Nurse Lang

by Jean S. MacLeod

  “Returning forever to his first love!” he said with an almost cynical inflection in his voice. “Sailormen still believe they might come upon him at any moment in his unending efforts to weather the Cape, but I should think he’d have had enough of the sea. She can be a cruel mistress, like most women.”

  She looked up, startled by something in his tone.

  “Which means that you despise my sex?” she challenged.

  “Not necessarily. I have lived too long in hospital wards to do that. Some are fickle, others are useful, intelligent and efficient.”

  “Intelligent and efficient—and so you find a use for them?” she suggested, struggling between anger and a desire to understand him. “Don’t tell me that you admire nurses for their cheerful, uncomplaining sacrifices. It would be too much!”

  “I wasn’t thinking about that,” he said, dismissing her barbed shaft as if he had scarcely noticed it. “I was being selfish enough to hope that I might ask for your help.”

  Taken completely by surprise, she gazed back at him, incredulity written large in her eyes.

  “In what way?” she asked. “If it has anything to do with your brother, I shall be only too glad to help.”

  He considered her offer carefully, turning to lean over the rail and gaze back at the curling wave flowing from the ship’s white hull. He watched it fan out, turn over and disappear in the churning wake before he spoke again.

  “Philip came out here to set up a charter business,” he said slowly. “He was crazy about flying. It was the dominating interest in his life, but I had hoped that England would hold him, until—something happened which made him decide to start afresh in Africa. There was scope, he believed, for new enterprise. It would be a new life. You see, he wanted rather desperately to be rid of the old one.” He seemed to have made the confession with difficulty, but she knew that he had been determined to make it so that she might understand his brother more easily. “It seemed a particularly cruel trick of fate that he should have crashed like this almost as soon as he landed,” he added. “Something went wrong with the plane when he was flying down from Jo’burg and he struck a spur of the Drakensbergs. It was the best part of two days before he was found.” Briefly, cryptically almost, he had recited his brother’s story, and Moira was left to wonder what had gone wrong in England to make Philip Melmore so anxious to leave it behind for a strange land away from his home and his own people. She realized, however, that she was unlikely to find out. Her companion had hesitated before the admission, as if he half doubted the advisability of mentioning such a personal matter at all, and she guessed from his continuing silence that his confidence had ended. There was nothing she could do but wait for him to speak.

  “I thought I had better tell you all this before you heard it from some, other source and put an entirely wrong construction on Philip’s attitude,” he said at last. “One’s private affairs are rarely one’s own on board ship for very long. Until we reach England, my brother will require very careful handling and—unfortunately I am not the best person to nurse him.”

  A hardness had crept into his voice, a bitterness of thought that she did not try to analyze, but she sensed immediately that something deep lay at the roots of it. For some reason there was tension between the Melmore brothers, and the fact that Philip Melmore could not overlook it made it difficult for Grant to help him.

  “My brother must be out on deck as much as possible during this voyage,” he said, knocking out the contents of his pipe as the first luncheon bell sounded. “There is a possibility that he may have to undergo a major operation at the end of it and the sea air should be invaluable in building up his strength. That will be the first consideration.” He had reverted to the brisk, incisive tone of the efficient medico ticking off the steps in a patient’s progress, and some of the kindliness seemed to have gone out of his voice in consequence. “It will be difficult to persuade him to come on deck, I’m afraid,” he went on. “He’s not so much sensitive to his crippled state as rebellious against it, and he will not be pitied. Neither will he be gazed upon by the merely curious,” he added with a tightening of the lips which had become familiar to Moira.

  “Which means that you will accept my help?” Moira asked, not quite knowing what to think.

  “I think you might have something to offer him,” he said almost impartially. “Some sort of courage, if you like. You’re—placid and reliable-looking. Can I say more?”

  She did not see him again until the following day. He had not taken his meals in the saloon, either at the captain’s table, where she had expected him to sit, or at one of the smaller, individual tables set close against the wall, and she supposed that he had remained with his brother and had their meals sent up to their cabin.

  There was never much to do on the first day out. Nobody appeared to have time to think of consulting the ship’s doctor in the bustle of settling in and making new acquaintances, and the stewardesses handled the inevitable cases of sea-sickness with the competence born of long experience.

  Gregory Paston roamed the deck in search of relaxation, finding it at length in a tall ash-blonde who spent most of the day in a bathing-costume dangling her bronzed legs over the edge of the swimming pool, and it was here that he met Mrs. Oliver Chiltern again. She was watching her teen-age daughter emulating an enthusiastic seal in the warm, blue-green water, and she turned to smile at Greg as he approached.

  “Audrey really ought to grow up!” she remarked indulgently. “She’ll be seventeen in June,” she added helpfully. “I keep pointing out that she is a young lady now and ought to be looking for a suitable young man! I’m surprised that I haven’t seen my friend, Doctor Melmore, about on deck,” she continued. “He can’t possibly be keeping that poor boy cooped up in his cabin all this time.”

  “I don’t think the ‘poor boy’ wants to come out to be stared at,” Greg told her, eyeing the ash-blonde’s retreat along the deck with a new squire. “He’s sensitive about his condition, I suppose.”

