Strange Recompense

by Catherine Airlie

“You thought you knew where she was,” he suggested. “Has it never occurred to you in all this time that you might have made a mistake about Anna?”

  She glared at him.

  “We knew what she did,” she affirmed. “They went away together. They had it all planned beforehand.”

  “Had they? I wonder. You were very much in love with Ned, weren’t you?” he asked. “Possessively in love, Jess. Was that not so? Forgive me, but I have to be blunt to get my point across to you! Have you never thought that you might have lost Ned without Anna being involved in it at all, that he might just have—changed his mind?”

  The painful color of hurt and embarrassment flew into her cheeks and her stormy dark eyes looked sulkier than ever as she strove to refute his suggestion by added proof from another source.

  “That Nurse Enman, or whatever she was, said that Anna had married Ned Armstrong!” she declared.

  He did not argue the point because he had not found an answer to that himself, and Jess added with fine sarcasm:

  “Maybe you can undo that knot, too, since you’ve come to prove to us how innocent she was?”

  “I’ve come to beg you to help her,” Noel answered, “that’s all. And I don’t see how you can possibly refuse.”

  He knew that she was about to turn down his appeal, that no amount of further argument would sway her, and then a voice hailed her from the floor above. It was guttural and indistinct, and Noel looked up in the general direction of the sound.

  “Your father?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “He won’t see anyone.”

  “I’m a doctor,” he reminded her. “Perhaps he will agree to see me. Did he know that you wrote to me in reply to Anna’s letter?”

  The tell-tale color climbed into her cheeks again, answering him before she said:

  “Why should I bother him with her affairs? She had cut herself off from the family and he never wanted to see her again after what she did.”

  “So you wrote without telling him,” Noel mused, “in order to keep me away?”

  “I wrote what I did because I knew he didn’t want her back,” she defended herself. “He could never forgive her,” Jess reiterated. “He could never get over her taking my mother’s ring. It was meant for me, and she used it for her own purpose, to marry the man I was engaged to! My father put his blessing on that ring when he entrusted it to her, and it was to be for the first of us who got married. She took it with her when it was meant for me!”

  The strangled pronouncement was so fraught with jealousy that Noel could feel genuinely sorry for her, seeing the warped outlook of an older sister deeply resentful at the idea of the younger being married first, and added to all that was the fact that Jessica Marrick firmly believed Anna to have married the man she loved.

  It was the same story that Sara had repeated, only now it held poignancy as well as venom. He was acutely sympathetic with Jessica Marrick in that moment, but he could not afford to let sympathy over a love affair stand in his way.

  “May I go upstairs?” he asked. “I can explain everything to your father.”

  “If you must.”

  Reluctantly she stood aside, watching him as he mounted the narrow stairs, and Noel found himself wondering what would become of her after all this was over.

  The only door standing open on the upstairs landing was evidently Abraham Marrick’s bedroom, and he went in to find the old man seated in an arm-chair near the window.

  To a trained eye such as Noel’s, it was evident that the first effect of the seizure was just wearing off, and he felt intense relief as the older man measured him with a keen scrutiny.

  “Your daughter wrote to me and told me about your illness,” he explained, holding out his hand to shake the gnarled one the farmer extended as he edged a chair forward with his foot.

  “My name’s Melford—Noel Melford, and I’ve had your younger daughter under my care in a Welsh hospital for the past few weeks.”

  Abraham Marrick stiffened in his seat.

  “I want nothing to do with her,” he declared harshly, but Noel was far too keen a psychologist not to detect the secret yearning in him for his favourite child.

  “Mr. Marrick,” he said bluntly, “there are a great many things that have to be overlooked in life, if not actually forgotten. I’m not here to ask your forgiveness on Anna’s behalf, only to plead with you as her physician to help her in the desperate situation she is in now. Even though she has no true memory of the past, I am quite convinced that her love for her family is one of the strongest emotions she knows. Home life and family ties have brought the greatest response in all our tests at the hospital and she has been greatly concerned about you, even though you are nothing more than a name to her at present.” He leaned over and put a hand on the other man’s knee. “As I see it,” he said quietly, “it is your duty to see her.”

