A Case of Heart Trouble (8 page)

Matron looked both shocked and pained.

“My dear Nurse Drew, if the child’s mother was alive do you think that Dr. Loring would be calling in an outsider? His daughter is not ill ... she merely requires someone to be with her and take charge of her, preferably someone young like yourself; and of course your nursing experience will be an advantage. That and the fact that you know Loring Court.

“B-but—but ... ” Dallas was stammering hopelessly. “But I don’t understand! I was quite sure that I met Mrs. Loring while I was at Loring Court. She came there. ... ”

Matron began to look impatient.

“You must be referring to his sister-in-law, Mrs. Roger Loring. She and the late Mrs. Martin Loring were sisters—twins—and in case you’re confusing a photograph they were very much alike. Mrs. Martin Loring, however, died nearly four years ago. I do hope you were not indiscreet enough to let the doctor know you imagined his sister-in-law was his wife! ”

“No, no, of course not.” But Dallas was only aware of one thing . . . Martin Loring was not marrie d, and when he took his recent trip to the Bahamas it was not a honeymoon trip! If she’d gone to tea in Harley Street six weeks ago she would not have found herself confronted by a confident, smiling wife . . . She could have had a cosy chat with Aunt Letty, who must have thought it extremely odd that she was adamant in her refusal to be taken back to Harley Street, and wondered in what way she had offended the sensitive Nurse Drew! Extraordinary over-sensitive, she must have thought, or merely ungrateful and rude!

There came a light tap on the door, and Dr. Loring himself entered. He glanced, with a slight smile on his face, at Dallas.

“So I’ve arrived at precisely the right moment,” he observed. “Sister Kenton has just been taking me on the rounds, but I thought I’d look in here before I left, Matron, and find out whether you’d had a word with Nurse Drew. And lo and behold, Nurse Drew is here in person! ”

Dallas could almost feel the criticism in his look as it roved over her, and she realized he was not entirely impressed by her appearance. She also sensed something else in the way he looked at her ... a kind of enquiry, as if he was by no means sure she had fallen in at once with the proposition put to her by Matron.

“Well, Nurse?” he said, his head a little on one side, his eyes oddly inscrutable as they met and held hers. “Can I take it that you will not let me down? I’m depending on you, you know!”

Dallas looked away, concentrating on the bowl of flowers on Matron’s desk.

“No, Doctor, I won’t let you down,” she replied, a trifle huskily.

“Good!” he exclaimed quietly, softly. He turned to Matron. “Then Nurse Drew can be released immediately, is that it, Matron? She’ll require a day in which to make her preparations, and I’d like to leave early in the morning. This time,” he said to Dallas, “we shall do the journey in a day. It’s simple when you’re not an invalid.”

And he most certainly was not an invalid any longer. She had the feeling that he was bursting with vigor, lean, hard, tanned and fit . . . with nothing about him to remind her of the man who had been so dependent on her once.

For the rest of the day she went about in a daze, hardly believing in her good fortune. Or was it good fortune, when her feelings had not changed for the man who was to employ her for several months? And he had said, casually, that he would probably require her services for several months . . . and there would be no need for her to wear uniform. He made this clear in Matron’s office. It would be better for his daughter if her companion was someone she could look upon as a kind of elder sister, rather than someone connected with the nursing profession. And as Matron agreed without any hesitation Dallas went round putting her uniform dresses and aprons away carefully before attempting to pack her ordinary everyday clothes.

Once more she came in for envy, but this time some of the looks she received were friendly.

“It’ll do you good, Dallas,” her particular friend said, when they said goodbye overnight. “You’ve been looking pretty peaked for weeks now, and I’m surprised Matron hasn’t done something about you long before this. We all thought you ought to have had a longer period of sick leave.” “Oh, I’m perfectly fit now,” Dallas declared; but Dr. Loring didn’t think she was perfectly fit, and he told her so the following day.

She was wearing a warm tweed coat lightly flecked with green, and her golden cap of hair swung lightly on her shoulders. Normally she wore it twisted into a kind of little knot in the nape of her neck when she was wearing her uniform cap, but now it was flowing free and it had a pale primrose beauty in the morning light. Dr. Loring frowned at it at first, said she ought to wear a hat or a headscarf until the frosty chill died out of the atmosphere, and she obligingly produced a headscarf from her pocket and tied it under her chin.