  “He’s had such dreadful luck!” Mrs. Chiltern lamented. “First, the girl he was going to marry, and then this!” She patted the vacant chair by her side, inviting him to sit down and hear the rest of the story. “We often wondered how he ever came to forgive Grant after all that happened,” she confided. “They were both in love with Kerry, of course.”

  Paston lowered himself into the chair. “And what happened to Kerry?” he asked idly, not really expecting that he could use the information to his own advantage.

  “My dear!” Eva Chiltern murmured, askance at such levity in the face of tragedy, “she died. She was killed driving her car away from the house, and a great many people never quite believed that it was an accident. It happened one night, late in November, when we had a lot of fog and visibility was down to inches. She drove out of the Priory gates and straight into a tree. Grant found her there in the morning, but he said at the inquest that she must have died instantly.”

  “Rather a shock for him,” Gregory Paston observed into the silence when all was told. “Is that what makes him so remote?”

  “I’m not quite sure.” Mrs. Chiltern pursed her lips. It was evident that she had come up against this remoteness of Grant Melmore’s even before the accident and to her complete chagrin. “He was always reserved and rather difficult to approach, and, of course, he took over the family responsibilities when he was quite young. He practically brought Philip up—with the help of a cousin who lives at the Priory and keeps house for him. No one has ever been quite sure about Serena Melmore,” she added with a frown. “Grant gave her a home when she had nowhere else to go, but she’s a strange woman, bitter and spiteful at times, and never giving anything away. She has her own circle of friends at Mellyn, but even then, I doubt if anyone really likes her.”

  Gregory Paston suspected that Mrs. Chiltern’s dislike of Serena Melmore was deep-rooted in her own unsatisfied curiosity, but something in the story of the Melmores intrigued him so that he did not
rise immediately to make his escape as he might have done.

  “It looks as if Melmore has installed a capable watchdog at the Priory,” he observed acidly, because he did not really like Mrs. Chiltern.

  “If he has lost the love of his life his uncommunicative cousin should suit the part of custodian very well.”

  “Oh, Serena was there when it all happened!” Mrs. Chiltern said. “It’s not so very long since Kerry died. Just before Philip dashed out to Africa to start this mad flying venture.”

  “Cause and effect!” Gregory murmured, rising as the first dinner-gong sounded along the deck. “It looks as if Melmore has more than an unsatisfactory love affair on his hands now, doesn’t it? I certainly don’t envy him.”

  He left Mrs. Chiltern to digest that last remark, but all she thought was that Doctor Paston was rather strange, not quite the gay young Lothario she had considered him when she had first come on board.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MOIRA came up into the dazzling sunshine of the boat deck the following morning to find Philip Melmore installed in a secluded corner just aft of the bridge companionway. He had been carried up there while the rest of the passengers were still at breakfast, and she felt her heart contract with pity at the thought of this sensitive boy eager to feel the tropic sun on his body yet unable to face the stares of the curious or the deliberately averted eyes of the understanding few.

  Philip Melmore had his eyes closed, but she was quite sure that he was not asleep. The hard line of his jaw and the tensed young mouth denied relaxation and the strong brown hand that lay on the open book on his knees was clenched as if in an effort to restrain some agonizing outburst of emotion.

  “You’ve stolen my favourite view-point!” she said, coming round to stand by his side. “I found this hide-away as soon as I first came on board. One feels more free out here—closer to the sea itself.”

  Philip Melmore met her smile with sullen disregard.

  “Grant has apparently got his own way again,” he observed ungraciously. “I told him in Cape Town that I wouldn't have a nurse travelling back with me. I made it a condition of my going to England, and now he has produced you!”

  “Your brother hasn’t exactly engaged me to nurse you," she explained carefully. “I’m employed by the shipping company to look after any passengers who may be unlucky enough to have to go into the sick-bay during the voyage. All sorts of accidents happen, and people can come on board with a fever without really knowing they have it.”

  “I don’t need a nurse," he said, disregarding her explanation.

  “I wasn't thinking about that when I came up here," she said. “I wondered if we had passed one ship all the way from Cape Town.”

  “How should I know? I'm not interested in passing ships.”

  “You can miss them down below,” she ran on. “The cabins and saloons always seem such a distance from the sea and a passing ship does become an event on a long voyage, especially after the second day out.”

  “The second day,” he repeated. “We’re not through with that yet and there will be twelve more to go at midnight to-night!”

  “Is it wise to count time like that?” she asked.

  “Why not? One day looks pretty much the same as the next when you are forced to view them from a cane chair on the broad of your back. There’s the rim of the sea to look at, and the ship’s rail, and the bridge and the masts and the sky!”

  Bitterness lay buried in that last word, the thought of the vast blue canopy of space arched above him which had once been his paradise.

  “When I came out here,” he continued in a tense, choked undertone, “I flew a plane over. That's what I intended to do for a living.” Once again the brief laugh grated against the silence of their isolated retreat. “Nothing could have been freer than that, and I wanted to escape. But the harsh gods laughed and sent me crashing down to earth again!”

