Nurse Lang

by Jean S. MacLeod

  “Except hurt Moira, and I won’t do that!”

  “Don’t you think it would hurt her a great deal more if she found out afterwards?” Elizabeth asked slowly. “She would, you know. Love isn’t a thing you can hide for very long, and Moira isn’t the type who would be connected with half measures—just as Grant isn’t. You wouldn’t be able to act apart all the time, Phil. No man could do that, and there isn’t a girl who wouldn’t find out, sooner or later.”

  “But where does all this get us?” Philip demanded wearily. “Where do we go from here?”

  “It’s up to you to tell Moira the truth.”

  “It’s going to be difficult,” he said, “but I see what you mean.”

  “Good boy!” she said approvingly. “Whatever it costs you, it will be worth while in the end.”

  She crossed to the window as Grant came back into the room. He looked grey and tired and he said with an obvious effort:

  “I’m sorry this has spoiled your evening, Phil. There’s no trace of the necklace and Moira is still terribly upset but there’s no need to waste Serena’s dinner. Shall we go in?”

  Moira sat through that nightmare meal with all her nerves on edge. Grant had apparently decided not to report their loss to the police for the time being and he would not have them discuss the loss of the pearls while the servants were in the room. He took his accustomed place at the head of the table, with Serena at the foot, and to all outward appearances they might have been any normal family gathering except for the dark undercurrent of tension which flowed beneath their conventional conversation.

  At ten o’clock Elizabeth rose and said she must go.

  “I’ve a case to see before I turn in for the night,” she explained, and Grant offered to run her over to the hospital.

  “Afterwards,” he said, looking down the table at Serena, “I would like a word with the staff.”

  Moira felt that she would be expected to stay up till he came home, although her most pressing desire was to fly to the sanctuary of her own room, and she followed Jill and Philip across the hall when they had said good-night to Elizabeth. Serena did not accompany them. She had probably gone to warn the servants not to go to bed till Grant had spoken to them.

  Jill snapped on the extra lighting as soon as they reached the drawingroom.

  “Do you mind if we have some cheering music?” she asked, turning in the direction of the radiogram.

  No one answered and she picked up a record at random, putting it on the turntable and standing beside it until it had run its course.

  Philip hobbled to the window and back again with the aid of a stick, sitting down with his back to Jill and staring into the fire, and Moira listened while the second record ran through, conscious that her ears were really attuned to the sound of Grant’s car returning from the hospital. When Jill chose a third record she recognized the tune with a vague feeling of resentment. Gigli had always been a favorite with her, but the deeply resonant voice seemed to fill the room with warning as it flowed out across the stillness.

  “If Harlequin thy Columbine hath stolen,

  Laugh, Punchinello, for the love that is ended,

  Laugh for the pain that is eating thy heart...”

  Before she could realize what was happening, Philip was on his feet. “Take off that damned thing!” he shouted to Jill, his face livid with suppressed passion. “Put it off at once and never play it in this house again!”

  The needle scraped across the offending disc and Jill stood staring at him speechlessly for a second before she turned and ran from the room.

  In the silence which followed, the rhythmic click of the turntable was the only sound and Moira moved automatically to stop it. It had been like something raw and grating on her nerves and she saw Philip relax as she put it off.

  “I’m sorry, Phil,” she said. “Jill didn’t mean any harm. She wouldn’t know that it would distress you so much, that you would be so—upset by it.”

  It was Kerry, she thought instinctively. Kerry again, insinuating herself into their lives through the memory of a song. She did not need Philip to tell her that. Somehow, she knew.

  “It was—how I felt at the time.” Philip had spoken gruffly and he sat down again, burying his face in his hands. “It was how I felt for a long time after she died, and I’ve let it eat in till it’s become an obsession with me, coloring my whole life, but—there’s nothing to it. I’ve found that out these past few weeks.”

  Moira stood quite still behind his chair, waiting. She felt ice-cold, numbed beyond thought.

