Strange Recompense (18 page)

“It was rather a shock to me, too, as you can very well imagine,” she told them. “One doesn’t exactly expect this sort of thing, but I suppose I should be hardened to odd life histories by this time. These sort of stories keep cropping up, don’t they? It must have been pretty hard on Jess Marrick, though.”

Noel looked at her as if he had not heard.

“The Marricks must be brought down here,” he said. “A meeting with her family may revive Anna’s memory in a second or two.”

Sara smiled.

“You’re going to have plenty of trouble convincing Abraham Marrick that he should accept his daughter again,” she said.

Noel regarded her coldly.

“Whatever you believe Anna has done, Sara,” he said, “you will admit that it is still our duty to see her through this and to enlist all the help that is necessary.”

“I can’t believe Anna would do what you say!” Ruth declared stoutly. “She wouldn’t do a thing like that—she’s not capable of hurting a fly!”

“You must both be quite mad!” Sara exclaimed, unable to curb her anger any longer. “How can you go on trusting a girl like that? Or are you both so completely blinded by her charm that you just won’t see!”

Ruth rose to her feet.

“I don’t think we are so easily blinded as all that, Sara,” she said stiffly.

Sara turned in Noel’s direction, ignoring the girl she had called her friend.

“What do you intend to do?” she asked.

“See Anna Marrick through this—to the best of my ability,” he answered as he strode past her through the open window and out into the garden.

“I wouldn’t have believed Noel could have been such a fool!” Sara exclaimed, anger having the upper hand now. “He’s running right into trouble by trusting that girl in the way he does!”

Ruth’s hands were trembling as she began to gather up the untouched tea-things.

“It’s not a question of trust, Sara,” she said, keeping her voice from rising on a note of angry contempt by a tremendous effort: “Noel must look at this entirely from the medical angle now, and his one clear duty is to follow up this clue of yours and restore Anna’s memory by returning her to her people.”

“Noel can try to bring old Marrick down here if he likes,” Sara sneered, “but he’ll be a master of persuasion if he succeeds! From what I saw of him he was a man who would not easily be swayed once his mind had been made up, and he certainly had no use for his younger daughter. If Anna proves to be that daughter—and I fail to see how even the most biased mind could have believed otherwise now!—she will have a good deal of explaining to d
o
all round.”

“We can hardly sit in judgment,” Ruth said briefly. “Somehow, Sara, I still have the utmost confidence in that girl.”

Nonplussed by this unexpected attitude, Sara turned angrily away, finding nothing to say in the face of Ruth’s continuing trust, but trying to console herself with the belief that they would emerge doubly disappointed in the end. For every gesture of faith there would be a detail of Anna Marrick’s past to counteract it, and the beginning would be Abraham Marrick’s refusal to accept his daughter into his home again.

Sara went off to the nurses home in high dudgeon, although her curiosity would not allow her to stay there for long.

From one of the top windows overlooking the garden she saw Noel leave the villa twenty minutes later and go in the direction of the hospital and, her heart pounding heavily with unsuppressed jealousy, she imagined him going straight to Anna.

Noel did seek Anna out, but with far less confidence than Sara had given him credit for. Shaken by the story he had just heard, he was far from accepting it in detail, yet it held much of the elements of truth in so far as names were linked and Alnborough could well be the incompleted word of Anna’s painful efforts at remembrance. With fine contempt he discounted the greater part of Sara’s story as a jumble of inconsequential facts. The main point remained to establish contact between these people and the girl he loved, and to do it with the least possible hurt to Anna herself.

He found her struggling with the intricacies of the typewriter keyboard, which she had set out to master while he was away, and she jumped up in surprise at sight of him, the swift color mounting to her cheeks as their eyes met.

“You’ve got the job!” she said, her confidence in him as sure as Sara’s had been but infinitely more pleasing to his ears. “I knew you would. Oh, Noel! I’m so glad, and Ruth will be so very proud!”

“I suppose so,” he smiled. “How has Tranby been treating you while I’ve been away?”

The impulse to take her in his arms was almost more than he could withstand, and he fumbled for his pipe and filled it while he glanced at the accumulated letters on his desk.

“He’s been very busy with you away,” Anna told him, “and that means I’ve been kept fairly busy, too.” Her eyes were raised suddenly to his, a deep anxiety of pleading in their depths. “There’s been nothing else, Noel—no remembering. I’m sorry.
”

He took a quick turn about the room before he came to stand beside her.

“Anna,” he said, “I want you to do something for me. I want you to write a letter just as I dictate it. We won’t need this.” He moved the typewriter aside. “I want it to be in your own handwriting. It
’
s going to your father.”

She swung round, staring at him, but she did not speak. She picked up the pen he laid on the desk, her hand trembling a little as she waited for him to begin.

“Head it ‘Glynmareth Cottage Hospital, Merioneth, North Wales’,” he said. “And the date.”

He waited, and when she looked up a second time he drew a deep breath and started the letter itself.

“Dear Father,

You will see by the above address that I am being taken care of here as the result of an accident. I have unfortunately lost all memory of the past and my doctors believe it can only be restored by a meeting with people I once knew or a return to a familiar scene. You could help me by coming here to see me, and Doctor Melford will make all the necessary arrangements for your journey as soon as he hears from you that you are willing to come.

I am enclosing a snapshot taken in the garden here so that you will see that I am quite well otherwise.

Your affectionate daughter,

Anna Marrick.”