  Moira did not answer him for a moment. It was easy to understand all that he felt, but she sensed that pity was the last of his needs. She dared not show him pity, although her heart was full of it.

  “Nothing is really final,” she said at last. “Your brother is taking you home to England in the hope of a cure.”

  “Grant?” He smiled. “Yes, he likes his resident guinea-pig, and I suppose they always have some hope of a recovery.”

  “Haven’t you?” she challenged, a first spark of anger stirring in her heart at this unfair criticism of his brother.

  “Not much,” he returned laconically. “I’ve cashed my chips, I guess.”

  “That’s no way to talk!” The anger was real now, very near the surface. “If you are going to accept defeat in the beginning we can do nothing for you.”

  “Who wants to live—crippled?” he demanded sullenly.

  “Is that the alternative?” she asked more gently.

  “What else could it be?”

  “However wrong I may be,” she said, “I’ve got to say this. You’re not being entirely fair to your brother. Without faith even the most brilliant surgeon can find himself handicapped. You’re—giving in before the fight has begun.”

  “You know all the answers, don’t you?” Philip Melmore said. “But the point is that life probably still means something to you.”

  Her remaining anger crumbled before the implication in the bitter words, but she was determined not to let him sink back into that moody silence again.

  “It can mean something to you, too,” she said, stooping to pick up his book which had fallen to the deck. “Life has a way of—pointing out these things to us, in time.”

  “Which proves that you’ve never been really disappointed in life,” he retorted.

  “Not—in this way,” she said. “Not directly, perhaps, but I have seen other people’s disappointments and near despairs and I can tell you from that experience that we are always given just enough courage and strength to bear our burdens.”

  “Don’t sermonize!” he said, shutting out the comfort in her words. “I’m not like other people!”

  “We all think that,” she returned, “but we are, you know, deep down. There are none of us so very different.” Impulsively she laid a hand on his arm. “Can’t you convince yourself that there’s hope in the future—some kind of hope? A man like your brother would never have held it out otherwise.”

  “Don’t you believe it!” he declared. “Grant can be as ruthless as the devil when it comes to getting his own way about something he feels sure about.”

  “There are different kinds of ruthlessness,” she pointed out, still defending the man she did not really know. “There are often reasons for what might seem at the time to be a harsh decision.”

  “Being cruel to be kind, you mean, I suppose,” he returned derisively. “That appears to be part of your stock-in-trade in the medical profession—the nasty-tasting medicine that works wonders! The sugar coated pill! The white light of hope shining at the bottom of a well!”

  “I think you know what I mean,” she said. “You owe it to your brother to have faith, at least.”

  He lay for a long moment, tensely still under the light ship’s blanket which covered the lower part of his body and in the brilliant sunshine his grey eyes seemed to glitter.

  “Debts are dangerous things to live with,” he said at last. “I can’t really see that I owe Grant very much. It seems to me that the boot is on the other foot,” he added grimly, “but I couldn’t expect you to know about that.” He picked up his book, dismissing her. “If you must come out to this part of the deck,” he added, “to please Grant or justify yourself with the shipping company, please come alone. I don’t like the look of your friend, the ship’s surgeon!”

  It was Gregory Paston’s youth and freedom he resented most, Moira realized as she walked away. How easy it was to see his tortured comparisons, the thoughts which drove like fiery demons of envy through his brain, sowing the seeds of bitterness and resentment broadcast in his heart!

  She was sitti
ng at her tea when the stewardess from A deck came down to the saloon.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Nurse,” she said, “but it’s that young Mr. Melmore in A2. He’s asked for a tray to be taken upon deck and he wants you to bring it. Seems that he won’t be moved from where he is till everybody else has gone down for dinner or some such nonsense! I suppose he’s sensitive about his condition,” she added more kindly, “but we saw plenty, of that during the war—we older ones!”

  “Mr. Melmore may not be able to look at it like that just now,” Moira said, taking up the tray. “I don’t mind going on deck at all. There’s nothing to do in the sick-bay just now. People seem to have forgotten they’re at sea!”

  “There’s always the chronically sea-sick!” the stewardess grunted.

  “We’ve got four of them up there. Down on their bunks as soon as they come on board, with their finger never off the bell when they’re not sound asleep!”

  Moira carried the tray along the deck in the hot afternoon sunshine, glad of the shade of the bridge awning as she reached the sheltered corner where Philip Melmore still lay. He was alone for the moment, but she knew that his brother had been with him for most of the day.

  “I’ve brought you some French rolls, a piece of Madeira cake, and some Russian tea!” she announced. “What could be fairer than that?”

  “Some more French rolls and a Vienna sausage!”

  “Then, you are hungry?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “I’ll go and enquire about the sausage,” she offered.

  “No—stay where you are. We can call a steward if we see one, and you can talk while I eat what’s here.” He surveyed the tray she set before him with evident relief. “Not invalid diet, anyway, thank heaven! There appears to be plenty of fruit.”

  “We’re sailing past where it comes from!”

  “Away from Africa,” he mused. “Do you regret that? My brother told me this is your last voyage.”