  “Duty?” The word seemed to stick in Abraham Marrick’s throat. “My girl didn’t show much sense of duty when she ran off like that, wi’ nary a word!” he declared bitterly.

  “That’s where I need your help,” Noel pointed out. “We must link up dates, and only you and Miss Marrick can give me what I want.”

  After the barest pause the farmer let his body relax, and sank back in his chair.

  “I’ll do my best,” he agreed, his hands unclenching under the warm pressure of Noel’s long fingers. “I never thought to see her again—”

  He spoke as if he had just heard of a miracle, and Noel’s lips curved in the slightest of smiles as he felt for his diary in his waistcoat pocket.

  “Now let me see,” he began, fingering through the pages. “My sister brought Anna to our home in Glynmareth suffering from loss of memory, on the twentieth of last month. You are a farmer, Mr. Marrick, so you are sure to remember the gales which were sweeping our country during that particular week—rain and high winds that made it more like March than June.”

  The old man nodded.

  “Ay, well I remember them, and told that girl o’ mine they would have blown themselves out by the end o’ the week, which they did!”

  “Mr. Marrick, do you remember exactly when Anna left Alnborough?”

  “She left on the Monday,” the farmer said. “We went with her as far as Alnwick, because it was market day, and she caught the bus for Newcastle there. We saw her on to it. She was to travel from Newcastle by the night train, so that she should have reached North Wales early the following day. The Monday would be the eighteenth of the month, for I paid bills that day and had them receipted and dated. “Yes,” he added decisively, “that was right! I looked them up, you see, just to make sure—”

  “There’s no need to make any more calculations,” Noel said with something in his eyes that was like liquid fire. “We’ve got a story here in a nutshell! Three days of it! The day Anna left here, the day when she travelled on to some unknown destination, and the day when she was found by my sister wandering on the moor near our home!”

  He got to his feet and stood staring out through the window, speaking rapidly, as if time were an urgent factor even now.

  “Only Anna can tell us what happened in between the eighteenth and the twentieth, but I am quite convinced now that she was the victim of an accident, something swift and terrifying which blotted out memory and all else for several hours. When she regained consciousness she was wet and cold, and she did the most sensible thing she could have done in the circumstances—began to walk. She walked till mid-day, when Ruth found her.” He wheeled round to face the older man. “This amnesia—this forgetting can be cleared up in two ways,” he explained. “The return to a well-remembered scene and the sight of known faces could bring everything back in a flash, or, if the amnesia is traumatic—the result of a severe blow—operation on the brain is necessary. We’ve come to the point in Anna’s case,” he added bluntly, “where memory should return. I’ve brought her to the door, Mr. Marrick. It is for you to open it to her.”

  The si
lence after he had finished speaking could almost be felt, but he waited confidently, sure that he had struck the right note.

  “What do you want me to do?” Abraham Marrick asked at last.

  “I want you to let me bring her here, in my own way.”

  Tears trickled slowly down the old man’s weather-beaten cheeks; tears of which he was no longer ashamed.

  “Ah did wrong,” he said in broad dialect. “Bring back the bairn into ma hoose.”

  Noel gripped his hand and wrung it warmly.

  “Thank you,” he said simply. “You won’t regret it, Mr. Marrick.”

  Quietly he made his way back down the stairs to find Jess standing at the foot with her dark brows drawn in a scowl. He could not say whether she had overheard their conversation or not, and he did not care.

  “Go up to your father,” he commanded, “and see that he goes to bed for a while. Take him something hot to drink and don’t let him talk too much. He’ll want to get up in the morning.” He held her sullen gaze with a steely look. “And remember, Jess, no scenes! One heated argument could cause a great deal of trouble just now. He’ll have excitement enough tomorrow, but I shall be there to take charge.”

