Strange Recompense

by Catherine Airlie

  At seven o’clock Noel pulled the car up at a wayside hotel.

  “We’re not going any further than this tonight,” he said. “It will make it too much of a strain. I think I should be able to get rooms here. It’s not quite on the beaten track, although it’s one of the best places I know. I came here a lot during my hospital year at Sheffield.”

  So very often Anna had tried to picture his past, to see those years he could remember so clearly and all they had contained, envying him the power to look back and wondering, sometimes, why he had never married. She knew that he had immersed himself in his career to the exclusion of a great many other things, but she also knew from experience that love could come unawares.

  In the last few weeks she had tried to remember just when she had fallen in love with Noel—she who had no right to fall in love with anyone!—but the knowledge escaped her. It had not come upon her as a sudden revelation, but the days had become suddenly fair and full of life, and she, who had known despair and had walked in dark places, had been led out into the light again, into the beauty and the full glory of life, to see it through new eyes.

  Nothing could ever dim that memory for her! No, not even Sara’s oft-repeated warning that returning memory of the more distant past would blot out these intervening weeks forever!

  The certainty of her belief that all this must endure even if it could only be in bitter-sweet retrospect was the one sure thing in her mind, a conviction so lasting that she accepted it now without question or doubt.

  An indifferent traveller at any time, Ruth reached the hotel with a raging headache which nothing would alleviate but a darkened room and a good night’s rest.

  “It’s dinner and straight to bed for Ruth,” Noel ordered when he joined them in the quaint little upstairs lounge adjoining the dining-room. “You’ll feel all right in the morning, old girl!”

  “This is really all my fault,” Anna said, distressed by Ruth’s obvious discomfort. “You would never have come on such a long journey by road if it hadn’t been for me.”

  “I’ve got used to this sort of thing whenever I leave home,” Ruth said imperturbably. “I come prepared, and I don’t intend to become a martyr to car-sickness and never go out because of it! Noel will give me a bromide and I’ll sleep as peacefully as a baby! Once the motion of the car stops going on in my head the symptoms gradually die down.”

  “I know you’d far rather be back in the garden at Glynmareth,” Anna said, wondering suddenly if she would ever see Ruth’s garden again.

  Had she stood beside the laughing brook for the last time and felt the sun-warmed grey stone under her feet as a parting caress?

  The agony of the thought stabbed through her, finding its relentless way to her heart. You will never return again, something seemed to be repeating within her. This is the end! The end!

  “What, a delightful place this is!” Ruth said. “Everything is so old-world and perfect, not in the usual pseudo-olde-worlde way one sees so much, but absolutely genuine!”

  “It’s not really difficult to recognize the genuine article,” her brother returned quietly, his eyes just resting on Anna’s burnished head where the gleam of the wall bracket behind them picked up the rich glint of red in her hair. “The real thing has a depth and beauty that all the clever shams in the world can never achieve.” He pushed the drinks he had ordered across the small table between them. “It can’t make the headache any worse,” he told Ruth, “and it might help you to enjoy your dinner.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt me to do without a meal,” Ruth said, “but you’ve spoken so often about this place that I feel I really ought to see the famous dining-room before I die!”

  “Is the headache as bad as that?” Anna asked with a smile in her eyes that was more tender than teasing. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a headache, but I do sympathize.”

  “Not even when you were flung clear of the car that night?” Noel’s question exploded between them, cutting across their lazy conversation with the impact of an eruption, and he sat waiting intently for the effect he hoped it would produce.

  Anna’s hands flew to her face, as if she would protect it, and she lowered her head defensively, as if something had shattered only a few inches from where she sat, but her eyes, fixed on the polished surface of the table before her and the three half-emptied glasses, were still puzzled and full of pain.

  “I can’t, Noel!” she pleaded. “I know about the car—but that’s all. Perhaps it will all come back gradually and I’ll know why I was there and what exactly happened, but just now it’s as if someone were holding back a curtain just sufficiently for me to catch one glimpse at a time.”

  “It will swing clear one of these days,” he said, trying to crush back his disappointment. He would have liked to take Anna back to Alnborough, remembering.

  They emptied their glasses and he led the way into the dining-room, a superb apartment surprising in proportion and furnishing for a hotel situated in such a remote spot, and Anna followed him down the shallow, red-carpeted steps to their table in one of the window bays with a feeling that here was their real parting.

  Whatever tomorrow brought, whatever there was to face of pain or heartache in the days which would follow, this was their day. She knew that Noel had meant it to be so, that he had brought her here to share his own memories of the past, those happy, blissful days when he had first applied all he had learned in six years of study.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THEY REACHED ALNWICK shortly after twelve o’clock the following morning, and Noel drove straight to the hotel where he had booked rooms for them by telephone before leaving Glynmareth.

  “This is going to be a ticklish business just at first,” he told Ruth, coming into her room while Anna unpacked in the bedroom next door.

