“Not a thing, as far as I could gather. She was terribly upset about it and seemed almost reluctant to come with me until I insisted,” Ruth explained, speaking automatically as she thought of something else. “When you say you are prepared to wait, does it mean that she is all right—that she is going to live?”
“Of course she’s going to live!” Noel replied without any hesitation whatever. “She’s strong enough to pull through a possible bout of pneumonia, and that’s as near to a diagnosis as I can make at the moment.”
He straightened, his lean, dark face still thoughtful, and Ruth crossed the room to pick up the girl’s personal effects from the table beside the settee.
“This must be all she had in her pockets,” she said. “Powder compact, purse and a handkerchief. Not much, really, to go on, and very little with which to establish an identity. Oh! but look here! There’s a name embroidered on the handkerchief in blue ‘Anna’!” Her thin face flushed excitedly. “Do you think that will be her own name, and will it help?” she asked eagerly.
Her brother took the fragment of linen from her, stretching it out between his strong hands to reveal the embroidered name.
“It’s possible,” he agreed, answering her first question. “And every little thing helps if this is a case of true amnesia. We shall find that out when she regains full consciousness, but I don’t propose to trouble her with too many questions until she has slept for at least twelve hours.”
He glanced down at the settee to find his patient’s eyes wide and full upon him, quietly thoughtful eyes, gently inquiring as they lingered on his strong face, and a surging pity welled in him as he recognized her utter helplessness.
“Can you tell me where I am—who I am?” she asked unsteadily, still with those wide eyes fixed on his. “I have lost my memory. I know that someone brought me here in a car, but—before that, I have no memory at all.”
“What you feel now may pass as soon as you have had a good rest,” he explained. “These are the essential things at present: I am a doctor, and I shall look after you.”
Her eyes clung to his for a moment longer, and then, slowly, they closed and a small sigh of utter exhaustion escaped her lips. Noel Melford turned round to where his sister waited.
“Best leave her where she is,” he advised as they went from the room together. “She’ll mend more quickly that way.”
“What do you think, Noel?” Ruth asked. Now that they could speak more freely she was beginning to realize that she had committed them both to considerable responsibility. “Do you think she’s likely to get her memory back and—how soon shall we have to tell the police about her?”
“Right away, I think.” He took out a cigarette and lit it, blowing the smoke thoughtfully above his head. “Her people may be trying to trace her, and if there’s been an accident anywhere the police may be looking for her even now. It’s a grim business, this amnesia, difficult to fight at the best of times,” he observed, “and generally full of all sorts of complications. How old would you say that child was?”
Ruth considered.
“Older than she looks in the present circumstances, I should think,” she decided. “About twenty-three or four. Does age help?”
“Everything helps. Approximate age may help to establish possible reasons for the amnesia, although there are no hard and fast rules. In the morning I shall see what I can do with the one clue we have found—the name on the handkerchief. Anna, wasn’t it? If it is really her own name, which is very likely, then the rest may be easy.” He moved restlessly about the kitchen, following in her wake as she prepared a meal, as if he sought some sort of assurance from her presence. “We could have done without this.”
Ruth turned to put an affectionate hand on his arm.
“I’m sorry, Noel,” she apologized. “I’ve thrust this on you without a great deal of thought, I’m afraid, when you were busy enough in the ordinary way—too busy, I sometimes think.” Her eyes pleaded with him to understand. “But I had to bring her home, Noel. There was something about her—not actually pathetic—that’s not the right word—but—in need of help.’ She turned away, not quite sure why she should suddenly feel that she was pleading with him on her own account. “I had to bring her,” she repeated.
“Of course you had to bring her!” He put a firm hand under her arm. “Your motherly instinct will out, old lady! Don’t worry too much about it,” he went on to advise. “We’ve handled amnesia before. I’ll give Tranby a ring in the morning and get him to come over and have a look at your protégée and if she’s all right by then we can send her on her way rejoicing.”
He had spoken lightly for her benefit, but Ruth knew that he had never taken any of his cases lightly, that the girl she had brought to Glynmareth would remain their responsibility until he had established her identity beyond the shadow of a doubt and freed her from her present bondage.
“Hullo, there, Ruth! I’ve brought along the necessary help. Fancy you turning the villa into a rival establishment!”
The gay voice drifted in from the garden and Ruth turned to the open door.
“It’s Sara!” she smiled “We’re in here, my dear—consulting in the kitchen!”
A tall young woman in the uniform of a nursing sister appeared in the doorway, her immaculate white coat and cap dazzling bright in the sunshine as she paused for a moment to consider brother and sister with a satisfied smile. Sara Enman experienced the old thrill of warmth and achievement as she looked into Noel Melford’s eyes, although, as yet, she could not lay claim to his affections with any real authority. His eyes were a little remote today, she mused, telling herself that she understood that look because she understood Noel and all that his profession meant to him as no one else could understand. When he was engrossed in a case nothing else mattered to him, and quite often he had taken her into his confidence in that respect, a compliment which Sara appreciated to the full. As second in command of the nursing staff, she held her own small niche in the little community of which he was virtually head, and a sense of power had developed in her out of all proportion to her importance. She was beginning to make herself objectionable to those who worked under her, but she kept that side of her character for the hospital wards and those times when Noel was well out of earshot!