  “You’re bringing her back!” she accused. “You’ve talked him into it!”

  “Yes,” Noel said, “I’m bringing her back.”

  He did not believe that Jessica Marrick would hold out against them once her father had made his decision, and he raced the car back to Alnwick with the blood hammering a mad tattoo in his veins, his whole horizon brighter for that half hour’s talk with an old bewildered man whose bitterness had not really gone very deep.

  It was ridiculous to feel such childish disappointment, he told himself, when he found the lounge empty and Ruth and Anna not yet returned, but reasoning has little understanding of love’s impetuosity, and he looked at his watch impatiently a dozen times during the next half-hour.

  “They’re going to be late for dinner,” he thought almost irritably when seven o’clock came round and there was still no sign of his sister. Ruth should have known better!

  Between seven and half-past Ruth came into the lounge alone. “Where’s Anna?” Eagerness and dismay mingled in his voice and his eyes searched his sister’s, demanding an explanation.

  “We walked so far,” Ruth explained, “she went straight up to her room to change her shoes. What news?” she asked.

  “We’re getting somewhere at last,” he said, relieved that no harm had come to them. “Anna Marrick left here on the eighteenth and you picked her up at Glynmareth two days later!”

  “On the twentieth,” Ruth agreed. “Yes, go on!”

  “Well—don’t you see! One day was hardly time enough to have met this Ned Armstrong fellow, far less married him!”

  Trained to composure, trained to meet the vagaries of life without undue comment, he had not been able to conceal his fundamental relief at the thought of Anna’s marriage being more or less an impossibility in these circumstances, and the little human revelation of the man under the skin of the doctor endeared him to Ruth more than ever. In her own heart she knew overwhelming relief for his sake, yet she realized that she must not tell him so—not yet. From this intimate moment of revelation onwards, he would be the doctor again, intent upon his case, living for nothing else until success came his way.

  “But you think she did meet him?” she asked.

  “I feel almost certain of it, in face of that letter. Armstrong had made an appeal to her which, being Anna, she would not refuse, and she went to meet him as he had suggested. Whether he was in love with her or she with him I don’t know, but that’s immaterial at the moment.”

  “What about the sister?” Ruth asked with a hint of sympathy in her pleasant voice.

  “She’s not taking this too well, of course. She’s still resentful.”

  “We’ll have to try to understand that.”

  “You will when you’ve seen her!”

  “You’re sorry for her, Noel?”

  “Yes, damnably sorry, but I don’t intend to let her stand in my way. I’ve won the old man over, so we can dispense with Jess Marrick’s co-operation for the present.”

  “Do you think she will try to make trouble?”

  “I don’t see how she can, but we can always take precautions.”

  “What has she to lose now?”

  “I don’t know. Since we don’t believe Anna ever married Ned Armstrong—nothing.”

  “All this—doesn’t account for the ring,” Ruth pointed out doubtfully.

  “I’ve got a theory about that,” Noel said. “Can you remember who helped you that day at the villa? You told me you called to a nurse going off duty.”

  “It was one of the probationers—Jill, I think they call her. I thought I’d better see Matron myself, and I asked her to hold the fort while I was away.”

  “Can you remember what you told her to do?”

  “I wouldn’t give her an order,” Ruth considered, “but—yes, I think I suggested she might look through Anna’s pockets for some evidence of identity. When I came back she had laid out a purse and a few coppers—and the handkerchief with Anna’s name on it.”

  “And the wedding ring was on Anna’s finger?”

  “Yes. I think that was when I first noticed it—when I came back from the hospital,” Ruth agreed. “Noel, do you think—?”

  “These superstitious Welsh!” Surprisingly, there was an amused light in his eyes now, making them kinder. “Sentiment before duty every time!”

  “You think Jill put the ring on?” Ruth asked incredulously.