  He spoke in a low tone, as if he already sought to protect his love from what might come, and Ruth had no doubt about his reactions to the story Sara had told. He would stand by Anna now to the bitter end, and if his faith was shaken, even then he would give no sign of it.

  “I’ve decided to go on to Alnborough alone,” Noel added as he paced to the window for the second time. “I can’t take the risk of breaking the amnesia and involving Anna in a family row into the bargain. One thing will be enough at a time. I must see those people and use my judgment about how to bring about a meeting between them.”

  “The meeting is, of course, absolutely essential?” Ruth asked.

  “Absolutely. But I must be a hundred per cent sure about them first.”

  She considered his broad outline against the sunlit window.

  “All this is most distressing for you,” she said. “I shall be thankful when it’s all over.”

  He squared his shoulders and turned to face her.

  “I can take it,” he said. “Do something with Anna, Ruth. If you can stand a bus journey after all the motoring of these past two days, take her for a run to the coast. Alnmouth isn’t much more than four or five miles away, and you’d both love it. It’s a perfect little gem of a place.”

  “Suppose it brings back memories for her? Could I cope?” Ruth wondered.

  “Yes, I think you could. I don’t expect any violent reaction on her part. She’s not the type.” He paused to cram tobacco into his pipe. “She’ll be upset, of course, but you’d be able to deal with that. It might even be more natural coming that way,” he mused, “and decidedly less of a shock to her system. I’ll deal with the other end of this wretched tangle in my own way.”

  His mouth hardened as he contemplated the forthcoming meeting with the Marricks, and Ruth knew that he was deeply prejudiced against these people because they had made no attempt to trace Anna in the first place. Tolerantly, she tried to weigh the fact against the story Sara had told them and wondered what truth Noel would learn before the day was out.

  Anger stirred in him at the thought of the people he was about to meet, a saving anger, draining some of the emotion out of him, yet he had no real r
ight to judge the Marricks beforehand. Sara had described them as a hard-working, honest people with a grim determination never to forgive a wrong woven into the fabric of their living, and he could not connect them with what he knew of Anna in any way.

  Best, therefore, to wait till he met them, he decided, swinging the car over the Lion Bridge and out to open country.

  It was good land this, green and undulating, rising to the knees of the hills with brown rivers threading their way through it to the sea, and the road over which he travelled led like a river itself between high green banks until it finally began to climb on to the rougher moorland of the north.

  The last shreds of his doubts about Anna’s identity vanished as the car sped onwards, for here, in the minutest detail, was the scene of that word-picture she had produced for him at Glynmareth. Here were the green uplands and the distant Border hills rising clear against the northern sky; here were the winding roads and the stunted thorns leaning away from the prevailing wind, and the sheep grazing on the open moor or cropping the finer grass by the wayside. Here, on a clear day, from any high place round about, the wide belt of the grey North Sea might be seen like a band of silver on the horizon, and here the four winds of heaven would blow free and strong and untrammelled across the hollows with the scent of heather and the tang of salt in their breath.

  No wonder she had loved it! No wonder it had remained the strongest impression in her subconscious mind when all else had been momentarily blurred by paralyzing shock!

  He stepped the car up to sixty, taking corners at a speed which would have surprised him in a saner frame of mind, watching the signposts for a word that had burned itself into his mind in the past few days.

  ALNBOROUGH—3 miles, he read at last, slowing down as he turned into the by-road. It was hardly broad enough to take the car, and the banks on either side were high with scentless mayweed and blue with the gleam of harebells. A gatekeeper butterfly zigzagged its way before him for a moment and then was lost, and then the undulating road claimed all his attention as it wound now east, now south.

  After a while it opened out and he was high on the moorland, still climbing, still dipping down into hollows where the green bracken swayed in the wind, and then he saw the house perched high on a rise before him. There could be no mistaking it. Anna had described it too well, and he drove straight to it and got out at the white-painted gate to walk the remainder of the way.

  The quiet of a summer Sunday afternoon lay on everything about him, broken only by the distant bleating of sheep and the fall of water in a hidden ditch beside the path. He noticed subconsciously that the garden on either side of the path had been well laid out but was now over-grown for lack of attention, its paths choked with weeds and the flowers rioting everywhere, together with blown poppies and invading scabious. Two magnificent hollyhocks flanked the doorway of the house, impervious to neglect in their tall majesty, and as he knocked boldly on the green-painted door he marvelled that they should grow to such splendor in this exposed spot.

  There was a long silence in which he experienced an irritating sensation of being watched, either from within the house or from some unseen vantage-point near at hand, and almost impatiently he swung round on his heel and strode over to the rough gravel and round the gable end of the house to the back.

  Here he was confronted by a youth bringing in half a dozen cows from the adjoining pasture, and he addressed him abruptly:

  “Is your master about?”

  The boy considered him doubtfully, in the way of country folk to whom time is a plentiful commodity.

  “I dunno that you can see him,” he said. “He’s been taken bad wi’ a stroke.”

  “I’ve heard that,” Noel said patiently. “As a matter of fact,” he added, “I’m a doctor, and Miss Marrick has just written to me. She may be expecting me.”

