Nurse in Waiting

by Jane Arbor

  No one spoke, respecting the moment in which he and his heritage were together. Then suddenly, as if she could control herself no longer, Shuan stumbled forward to fall upon her knees at the side of his chair and to burst into a storm of sobs.

  Startled, he looked down at her bent head. Mrs. Carnehill cried: “Shuan—don’t distress Roger!” But it was Joanna who stooped to put an arm about the sobbing girl in order to draw her to her feet.

  Evidently Shuan did not know what she was doing, for she turned her bent head to hide it upon Joanna’s shoulder and went on crying softly.

  Joanna kept her arm about her while she urged softly: “Shuan, we know how much it has mattered to you. But it’s all right now. You simply can’t give way like this when all along you’ve been so brave!”

  Shuan did not answer, being occupied, like a child, in controlling her tears. When she lifted her head at last she stood irresolutely by Joanna’s side, smiling tremulously down at Roger, who summoned an enormous wink and a grimace.

  Then Dr. Beltane strode firmly across to her, took her round the waist.

  “Now you, my gosson,” he ordered, “are going to take me round to the stables to find Michael. There’s a small matter of a gasket in my car—”

  She turned obediently. When they had gone Mrs. Carnehill said: “She is overwrought, poor child. She has minded so much—too much.”

  And Roger, who had sometimes appeared impatient of or embarrassed by Shuan’s extravagances of expression, said with unexpected gentleness: “Bless her. She’d have stood it all for me if she’d been able—and more besides.”

  During the brief hour or two of his permitted outing there was only one other discordant note. And that was when Justin McKiley came striding up from the Dower House.

  The two men looked at each other. Then upon a light note Justin said:

  “Congratulations, old man. ‘Monarch of all you survey’ again at last?”

  “Thanks,” said Roger coldly. “I hope so!”

  And the hostility between them was something which could almost be felt.

  That night Shuan went to bed early, leaving Mrs. Carnehill and Joanna alone together after dinner.

  Presently Mrs. Carnehill went on her nightly visit to Roger, and when she returned Joanna thought she looked oddly tired and distressed.

  “Mrs. Carnehill, you’ve taken a lot of strain,” said Joanna gently. “May I pour you some more coffee?—it’s still hot. Or would you rather go to bed with a sedative which I could mix for you?”

  Roger’s mother turned strangely haunted eyes upon her. “No,” she said. “I’m all right.” But the emptily twisting hands in her lap belied her words.

  “You are worried about Mr. Carnehill?” Joanna sat down beside her. “There’s no need—”

  “Not about his condition. Not any more. But, oh, Joanna, you’ve not an idea at all of the way I’ve hoped for and prayed for and—dreaded this day—!”

  “Dreaded?” The word had a secret echo in Joanna’s own heart. But she must not think of that now...

  “Yes. I’ve known it had to come. Already he is asking questions—and I can’t put off the answering of them any longer. He insists now on having an account of our stewardship—mine and Justin’s. And—and that’s something that I can scarcely bear to tell him!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  There was silence in the room, broken only by the ticking of the grandfather clock and the intermittent creak of an old tree beyond the window.

  Joanna said gently, laying her hand upon the older woman’s: “I think I’ve known for a long time that there was something you were unhappy about. Would it help to tell me more?”

  Mrs. Carnehill withdrew one of her hands in order to twist restlessly at the string of pearls round her throat. “Yes—yes. I suppose it would. I’ve been so worried. Though it isn’t as if—as if anyone had done anything wrong, d’you understand—?” she said rather pitifully.

  “You mean you’ve been worried about the way the estate’s affairs have gone since your son’s accident? Is that it?”

  “Yes. It has been going downhill ever since then. There’s never enough money now for anything—look at the state of the park wall, and the stables are just as bad—And yet market prices haven’t altered much, so I just don’t know why! And all Justin says is that it’s ‘inevitable’ or that it’s ‘just a passing fluctuation’. He doesn’t try to make it very clear, and I’m afraid I’m rather stupid.”

