I don’t think he ought to be left.”

  “Don’t you? Well, I think it’s perfectly safe.” Virginia could not refrain from smiling a little inwardly. Poor Iris! She was apparently very impressionable, and this was the first time she had come into such close contact with a member of the opposite sex who undoubtedly had much to commend him in the way of looks, even if he was still only semi-conscious. But it was to be hoped she was not going to prove too impressionable. Nineteen was certainly an impressionable age. “Dr. Cameron is sending a nurse to-day, so there’ll be no need for you to miss your classes and stay at home. And while you’re downstairs you might give Bartholomew some milk. I heard him knock down something in the larder a short while ago, trying to help himself.”

  Iris departed, muttering something about the larder window needing a catch on it, and 'Offering it as her opinion that that was one of the things that ought to be done!

  Virginia smiled, watching her depart, and then went on her way to the bathroom, where she sang a little in her bath—although very softly this morning—because it was her custom. After which she dressed herself in her old print frock and went downstairs to supervise things in the kitchen.

  Iris had put the kettle on, but had escaped without giving Bartholomew his milk, and Virginia said a few words to him when he rubbed round her legs, his tail like a brush in the air, and rewarded his depredations in the larder with part of a large cod’s head. After which she reached for the frying-pan, and was breaking eggs into it when Midge made his first appearance of the day.

  Midge looked unnaturally solemn—an expression he had worn since the day before—and tip-toed across the floor to her as if terrified of making the least sound.

  “How is he?” he inquired, his voice a little hoarse. “Will he—is he still alive?”

  “Yes, darling, he’s still alive, and sleeping very nicely at the moment,” his aunt answered him quite cheerfully, turning him round to examine the backs of his ears, and then making a close inspection of the backs of his hands. “You have skimped things this morning, haven’t you, Midge?” she said reproachfully. “Wasn’t there any soap in the bathroom?”

  Midge hastily hid his hands behind his back, and excused himself on the grounds of being in a hurry.

  “I wanted to know how things were,” he explained. “And, by the way, Auntie Jinny, that car that got smashed up—his car!—it must have been absolutely super before he turned it upside-down like that.” Midge had only recently started to make use of the word “super,” and even so he did not apply it unless he believed it was completely justified. “I saw it in the garage yesterday afternoon, and it’s all black and shiny, with bits on it like silver. But he has made a mess of it—an awful mess,” regretfully.

  “Well, that’s not so surprising, as apparently he was travelling at over eighty miles an hour, and on a road which does nothing but wind an accident was more or less inevitable, or so I should say,” his aunt offered it as her opinion.

  “That noise I heard—a noise like an explosion—must have been caused by him hitting the bank,” Midge said, picking up Bartholomew and interfering with his washing arrangements by squeezing him up against his coat. “Auntie Jinny, do you think if I hadn’t gone along the road when I did, and found him—like I did—he—he would have
died...?”

  “I shouldn’t think so, Midge,” Virginia replied quietly, and turned the morbid trend of his thoughts by placing a plate of bacon and eggs in front of him on the dining-room table. “There, get on with that,” she advised, “and don’t take too long over it, or you’ll be late for school.”

  “I thought,” Midge confessed, looking up at her with large, appealing eyes, which she avoided, “that if you’re going to be very busy again to-day—looking after this gentleman, and—and cooking dinner, and—and other things, perhaps I might stay at home from school and help you? There’s a lot of things I could do—”

  “No, thank you, darling,” Virginia cut him short, very firmly. “I shall manage perfectly well without your assistance.”

  Whereupon Midge sighed—for he was not particularly fond of school.

  After breakfast the doctor looked in and collected a report from Virginia.

  “We’ve managed to find out the name of your young man,” he said. “It hasn’t been easy, because the license disc on the front of his car was practically obliterated, and there was little apart from it to guide us. But his initials are C.D.W.—which you know already, because they were inside the pyjamas and so forth in his suitcase. But we now know that the initials stand for Charles Digby Wickham, and the car was practically new, and he’d been driving it on the Continent recently. In fact, he’d only just returned to England.”

  Virginia looked thoughtful.

  “Charles Wickham?” she said. “I know that name.”

  “So do I,” Dr. Cameron replied immediately, “and so does quite a large proportion of the public in these islands, and in various other portions of the civilised globe as well. Charles Wickham, the pianist and composer, and, incidentally, the son of Lady Charles Wickham, of Hans Mews, Chelsea. The police have been in touch with her, and you’ll probably receive a telephone call or a visit from her soon. There may be other people who’ll ring you up, too. As a matter of fact, I rather suspected he was a musician when I saw his hands.”

  “Iris fell in love with his hands,” Virginia told him. “Or, at least, she thought they were rather striking.”

  “Iris!” Dr. Cameron scoffed. He was a bachelor, nearing forty, with a hint of red in his hair, and he had no use at all for glamorous young women who studied art while their fees were paid with difficulty by an elder sister who denied herself every small luxury to do so. Quite apart from which Colin Cameron thought Virginia, with her much more subdued type of beauty that was rather like studying a picture through gauze, and seeing it rendered less striking, but in some ways infinitely more appealing, a young woman to be admired in every way. And he was only waiting for some slight sign from her that the notion of sharing his large and inconvenient house on the outskirts of the village was sufficiently attractive to make it possible for her to view with equanimity the prospect of giving up her precious Meadow House, to let her know about his admiration. “Iris is film-struck, and I wouldn’t trust her judgment too far. But what I would like to know is why Charles Wickham was driving his car at such speed on that dangerous, curving bit of road. Either he was in a tremendous hurry, or he wasn’t particularly caring what happened to him. He hasn’t talked much yet, I suppose?”

