“But he’s a proud man. Some people say he’s as proud as Lucifer, whatever that may mean. Why should he be willing to marry a girl who’s in love with someone else, if he hasn’t got an over-riding reason for it?”
“It—it just happens to—suit us both very well.”
“Oh. It happens to suit you both very well,” repeated Sister Evans ironically. “Well, I don’t pretend to understand. But they say you can learn something new every day. I suppose you know what you’re doing, and I’ll be glad enough to see you congratulated by everyone, instead of set down and patronized by that Grayce girl. But—be careful.”
“How do you mean?” Alma was not quite sure what to make of this mixture of censure and congratulation.
“Don’t get hurt again. And don’t,” Sister Evans added as an afterthought, “hurt him. He doesn’t deserve it. He’s a very fine person.”
“Of course! I know he is. That’s why I—I said ‘yes’.”
“All right.” Sister Evans gave her a grim, not unkindly smile. “Is this all confidential, by the way?”
“The circumstances are, of course. The actual news of the engagement isn’t.”
“Then I can mention it—casually?”
“Yes. I’d be glad to have you tell people, rather than have to tell them myself.”
“Very well,” said Sister Evans, not attempting to hide her satisfaction at being the one selected to break the sensational tidings.
And Alma went away to her room at last, aware that few of the night staff throughout the nursing home would go off duty without imparting the news of her engagement to the day staff.
Next morning, it was all too obvious that this was what had happened. Almost everyone looked at her with smiling interest, and several of those who knew her best stopped to offer their good wishes. On her own theatre staff the jubilation was such that it was difficult to contain it within decorous bounds, and the gay young nurse whom she had almost snubbed the previous evening exclaimed,
“Oh, Sister, may I say that we’re all thrilled at the news? It’s so much more exciting than—I mean, we’d somehow got hold of quite the wrong story before. But this is true, isn’t it? You are engaged to Mr. Perring, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Alma said, with a feeling of rather frightening finality. “I am.”
And then Mr. Colbridge came in and a heavy morning’s work began. No one had told him the news yet, it was evident. And, under his slow but capable direction, the life of the theatre resumed its natural character again, and the interests of the patient became paramount.
Either by accident or design, Geraldine did not cross Alma’s path once during the day, so there was no way of knowing how she had reacted to the news. That she must have heard it was certain. But probably she was too much occupied with her own affairs to bother much about other people’s. And for this Alma was thankful.
In point of fact, she had very little time herself during the day to think about her personal situation. At the back of her mind there was, of course, perpetually the astonishing knowledge that she had become engaged to Mr. Perring. (Somehow, he could be thought of only as Mr. Perring when one was in the theatre.) But her immediate attention was entirely occupied by her work.
The fresh realization of her position was all the sharper, therefore, when she was free at last to go to her own room—but accompanied by the thought that in a little while he would, as of right, be coming to fetch her.
A sort of panic assailed her. But she angrily thrust it from her. And, thankfully stripping off her uniform, she searched among her things for something slightly festive, which might be in keeping with the appearance of a girl who had just become engaged.
Hardly had she slipped into the full-skirted, cherry-red dress which seemed suitable to the occasion when someone knocked on the door, to say that she was wanted in the staff waiting room.
“That’s Mr. Perring!” she thought. “Oh, I must stop thinking of him in that ridiculous way!”
But the atmosphere of the theatre was still upon her. And, when she went downstairs and into the staff waiting room, it was Mr. Perring, she felt, who turned from the window to greet her.
“Hello,” he said. “You look lovely!” Which did rather reduce the feeling of theatre sister versus surgeon.
“Oh, thank you. I thought I should put on something a bit—festive.”
“For the special occasion, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“And I have something else festive for you to put on,” he told her with a smile, and he took a small box out of his coat pocket.
He could not know, of course, that the very sight of a jeweller’s box made her feel sick and panic-stricken.
Or perhaps he did know. At any rate, it was only a matter of seconds before he had taken out the ring and the box was back in his pocket.
“Come and tell me how you like it.” He stood by the window still, so that she could see it in the best light, and she slowly drew near and gazed down at the shining ring which lay in the palm of his hand.
It could hardly have been less like the one Jeremy had put on her finger. It was not a modern ring at all, but a most exquisitely set cluster of diamonds and opals, from which it seemed that fire and water sparkled.
“Oh, how lovely!” she cried involuntarily.
“You like it?”
“I think it’s the most beautiful ring I ever saw!”
“Do you?” He laughed softly, but on a note of unmistakable pleasure. “Then let me see you wear it.”
And, taking her hand in his strong, well-shaped fingers, he slipped on the ring without any fuss.
Even so, it was an unbearably difficult moment for Alma. Not that it added any finality to a situation which had already been clearly defined. But—the symbolic gesture was, she felt, one that would be forever associated in her mind with horror.