“That’s better,” he said. He touched the green tweed coat. “At least this is warm. You’d better put that window up on your side, and tell me if you feel a draft at any time. We’ll stop for some coffee in about an hour. By that time we should be well clear of London.”

She lay back against the warm scarlet upholstery and sighed. The cream car was so superbly comfortable, there was a thick plaid rug over her knees; she took pleasure in watching Dr. Loring’s lean brown hands on the wheel, and she still couldn’t believe in her good luck in leaving London.

“You mustn’t treat me as if I’m fragile, Doctor,” she remarked, after his display of concern for her

well-being. “I’m a Cockney, you know, and Cockneys are notoriously tough.”

“Some of them may be, but you are not,” he replied, almost curtly. His hand came out and rested lightly on her knee. “I want to offer you an apology, Dallas, for that last day at Loring—that day when you had tea with my cousin. If I hadn’t been in such a devil of a temper I wouldn’t have allowed you to be despatched so summarily back to London. It was the wrong time of year for you, I

had other plans for you, and—”

“Yes?” she said, quietly, waiting for him to go on. “Why did you dash off that day without giving me any warning that you intended to stay away for lunch, and not get back until five o’clock?” he

asked curiously.

She looked down at her gloved hands, lightly clutching one another in her lap.

“I ... I think it was the arrival of your visitor,” she explained, at last. “She said she was Mrs. Loring, and I thought she was your wife, and I —I thought you would want to be alone with her.” “I— see,” he commented. There was silence for a moment, and then he asked: “But you know now that she was not my wife?”

“Yes.” She glanced at him for a moment, and then away. “Matron told me yesterday.”

“Only yesterday?” He was watching the road ahead very carefully. “That day you went to Oldthorpe what did you do, apart from have tea with my cousin?”

“I—I wandered about. There wasn’t very much to do.”

“But you preferred wandering about in an aimless fashion to meeting the woman you thought was my wife again at lunch? And perhaps hearing that she was going to stay on for a few days?”

“Y-yes.” She bit her lip, moistened it with the tip of her tongue, and kept her eyes glued to the window on her side of the car.

“And did it never strike you as odd that I didn’t mention a wife to you before?” His tone was a little

dry. “What did you think I had done with her? Did you think we were separated?”

“I suppose. I thought something of the kind.”

“Hence the smack on the face that time when I kissed you?”

She glanced round at him swiftly, and her face turned brilliantly, revealingly pink.

“I’ve already apologized more than once for smacking your face.”

“Yes, you have.” His tone was now queerly, quietly content. “And in addition you practically shed tears over me at the time! I’ve never forgotten how extraordinarily bright those tears looked welling up in your green eyes, Dallas! And one of them splashed over and ran down on to your hand! ”

“D-did it?” she said, and looked down at the hand, now encased in a suede glove.

“Yes. I ought to have saluted the hand as a sign that hostilities were over between us, oughtn't I?” glancing at her sideways and smiling at her with a gentleness that actually shook her. “Only fortunately they weren’t over, for not much more than a week afterwards I was calmly agreeing to your packing your bags and returning to London. And I went off on a boring jaunt to the Bahamas! ”

“But it did you a wonderful amount of good,” she declared speaking swiftly, but still not daring to look properly at him. “You were completely fit when you got back to London. You’re obviously wonderfully fit now! ”

“And you, my poor little one, are not at all robust.” He sounded very sober all at once. “I had a word with Dr. Crawthorne, who has been keeping a check on you, and he says there’s nothing really seriously wrong with you, but you do need looking after. You had a virus infection, on top of which you nearly, but not quite, developed pneumonia, and it’s left you with a tendency to pick up chills more readily than you would do normally. You need cosseting for a bit, it was certainly necessary to get you out of London, and the strain of nursing was too much for you. You and Stephanie will be very good for one another.”

She heard herself laugh suddenly, a little unsteadily.

“I was beginning to wonder, Doctor, whether there really was a Stephanie to take charge of,” she confessed. “Or whether, perhaps, you had invited a need for someone to look after her.”

