by Jane Arbor
Then, as if afraid of betraying that she was near to tears, she turned and ran out of the room.
Puzzled and dismayed, Joanna sat on alone by the fire until Mrs. Carnehill returned. Soon afterwards she excused herself, saying that she would go to bed. But before she went she said quietly:
“Mr. Carnehill tells me that Shuan usually takes his early tea to him in the mornings. Do you think she would like to go on doing that?”
“Why, yes, I think the child would. If that’s all right with you?”
“Yes, of course. I’ll leave it to her.” Joanna hesitated, wondering whether she ought to tell Mrs. Carnehill of the hostility which her own arrival had aroused in Shuan. But she decided to say nothing. For all the girl’s rudeness, Joanna had a certain sympathy for her; she was, after all, no more than a child who thought herself supplanted. And Joanna believed that she had tact enough to deal with a situation of that sort.
She said good night and went to her room. She undressed quickly, put on a warm house-gown and unpinned the shining knot of her hair. It tumbled slowly in a golden cascade over her shoulders and she began the leisurely ritual of its nightly brushing in long, rhythmical strokes.
When she had finished she took from a compartment in her dressing-case writing materials and the fountain-pen which Dale Woodward had given her for her last birthday.
She began to write:
“My dear Dale—” but there she stopped.
She remembered that this had been going to be a funny letter. That she had been making mental notes all day, meaning, when she wrote it, to recount all the oddities of her first day in Ireland.
But somehow, tonight, none of it seemed very laughable. Overlaid upon it now was a depressing sense of conflict, of difficult situations lying ahead. And she knew that, tonight at any rate, she could not write of Carrieghmere without betraying to Dale that she had misgivings as to her dealings with the people in it.
And Dale had no use or misunderstanding of what he called “Whimsy-whamsies.” As a scientist, he had the scientist’s precision of mind. For Dale, in his work of research chemistry, disease was a matter of a germ, a microscope and the intriguing “isolation” to follow. And he would not try to understand, as Joanna herself must, that strange tempers and incalculable moods were the things which made patients into people, and that to be granted a revealing dawn of hope in a sick man’s eyes was worth to her all the microscopic slides in the world!
No, Dale would not understand ... “If you don’t think you can cope, throw up the case and come home”—that was how he would reply bluntly to any doubts she might voice. So, until she could be funny and confident and casual about Carrieghmere, about Roger Carnehill and Shuan Ferrall, she would not write at all.
She poised her pen once more over the paper.
“Dear Dale,
“This is just to let you know that I arrived safely. I will tell you all about everything in a day or two. I am just going to bed! Good night.
Affectionately,
Joanna.”
She had never written so briefly to Dale before!
CHAPTER THREE
It was barely light when she awoke next day to wonder what Carrieghmere’s early-morning routine was. In a similar house in England she would expect to be called by the housemaid with early morning tea and to have her bath run in readiness for her. But here no one had suggested overnight that this would be so, and somehow she hardly expected that Shuan, who would be taking Roger Carnehill’s tea, would be gracious enough to perform the same office for her!
She had just decided that she would get up when there was a knock at the door, and a girl in a pink print dress, over which she wore a green cardigan and an apron of doubtful whiteness, came in.
Roseen, yesterday’s absent housemaid, decided Joanna, as the tea-tray was brought to her bedside.
She smiled as she sat up. “Thank you. I didn’t expect this. I wonder if you would draw the curtains before you go?”
But Roseen was staring at her, apparently entranced. When she moved over to the window she did so by backing away from the bed, still gazing dumbly at Joanna.
At last she said in a rich Connemara brogue: “I said to Cook, ‘Give me a cup of tea now, for Mr. Roger’s new nurse that’ll be lying in her bed, looking to be waited on hand and foot as the English do.’ But I wasn’t expecting to see anyone of the likes of you! ‘Tis middle-aged and crabby I thought you’d be. And you with the fair looks of one of them filum stars—what’s this her name is now?—the way she’s always wearing her golden hair over her shoulders, just like yours!”
Amused and slightly embarrassed by this outburst, Joanna shook back her hair and looked up at the girl with a twinkle in her eye.
“You’re Roseen, aren’t you? You wouldn’t have been kissing your famous blarney stone, by any chance?”
Roseen took the accusation without humor. “I have not, so!” she declared indignantly. “ ‘Twas surprise alone that took my manner away from me for the moment.” She put her head on one side as she continued to eye Joanna speculatively. “How it is now, that you’d be let to come out nursing on your own, when you wouldn’t be much more than the age of meself?”
“I’m ‘let’ because I’m fully trained, I suppose,” smiled Joanna. “And I dare say I’m several years older than you are, really.”
“I’m twenty,” said Roseen gloomily. “ ‘Tis my deep ambition to be a nurse, but I’m not let to go to England alone.”
“What about Dublin?” put in Joanna.
