Nurse with a Dream
Page 20
“I’m sorry for him, that’s all. But he’ll be all right eventually. Phyllis is a nice girl, and if she doesn’t make the most of the opportunity Fate has thrown into her lap, she doesn’t deserve him. Guy didn’t love me, I’m sure. Not the me inside my skin. He was in love with an idea.”
“Our work is done here, my sweet. Come into the wood.” Arm linked in arm, they left the cobbled yard and the old dark house. In the wood birds were fluting and chittering. They walked on a soft carpet of needles.
“Those people, with their needs and weakness, interrupted our very first kiss.”
She smiled up into his eyes, a soft invitation. “So they did, Alan.”
“That is how it will be—always. Our tenderest, our most important moments—humanity will barge in and interrupt. Are you prepared for that? Will you always understand—and know that I love you best and dearest; that you are of all beings most important to me?”
“After to-day—yes, I will. I’ll always say ‘Lord, he whom Thou lovest is sick’—and I won’t resent your leaving me, because I’ll know you will come back.”
He stroked her soft hair and, cupping her face in his hand, gazed into her steady eyes. “I don’t deserve all this love. I’ve done nothing to earn it. Yet here it is, poured out so generously, for me, I am the richest man alive.”
“I am rich, too. Perhaps nobody ever really deserves love. It’s a bonus!”
“Your soul looks out of your eyes, my darling. I love the ‘me’ under your skin—the pilgrim soul in you.” He hesitated. “Tell me something—if you care to. Why exactly did you get engaged to Guy? I know it was because Deborah pressed you, but what made you do it? What made you give in to her? You’re not weak or suggestible, and you’re capable of giving Deborah as good as she gave. So why?”
She studied him quizzically. “Don’t you really know?”
“When we spoke about it earlier, I was too eager to find out if I had a chance with you. But you said it was ‘nothing’—which means something, of course. And I asked if she was blackmailing you, and you said—”
He stepped back and a light broke over his face. “Glory be,” he said under his breath. “You did it for me! The blind fool I’ve been! Oh, Jacky, my little white darling—I ought to kneel at your feet and ask forgiveness. There I was, yapping about my love for you, and asking if you could possibly love me—when you’d been willing to sacrifice your own happiness to save my reputation. You never even waited to see if it was really necessary—you just plunged in, in your impulsive, warm-hearted way.” He was suddenly too deeply moved to speak, and turned his head away.
“It was necessary. Diana Lovell was going to spread a funny story about it. Alan Broderick and his little blonde nurse. She was going to tease you about it at the Club—unmercifully, she said. She told me so, her own self. Getting engaged to Guy was the perfect way of killing that story stone dead.”
“Not the perfect way. The perfect way was getting engaged to me. And now you have. We are engaged, aren’t we? And I don’t intend to wait for you—at least not very long. I’m going to fly to France and ask your grandfather for your hand in marriage.”
Her eyes shone with happiness. “He’d appreciate that. How dear of you to think of it. It’s old-fashioned and charming, and makes me feel cherished and somehow precious.”
“So you are. And may I remind you we haven’t kissed properly yet.” He held her closely, kissed her deeply and long, and this time there was no interruption. Only the soft sigh of the wind in the tree-tops and the fluting of birds in spring.
“There will always be people,” he said at last. “Sick people, cruel people, demanding people—and, of course, our friends. We shall never belong to each other wholly, because we can’t put ourselves in a glass case like a French clock. But they will not destroy our love.”
Her voice was shaken with tenderness, with laughter and delight. “A glass case is for a princess in a fairy story. Our love is real, because we are real people. No, they will not destroy our love, my dearest heart.”
He took her hand and led her out of the wood; to whatever awaited them of happiness and grief, pain, joy and fulfilment, work and duty. And because they had the precious gift of love and trusted each other utterly, their hands clung together and they were not afraid of the future.