There were things about Noel she might never know, tender, passionate things that went deep to the soul of the man, but she had assured herself that she could do without these things because they had so many other things in common. She was the sort of person Noel needed, someone who would understand his work and is ambitions and share his interests with him. That, Sara had decided, was really the most important thing in life.
Her friendship with Ruth had been cultivated largely to the end of getting to know Noel in his off-duty hours, a thing which might not have been possible otherwise, and as she came into the kitchen she smiled at Ruth.
“Why the kitchen?” she asked “And where’s the patient?”
“Noel wants her to sleep all she can,” Ruth explained. “We’ve left her on the settee in the sitting-room. It’s comfortable enough there and there’s no point in moving her upstairs at present.”
“Not when we’ll be moving her across to the wards in the morning,” Sara agreed briskly taking charge automatically. “I’ll make all the arrangements and then you won’t have any more trouble. What’s the matter?” she asked, turning to Noel for the first time.
“Amnesia,” he said briefly. “She’s young. It may only be a temporary lapse.”
“I see.” Ruth watched Sara’s face take on its most professional expression, her grey eyes rather hard, her fine lips firmly compressed as she accepted the cigarette Noel proffered. “Another case for Inspector Evans, I suppose. We’ve had ‘em before!”
“Not like this,” Ruth heard herself saying sharply, contradicting the suggestion in the younger girl’s voice. “This girl’s different.”
Sara’s carefully shaped eyebrows went up.
“In
what way?” she asked mildly. “They mostly turn out to have a fairly seedy history, picked up off the street like that.”
“This girl wasn’t exactly picked up off the streets,” Noel informed her quietly. “Ruth came across her out on the moors after she had walked some considerable distance, it seems. She doesn’t look—the other type.”
Sara glanced at him sharply, then at Ruth.
“This certainly makes a difference,” she said in a completely changed voice. “Could there have been an accident, do you suppose? Perhaps she walked away from the scene of it in a dazed condition and can’t quite recall what happened. She may have had a blow of some kind, on the head, for instance, which would account for the amnesia,” she added professionally.
“We shall take all that into account,” Noel said. “We’ll know by the time we report the case,” he added. “And the police will check up on possible accidents in the district.”
“It almost seems as if Noel is reluctant to call in the police,” Sara observed as Ruth filled a hot-water bottle at the sink. “I wonder why?”
Ruth handed her the bottle.
“You’ll see for yourself in a minute,” she said. “Will you carry that in for me?”
The nurse who had come across from the hospital was still waiting in the hall and Ruth smiled as she recognized the girl, glad that “Topsy” Craven was on duty because of a rich quality of understanding in her make-up which she had discovered during her own recent illness, when she had been nursed back to health in one of the private rooms at the hospital.
“Your patient is in here, Topsy,” she explained, opening the sitting-room door. “My brother doesn’t think she should be moved, so we won’t bother to undress her until she has had a long, refreshing sleep.”
Sara had preceded her into the room and was standing looking down at the nameless girl on the settee with her most professional expression.
“Young, indeed,” she mused, “to have come to this! Loss of memory. One invariably associates it with some sort of tragedy. Well,” she concluded briskly, “we should know part of the answer by the morning, if not all of it.”
For the remainder of the afternoon Ruth found herself chained to the house, “hovering,” as she put it, “outside the sitting-room like a broody hen with her first patch of chicks,” waiting for any sound from within that would tell her the girl was awake.
Once, when she opened the door noiselessly, she found Topsy dozing in the chair beside the window and marvelled once again at the capacity of nurses in general for hard work and an ever-cheerful disposition. Surely, she mused, they must be born and not made!
Topsy’s patient had not stirred, but even Ruth could see that she was sleeping naturally now. She closed the door with a sigh of relief, thinking that it remained only to wait for Noel’s verdict when he came home some time after six o’clock.
Wondering why this case should suddenly have come to mean so much to her, she saw her brother’s tall figure approaching from the direction of the hospital and glanced hastily at the clock; it was a full hour before his usual time for returning and she knew that anxiety about his new patient must have brought him.
“How is she?” he asked without preliminary. “I thought I would pop over and have another look at her.”
“She appears to have been sleeping quite naturally most of the afternoon,” Ruth told him. “Nurse Craven has been with her, and there has been no sign of complications.”
He nodded, pausing by the closed door of the sitting-room, his face gravely thoughtful as he turned over a possible suggestion in his mind, but he went on into the room without communicating his thoughts to his sister, and Ruth turned back to the kitchen to prepare his evening meal.
She was peeling potatoes when Sara Enman appeared at the back door for the second time that day.
“I’ve just come off duty,” she explained, “and I wondered if there was anything I could do for you. About the girl, I mean,” she added when Ruth looked puzzled. “Has Noel notified the police yet?”
