She wasn’t in the least a well-to-do young woman, but there were some things she couldn’t, and wouldn’t, do.
Charles was lying back in his chair, a faint smile on his lips, his eyes very dark. He looked—and a little rush of that mortifying sickness returned to swamp her with misery—rather white and tired, and as if he ought to have been in bed at least an hour ago. She wondered what had happened to the nurse, and why she hadn’t returned, and while she was wondering Charles spoke.
“I’m sorry about that, Virginia!”
Virginia made a purely mechanical gesture and removed her little hat from her soft brown curls. The curls were a little tumbled after her day’s outing, and she felt sure the tip of her nose was shiny, because she hadn’t stopped to powder it on the way down, but she didn’t greatly care. She didn’t greatly care about anything very much just then.
“So long as it never happens again you needn’t be,” she said. “If .it does happen again I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
“It won’t happen again.”
She turned away.
“Have you had any tea? I’m much later back than I expected to be. But I expect Iris looked after you...”
“Virginia!”
She turned round slowly and looked at him wearily. “I’d like to go and get into something cooler, if you don’t mind, and will excuse me. What’s happened to Nurse Howard, by the way? Isn’t she back?”
He uttered something highly uncomplimentary to Nurse Howard and said in effect that he didn’t care whether she ever returned since she had-not so far put in an appearance, and that he would survive much more happily if she never returned.
“Virginia,” he went oh, “give me a few moments and let me explain. I don’t like to see you looking like that—”
“How am I looking?” she inquired, trying to force all expression out of her face.
“As if you’ve been rather badly shocked! As if I’ve given you a shock.”
“I don’t think you have.” She regarded him reflectively. “I saw your mother this afternoon, and she explained to me that women pursue you madly wherever you go, and Iris of course has simply joined their number. Women, apparently, are a great cause of embarrassment to you, simply dying for you to make love to them at the drop of a handkerchief—in most cases not even waiting to drop a handkerchief!—and it’s unfortunate for you that you should come here and be ill and have another one fall for you. But you’ll very soon be convalescent now, and there won’t much longer be any need for you to stay here ”
“Virginia, you’re talking a lot of rubbish, and so far as Iris is concerned I had to kiss her because she expected it. She’s only a kid—”
“And do you usually kiss ‘kids’? Do you make exceptions in their case, not 'regarding them as so potentially dangerous as older women?”
“I—” His eyebrows lifted, and then he grinned a little. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. I suppose it is rather more dangerous to kiss an older woman.”
“She’d probably expect more than one kiss,” Virginia pointed out, with great dryness.
His eyes laughed at her suddenly, and mocked her at the same time.
“How do you know, Virginia?” he inquired, with so much wooing softness in his voice that she knew she had blundered badly, and felt the revealing colour rush to her cheeks. “You’re older than Iris, and you speak as if you’ve a certain amount of knowledge of what an older woman would expect. If, for instance, I’d kissed you, how would you have reacted?”
“I wouldn’t have given you the opportunity.”
“No?”
“No.” She managed to look at him very levelly. “And I don’t think it was a very—generous—return for hospitality to implant ideas in the head of an impressionable nineteen-year-old like my sister Iris. I honestly thought you were a little above that sort of thing. In a way I trusted you to-day. She was the only one I could leave with you, and—well, I trusted you!”
She saw a faint tinge of colour creep up slowly under his pale skin.
“I’m honestly sorry, Virginia! I’ve already promised you that it won’t occur again.”
“Then we’ll forget it, shall we?” Virginia said, more briskly. “And before I forget I’d better tell you that I saw Miss le Clair to-day. Apparently she has a key to your flat, and she arrived very soon after lunch—and, by the way, your manservant provided me with an excellent lunch. It was good of you to ask him to do so.”
“Not at all,” he replied, rather slowly. He was staring closely at her. “So you and Annette saw one another again to-day!”
“Yes. And she’s coming down here to see you as soon as she can manage it—she and a Mr. Martin Sutherland, who arrived with her at the flat.”
“So you met Martin Sutherland, too, did you?” Charles’s voice sounded more musing. “He’s a very wealthy impressario whom quite a lot of people find it worth while to cultivate. What did you think of him?”
“I thought he was exceptionally nice,” Virginia answered truthfully, but also with a little more enthusiasm in her voice than she could understand herself. “And he’s coming down to visit you, too.”
“Did he suggest it, or did you invite him?”
“Naturally I didn’t invite him. He asked me if he could do so.”
“And you said yes?”
“I said I’d be very pleased for him to do so.”
Charles frowned. He turned his face away and stared at the flower-banked fireplace.
“If that Howard woman isn’t likely to put in an appearance soon I’ll get myself to bed,” he muttered.
But at that moment Iris opened the door in an agitated manner and announced that Nurse Howard had just driven up in a taxi, and was full of apologies for being late. By a miscalculation she had missed her train.