  “Would it help to talk about it, Phil?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I guess it was the beginning of—everything.”

  She waited.

  “It started with Kerry.”

  Her heart contracted. This was what she had expected, but the bald words seemed to come out and strike at her without warning, mocking her because she could do nothing to defend herself.

  “When I brought Kerry to Mellyn I was in love with her, hopelessly and madly in love,” Philip went on, “and on the way down she told me that she would marry me. I had very little to offer her, of course—not the sort of things a girl like Kerry feels entitled to, because she was born gay and lovely and free from inhibitions. She was the most dynamic thing you could imagine, small and fair and eager for life. That was what we had most in common, I guess—our desire to live our lives to the full and to the devil with the consequences. She was modelling clothes in Paris when I first met her and the wonder of it was that she ever looked twice at me!”

  Moira knew what was coming and she felt that she could not bear to listen to the confession, but Philip seeped determined to continue once he had begun.

  “When we got here Grant was out and we filled in the time going over the Priory. Kerry seemed impressed. It evidently wasn’t what she had expected, and she asked me about Grant, of course—my elder brother who would one day own Mellyn. I told her all that I thought would interest her and she couldn’t have failed to see that Grant and I were—pretty thick.” He raised his head, and Moira saw a small pulse working in his cheek, but his eyes looked stony, gazing into the past with all the old bitterness of resentment reflected in their grey depths. “She met Grant, and came to Mellyn several times after that. I don’t know just when I realized she had fallen in love with him, but I must have been fairly blind, because it was more than obvious to other people. Elizabeth saw it, and Serena. Later on, Serena considered it her duty to tell me that Kerry was in love with Grant, but at first I expected they were all sorry for me and so they kept silent.”

  Moira said: “Phil, don’t go on! You are only hurting yourself—remembering like this.”

  “They had cause to be sorry,” he said, as if he had not heard the interruption. “I reacted like the blind, unreasoning fool I was and—I blamed Grant. I blamed him for making love to Kerry, for taking her away from me in cold blood. I guess I must have flung my weight about a bit and, in the end, I challenged both of them. I came in here and found them together one day—”

  “No, Phil! Don’t tell me anymore. I can’t—I don’t want to hear!” she protested, but he went on with a ruthless determination which reminded her painfully of Grant.

  “They were in each other’s arms, but what I wouldn’t admit till afterwards was the fact that I knew it was Kerry who had done it. She had taken the initiative. She had made love to him for what she could get out of it and Grant had seen through her.” He drew in a long quivering breath. “That’s what I’ve got to make clear now. It was Kerry’s doing, and the final scene was between Kerry and me. She told me how little she had ever cared for me and I threw her out, but I could never really bring myself to forgive Grant. Something in me wanted to lay the blame somewhere, I suppose, and I must have been still half in love with Kerry even then. I knew she was no use, but I wanted to blame Grant because he had found her out. It was a twisted, bitter sort of reasoning, and that wasn’t the end of it. When she died like tha
t—driving my sports car away from Mellyn—I told Grant that it was his responsibility. If he had accepted her, I argued, and not been so brutal about his rejection, she would still have been alive, but all the time I knew that I was only looking for some sort of excuse to cover up my own guilt. I think—what I said affected Grant a great deal, but the fact remains that Kerry died because of me and not because of Grant, although I wouldn’t admit it. I even sunk so low as to try to get my own back in a foolish, paltry way when I first met you on the boat coming from Africa.”

  He looked up, his thin, boyish face ravaged, but Moira knew that she could not help him. There was still something more he had to say.

  “I thought Grant was in love with you,” he said, “and I decided to put a spoke in his wheel. It was easy enough to win your sympathy, because you are that sort of person, and when I asked you to marry me it was partly for Grant’s benefit.”