She had an almost irresistible impulse to tear the ring from her finger and declare that she could not, after all, marry him. Or, indeed, anyone who was not Jeremy. But, by a supreme effort, she controlled herself. In every particular, that was to say, except the spasmodic stiffening of her fingers. And that she hoped he might not have noticed.
“It looks—lovely,” she said, a little huskily.
And then she thought, “I have to kiss him now. No girl accepts a man’s ring without kissing him.”
“Look up,” he said at that moment, not exactly peremptorily, but as though he expected her to obey. And, as she looked up, he bent his head and kissed her.
It was not at all the sort of kiss she had expected. She had supposed it would be cool and light and perhaps a little humorous. If she had shut her eyes she could never have identified that firm, compelling, almost passionate kiss as coming from Maxwell Perring. It reminded her of nothing she had previously known of him.
All it reminded her of was Sister Evans saying, “He must love you very much.”
CHAPTER NINE
In some inexplicable way, the evening was strangely easy after that. They drove out to some place he knew of by the river, where they could have a quiet meal and the restful evening which both needed after a strenuous day.
As she sat beside him in the car, she watched his clever surgeon’s hands on the wheel and thought,
“I must remember that he’s no longer Mr. Perring now. He is Max—the man I’ve agreed to marry. The man whose ring I’m wearing. The man who kissed me in that surprising way.”
There was no attempt to make love to her during the evening, in the ordinary sense of the term. He was kind and attentive. He was even, in a half humorous way, affectionate. But he didn’t put his arm round her, or kiss her again, or even try to make her discuss a wedding date.
Which perhaps was just as well, she thought. For, after all, events were galloping along quite fast enough without their starting to discuss wedding plans.
“I gather,” he said, as they lingered over coffee, “that our news got round pretty rapidly. The hall porter offered me his
congratulations as I came in this evening.”
“Did he really?” Alma laughed and coloured slightly. “I thought the easiest way of letting people know was to tell the news to Sister Evans and explain it was not specially confidential.”
“Wouldn’t it have gone round sooner if you’d said it was confidential?” he enquired, with friendly irony.
“I don’t think it could have,” Alma told him, with a laugh. “By this morning, everyone except Mr. Colbridge seemed to know.”
“He also knew by the end of the afternoon,”
Max assured her. “He telephoned to give me his good wishes.”
“He did?” Alma was slightly put out, as well as amused. “I wonder who told him.”
“Perhaps no one told him directly. You’d be surprised how much a surgeon hears, which you girls don’t actually tell him.” He flashed her an amused glance.
“We girls sometimes hear things that you surgeons don’t quite intend, too,” replied Alma demurely, which made him laugh.
“Anyway, everyone seems to approve,” he said lightly. “What did Geraldine have to say about it?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her today.”
“I suppose she’s pretty well occupied with her own affairs,” he said carelessly. And though, in the first instant, Alma thought that brutally tactless of him, in the next moment she told herself that his astringent matter-of-fact air was probably healthier than a sympathetic avoidance of the subject.
“I’m not going to keep you out late this evening,” he told her presently. “You had a heavy day, didn’t you?”
“Yes. But so did you, I think.” And she glanced at him as though, for the first time, the way he looked was her personal concern.
“True. But what makes you think so?”
“You have those little lines at the corners of your eyes which only come when you’re tired,” she told him promptly.
“Observant of you. But that isn’t only weariness, you know. It’s age,” he told her with a slight grimace. “Do you know that I’m really rather old for anyone quite so young and lovely as you are?”
“What nonsense!” she dismissed that scornfully. And then added, with almost naive interest, “How old are you, anyway?”
“Thirty-six.”
“A successful surgeon could hardly be younger,” she told him. “I don’t know how you’ve crammed all your experience into that time. And anyone who does as much as you is entitled to look a little tired sometimes.”
He smiled.
“Well—there were some difficult cases today. I missed you.”
“Did you?” The professional side of her was gratified.
“Yes. I have a good theatre sister at the hospital. But, when all’s said and done, she is only my second-best sister.”
“Oh, thank you, sir!” Alma blushed with pleasure. Then she became aware of his quizzical glance and said, “I mean—Oh, I’m sorry.”
“All right. You’ll get used to it in time,” he told her. “What about coming down home at the weekend, Alma? I suppose you and my sister will want to discuss all sorts of things in connection with the house. And there’s not all that time left before she goes.”
“I suppose there isn’t,” Alma agreed slowly. And she tried to see herself as the eventual mistress of Maxwell Perring’s beautiful home—and failed. “Very well, I’ll come. I mean—I should very much like to come.”
And then, true to his intention, he took her home comparatively early. He kissed her again when he said goodnight to her, but this time it was more as she would have expected him to kiss her. Lightly and with a touch of humorous affection, quite unlike the way he had kissed her earlier in the evening.