Charles muttered something peevishly under his breath, and Virginia’s heart turned right over in her breast when she looked at him and saw how white and drawn he was.
“I’ll put a hot-water bottle in your bed at once,” she said, bending over him almost soothingly. “And if Nurse Howard hasn’t changed into uniform in a few minutes I’ll help you upstairs myself.”
His hand reached out for her, and he smiled at her wanly, gratefully.
“Oh, Virginia, you’re a—!” But what she was he didn’t say, and afterwards she tried to decide in her own mind what it was he thought she was. But just then, as his hand closed over hers and hung on to it tightly, she felt in a sense that it was a reward for anything she had ever done for him. All her anger against him had fled. She only wanted to help him upstairs to bed, and have him depend on her for just a little longer.
That night, when the house had settled down to its usual quiet, she went out into the garden and inhaled deep breaths of the cool night air. The moisture from the river had overlaid the heat, and it was deliciously, breathlessly cool at that late hour.
And it was late. The moon was struggling into view above the orchard wall, and it looked like a yellow lantern that had suffered a certain amount of damage and become lop-sided. From the sycamore thicket at least one nightingale was pouring forth its heart and soul to the night, and the liquid notes sent responsive shivers of appreciation along Virginia’s spine. She felt it would be very pleasant to stay out there all night and listen to the nightingale and commune with that knowing-looking battered remnant of a moon.
When she looked up at the house, with its silver-grey thatch, she could see Midge’s window under the eaves. But Midge, she knew, was fast asleep, and untroubled by temporal desires of any kind. A little way farther along was Iris’s window, but she could not be nearly so certain that Iris was asleep—and, in fact, she was more or less prepared to swear that Iris was not asleep. Iris had looked rather pale and subdued just before she went upstairs to bed, and her blue eyes had been heavily wistful. If Virginia hadn’t still been conscious of a kind of sick disgust every time she looked at her, and thought of the ease with which she yielded to temptat
ion, and the absence of any sort of pride apparently in her make-up, she would have felt sorry for her. For Iris was building about herself a wonderland that could not endure—it would vanish like a pricked bubble overnight when Charles Wickham took his departure.
Charles’s room was well beyond Iris’s, and on a corner of the house. His windows commanded both the orchard and the road beyond it, and Virginia’s attractive flower-garden in which she laboured so much.
Virginia was thinking, with a heart full of sighs, that she would have to leave all this loveliness of the night and go inside and seek her own bed, when a car came crawling along the lane and stopped outside the orchard gate. When she reached the gate Colin Cameron had slipped out from his driving-seat and was already pushing the gate open. She looked at him in surprise.
“This is a late hour for a call, Colin! You don’t normally come a-visiting when the moon is on the wane.”
“And you oughtn’t to be up at this late hour. You don’t get enough rest.” He slipped a hand inside her arm and started to lead her across the lawn in the direction of the house. The turf felt deliciously crisp and yielding beneath their feet, and it was sheer joy to be walking on it in such an enchanted night. “I had to pay a call on old Granny Adams in the village, and I thought I’d take the homeward road past your house in the faint hopes that you might—well, might be up.”
“And I am.”
“Which is excellent from my point of view, because I want to talk to you.”
“Oh!” Virginia looked at him sideways. “Shall we go inside, and I’ll get you a drink? Make you-some coffee, if you’d like it...? Or would you rather stay out here?”
“Stay out here.” He released her arm and looked up at the front of the house. “Charming old place, but you’ll have to get rid of it one day, Virginia. And that brings me part way to the thing I want to talk to you about. When is that chap Wickham going to remove himself?”
“But you’re still attending him as his doctor, and he isn’t fit to be moved.”
“He will be in a day or so—a week at the outside.
And he can get on with the business of convalescence in his own London flat, or' somewhere like that.”
“But London is terribly hot at this time of the year, and he’s doing very well here.”
He looked down at her closely, critically.
“Do you like having him here, Virginia?”
“Like?” She felt suddenly confused. “No, of course I don’t—at least, I don’t dislike having him, and I’d hate to think that he was—well, that he was forced out of here too soon.”
“He’s doing very nicely, thank you! And you said yourself that Iris had fallen for him.”
“Yes,” with a faint sigh. “I’m afraid she has.”
“Then that won’t do! You’ll have to get rid of him, if only for Iris’s sake! Don’t you recognise that he could be a danger to her?—a menace to her peace of mind if nothing else!”
Virginia looked at him rather curiously. He had never before betrayed the slightest desire to preserve Iris’s peace of mind for her.
“Iris is young, and she’s merely being silly.” She decided not to tell him about the little tableau that had awaited her when she returned from London. “She’ll get over it. All young girls have infatuations.”
“You’re only a young girl yourself, Virginia,” he reminded her. “Are you liable to sudden infatuations?” She looked suddenly a little wistful, but the fact that the moon had got itself blotted out by a wall of the house caused them to be standing in a pool of shadow, and he could not see her face very clearly.