  “I’m almost sure of it! Rather than let the stranger die with it in her pocket, Jill would risk it. The third finger of the girl’s left hand being the only place that a wedding ring should go, Jill would put it there with never a second thought. By Jove, Ruth, I think we’ve got it!” he exclaimed. “The answer to a good deal of anguish and heart-searching!” he added quietly.

  “I hope you’re right, my dear,” Ruth said as Anna opened the door of the lounge and came in. “I’ve felt all day that she was coming right to the brink of remembering.”

  Anna came towards them almost shyly, her eyes questioning Noel, and he said briefly:

  “We’re leaving everything till tomorrow. There’s not a great deal to explain at this stage, but we are getting somewhere, at last. I’ve met your father, Anna. He’s been ill, but you will be able to see him tomorrow.”

  He was evading a detailed explanation of his plans, and Ruth knew that he was depending on the element of surprise to revive memory where so much else had failed. He did not want Anna to spend the next few hours counting the time to her ordeal, her nervousness and anxiety mounting until they finally defeated his object.

  “Where did you go?” he asked.

  “When we came off the bus at Alnmouth we had some tea,” Ruth told him.

  “At ‘The Schooner’,” Anna added eagerly. “As soon as I went in I knew I had been there before, Noel, and I thought, after that, it would all be easy—” She broke off, but her brow was no longer clouded. The groping was upwards, towards the certain light. “I knew that I had been there often in the past—happily. If it had only been a matter of place and environment,” she added with amazing insight into her problem, “I’m sure everything would have cleared for me there and then, but that’s not all it is. It’s about people, Noel—”

  “Yes,” he agreed quietly. “I know. Your concern is with Ned Armstrong.”

  The name drew all the color into her cheeks and Ruth saw her hand clench suddenly over her handbag.

  “If only I could do something!” she cried.

  “Whatever you want to do,” Noel said, “whatever you had set out to do, will all come right in the end, Anna. We can’t rush things. We must be prepared to wait for results—even now.”

  They went to dinner, and Anna noticed the difference in Noel as he ordered their meal. He looked unaccountably younger and far more sure of t
he situation than he had ever been, and her pulses quickened as she let her thoughts go forward to tomorrow. A few more hours were all that might be left between her and the past. It was like walking backwards in time, re-living her life, step by step, back to that dark curtain which divided her from so much of that past that had a definite bearing on the present, too. Without the memory of the past the present was meaningless, and she knew that Noel had recognized that long ago.

  Tonight, however, there was a new warmth in his voice, and his eyes were clear. It was as if he were trying to tell her that there was no need to fear, and she took fresh courage from the thought.

  She even slept peacefully that night, untroubled by any dream, and when the morning came her courage was renewed. She was first down to breakfast, but Noel came in soon afterwards.

  “You’ve been out walking!” she greeted him. “You’ve got a look of fresh air about you!”

  “I never sleep much after six,” he said, taking the chair opposite her and unfolding his table napkin. “Anna,” he added suddenly, “before Ruth comes I want to tell you that, whatever today brings, you can always count on me. I love you, my dear—whatever that is worth in this hopeless situation.”

  He did not tell her that he was fool enough to believe that her marriage had never taken place. He did not want to confuse her unnecessarily, and she still wore the wedding ring like an amulet. The ring he had bought! He smiled wryly at the irony of that thought.

  “If only—it had all been different,” Anna said heavily. “Oh! I can’t bear to think of forgetting all this, Noel, of perhaps not being able to remember about you or about Ruth and Glynmareth! I feel that—fate might have been kinder to us,” she added brokenly.

  He did not mean her to forget, but he could not tell her that now, and he cursed Sara Enman for her interference.

  “We can only work these things out when we come to them,” he said. “This afternoon I am going to take you to Alnborough to your father.”

  A wave of deep color stained her cheeks.

  “Was he really ill, Noel, or did he not answer my letter because there was something wrong—because he did not wish to see me?” she asked. “I’ve never been able to understand why my people didn’t report my disappearance to the police,” she went on unhappily. “It would have saved you so much unnecessary trouble and all these long, wearying journeys.”