by Jane Arbor
“It wasn’t a personal issue. It was a reflection on me professionally, and I supposed it would be cleared up sometime.”
“I see. You make it clear that my doubt of you held no real concern for you. I daresay I was wrong to suppose it might have done—”
At that Jess’s strung nerves tautened still further. What was he trying to make her say, and why? There were men, she knew, who could not resist turning any difference with a woman into a thing of thrust and counterthrust between male and female. But she had not thought of Muir as one of them. Instead she remembered her first hasty judgment of him—that he hated to lose or to be proved wrong. Had it been so hasty after all, when seemingly the same false self-esteem wanted to force her admission that he had the power to hurt her? More than anyone in the world, he had. But she must not let him know it.
She said, “You can suppose it—if it salves your pride to do so.”
“My pride?” he echoed incredulously. He was looking at her now as if he despised her.
Though she hated the impulse to stab him again she retorted, “Well, wasn’t it your pride that had to believe I cared deeply about failing you—not failing Castle, not failing my duty—just failing you?”
His eyes darkened ominously. On a dangerously quiet note he said, “No, it was not my pride.”
Afterward Jess could not have told whether, after that long, savage assault of his mouth upon hers, it was he who released her without another word or whether, panic-stricken, she had thrust back from him. She remembered only hearing his voice talking to the children in the kitchen beyond, answering their excited delight as he told them to put away their toys and to get their coats while she remained standing in the twilight of the front room, willing her pulses to quieten so that thought could take shape.
Why had he kissed her? And like that—not from love but angrily, as if he sought to purge himself of his contempt of her? If he had wanted her to understand anything gentle he meant by it he would have stayed with her, not allowing her shocked surprise to reject him utterly.
But he had left her, going straight to the children, not wanting to touch her nor to speak to her, except in everyday formalities, again.
When he and the children were ready to leave he had asked her if he could give her a lift back to her rooms. But she had replied that she would stay to tend the fires and to lay the tea table for Mrs. Castle and that, in any case, she had come down from the village by car. He had nodded and driven away. And then she was left to hour after hour of doubts, now and then stabbed with hope but more often with shamed self-questionings to which she had no answer.
No answer until the following day, when his note came, delivered by hand. It said no more than:
Dear Jess,
I came back yesterday to apologize for my unpardonable misjudgment of you. I felt that it was personal between us, but though it was you who insisted it was no more than professional, I realize now that you were right.
It remains for me only to hope you will forget another passage between us. Take it, please, that it was no more than the momentary expression of something—thwarted pride, no doubt—which I could not contain and think no more about it. I should not like it to make any difference to your friendship with Liane.
Sincerely, Muir Forester
She read it through twice, then tore the paper across and across and threw the pieces in the fire. If only the shame that engulfed her could be burned away as swiftly and finally! For this was the ultimate depth of any girl’s humiliation—to hope against all reason that the kiss of the man she loved carried some vital impulse only to find that he regretted and retracted it as an embarrassing memory.
Why had she allowed hope to creep in? For her heart’s defense from him she had been unyielding and unresponsive to his explanation of his doubt of her, and he had resented that. Why, then, had she supposed he could possibly want to kiss her except, possibly, as a final, baffled expression of the mastery that men sometimes craved over women? No, her first reaction—recoil from the loveless pressure of his lips—had been the true one. She had not hoped then, and there was no hope now...
At the heart of the fire the paper scraps curled, glowed once and dissolved in a feather of gray dust.
Edgar Bretton had been right when he had said the black frost was about to break. When it did and the wind changed, the rains came back, sweeping almost horizontally across the bleak, open country, stabbing and rattling upon windowpanes and swelling the little River Crane to an angry, boiling flood.
Between storms the old men of the parish gathered to peer over the coping of the stone bridge that spanned Crane-by-Sea’s main street, arguing over the height of the water and minding the time when it had been higher or lower than now and when, a generation ago, it had burst its banks and flooded some houses to a depth of several feet.
Down by Cranemouth harbor there were other enforced idlers—the fishermen whose herring boats lay high upon the shingle, waiting day after day for the gales to abate before they put to sea once more. Meanwhile, the rains brought their toll of sickness to the villages, and Jess found herself busier than ever.
On each of Dr. Gilder’s visiting days the office would be full of patients, and sometimes he and Jess had difficulty in getting through the work in time for her to make her visits afterward. They had been promised a temporary relief nurse, but none was yet available, and when Jess slid into bed each night she was almost too tired to think of anything but the day’s work that lay behind her, the morrow’s work in front.
One day she gave a lift to Petra Tempton-Burney, trudging back from Crane after delivering some early-hatched chicks. Petra confided that she was gradually getting rid of her poultry stock in readiness for their move to London when she went to college in the summer term.
“Mommy is looking forward to that part of it,” she said, adding wistfully, “I’m not. I shall miss the coast so.”
“Well, you’ve rather made it your own, haven’t you?” smiled Jess, thinking of the reedy Warrens that Petra knew from end to end and of the prospects of tide and sea weather that she could predict as well as the fishermen themselves.