As she went into the nursing home, she thought, “That’s the way I prefer to have it. At least—I suppose it is.”
She had no more than opened the door of her room before Geraldine appeared, framed in her own doorway, and said, without preliminaries,
“Is it true? The story that’s all round the nursing home?”
Alma turned to face her.
“If you mean the news of my engagement to Mr. Perring—yes.” And then she could have kicked herself for not having the presence of mind to call him Max, at least to his own cousin.
“But how very odd. I didn’t know you were even fond of each other.”
“There was no reason why you should know, was there?” replied Alma, but quite pleasantly, as though to a young relation rather than a hated rival Geraldine didn’t answer that. She said abruptly, “Have you told Jeremy?”
“No,” Alma said. “Have you?”
“No. Of course not!”
Alma wondered why of course not. But aloud she said,
“It was all rather unexpected, I know. But Max and I have known each other professionally for some years. Quite honestly, I didn’t know he thought of me that way. But when he asked me last night to marry him, I was proud and happy to accept.”
She privately thought it sounded rather good, put like that. But Geraldine merely stared at her thoughtfully and said,
“I wonder why last night, of all times. Did he know about—Jeremy?”
Alma controlled an impulse to wince.
“About his recovering his memory, you mean? Yes, of course. It was the first thing I told him. I knew he’d want to hear about such an important step in his patient’s recovery.”
“Oh, of course.” But Geraldine’s casual tone took little account of professional interest in the case. It was the personal side which interested her. Above all, the personal side as it affected herself.
“You told him that Jeremy remembered me?”
“Yes, naturally,” said Alma coldly.
“And my place in his life?”
“I told Max exactly what happened, and the implications which followed on Jeremy’s recovery. There was nothing I needed to labor, so far as I could see,” Alma retorted.
Then she went into her room and shut the door, leaving the other girl to stare after her with slightly narrowed eyes.
“She wants me to say that Max was sorry for me. That I cried on his shoulder and he asked me to marry him,” thought Alma angrily.
Well, if Geraldine wanted to believe—or imply—that, she could think again. Maxwell Perring was not the man to marry his theatre sister just because he was sorry for her. He was not that kind of man at all. He had asked her because—
Alma went over slowly to the window, and stood looking down on the moving lights of cars and taxis far below.
Why had Max asked her to marry him?
Until this moment, she realized now, she had been running away from the question. Which showed she had not really believed him when he coolly stated that he merely wanted to get married and have someone to run his home.
"That isn’t like him either!” she thought. “He never did anything for a negative sort of reason. Some men may work things out that way, but not Max. There would have to be more to it than that.”
Which brought her back—half reluctantly, half fascinatedly—to the way he had kissed her that evening. And the extraordinary thing Sister Evans had said.
“But—would I want him to love me very much?” Alma thought. And, instead of taking off her things, she sat down on the side of her bed and became lost in thought.
Jeremy was the man she loved. Jeremy was the man she had wanted. But, now that he had been rooted so painfully out of her life, what did she really want to put in his place?
“It’s too early to say,” she whispered agitatedly to herself. “It’s much too early to say.”
And although she sat there for quite a while longer, pretending that she was clarifying the situation for herself, her thoughts were still in a strange, chaotic confusion when she finally went to bed.
During the next few days, everyone gradually settled down to the fact that Mr. Perring was indeed going to marry the charming new theatre sister, at some unspecified date, and that all the peculiar talk about her and that nice Mr.
Truscott had been so much hot air.
He had recovered his memory, it seemed, and found that he didn’t want to marry her after all—or never had wanted to marry her—or she’d never wanted him. You could take your pick of the stories. There was now a strong rumor that Geraldine Grayce was going to marry him. But she was not wearing a ring, and nothing definite had been announced.
Sister Miles now, was wearing a ring, off duty. And a very beautiful ring it was, too. Original and obviously very valuable. The sort of gorgeous affair one might imagine Mr. Perring choosing for his future wife. Some girls had all the luck!
Alma was perfectly aware, of course, of the gossip and speculation around her. She had spent too many years in nursing communities to be in any doubt of the amount of enjoyable conjecture that anything like her story produced.
But she managed to preserve an admirable degree of outward calm and, with an air of good-humored candor, to say a good deal without really imparting much information. Meal times were naturally the most difficult, but she always contrived to make a good deal of play with any letters she received at breakfast time. And, for the other occasions, she learned to take the initiative, by asking questions herself about the affairs of her colleagues.
Few people, she found, can resist the exquisite temptation of talking about themselves, if a sympathetic audience seems available.
On the Saturday morning when she was due to go down to Windhurst, she received a short letter from her father and a long one from her stepmother. Both contained the information that they were expecting to pay a flying visit to London in the very near future. But Juliet Miles—who entertained a genuine affection for the stepdaughter who had never resented her—enlarged quite a lot on the event.
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