“It must be wonderful to come here after a really hectic day.”
“Yes, it is,” he agreed with a slight laugh. “It has been our family home for several generations. And although I have a flat in town, I come out here as often as I can make it. I should hate to have to give it up.”
He frowned slightly as he said that, and Alma glanced at him enquiringly.
“Do you mean there is some possibility of that happening?”
“Well, I don’t know. My sister has run the place for me ever since our parents died. But she is getting married towards the end of the year and going abroad. There might have to be changes. This is not a house that can be run easily as a bachelor establishment. But we’ll cross that stile when we reach it. Come in and meet my sister.”
Very willingly and with some curiosity, Alma followed him into the house and into a long, beautiful room which, she saw immediately, was furnished with that indefinable elegance which borders on luxury without ever quite degenerating into that somewhat glossy state. Here the sole occupant was sitting by a window, working at a large embroidery frame.
She pushed this away, however, as they came in and rose to greet them, with an air of good-humored self-possession oddly like her brother’s. Everything about Charity Perring was strong, elegant and authoritative—which was also not unlike her brother, Alma thought—though she was possibly a year or two older than he.
Hardly had introductions been exchanged when Maxwell Perring was called to the telephone, and his sister, suggesting that Alma might like to see more of the place, led the way through the french windows into the garden. Here she proceeded to expatiate on the planning and beauties of the borders in a way that showed her to be an enthusiastic gardener.
“I’m going to miss all this,” she remarked with a sigh. “Has Max told you that I’m being married in October and going out East to live?”
“He said you were marrying and going abroad,” Alma agreed, “and he seemed rather concerned in consequence about what new arrangements he might have to make. He described this as a difficult place to run as a bachelor establishment.”
‘‘Yes, of course it is. He ought to get married himself,” was Miss Perring’s somewhat uncompromising solution of the difficulty. “I’ve been telling him so for years. I’ve even found him one or two very promising candidates. But he’s very obstinate, you know. Like one of those thoroughbred horses who buck if they have any idea that you’re trying to coerce them.”
Alma, who had not thought of her favorite surgeon in this category, smiled and said she supposed it was best for a man to choose his own wife.
“Don’t you believe it!” Charity Perring replied energetically. “Most of them would do much better to leave it to their womenfolk. We’re much more discerning where our own sex are concerned. I know exactly the sort of girl Max should marry.”
And at this her glance travelled over Alma with an air of such candid speculation that Alma wondered, rather startledly, if she were being reviewed in the light of a possible candidate, and blushed accordingly.
“How pretty,” said Miss Perring, with uninhibited frankness. “So few women can do that nowadays. How do you get on with Max?”
“Very well indeed, professionally speaking,” Alma hastened to assure her. “He is a wonderful surgeon and most exhilarating to work for.”
“You don’t find him too dictatorial?”
“Certainly not! A surgeon needs to be something of a dictator. He has the vital decisions to make, and can’t be expected to discuss pros and cons with lesser members of the staff.”
“I always said Max should marry one of his own nurses,” remarked Miss Perring elliptically.
“D-did you?” said Alma, wondering quite what she was intended to make of that.
“Yes. He needs someone who understands that that authoritative and sometimes curt air of his is only part of his professional make-up.”
“I—I suppose anyone who came to know him well would soon understand that,” Alma suggested.
“The odd thing is that few people come to know him well outside his profession,” was the rather discontented reply. “Max is ninety per cent surgeon and ten per cent everything else. That’s another reason why he should marry one of his own nurses.”
“Perhaps he will,” said Alma mildly, and there the matter was allowed to rest, for Maxwell Perring himself came out into the garden then to join them, and apparently even his candid sister drew the line at discussing his matrimonial prospects in front of him.
It was an extraordinarily pleasant afternoon and evening after that. For although Alma found some difficulty in freeing herself from the slight sense of respectful awe which she had for the most brilliant surgeon she had ever known, she found Maxwell Perring a charming host, and his sister a very amusing and trenchant personality.
“How do you get on with Geraldine?” she wanted to know, when she learned that her young cousin was to join them sometime during the evening.
To this it was not so easy to offer a glib and reassuring answer of “Very well”. So Alma said carefully that they had not seen enough of each other to become in any way intimate, but that she was sure Geraldine was a good nurse.
“Max always says her heart isn’t really in her work,” Miss Perring remarked indulgently, “and perhaps that’s so. But then I suppose it’s very natural for a girl of twenty to have her heart in other things besides nursing. Have you met this young man who’s the centre of her life at the moment?” Alma felt her conversational powers dry up abruptly, and she stared wordlessly back at her hostess for a moment.
“Jeremy Something,” Miss Perring amplified helpfully. “He’s some sort of journalist, I believe.”
“I—know who you mean,” Alma said huskily. “He’s the young man who had an accident some days ago. Mr. Perring operated on him.”
“Did he? Max, you never told me about it.” Miss Perring swung round to look at her brother.
“I didn’t know it was of any special interest to you.”