“No, I don’t think so, Colin,” she admitted, at last. “I never have been addicted to infatuations.”
That was true.
“Then you’re not in any danger of falling for this Wickham fellow as Iris has done?”
“Don’t be silly!” she answered, rather shortly.
Colin tried hard to see her face through the gloom. “You do realise, I suppose,” he said, slowly, “that he’s not the marrying sort? He might lead Iris up the garden, but he would never dream of marrying her. I disliked very much his free and easy manner to you, Virginia, on the one or two occasions when I’ve been here to see him and you’ve been in the room at the same time. That’s why I absolutely insisted on the nurse. But the nurse will be going soon, and you must get rid of him.”
“I will,” Virginia promised, “as soon as he’s fit to be got rid of.”
Colin’s voice sounded suddenly hesitant.
“I know it’s late,” he said, “but the other thing I wanted to ask you—the thing I’m always wanting to ask you!—is whether you can’t make up your mind and marry me soon, Virginia? I hate to think of you here, working and slaving for no real purpose—in order, simply, to provide a roof for Midge and Iris! Iris ought to be doing something practical with her life, and getting a job—and Midge of course can live with us when we’re married. So won’t you marry me, Virginia?”
It wasn’t a very romantic proposal, but for an instant Virginia was strongly tempted to say yes. Colin would make a most dependable husband, the kind who never philandered, whose feet were always planted on the solid earth, and who would see that she was always looked after and cared for. He would make a reasonably kind and considerate husband, in return for having his house and himself looked after—and some children provided at reasonable intervals. Colin was fond of children—the children in the village all loved him—and for that reason he would also be good to Midge.
She sighed. If only she could say yes!
“Please, Virginia.” His voice was not quite like his normal voice, and he touched her arm pleadingly. “I love you very much!”
“Do you, Colin?” a little doubtfully, for it was difficult to imagine Colin in love. He was so practical.
“Of course I do! I’ve loved you for months—for the last two years, in fact! Ever since I bought the practice!” But if he had acted on impulse and suddenly caught her up into his arms she might have believed him. If he had only kissed her once she might have found out whether she could ever be in love with him, and whether she wanted to be in his arms. But, in spite of all the fragrant stillness and the magic, about them, the sleepy murmur of the river, the tireless voice of the nightingale growing every moment more impassioned, he merely repeated, “Please, Virginia! I want you for my wife. I’m sure we could be happy together.” The moon sailed clear of the wall of the house, and she could see his level eyes and his square jaw, and his thick hair with the hint of red in it, and a habit of standing slightly on end. With that suggestion of red in his hair Colin should be able to fall violently in love! But, was he, she wondered, with her?
“I’ll think about it, Colin,” she answered, suddenly feeling very tired and turning away. “And now, if you’ll forgive me, I really do think I’d like to go to bed. I’ve had rather a tiring day.”
On her way up to her own room she saw the light under Charles Wickham’s door. The nurse was sleeping at the end of the corridor now that it was no longer necessary for her to sit with him at nights, and she was probably wrapped in profound slumber. But the light indicated that he was not yet asleep, and it occurred to Virginia that he might be restless, or he might be wanting something.
She was fully prepared to go down and make him a hot drink if he needed it, or fetch him a cool drink if that was what he desired.
She softly pushed open his door, because if she tapped the whole house might be awakened, light taps carrying strangely in an old house. She saw at once that it was his bedside light that was on, and he was making a pretence at reading. It was quite clearly a pretence, because the book he held was upside down, and he was staring at the ceiling.
Virginia whispered softly:
“I saw your light, and I thought perhaps you couldn’t sleep. Would you like me to turn your pillows for you?”
He turned his head and looked at her slowly.
“No, thank you all the same, Ministering Angel!”
His eyes looked intent and dark and a little mocking. “How’s the courtship going?” he asked. “When are you and our local Doc going to get married?”
Virginia had reached the side of his bed, and she looked down at him curiously.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you were outside in the garden with him just now, weren’t you? I was watching from the window when his car drew up, and I saw the pair of you sauntering across the lawn. He was holding your arm.”
“Well?”
“Did he wait until you reached a suitable patch of shade and then crush you to his manly breast and ask you to name the day? Did he tell you what a wonderful doctor’s wife you’d make, and how unfailingly you’d take down telephone messages, and have cups of coffee waiting for him when he returned home after delivering other people’s babies? Particularly when he returned home in the early hours of the morning, and you’d been sitting up shivering and waiting for him! Because that’s what you would do, being Virginia!”
Virginia smiled at him almost gently.
“At least I’m glad to know you have a reasonably good opinion of me.”
“I have an excellent opinion of you, but I also think that if you agreed to marry that fellow you’ll be—Virginia, don’t!” He touched her hand, stroking the fingers lightly. “If you must marry, at least let it be someone who’ll appreciate you, and not take you for granted! But, better still, don’t marry at all!”
A Nightingale in the Sycamore Page 6