  “Well, perhaps it is inevitable,” suggested Joanna thoughtfully. “The place had a complete change of management when Mr. McKiley took over.”

  Mrs. Carnehill clutched at the idea as at a straw. “Yes. That’s what I hoped it might be. But”—doubtfully—“that ought to have righted itself by now, wouldn’t you think? Justin has been in charge for two years. Even with his different methods—”

  “Yes, you’d think so,” agreed Joanna. “Besides, I suppose you have auditors? You—you don’t suspect anything wrong—really wrong, I mean?”

  “No. What would there be? Justin’s accounts are all right. It’s simply that Carrieghmere doesn’t seem to pay its way any more.”

  “But if this is so,” urged Joanna, “oughtn’t you to have let Mr. Carnehill know? The place is his, and I believe that for a long time he has been anxious to take back at least some of his responsibilities towards it. You’ve known it too, haven’t you?”

  “Yes—only too well. But, you see, in the beginning Justin had to take over completely—they wouldn’t let me bring to Roger anything which might have worried him. Then, later, I did not want to consult him lest it should bring on a relapse. Later still, I haven’t wanted him to guess at all what has been happening. I’ve known how antagonistic he and Justin are to each other and I haven’t dared to let things come to a real clash between them, for we couldn’t afford to lose Justin while Roger was so ill. So I’ve encouraged Justin to give him only general reports, hoping from month to month that things would right themselves. But they didn’t. And because I couldn’t sell anything—pictures or furniture or silver—without Roger’s consent, I had to try to make money in the only way open to me—”

  “By your journalism?” asked Joanna.

  “Yes. And Roger has made no secret of how he has hated that. But I was lucky. I had been dabbling in it for a long time as a hobby, and when the need arose I was fortunate enough to get several regular commissions. The money has helped a lot, but you do see why I’ve never been able to meet Roger’s arguments against it? The alternative would have been to sell things which ultimately he would have missed., These, for instance”—again her fingers strayed to her pearls—“which are Carnehill heirlooms and which I couldn’t part with.”

  “You could have told him the truth,” said Joanna slowly. “He wouldn’t have blamed you.” For the first time she understood that which had struck her most forcibly about Carrieghmere—its strange mixture of past luxury and present poverty which had once seemed inexplicable. It had a past which Roger Carnehill remembered and believed in. Its present in alien hands, was something quite different. And yet—so well had she come to know him lately—she felt confident that he would accept the new facts as a challenge rather than with useless regret or impotent anger.

  Mrs. Carnehill was saying: “Blame, is it? Would I have cared about his blame if I had thought that to tell him would not set him back hopelessly from recovery—?”

  “That was earlier,” Joanna reminded her gently. “Now it can’t hurt him physically to learn that he will be returning to something different from that which he left. In fact, now he must be told. For very soon he will be able to get about and see for himself.”

  “Yes, I realize that,” said the older woman wretchedly. “But it’s the harder for having put it off for so long—”

  “I think—I could tell him,” put in Joanna. “In fact, he will scarcely need telling. For I believe—he knows.”

  “He knows?”

  “ ‘Guesses’ might have been
a better word. For a long time he has worried more about what has been kept from him than he could have done over the truth, Mrs. Carnehill. Forgive my saying this now. Perhaps you feel I should have said it before, but until you spoke to me I couldn’t very well interfere.”

  Mrs. Carnehill looked at her gratefully. “Bless you, Joanna,” she said. “I wish I’d had a daughter like you! D’you mean you’d prepare him for the facts which Justin and I will have to put before him sooner or later?”

  “Yes. If he needs ‘preparation’—which I doubt. Lately we’ve talked about a lot of things—among them, the picking up of threads, the re-shouldering of responsibility. In certain moods he dreads the thought; in others, increasingly as he gets stronger, he is ready to face anything that lies in front. You see, in the past he has been hurt and bewildered by your reluctance to share the worst with him; by contrast the future is his oyster for the opening. And when the time comes he won’t be afraid to accept what he finds.”

