Nurse Lang

by Jean S. MacLeod

  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 t
hem. 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.”

  “She left them to the improbable Mrs. Grant,” he said after a pause, “who appears to have become more improbable than ever!” He watched her reflectively for a few minutes. “Grant should marry,” he added. “It would—broaden his outlook.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought Grant needed ‘broadening’,” Moira said with a swift smile. “He manages to take most things in his stride as it is.”

  “I fancy neither of us really knows Grant,” Philip said unexpectedly. “I wouldn’t, for instance, have connected him with sentiment.”

  Her eyes flew to his.

  “Sentiment?” she repeated. “No—it doesn’t seem to apply to Grant, does it?”

  “Yet he bought you an emerald, which was my mother’s favorite stone.”

  “It could have been a coincidence.”

  “Not with Grant. He would be deliberate about a thing like that.”

  “The choice of my ring could not mean anything to him,” Moira protested, feeling all the old hurt rushing back to crush her.

  “No,” Philip agreed, “that’s true enough, but I feel that he meant you to have the emerald, all the same.”

  Moira left the supposition there. Somehow, she could not bear to discuss the pearls just now, and when she carried them back to the Priory she put them into their case and looked about her for a safe place to leave them.

  In the end their value suggested only one safe depository, but she hesitated before returning them to Grant. Her emotions had been stripped bare on that last occasion and this might prove equally poignant, asking him to take care of her jewels for her, as his wife might have done.

  The library was in darkness except for a single lamp burning on the desk, its yellow light shining on the array of books and papers scattered across the shining mahogany and lying revealing on a man’s dark hair. Grant had rested his head on his arms and his face was hidden, but something about the tense, rigid set of his shoulders and the clenched hands warned her of trespass. She stood silent and immovable in the doorway, her eyes deep wells of wounded love and protest, till he lifted his head with some sense of her presence there in the room beside him. In that split second she saw a look in his eyes which shook her to the depths of her being, but it was masked in the next instant as he straightened his broad shoulders and moved towards her.

  “To what do I owe the unexpected pleasure?” he asked in the old tone of light mockery which had never failed to hurt her and told her nothing.

  “I’ve come about your mother’s pearls,” she explained, laying the case down on the desk between them. “I can’t—look after them properly, Grant, and I want you to put them back in your safe.”

  “I take it that you want me to keep them for you?” he queried. “You’re not—rejecting my love gift?”

  “Don’t call it that!” she cried, driven beyond caring that he might see her love for him and feeling that she had already taken more than she could endure. “You know that you felt it was your duty to give them to me!”

  “On the contrary,” he said, laying the pearls back on the desk, "I wanted you to have them, strange as it may seem. I don’t do everything out of a sense of duty, you know. I am human in some respects.”

  “I’m sorry!” Her apology was low and constrained. “I shouldn’t have said what I did. It must be—because I’m tired.”

  He looked down at her with professional keenness, all trace of his own fatigue gone as his eyes took in the details of her pale face and sensitively quivering mouth.

  “If you feel that the work in the hospital is too much for you,” he said, “you must take a rest.”

  She smiled faintly.

  “My work just doesn’t come into it.”

  “What is it, then?” He was still watching her with that direct, professional look which seemed to accentuate his utter remoteness.

  “You’ve had a great deal of excitement these past few days, I admit, but at least Philip can’t have been too demanding. I limited your visits to him deliberately.”

  “Why?” she asked bleakly. “Why?”

  “For Philip’s sake mostly. I don’t want him to get the idea into his head that he should be on his feet again in a couple of weeks.”

  “You mean—that this is going to be a long business?” she asked.

  “A very long business.”

  “Grant!” she pleaded, her heart pounding with sudden fear, “are you telling me the truth about this? Are you telling me—everything I ought to know?”

  “I’m telling you as much as I know myself,” he said.

  “Sir Archibald?” She knew that she was clutching at straws now. “What does he say?”

  “Sir Archibald can only wait and see, like the rest of us.”

  “I see,” she whispered.

  “There’s nothing much we can do but hope at present,” he repeated, crossing to the fire to gaze down at the fine white ash of the burnt logs. “Philip is young. He should have a terrific reserve of strength, and faith has been known to remove mountains.”

  “Grant, is this—a mountain we are hoping to remove?” she demanded.

  “In a way, I suppose you might call it that.”

  She knew that he would not say any more about Philip or the future, and as if to accentuate the fact he took a small, quaintly-shaped key from a locked drawer in his desk and held it up.

  “In case you ever want to wear your pearls when I am away from Mellyn,” he said. “It’s a key to the safe.” He crossed to the panelling between the bookshelves opposite explaining as he pressed on a small section of the moulding which would be indistinguishable from the rest if it were not already known: “Three shelves up on the left hand side and the second moulding along.”

  A swift movement of his strong fingers released the whole panel block and it swung out to reveal a deep wall safe which he opened with her key. “Philip has a third one,” he said. “There are only three.”

  “Grant,” she said when he dropped it into her hand and closed
her fingers over it, “I don’t think I ought to accept this.”

  “Why not?” He turned deliberately, closing the safe. “The pearls are your property. They are better for being worn.”

  “It isn’t that.” She did not know how to explain what she wanted to say. “It’s the fact of me—going to live elsewhere and taking the key of your safe with me.”

  “Going elsewhere?” he repeated, frowning. “Where do you propose to go?”

  “There will be accommodation for me in the Nurses’ Home in a day or two, Matron says.”

  “Matron ought to have known better than that,” he said briefly. “She should have known that I have no intention of letting you leave the Priory now. Philip will be back here in less than a month and he will need you.”

  “I thought—until he came back that it would be best for me to go,” she tried to explain.

  “Let me be the judge of that,” he told her almost brusquely. “If Serena has made it difficult for you, that can be put right, too.”

  “Oh, no!” Moira protested. “I wasn’t complaining about Serena. Naturally she must feel that I have no right to intrude.”

  “You are Philip’s future wife,” he reminded her harshly. “What better right can you imagine?”

  He had given her no room to answer, but she dared not think what Serena’s reaction would be.

  “Leave Serena to me,” he said firmly. “All you have to do is look after Philip.”

  Olga came in just then with the mail and handed it to Grant.

  Moira rarely looked for letters these days. Jill was her only correspondent and her communications were far from regular. There had been a highly-colored postcard from Madeira a week after the S.S. Tavistock had sailed, but nothing since. She made a rapid calculation realizing that the ship would be well on its homeward way again—at the Canaries, in fact.

  She watched him sort through the mail.

  “There’s one here for you.” He turned the letter over to look at the shipping company’s crest on the flap of the envelope. “Your friend, Doctor Paston, has evidently not forgotten you.”

  “It’s from Jill,” Moira said, taking it from him. "It may be good news, in fact. I think she was practically engaged to Greg Paston before she went ashore for her operation.”