  Moira felt stunned. She could not think where his revelations were leading them, nor could she try to understand. She could only think back to the voyage from the Cape, to Grant as he had been then and to Philip’s need of her, but the whole thing seemed so distant, so far away in the past that no clear picture of how their engagement had come about would form itself in her mind.

  “It’s not been until recently—till I met Jill—that I’ve begun to realize how wrong and selfish it all was, how thwarted I had let myself become because of my own bitterness. I know now that Grant never encouraged Kerry in any way. He had seen what she was and he thought that I was wrong to marry her—he saw that she was wrong for me—but I know now that he would never have come deliberately between me and my desires if Kerry hadn’t forced the pace. He had taken on a trust when our mother died and he had carried it through. Strangely enough, it wasn’t till I saw you and Jill together that I realized that. You feel the same way about Jill, I guess.”

  “Phil,” she asked, “are you in love with Jill?”

  “I ought to be shot,” he said humbly.

  “No! No, you ought to have told me the truth long ago,” Moira cried. “When you first discovered it, but I think I can understand how you felt.”

  “You’ll never know,” he said. “Nobody will. And now I feel desperately ashamed—ashamed of my part in all this and damnably ashamed of the past. I’ve let Grant take the rap for so much.”

  “His—shoulders are very broad.” Moira said in a stifled whisper. “Do you want me to tell him—about this, or will you?”

  “I ought to tell him, in fairness to Jill.”

  “Which means that Jill returns your love?”

  “Don’t ask me how it all came about. I guess we just knew.” Moira stood very still, conscious that he had nothing more to say, yet aware that there was still so much to be said.

  “I think you should go to bed.” She could not let him face any more strain by trying to explain things to Grant when he came in and she thought that it might perhaps be her own job, after all.

  When he was safely in bed she stood hesitating in the upstairs corridor, wondering what she should do. Jill’s light was still burning. She could see the thin thread of it under the heavy door, but she felt that she could not go in to her sister at that moment. Jill’s turn would come in the morning.

  Slowly she descended the stairs, watching Serena through the half open door of the drawing-room as she paced restlessly up and down, waiting for Grant, and when the older woman paused at the far end of the room she ran down the few remaining stairs and slid in between the double doors of the library, closing them firmly behind her.

  When Grant came in he stood in the open doorway for a moment, looking down the length of the long room at her, and then he closed the doors and came towards her.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” he said harshly. “It was to have been your great day and this business of the pearls has spoiled it.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” The words seemed inadequate, forced from her by the extent of her emotion. “It doesn’t really matter now at all. The main thing is your mother’s pearls—getting them back.”

  “You needn’t worry about that,” he said. “I’ve traced them.” He looked suddenly drawn and tired, as if he had been asked to cope with too much in one day. “They—never left the house.”

  “Oh—!” Moira knew that he didn’t mean her to ask about the pearls or how they had been taken out of the safe. “I’m so glad, Grant, for your sake. I should never have forgiven myself if they had been lost.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.” There was more than tiredness in his voice now. “I meant you to wear them tonight. That was what my mother would have wished, but instead of that they cancelled your engagement party and upset Philip into the bargain.”

  “Philip was—upset over something else this evening.” she admitted unsteadily, facing him in the clear light of the great chandelier which he had switched on as he passed the door. “I’ve no right to wear the pearls now, Grant. Phil and I are no longer engaged.”

  She saw something go out of his face, some of the tension which had sharpened his features these past few weeks, but it also seemed that there was anger there.

  “You can’t do this to him!” His hands were suddenly hard and demanding on her bare arms as he imprisoned her in a grip of steel, “You can’t just—walk out on him at the eleventh hour like this. It would be—murder.”

  “No, Grant. Philip wants it that way. You see, he was never really in love with me. I think I stood for sympathy and understanding in his life when he needed someone—a woman—to fall back upon, but I never had the kind of love to give that Phil wants. I think he realizes now how utterly unsuited we were to one another. He needs someone like Jill, and now that they have found one another I have no right to stand in their way.”