“But of course it is! Geraldine’s more or less engaged to this young man, isn’t she?”
“She hasn’t told me so.”
“Well, she told me,” said his sister with some frankness. “Last time she was down here she poured out a great deal of romantic information about him. I gathered that everything was fixed except the wedding date.”
“It’s possible that Geraldine was a little previous with her information,” replied the surgeon drily. “I understand that, since the accident, the young man doesn’t even recognize her as someone he knew.”
“Doesn’t even recognize her?”
“It’s a case of partial amnesia, Miss Perring,” said Alma, who was rather pale. He’s forgotten some things, though he remembers others.”
“Sister Miles, for instance,” put in Maxwell Perring, still in that faintly dry tone.
“Oh,” said his sister, who was no fool. “I see.” And she bit her lip thoughtfully. “Was he a—a friend of yours, Miss Miles?”
“I knew him very well indeed at one time,” Alma heard herself explain, and so admirable was her composure that she thought she saw a certain uneasiness relax in her hostess. “I hadn’t seen so much of him lately. That was what made it all the more surprising that he should recognize me and not recognize Ger—Nurse Grayce.”
“Not necessarily,” observed Maxwell Perring. But Alma could not quite find the courage to ask what he meant by that.
The subject of Jeremy was dropped and not revived again until Geraldine herself put in an appearance—which she did just as dinner was announced.
She was evidently on good terms with her cousins, whom she treated more as aunt and uncle, and she bestowed upon each of them a light, charming kiss which could have meant anything or nothing. To Alma she was distant but polite, and it was evident that she had no intention of creating any social crisis in her own home.
“We hear that your friend Jeremy is beginning to make a good recovery,” obs
erved Miss Perring, who had a special, good-humoured talent for grasping conversational nettles. “But that there are some awkward gaps still in his memory.”
Geraldine shot a quick suspicious glance at Alma, as though to see if she had in any way been stealing a march on her. Then she said, with more composure than Alma had expected,
“Some of the gaps are very awkward indeed. I’m one of them.”
“It’s early days yet,” Charity Perring said soothingly. But Geraldine turned eagerly to her other cousin.
“Max, I can’t understand it! Is it possible for anyone to forget his—his nearest and dearest like this?”
“Anything is possible in the case of a brain injury,” Maxwell Perring said, and though he did not query Geraldine’s description of herself, his tone was a trifle dry.
“But that it should have happened now!—just as everything was so—so wonderful.” For a moment Geraldine’s dark lashes swept upwards and she looked across the table at the still, pale girl opposite. Then her gaze shifted appealingly to Charity Perring.
“You know, Charity—I told you—we were practically engaged.”
It was the first time Alma had heard her qualify the engagement in any way, and an obstinate little flicker of hope stirred in her heart, in spite of the helplessness to which she had been cleverly reduced.
“If that was the situation, I imagine he’ll remember about it in time,” said Maxwell Perring, without looking at his theatre sister. “But, until he does, it would be better to refrain from any prompting.”
“I shouldn’t prompt him in any way,” retorted Geraldine, with a slight toss of her head.
“Then I don’t imagine anyone else will,” replied her cousin drily.
“What about anyone else connected with him?” enquired Miss Perring, with an air of shifting the conversation on to safer ground. “Has he any family?”
“Only a married brother, living in Scotland,” Alma explained, and she was annoyed to find that her voice sounded slightly husky. “There are his professional colleagues, of course, and one or two friends. But he has not been allowed visitors yet, so the issue hasn’t really been put to the test.”
“It must be extraordinary to remember bits of one’s life and forget others,” mused Miss Perring. “Some bits, of course, one would like to forget. Like putting back the clock, and having another chance.”
“That hardly applies in this case,” Geraldine said angrily.
But to Alma it seemed that perhaps it applied with very special point. Suppose Jeremy did want to forget his later entanglement with Geraldine? Suppose, subconsciously, he were really returning to the part of his life he would prefer to continue? Then indeed, if the tangle could be resolved, she would be a happy girl!
The rest of the evening slid by uneventfully, and presently Alma said that she must think about catching whatever bus connected with her late train.
“You don’t need to worry about buses,” Maxwell Perring told her. “I’ll drive you in.”
“But, sir, it isn’t necessary.” In spite of his lazy, half-indulgent smile, she was still very much aware of him as the surgeon whose every need and wish she should anticipate. “You had a specially tiring day yesterday. You need all the rest you can get during the weekend.”
“There’s nothing tiring about driving you into St. Albans,” he told her. And somehow there was no possibility of further argument after that.
She went upstairs to fetch her coat and scarf, and it was Geraldine, not Miss Perring, who accompanied her into the charming bedroom, with the two windows which looked over the flower-garden to the wooded country beyond.
“What a very pleasant home you have,” Alma said, determined to make normal conversation if it were humanly possible.
“Yes,” Geraldine agreed, but almost absently. “I wanted to—to underline what Maxwell said about Jeremy.”