  It was a long shot, but the innocent piece of subterfuge produced the desired result. The cows were prodded until the leader was safely inside the barn where they would wait to be milked, and the youth put his tousled head in at the door of the house and shouted something unintelligible which might have been heard at the far end of the uplands if only it could have been understood.

  He turned and touched a forelock.

  “Go right inside, sir,” he said. “She’ll be down in a minute. She’s got the milkin’ to do, anyway.”

  Jessica Marrick came slowly down the stairs to meet him. She had not troubled to run a last-minute comb through the dark tangle of her hair and her clothes were still the rough working garments which she habitually wore. She had made no concession to a Sunday afternoon apart from putting on a clean apron to milk the cows.

  “I’m Noel Melford, the doctor you wrote to in answer to your sister’s letter.” Noel explained as he studied her closely. “I felt it best to come and see your father rather than write again.”

  “What difference will it make, coming here?” she demanded, the sullen light in her eyes charged with extra resentment as she noticed how handsome he was. “It won’t make us change our minds about—about things.”

  “What things, Jess?” he asked tolerantly. “There are some things that we must do in spite of obvious prejudices. We cannot, for instance, refuse help to those in acute physical and mental distress because we harbor some sort of resentment towards them.” He kept his eyes on her sullen face, willing her to listen to what he had to say. “Frankly,” he went on, “I have come here to enlist your help. Your sister was put into my care suffering from loss of memory over three weeks ago and we have only now been successful in tracing you. There would appear to have been an accident of some sort, in which she was involved, but so far we have not been able to trace anything. That is why I have come from Wales to ask for your co-operation. I have brought Anna with me.”

  At the sound of her sister’s name Jessica Marrick drew back as if she had been dealt a physical blow and her eyes dilated with uncontrolled passion.

  “She will not come here!” she cried. “She would not dare!”

  Noel took a step towards her, although he would not have been surprised if she had flown at him with all the ferocity of a cornered animal.

  “Now, Jess,” he urged gently, “can’t we talk this over without all this fuss? I’m not belittling your loss or suggesting that some injustice has not been done somewhere, but there is absolutely nothing to be gained by an attitude of hatred and non-co-operation in this instance. Anna must be helped to get her memory back, and you are the only person left who can help her. You say that your father has had a stroke, so we could not inflict such a strain on him at present. It’s up to you, Jess.”

  He kept his eyes on her, demanding that she should consider what he said, but Jess Marrick would not waver in her decision nor give away one inch. This was a battle of hurt pride against an appeal for sympathy, Noel realized, and hurt pride could be a revengeful, enemy.

  “What right have you to ask me to do this?” she burst out passionately. “You don’t understand what she did to me. You can’t know what she is like!”

  “I think I do know what she is like, Jess,” he said patiently, “and that is why I have come here to appeal to you to forget the past for the sake of the present and the future.”

  “She stole the man I was going to marry!” Jess spat out, glad when she saw him flinch at the crude accusation, glad that she had the power to inflict hurt.

  “And because of that you are going to refuse to help me, even when I tell you that I know how you have suffered, even when I say that I am in love with Anna and have no hope of ever claiming her love in return?”

  The appeal silenced her and she stared at him as if he had struck her.

  “You?” she said. “But—Ned Armstrong married her didn’t he?”

  “We can’t find any trace of him,” he explained. “He didn’t rejoin his ship. We telephoned to the owners in Swansea, but these things happen quite frequently, it appears. The fact remains that Ned Armstrong has not tried to trace A
nna in all these weeks and—we must find him, or find out about him.”

  “He wrote to her,” Jess muttered, following her own train of thoughts down into the past, “and she went off to meet him. She knew that she was going to him, and she said nothing. She left us without a word, with that Judas kiss of hers, and next day I found the letter!”

  “Can you tell me about the letter, Jess?” Noel’s face was pale and strained now, his mouth more tightly compressed that ever. “It may help us to discover what exactly happened to them.”

  Jess hesitated, looking for a moment as if she would still turn on her heel and leave him, and then she said slowly.

  “It came just before she left to go on her holiday to Wales and she was—agitated about it. I know she didn’t sleep much that night, for I heard her pacing about her room next to mine. But that wasn’t when she burned the letter,” Jess added. “I was in her room the next morning and it wasn’t in the grate then.”

  Noel supposed that she had gone to her sister’s room afterwards in search of the all-important letter, but he made no comment, and after another pause in which she remained deep in thought, Jess went on in the same resentful tone:

  “They must have made it up between them—what they were going to do. He gave her an address where he was staying in Swansea and she must have replied to him there and agreed to meet him, because there was a complaint from the hotel she should have gone to at Harlech several days later. The people said that she hadn’t taken up her reservation, but we had found the letter burned in her room before then.”

  “And you didn’t reply to the hotel,” Noel summed up, “or notify the police that your sister was missing?”

  “We knew where she was!” she answered defiantly.