“I suppose so,” she agreed. “I do know things about the sea that other people don’t always notice. For instance, the spring tides are going to be abnormally high this year.”
“How can you tell?”
“Partly by the way the seabirds congregate much farther inland than usual. And the wind drives up so much water that both flood and ebb levels are higher than I’ve ever seen them, with the peak tide yet to come.”
After dropping Petra, Jess drove slowly along the Cranemouth front on her way to her next call. The gale shrieked around the car, buffeting it from seaward with nagging persistence. Out toward the horizon a gray mass of water heaved and rolled. Soon it would be surging against the sturdy sea wall that was the foundation of the roadway she was driving on. She shivered suddenly, remembering the bright day in the summer when, just here, the soaring of her spirit had checked when she had heard Muir Forester’s name linked for the first time with Liane’s. Behind the bright wonder of that day, biding on its time, had lurked today’s threat of tempest, just as for her must have been lurking the threat of today’s despairs. But if the defense of the sea wall could hold, she supposed her own must—against all that fate could do to her.
All day the wind rose, daunting even the rain to no more than fitful, scurrying spurts, though torrents of it seemed to be gathered behind the wind, ready to sweep cascades of water from the heavens as soon as the gale eased.
Jess was out late as usual and was glad to plunge into the hot bath Mrs. Boss had prepared for her before having her late tea in front of the fire, clad in a woolen housecoat and slippers. Later, when the telephone rang she let Mrs. Boss answer it, hoping against hope that it would not be a message for her.
Mrs. Boss came in. “It’s all right, nurse. You don’t have to go out again. It’s Mr. Forester, calling to ask if Miss Hart is here with you. I sa
id no, but he’d rather like to speak to you.”
Liane out on such a night and Muir not to know where she was! No wonder he was worried, if there was no simple explanation of her absence. But Jess felt there must be, until she picked up the receiver and heard Muir saying that no one had known Liane was out until he had come home himself and had asked where she was. She had left no message as to where she was going or when she would be back, and though he had already contacted the Brettons and one or two other acquaintances of hers, no one had seen her.
“Has she ever done such a thing before?” asked Jess.
“Never, of course,” said Muir shortly.
“When was she last seen at home?”
“She and Mrs. Seacombe lunched together, and then she went to her room.”
“Has she taken the car?”
“I had it myself, and though the working jeep was in the garage I daresay you know what she felt about driving. But where did you think she might have taken the car to?”
“I was wondering whether she might have gone in to Starmouth—to a movie or something and had forgotten to leave a message for you. Or—” Jess was struck by the idea “—she could have walked over to Cranemouth to see Petra Tempton-Burney. Shall I phone Petra and find out?”
“Yes, do that if you will. Meanwhile, I’ll get Mrs. Seacombe to check what she was wearing. That might give a clue.”
They hung up, and as Jess dialed Petra’s number she had time to be grateful that urgency had banished embarrassment between herself and Muir. She had been dreading their first encounter.
At the other end of the line Mrs. Tempton-Burney’s drooping voice answered her. No, Miss Hart wasn’t there. Why should Nurse Mawney have thought she was? And Petra wasn’t in. She had begged to go down to the harbor to watch high tide, and she hadn’t come back yet, though she knew very well it was time for her mother’s evening hot milk. But of course Mrs. Tempton-Burney rarely looked for consideration for herself, so that she wasn’t disappointed when she didn’t get it. But here was Petra now, if Nurse Mawney would like to speak to her?
“Liane? No, I’ve seen nothing of her.” Petra was panting and breathless. She listened to Jess’s hurried explanation for her call, then begged her not to hang up while she saw that her mother went back to the fireside in the sitting room.
When she returned she said urgently, “I didn’t want mommy to hear this in case she worried, but Jess—if you’ve any idea at all that Liane could be down here, you’ve got to find her somehow!”
The urgency in the young voice chilled Jess’s blood. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“Well, things may be awfully serious before long, if the wind doesn’t drop and the tide goes on rising at its present rate. I went down to the harbor, you know, expecting a tide that topped the sea wall with its biggest waves, perhaps. But when I got there I couldn’t struggle within yards of the jetty, and the sea was across the roadway a foot deep and getting deeper. There wasn’t anyone about, but I woke up old Tingle—they go to bed awfully early, you know—and he woke up the other cottagers, and they are all standing by, expecting anything. But I had to come back, of course.”
“You mean there’s danger of the houses being flooded out?”
“More than that—if the people don’t get away in time,” said Petra gravely. “The front is already impassable, and it is raining in sheets now, though the wind hasn’t dropped at all. Jess—what do you think I ought to do about mommy?”
“Get her away at once if you can, if only for your own peace of mind,” advised Jess. “Your neighbors would help you, wouldn’t they?”
“Yes, I suppose so, though I’ll have to try not to alarm her. But about Liane—I’ve just had an awful thought. Do you remember how I told you about meeting her out on The Warrens? She—she wouldn’t have tried to get out there again, would she?”