  “Only a few scraps of nonsense. He certainly hasn’t told me who he is.”

  “He’s probably not quite sure himself. He’s suffering from concussion, and a fracture or two—but he’s lucky he wasn’t killed outright!”

  “He’s quite a good patient,” Virginia remarked. “That is to say, he sleeps most of the time, and takes his nourishment meekly.”

  “Even so, I’m sorry you’ve had to put up with the inconvenience of having him thrust on you. I’ll try and get him into the Cottage Hospital in a day or two, when he’s more fit to move, and if they can’t have him we’ll find a nursing-home. Judging by the size and make of his car he’s not in the least impecunious, and can afford to pay to be looked after.”

  “As to that,” Virginia said, “I look upon him as an unexpected guest, and I’m perfectly willing for him to remain where he is for as long as it’s necessary. I wouldn’t wish him to be moved if it might do him any harm. But a nurse to help with the actual nursing would make things easier.”

  “Oh, that’s settled,” Colin Cameron told her. “A nurse will take over night-duty from to-night, and you can tell Iris she can devote herself to her art again as quickly as she likes.”

  When he stood beside the patient’s bed he looked down at him for a few moments in silence, while Virginia remained out of sight near the door. Charles Wickham, as they now knew him to be called, was lying staring rather blankly out of the window, his face very white and haggard-looking with the dark stubble of beard clinging to his square, mutinous chin. His mouth, however, had a much more resigned—even patient—expression upon it; and as he sensed that someone was near him it flashed a hint of a white-toothed smile upwards at the face that bent over him.

  “So you’ve come back!...” he said. And then he scowled, the tawny eyes looking positively resentful. “Who are you?” he asked the doctor ungraciously. “And what do you want?”

  “Only to ask how you’re feeling?” Dr. Cameron replied, taking a seat beside the bed.

  “As if I’d been run over by a steam-roller,” his patient told him.

  “It wasn’t as bad as that.” Colin’s thin, controlled lips smiled dryly. “But it was bad enough—quite bad enough. Your car’s in a bit of a mess.”

  “My car?” Virginia, who had stolen forward a little but was still protected from view by the chintz of the bed curtain, could see the puzzled, bewildered expression that appeared in the eyes of the man who lay with his long-fingered hands lying limply outside the bed-clothes. He wore pyjamas of heavy, almost purplish silk, and possibly it was their colour that emphasised his pallor, and caused that strange, groping look in his eyes-—under their extraordinary eyelashes—to affect her as the sight of a child in' distress might have affected her. At any rate, she wanted badly to help him. “My—car?'”

  “Yes. A big black one, and a beauty! Can’t you remember it, Wickham?’”

  A sound, like an intake of breath, followed by a rather long-drawn-out sigh, escaped the lips of the invalid. He made a little movement of his head in the direction of the side of the bed where Virginia was standing, but as recollection flocked over him he did not even see her.

  “Ah!” he said. “Ah...” he exclaimed again, a wry look appearing on his lips. “So I smashed it up, did I? I seem to remember...”

  The doctor put his fingers on his pulse, and kept them there for a minute or so.

  “I wouldn’t try to remember too much just yet if I were you,” he advised.

  But Charles Wickham was plainly remembering a good deal, and for a few seconds he closed his eyes and turned his face to the wall as if preferring to be left alone with his thoughts, disturbing and confusing as they probably were. And then he opened his eyes as abruptly as if they had been jerked open by some Hidden mechanism and said sharply:

  “You called me Wickham! ... That’s my name, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” quite soothingly from Colin, “you’re Charles Wickham—Charles Digby Wickham, if that conveys anything more to you?”

  For answer the patient began to make an attempt to sit up in bed, and he started feverishly to throw off the clothes.

  “Then why are you keeping me here? Don’t you realise that I’ve got to be in London!...” He groaned, and lay back again on the pillows as the movement caused a violent pain to jerk through his head, and his weakness was so great that it brought actual tears of frustration to his suddenly feverishly glistening golden eyes. “You must know that I can’t just lie here like this! ... There are people I’ve got to see—one in particular! That’s why I crashed my car...”

  Virginia moved forward into his line of vision with something soothing in a glass, and as she bent over him and offered it to him the expression on his face relaxed, and all the sudden excitem
ent died out of his eyes. Instead they smiled at her, wanly and apologetically.

  “I couldn’t think what had become of you,” he confessed. “You haven’t been to see me for so long. Why?”

  “My sister has been sitting with you,” she told him gently.

  “The yellow-haired young woman?” he inquired. “But I don’t find her at all soothing, and she’s far too ornamental. Ornamental young women don’t make good nurses.”

  “Don’t they?” She smiled, realising that he intended her no disparagement, and a little amused because Iris would have been so hurt if she had heard him. Iris who imagined her presence beside his bed was helping so much towards his recovery! “But I’m very busy, you know. I have other things to do besides look after you.”

  “Of course Miss Summers has a great many other things to do,” Dr. Cameron said a little curtly. “And if necessary we may have to get you into a nursing-home.”

  “Then I shall refuse to go,” the patient declared, quite coolly, still gazing upwards at Virginia, and confusing her a little with the strange brilliance of his sherry-coloured eyes. He had apparently forgotten all about his urgent desire to get to London, and the reason why he had risked life and limb and an expensive new car on a highly unsuitable strip of highway. He lay quite calmly on his lace-edged, lavender-scented pillows. “I’m far too comfortable where I am and this is the most delightful bedroom I’ve ever occupied. There’s an apple tree outside the window, and the stars get caught up in it at night.” A puckish smile stole across his bps. “And there’s a grandfather-clock downstairs in the hall which ticks solemnly. I like lying listening to it.”