Noel waited after he had uttered the name, tensely expectant, but Anna wrote the full signature as a matter of course and without undue emotion, drawing a firm line beneath it as if it was a task she had accomplished hundreds of times. The action convinced him beyond doubt that they were on the right track and he was conscious of sudden, tremendous elation.

“This is it, Anna!” he cried, catching her by the shoulders to look triumphantly into her questioning eyes. “We’re more than half way there already!”

“You think—my father will come?”

“Of course he’ll come!”

“Supposing it’s wrong? Supposing we’re just making another shot in the dark?”

He shook her very gently, his lips curving in a one-sided smile. “This isn’t a chance shot, Anna,” he assured her. “It’s the end of our quest.”

She crushed down something that was far from the happiness she should have felt, seeing the inevitable end of all this rising to mock her, yet she could not let him guess that she valued her present happiness so much that she would gladly have gambled the past and even the future to retain what she now held for a few brief weeks longer.

“Everything comes to an end sooner or later,” she said. “This had to come. Somehow, I knew it would.”

“We’ll all help,” Noel said, not quite trusting himself to look at her now. “Ruth and Tranby and I are all behind you in this.”

She thanked him as best she could, but an emotion stronger than any she had ever known threatened to crush the words back into her throat, choking her.

“Don’t cry, my dear,” he said gently, his own voice roughened. “God knows, Anna, we may have a steepish hill to climb yet and we are only human. I’d put my faith in Ruth more than in anybody, though. She has never wavered in all my knowledge of her, an
d
I don’t think she’ll fail us now. Even if these people don’t claim
you as their daughter, that isn’t the end.”

“If I only knew the end!” Anna cried. “If I could only see a little way ahead!”

The age-old plea, the cry for the power of God so mercifully denied!

“It isn’t fair to you, Noel,” she added after a moment. “All this uncertainty and worry when you are going to a new job—”

“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I thrive on that sort of thing!”

He had forced a lightness into his voice that he was far from feeling and she recognized it and responded to it immediately.

“You have only a few more weeks to thrive!” she smiled, and then stood aghast at the prospect.

They remained facing each other, all their carefully prepared defences down, and with a sudden movement he had taken her into his arms and was crushing his lips against hers.

“My God, Anna, I can’t let you go! I can’t bear to let you go!”

“You must! We can’t—ever mean anything to each other.” She held on to his supporting arm even as she strove to put a world of reasoning between them. “Neither of us is really free. You owe it
to your career to go on—and I must go back to—whatever was there before I came to you.”

Her voice broke, an
d
for a moment longer he held her to him as if by the intensity of his embrace he could shut out all that stood between them, and then he put her gently into the chair where he had found her and strode from the room without a backward glance.

CHAPTER TEN

THE LETTER WAS sent off to Northumberland that evening and the tension of waiting for the reply began for them. If Noel had thought to save Anna by telling her only the bare essentials, he realized quite soon that he could not shield her from her own sensitive forebodings, and he was forced to watch the mixture of eagerness and dismay with which she watched each post come and go.

Anna knew that she had not even given the letter time to reach its destination before she was looking for a reply, but the hours seemed to stretch out interminably between post and post, while she attempted to go about her normal everyday tasks as if she was not walking perpetually in the shadow of doubt and fear.

During this time she came closer than ever to Ruth, for without actual words Ruth offered her a sympathy which could only have arisen out of complete love and understanding.

Knowing the full story, Ruth had no doubt that Anna was the daughter of Abraham Marrick, and she managed to view Sara’s version of it with an unbiased mind, coming to the conclusion that they would not be in possession of the real truth and all the details until Anna’s memory was finally restored.

She realized that her brother thought so, too, but Noel had to approach the situation from the medical angle, also, and be ready to shield his patient from any sudden shock which, Dennis had explained to her some time ago, might have the reverse effect to the one they wanted.

Dennis was constantly at the villa these days, adding the assurance of his friendship to theirs, and quite often Anna’s heart came near to overflowing when she sat in their company and realized what a precious gift they were offering her for what she considered to be so little in return.

“Ruth, whatever happens I shall never forget these past four days,” she said as they cleared the breakfast-table that Saturday morning. “You’ve given me such faith in human nature that whatever is to happen now, or has happened in the past, I feel that I can face it with some sort of courage, at last.”

“You always had that courage,” Ruth assured her. “It isn’t just born in an hour, Anna. The hour may recognize it, but it is part of us—a fundamental part—or it just isn’t there at all. The folk without it go to pieces in an emergency, but you showed so much courage when you first came here, fighting this thing in the beginning, that I’m quite confident for you now. I’ve heard Dennis and Noel speaking about it often enough, and I’m sure it has made Noel’s work easier.”

A faint flush rose in Anna’s cheeks. Did Ruth know?

“When will he get to Bristol to take up this new appointment?” she asked.

“It’s not offic
i
al yet,” Ruth said. “There’s all the red tape to unravel yet. Probably he won’t know until the end of the month.”

And I shall know—when? Anna’s heart began to beat suffocatingly close to her throat, and the hand she put to it was trembling. When would she be done with the agony of parting and the heartache and all the useless longing that clamored in her night and day, giving her no rest? To live here always, to keep Ruth’s friendship and Noel’s respect! That was all she wanted, now or ever!

She looked down at the thin gold circle on the third finger of her left hand, seeing it through a mist of tears and the searing white flame of sudden remorse. Ned! she thought. Ned, what happened to us? I couldn’t have married you!