“Oh, no, there’s a Stephanie all right. And she can do with a few weeks’ running wild on the moors. But I don’t mind admitting,” his tone and his look suddenly intensely serious, “that if there hadn’t been a Stephanie I would have got you out of London somehow or other. It was my fault that you returned to it when you did, and therefore it was up to me to get you away from it again.” “But I had to return to London sooner or later,’' she protested. “After all, my work is there.”

“Is it?” He had slowed the car to a mere crawl, and suddenly she met his eyes. She felt as if her whole inner being gave a tremendous bound, and the color that rushed up into her face was the lovely, glowing color resulting from an extraordinary sensation of relief. “A part of your life, perhaps, but not your work! Not necessarily your work. ... ”

They drove under the arch of an old-world inn, and he said that this was the place where they would have their coffee.

“And, reverting to the subject of my wife,” he continued, as he helped her to alight, “my wife died over three years ago. I have no other wife—or wives.” He smiled slightly. “Not yet.”

It was quite dark when they arrived at Loring Court, and Dallas

was glad that she was able to make out the twisted Tudor chimneys, and the rosy red brick of the facade in the gentle grey dusk that was enveloping it like a mantle. The evening star shone brightly above one of the chimneys, and as they turned in at the gates and streaked up the drive she caught the shimmer of a still sheet of water as they flashed past the lake.

On their way across the moor she had been straining her eyes for a first sight of Loring. Now she felt that she had come home.

Mrs. Baxter, the housekeeper, welcomed them in the hall. She explained that Miss Stephanie was upstairs in the old schoolroom, that had been opened up for her. Edith, the young housemaid, was for the moment in charge of her.

“And my aunt caught her train all right this morning?” Dr. Loring asked.

“Oh, yes, sir. Foulkes drove her to the station, and saw her settled in her compartment. He said she was quite looking forward to the journey.”

“Isn’t Mrs. Loring here?” Dallas asked, suddenly realizing that the one person she had been looking forward to meeting was not there to receive her.

Martin Loring smiled down at her. His expression was a trifle odd, but it was also smiling.

“No, I’m afraid she isn’t,” he said. “She had an urgent appeal from an old friend to spend a couple of weeks with her in the South of France, and she’s gone off to join her. So I’m afraid tonight you’ll have to dine alone with me. Which will probably be rather dull for you! ”

C H A P T E R E I G H T

EDITH had put Stephanie to bed, so Dallas decided not to disturb her that night. She found that she and the child were in a wing of the house that was strange to her, and Dr. Loring had, apparently, resumed occupancy of his old quarters.

She changed into a fine wool dress for the evening, and went down to dinner when the gong sounded. Dr. Loring was in the hall when she crossed it on her way to the dining room, and he smiled swiftly at the sight of her.

“This is like old times,” he said. “I wonder whether you realize how often I’ve thought of that month you spent here? How often I wonder how you ever put up with me, and why I didn’t turn your hair grey at times! ”

“You were a very good patient, really,” she told him, wishing her pulses didn’t bound so uncontrollably whenever he appeared within a

few feet of her. “In fact, in many ways you were an exemplary patient.”

He opened the door of the library, and suggested they have a drink before dinner.

“I’ve asked Mrs. Baxter to keep it back for ten minutes,” he said. “She’s an amiable soul, and she didn’t really mind.”

The library, to Dallas’s bemused eyes, looked everything a room so named ought to be. She had tried to recall it often in the weeks that had intervened since that last stormy interview that had preceded her sudden return to London, but somehow it had never materialized satisfyingly for her benefit. The logs blazing on the wide hearth, the deep leather chairs, the books in their colorful bindings. . . . She had seen all those at intervals; but the atmosphere of the room so much favored by Martin Loring himself, the solid snugness of it, the smell of it—the smell of cigarette smoke and the occasional odd cigar the owner of Loring smoked when he was

feeling particularly relaxed, the slightly musty odor of ancient books, and even the leather of the chairs— these things had defeated her.

The only thing she remembered about the smell of the library at Loring was the heavy odor of a woman’s perfume hanging about it; and now that she knew it was the perfume used by the doctor’s sister-in-law she wouldn’t have minded at all if it had been hanging about it still.