“Which bit that he said about Jeremy?” enquired Alma, her heart sinking slightly at the realization that she was not to get away without at least one more reference to the thorny subject.
“He said it would be wrong—he meant it would be bad for Jeremy—to try to prompt his memory in any way.”
“I have no intention of prompting him in any way,” Alma said coldly.
“But you’ve done so already, haven’t you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Nothing—nothing—will make me believe that he quite naturally forgot me and remembered you,” the other girl exclaimed passionately. “I think you’ve spoken to him, sometime when no one else was there, and given him the idea that he was really in love with you. And if I find that you try to push it further, I’ll tell Maxwell exactly what has happened, and he’ll probably have you removed for unprofessional conduct.”
“You must be mad!” If Alma had not sensed that this type of jealousy was extraordinarily dangerous she might, even now, have laughed Geraldine’s suggestion out of court. As it was, she felt a genuine chill at the intensity of the other girl’s manner. “Your accusation is absolutely without basis, and Mr. Perring would know it in a minute.”
“Why should he? The facts support my story pretty thoroughly. And he’d take my word against yours.”
“I’m not sure that he would,” Alma said slowly, and she was aware of a lessening of the chill at her heart as she spoke.
“Of course he would!” Geraldine was scornful.
“He knows me a great deal better than he knows you. I’m part of his family.”
“Then I’m afraid he must know you for an unbalanced and somewhat unprincipled young woman,” Alma retorted grimly. “I absolutely repudiate your accusations and your threats, and I’m only sorry that you should insist on ending this pleasant visit on such a disagreeable note.—I’m ready now.”
And, without waiting to hear if Geraldine had anything to say in reply to that, she went out of the room and downstairs.
In the drawing room Miss Perring was waiting to say goodnight to her, and if she noticed any agitation in Alma’s manner, she affected not to do so.
“Come and sit down for a minute. Max is getting the car out of the garage,” she said. “I do hope we’re going to see you here again quite soon.” Alma tried not to think how completely Geraldine’s last words had spoiled the visit for her, and said how kind Miss Perring was and how much she would like to come again.
“Then Max will arrange it. I think he said you have no family of your own?”
“Not in this country. My father and stepmother live in the States.” With an effort, Alma kept her voice calm and the whole of her attention on the conventional exchange of courtesies. Then at last Maxwell Perring came in to say that the car was ready.
Geraldine made no further appearance, but presumably her cousins supposed that her goodbyes had been said upstairs. Miss Perring clasped Alma’s hand with real warmth, repeating her hopes that Alma would come again, and then Alma went out to the car with Maxwell Perring.
Even now, it was difficult to keep her agitation under control, and she was actually seated in the car before she realized that she had left her scarf behind in the house.
“Oh, I’m so sorry”—she stopped him as he was about to start the car—“my scarf! I’ve left it behind.”
“Let me fetch it for you.”
“No. I know exactly where it is. I must have dropped it in the drawing room. And before he could forestall her, Alma slipped out of the car and ran back into the house.
As she came up to the drawing room door, which stood half open, she heard Geraldine’s voice, raised in angry, rapid expostulation.
“You don’t understand,” she was saying, almost tearfully. “She’s determined to take Jeremy away from me, and she won’t stick at anything.”
Unable either to interrupt the conversation or to withdraw, Alma stood there, trembling with indecision and outrage at the accusations levelled at her. Then, to her indescribable relief, Miss Perring’s voice answered in a matter-of-fact tone which suggested
that Geraldine’s heroics were not new to her.
“You don’t need to worry about that girl,” she said. “She’s perfectly straight, and she isn’t the kind to take anyone else’s man away.”
“You don’t know! She’ll marry Jeremy and—”
“She won’t marry Jeremy,” replied Charity Perring’s voice, on a note of monumental calm. “She’ll marry Maxwell, if I have anything to do with it. She’s the girl I’ve been waiting for for nearly ten years.”
CHAPTER FIVE
So staggered was Alma by this completely new turn of events that she leaned against the wall, quite weak and shaken, unable even to follow whatever reply Geraldine chose to make to Miss Perring’s astonishing statement.
Here Maxwell Perring found her a few minutes later, when he followed her into the house to see what was delaying her.
“I—I couldn’t find—the scarf—upstairs,” she stammered, feeling she must give some sort of explanation for the passage of time and the non-appearance of the scarf. “I think—It must be—in there.”
“Well, why didn’t you go in and see?” He looked amused and slightly puzzled.
“I didn’t like to interrupt—the conversation.”
“Nonsense. It wouldn’t be anything important or confidential,” he declared, with unconscious but singular inaccuracy. And, without more ado, he entered the room, and Alma heard him say,
“Alma left her scarf—Ah, there it is, I see.—What’s the matter, Geraldine? You look as though you’ve been crying.”
“Nothing. Nothing you’d understand,” Geraldine was heard to say somewhat sulkily. Then Maxwell came out again, still looking slightly amused, and, having restored Alma’s scarf to her, he took her lightly by the elbow and hurried her out to the car.
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