Jess’s fingers tightened on the receiver. “She gave me her promise that she wouldn’t.”
“And she wouldn’t have broken it?”
Would she? Baffled, Jess realized that she did not know Liane well enough to say. That was the measure by which their friendship had failed. She just did not understand Liane anymore.
She hung up, promising to call Petra back when she had been in touch with Muir again.
She lifted the receiver again, then turned to see that Mrs. Boss was admitting Muir himself.
“You were a long time. I couldn’t wait,” he said abruptly. “Is there no news, then?”
“No news. Liane hasn’t been there.”
“Nor anywhere else. She is not a hospital casualty, and she is not at the club.”
He followed Jess as a matter of course into her sitting room, and one glance at him told her that she need not be concerned for the informality of her attire—for her bare feet in slippers, the snug homeliness of her housecoat, her hair, damply curling after her bath. Muir had no eyes nor thoughts for her—only for Liane and for the fears he had begun to face.
He went to stand by the fire, staring down into it. “Are there any possibilities that we haven’t explored?” he queried.
Jess answered the question with another. “What was she wearing? Have you found out?”
“Yes. Only her everyday tweed coat and no hat, unless she had a cap or scarf in her pocket. That indicates she didn’t mean to go far. But how could she possibly stay out on a night like this, unless she has met with an accident?” Muir paused, then turned to face Jess. “Well,” he said, “we’ve discussed it enough. Now it’s time for me to act, by instituting a search for her. I’ll call out Edgar Bretton, and we’ll muster what men we can. Meanwhile, have you any theory as to where we could begin looking—any haunts of hers that you know of?”
Jess took a grip upon herself. In a low voice she said, “I know that since Christmas she had discovered The Warrens and went for long walks there alone.”
“The Warrens!” Muir’s jaw tightened. “But she didn’t know them, and they’re dangerous! Why wasn’t I told? Or why wasn’t she warned?”
“She was. Petra met her out there more than once and warned her. Petra told me, and Liane promised me that she wouldn’t go out there by herself again.”
“But why should she have broken her promise? What peculiar fascination had The Warrens for her?”
“They are—lonely. And I think Liane has a great need to be alone sometimes,” said Jess.
Muir’s eyes searched her face. “That’s an extension of your idea that she has been hiding some unhappiness for fear of me. What do you know of her that I don’t?” Dared she tell him? Would Liane ever forgive her the betrayal of the secret that the girl had determined to live down in her own way? No, she had no right to do it. Unless—unless it was already too late for Liane to tell Muir herself.
“Well?” pressed Muir.
“I—I would rather you asked Liane.”
“You would rather I asked Liane!” He echoed the words in a savage bitterness that wrung her heart for him. “All right. I’ll ask her. But she has to be found first.” He looked at his watch. “High tide was an hour ago. We shall have to go out by boat, if we can get one to live in the sea that will be running in this gale.”
“I doubt if you will.”
“What do you mean?”
Quickly she told him of the conditions Petra had described. “I promised to call her back,” she added.
“Well, do that and find out what help they want, if any.”
He went with her to the telephone, stood by while she dialed the number.
There was no reply. The line was dead. She tried one or two other numbers in Cranemouth with the same result.
Muir said harshly, “Hang up, it’s no good. I must go and do what I can.”
On an impulse she could not resist, Jess laid a hand urgently upon his sleeve. “Let me come with you— Please!”
“It’s no night for a woman to be out!”
“Women are out in it now,” she reminded him. “Liane may be, too—”
“Then I must come with you! I can help!”
“Yes, there’ll be work for you now. How quickly can you change?”
She went to hurry into her uniform, a raincoat and boots, and rejoined him within a couple of minutes.
In the car she asked, “There’s no danger here in Crane-by-Sea, is there?”
“It depends on whether the banks of the Crane hold, I’d say. But there should be reasonable warning if danger does threaten. Meanwhile—” he glanced briefly at her “—I’m glad of the fate that takes you to Quintains. I’d rather you were there than anywhere, and at least I shall know where you are.”
She told herself the words expressed no more than a simple, matter-of-fact concern for her safety, but they set a glow in her heart. She had so little to cherish!
He went on, “I shall drop you at the house and then make my way down to Cranemouth as best I can. They want every able-bodied man on the job of rescue, and I must report.”
“And—Liane?”
“She will be found. She must be found.” It was a desperate hope, rather than conviction, that spoke in his voice. He went on. “I’m telling myself that she can’t possibly have disappeared without a trace. Someone must have seen her—somewhere. I want you to ask everyone—anyone—who comes up to Quintains from Cranemouth.” They were silent, each guarding their doubts from the other. Above the purr of the car engine the wind boomed and racketed. But it still could not outshout the distant roar of the sea—a sea turned enemy against a whole countryside, pounding fear into more hearts than theirs.
CHAPTER NINE
That night the lighted windows and the open door of Quintains were to beckon many people to safety and the long-weathered shelter of its roof.