  A note of quiet, confident belief in Roger’s character had crept into Joanna’s voice as she spoke. She did not know that something else shone behind her eyes—something which Mrs. Carnehill, watching her, vaguely sensed, but as yet did not understand. She said again: “Bless you!” And then added, half-enviously but without bitterness: “Almost I could believe that you know my own son better than I do myself!”

  Joanna did not answer. She did not know herself how it was that she could speak so confidently of Roger’s reactions to a future she would not be there to see. She knew now that, for a different reason from his mother’s, she too had dreaded this day—the day that marked the first step towards his needing her no more. In the re-blossoming of Carrieghmere under his guidance there would be no room for Nurse Joanna Merivale of London. As a “case” she would have done with Roger Carnehill; she would have had to learn to forget him—as a man.

  For a moment the thought meant nothing to her reason. It was her heart which took the significance of it in a cold spear-thrust of pain. For the heart has no weapon and no armor—only its own great capacity for fulfilment. And fulfilment, Joanna knew in that instant of revelation, was something which she must deny herself for ever. She had come to Carrieghmere upon prosaic duty. When she left it she would go, knowing that she had come to love Roger for himself alone and that the dulling pulse of time would bring forgetfulness.

  As in a dream she heard Mrs. Carnehill saying anxiously: “Joanna—you’ve gone suddenly white! We work you too hard to be sure! But we’ve come to lean upon you so much—all of us! But you must take things more easily now. Presently, as Roger gets stronger, you’ll be able to begin to enjoy Carrieghmere—”

  The bland assumption that for a long time to come she would be there to “enjoy” the place was something with which Joanna longed with every fibre to agree. But through dry lips she said:

  “Soon there’ll be no need for my staying on any longer. Time, then, will be all the nursing Mr. Carnehill will need. Dr. Beltane will judge, of course. But—a week or two, perhaps—” (That was the brief measure of bitter-sweetness left to her still. A week or two more. And then—nothing.)

  Mrs. Carnehill was protesting; “Oh, no! Longer than that. You’ll stay on as our guest if necessary, Joanna. Your matron would permit that, surely?”

  Joanna shook her head and sought refuge in the excuses she would make if she really wanted to bring a case to its appropriate end.

  “I’m afraid not. You see, from my reports Matron will know approximately when I may be booked for another patient. She couldn’t hope to run a nursing home at all if we were allowed a complete elasticity of time on each case. Dr. Beltane will tell Matron when I may be spared. Then—I must go.”

  A trace of the Carnehill petulance which she knew so well in Roger hardened the older woman’s mouth for a moment. “And supposing,” she asked rather sharply, “Roger takes badly the things I have told you tonight? Supposing the news sets him back a long way?”

  “Physically,” said Joanna decisively, “it can hardly do that any more. And even if it were a shock to him—and I doubt that—it would not be to me that he would turn. Rather to you—or to—to Shaun. Anyway, to his own people.”

  Something stronger than her own will, something which impelled her to probe her own pain, had forced Shuan’s name to her lips. To plead the girl’s cause with his mother was indirectly to serve him, she felt. For, loving him as she did, Shuan might show him the way to happiness in the end.

  But Mrs. Carnehill said rather bitterly: “You forget. I kept the truth from him. He will hardly trust me. As for Shuan—she is only a child!”

  And Joanna was left to reflect upon the strange alchemy which could, for instance, allow the older woman to know that René Menden loved Shuan, yet hid from her the fact that the girl—“only a child”—might herself love and suffer to the same degree.

  Though there was now a magic in simply being with him, in the days which followed Joanna often found it difficult to meet Roger’s eyes and to keep her hitherto disciplined hands from trembling as they went about their prosaic tasks. But in the end it was the very discipline of her profession which told her that for as long as Roger Carnehill had need of her skill she must give it as freely and as impersonally as ever. Other women before her had surely come to love where they had served, as she had done. And was not her very pain part of the pattern of the ecstasy of loving which she had longed to know?