“I don’t know.” Ruth felt vaguely irritated by the question for some unknown reason, wishing, almost, that Sara had stayed away. “He’s with her now, as a matter of fact. I suppose he’ll want to check up on her reactions as soon as she returns to full consciousness.”
“There’s a police surgeon to do that sort of job,” Sara returned sharply.
“Oh! Tim won’t mind!” Ruth smiled. “Anyway, I believe he’s still away in London.”
She thought of Tim Wedderburn, slow, stolid, not given to a quick decision, but universally liked wherever he went. They called him Doctor Watson even to his face, and he laughed quietly at their joke and went on doing his job slowly but surely.
“That doesn’t exactly make Noel responsible for all the police cases that come in while he’s away,” Sara remarked dryly. “He’s far too busy to be bothered with routine stuff like this, and I understood he was operating this afternoon.”
“Yes,” Ruth said, “but he must have got through early. He came in just before you did.”
For the first time in their long acquaintance she was finding it difficult to understand Sara, thinking of her unexpected visit as bordering on interference, but that was unreasonable where an old friend was concerned. Ever since her recent illness small details had been apt to take on undue importance, and she made up her mind to speak to Noel about it whenever a suitable opportunity presented itself. A tonic or something was probably all she needed.
“Has she been sleeping all this time?” Sara asked, still determined to pursue the one subject which interested her. “I wonder what line Noel proposes to take. I would suggest sodium pentothal. You get a lot out of them that way.”
“The ‘truth drug’,” Ruth mused. “It always seems—rather cruel to me, dragging, a person’s secrets from them ruthlessly like that, perhaps against their will.”
“One has to be ruthless in our profession on occasion,” Sara remarked, examining her well-kept fingernails with minute attention. “Especially with the criminal classes. People who are trying to hide something, for instance, don’t react normally to the usual methods.”
Ruth flushed. Could Sara be suggesting that the girl she had picked up on the moors was a criminal? Briskly she thrust the suggestion aside.
“Noel expected that there might be a report of an accident when he phoned the police,” she said, “but I haven’t had time to ask him what he has done. I’m hoping he’ll stay over for a meal and not go dashing back to work till all hours without a bite,” she explained as she turned to put the potatoes on the electric cooker. “Will you stay, Sara?” she invited. “There’s quite enough for four.”
“That girl would be far better over in the wards,” Sara said decisively, as if she could not let the subject of Ruth’s protégée drop even to answer her invitation. “I can’t stay this evening,” she went on regretfully. “I’ve got a pile of corrections to wade through, test papers and the usual reports to check. Matron leaves almost everything like that to me these days,” she complained. “She takes it for granted that. I live only for my work, as she does.”
“Never mind!” Ruth consoled. “You’ll disillusion her one of these days!”
She was not quite sure what she meant by that, she mused, as she watched Sara walk away in the direction of the nurses’ home. Perhaps she meant that Sara would get married quite soon. She had done remarkably well in her chosen profession, rising to the position of ward sister and senior sister with amazing rapidity, and she was not quite thirty, but Ruth knew that she would never let professional advancement stand in the way of marriage.
If Ruth had automatically expected Noel to marry Sara one day, she had kept that to herself, too, and her brother’s confidences had certainly never run to the subject of marriage, with Sara or anyone else.
Ruth waited for him in the dining-room and she saw him come towards her across the hall with the same thoughtful expression that had been in his eyes when he had first come in.
“Ruth,” he questioned, coming to the point immediately, “could you possibly cope with a patient in the house for a day or two?”
She looked beyond him to the half-open door of the sitting-room. “You want to keep her here under constant observation?” she surmised.
He nodded.
“She can have the spare room for as long as you think fit,” Ruth agreed without the slightest hesitation. “I won’t mind a bit.”
“It will mean a good deal of extra work for you, cooking meals and that sort of thing,” he warned. “If there’s any nursing to be done, of course, we can call in help from the hospital.”
“Will she be able to take a normal diet?” Ruth asked as he followed her into the kitchen. “There’s some soup she can have now, and the remains of the chicken we had yesterday.”
“There’s nothing whatever wrong with her appetite.” He was standing by the window looking out, not really seeing the scene in front of him but engrossed in the fascinating study of a new case. “Amnesia—the blotting out of memory—a forgetting,” he mused. “Names, identity, home, have all been swept away behind the dark curtain.” He turned abruptly. “Only those who have experienced it can possibly know the terrible desolation of not being able to remember,” he said quietly.
“How will she react?” Ruth asked. “Now, I mean, while her mind still remains a blank?”
He looked up quickly.
“Don’t make the mistake of imagining that this girl isn’t capable of understanding in the ordinary way,” he said. “To my mind, that is the tragedy of it all. The amnesiac looks completely normal, and he keeps his ordinary faculties. It’s just that one particular part of his brain is sealed off—for a day, perhaps for a week or even for months. Sometimes an operation is necessary. Traumatic amnesia is caused by a blow on the head and until the pressure is lifted surgically nothing will give back the memory of what went before.”
Strange Recompense Page 2