  “When did this happen?” he asked.

  “Tonight—this evening after you left for the hospital. Phil couldn’t pretend any longer. When I thought that the loss of the pearls had spoiled things for him I tried to apologize, but I could see that it wasn’t really the pearls, after all. He tried not to let me see, I suppose, but sometimes it isn’t really difficult—”

  He swung round, his face haggard in the brilliant light above her head.

  “Sometimes!” When he laughed it was a harsh, cracked sound against the stillness of the room. “My heavens! How little women understand!”

  He left her with that, going out and crossing the hall in search of his cousin, and Moira stood in the library for a long while after he had gone, hearing the sound of that laugh echoing in the silence like splintering glass.

  When she moved at last she could hear the sound of voices behind the closed doors of the drawing-room, Serena's voice and Grant’s low-pitched and demanding, and she switched off the library lights and closed the heavy doors behind her in a kind of panic. Whatever was going on in the room across the hall, she had no part in it. Grant had made that perfectly clear when he had told her that he had traced the pearls and that they had never left the house, and now he and Serena were discussing it all behind the closed door of the drawing-room, as they must have discussed their domestic problems for the past seven years.

  Suddenly, the empty hall and the great staircase seemed to be echoing a vast emptiness in her own heart. Tomorrow she would give Grant back the key to his safe and an interlude in their lives would be over.

  In the morning there was no sign of Serena, and Grant had left for the hospital before Moira got down. Olga was clearing away his breakfast dishes and she looked tearful and slightly defiant as she arranged the knives and fork at Moira’s place.

  “I am sorry to cause so much trouble about last night,” she said in her halting English, “but was it not only the right thing to tell Mr. Grant the truth—all that I saw? Otherwise, he may have blame the wrong person for the loss of your so beautiful pearls.”

  Moira had no idea when Grant had questioned the servants, but now it seemed that he must have done so before he came to her in the library and before he had
seen his cousin. It seemed that Olga had felt herself suspect and could not bear the thought of being mistrusted. She looked the soul of honesty, and she was obviously relieved that the real culprit had been discovered.

  “I saw Miss Melmore taking the pearls out of the safe two days ago, and I also saw her returning the key to your bag—the little bag you have for the evening. It did not seem to me the sort of thing that an English lady would do,” Olga continued, seemingly unconscious of Moira’s gasp of horror, “so that is why I tell Mr. Grant about it when he ask if I see anything suspicious—any stranger about the place. When he tell me that something valuable has disappeared from his safe in the library, I know then who has taken it. I tell him it is Miss Melmore and that she take your pearls out of spite because she does not like you. She thinks then that Mr. Grant will blame you and send you away, but I hope that is not so.” Olga looked at her anxiously. “It would be far better for Mr. Grant to have young people about him instead of someone so spiteful and wicked as his cousin, to whom he has been so kind. Miss Melmore does not like anyone.” Olga concluded. “Only she must be here, to do with Mr. Grant’s house as she wills! Always since you came and since Miss Jill is here she has been watching everything you do, waiting to find some way in which she can injure you. If the pearls were lost, that is the way. Mr. Grant gave them to you and you have been careless of them. Perhaps you have even sold them for the money you need! That is the way Miss Melmore would plan to injure you. She is not a good person. She makes schemes all the time to keep herself mistress here!”

  When Jill came down to the breakfast-room her eyes were luminous. It was evident that she had been to see Philip and there had been tears, but now her whole world was transformed.

  “Phil has told me about last night,” she said, looking tentatively across the table in Moira’s direction. “I’m terribly sorry, but it was just one of these things that happen, Moira. Neither Phil nor I could help falling in love.”

  “Of course, you couldn’t!” she agreed. “Don’t mourn for me, Jill. What I felt for Phil wasn’t love. It was pity and the desire to help when I was needed, that was all. I was a fool to think it might develop into anything stronger.”