  Even so, discipline found it difficult to control every movement of her hands, her eyes, every inflection of her voice during those awkward days. And though she told herself it might be her imagination, Roger himself seemed to have changed. As he grew stronger and able to do more things for himself he took on a new dignity which seemed no longer to need to armor itself against the world by an indulgence in caprice and self-pity. Roger Carnehill, returning slowly to man’s estate, was above all things a man...

  Once, when they sat together on the terrace and she had supposed him to be reading, she looked up quickly to find his eyes deeply concentrated upon her face. Momentarily there seemed to be in them a question...

  “That is how,” had flashed a swift arrow of thought through her mind, “he may some day look at the woman he loves.” But today it could have been only a cruel trick of light or shadow which had put that depth of feeling into a casual glance. For in the next instant he had raised his eyebrows, looked away, and made an indifferent remark.

  As she had expected, he took the tale of Carrieghmere’s difficulties without surprise, almost without dismay.

  He said only: “I’ve known for a long time, of course, that Mother has been hiding something—for my sake, as she thought, poor dear. Though why she couldn’t have given me a hint before the thing became a landslide—”

  “At first they wouldn’t let her,” Joanna pointed out. “Then I suppose it began to look like gross mismanagement, and inasmuch as it was that, she felt she had let you down.”

  “If it’s mismanagement, that’s McKiley’s pigeon,” argued Roger with a new grim set to his lips. “If Mother had only let me at him—!”

  “But that, for good or ill is something which, all along, she has tried to avoid—a clash between the two of you, which would have meant that Justin McKiley would have to go. She believed it best to let matters go on, hoping they would right themselves as he assured her they would, and trying to close the gap in her own way.”

  “M’m.” It was typical of the new Roger that, even to Joanna, he would no longer indulge in irritable criticism of Mrs. Carnehill’s work. For a moment there was silence. Then he snapped: “How well have you come to know McKiley since you’ve been here?”

  The abruptness of the question so took Joanna aback that she flushed and stammered almost guiltily: “N-not very well. Why?”

  “But you’ve come to know something of him?” he persisted. “Joanna”—there was almost a note of pleading in his voice where earlier there would have been truculence—“there’s no need to continue indefinitely t
he ‘Tell Roger nothing theory, you know!”

  Because she dared not defend herself as she would have wished, Joanna could only say evenly: “I’m not keeping anything from you. I don’t know Mr. McKiley very well. He has been to dinner with Mrs. Carnehill and the rest of us several times. He drove me back from Dublin on the day I went with you to the nursing home. And on—another occasion he took me in and brought me out from Dublin. Once I went to a party of his at the Dower House—”

  “You did? I didn’t know that?”

  “You weren’t here. It was on the first day I mentioned. He gave me lunch at the Sheldon, drove me home and asked me on the way to go to the party in the evening.”

  “And you went?”

  “Yes. It was just an ordinary cocktail affair—”

  “I see.” There was a world of withheld comment in his tone, but just what such comment referred to Joanna could not guess.

  There was a pause. When Roger spoke again it was with a studied lightness that he said:

  “Well, it took Justin to introduce us to the cocktail party here at Carrieghmere! In my day we went in for something more robust in the way of entertainment. We shall again—” Then he went on more seriously: “Joanna, don’t you see that I’ve got to try to be just to the fellow, if only for Mother’s sake, because she believes that he is doing his best? But also, very soon. I’ve got to try to find what he has been doing with my affairs. For more than two years he has been free to fell my timber, sell my stock, rule my tenants, and conduct a private life about which I know very little. I realize that the last is my concern only so far as it may affect the rest. But if I find it does affect the rest—”

  “You mean,” said Joanna slowly, “that you think he may have been using his position at Carrieghmere in some way?”