“Nor to Dublin, till the day I’ll be twenty-one. My mother says—But you’ll be wanting your tea, Miss! I’ll leave you now—”
She began to back towards the door, but Joanna stopped her to ask:
“What about Mr. Roger’s tea? Has Miss Shuan taken it to him yet?”
Roseen looked faintly astonished. “Mr. Roger’s tea, is it? Miss Shuan won’t be at that for an hour or more!”
Joanna glanced at her travelling clock. “But I understood Mr. Roger to say that she took it to him at about seven?”
“Arrah, no. ‘Tis nearer eight and oftener nine when Miss Shuan does be getting it for him! What for would he be wanting it earlier, and him lying there all day, the way time would be nothing to him at all?”
This was an argument into which Joanna was not prepared to enter. So she said briefly: “All right, Roseen. Perhaps I’ll take it to him myself. I’m getting up straight away as soon as I’ve drunk my tea.”
The girl went out, and Joanna leaned over to pour a well-stewed brew into a cup of equally exquisite fineness as the china from which she had lunched and dined yesterday. What a very odd household this was, to be sure, she thought as she swallowed the black liquid with a grimace at its bitterness.
Then she bathed and dressed and twisted her ‘filum-star’ hair into its familiar neat knot beneath the cap of her uniform. She was thinking as she did so that even if time was indeed “nothing” to her patient, at least it was her duty to show his doctor that it meant something to her! How could she be expected to have Roger ready for a morning call when he might not have had his morning tea until nine!
She went briskly down to the kitchen to find that she was expected to use for her patient the contents of a large earthenware teapot standing on the hearth before the peat fire.
“I think,” said Joanna with the firm gentleness with which she usually got her way, “that it would be better if we made some fresh tea.”
At this the fat woman known as Cook looked truculent, and Roseen ventured:
“Mr. Roger likes his tea strong.”
“Maybe. But I’d still like him to have it newly made. Do you mind—?”
The cool confidence in her voice sent Cook, muttering slightly, to fill another kettle while Roseen prepared a tray. When it was ready she took it to Roger Carnehill’s room, to find that he was already awake.
He was staring straight ahead as if deep in thought, and as she entered he turned abstracted eyes upon her.<
br />
“Good morning,” said Joanna.
“Good morning.” He frowned slightly. “Where’s Shuan?” he demanded.
“I don’t think she is up yet.” Joanna’s voice was equable as she set down the tray. “So, as you said you usually waked at seven or so, I brought your tea myself.”
He regarded her with the rather inscrutable amusement to which she told herself she must get used. It was evidently one of his mannerisms.
“Yesterday,” he remarked dispassionately, “you were ready to accuse me of deliberately creating difficulties between you and Shuan. Aren’t you beginning to wield a very pretty new broom in the child’s face yourself? She’s awfully jealous of her ‘privileges’. And she regards the bringing of my tea as one of the most important of them.”
“I guessed that,” returned Joanna patiently. “And Mrs. Carnehill thought she would like to go on doing it. But they tell me in the kitchen that often you don’t get it until between eight and nine—”
“Well, what of it? One day you’ll learn that our country’s whole philosophy turns upon the phrase ‘Arrah, sure there’s time enough’ And there usually is, you know.”
“Not,” retorted Joanna crisply, “on a morning when I am expecting my first visit from your doctor—Do you mind?” Again it was the cool
assurance that she would be obeyed which constrained Roger to take from her the preferred teacup.
He gulped its contents and looked up with a grimace. “What have they made this from? Last night’s washing-up water?”
“I had it freshly made. I thought you would prefer it.”
“But we like our tea with a bit of body to it! You’re not going to anglicize that! Take it away.
I can’t drink it.”
He set down the cup petulantly. After a second’s hesitation Joanna, her fair skin flushed with annoyance at his rudeness, picked up the tray and moved towards the door. But before she reached it a voice from the bed said:
“I’m sorry. You couldn’t know. I’ll have a stab at it if you like.” He was thinking as she turned about, smiling now, that he had been wrong when he had decided that in uniform she would look utterly inhuman. All that stiff, immaculate whiteness, which you would expect to drain color from anyone so fair, seemed to serve this girl by its very severity and simplicity. And fractiousness had been worth it, to bring that sort of morning flush to her cheeks!
She was saying: “It doesn’t matter. I’ll see that it’s as you like it another morning.” But he beckoned rather imperiously towards the tray, and so she brought it back to him.
She had left his room and was crossing the hall when the baize door leading to the kitchen regions was flung open as three lumbering golden bodies jostled each other for place. They were followed by Shuan, who held their leashes gathered into one hand, while she held her dressing gown from her feet with the other.
Her lovely eyes were bright with the hurt indignation of a child as, at sight of Joanna, she accused:
“You’ve taken Roger’s tea! I always do it! And Mums told you that she wanted me to go on. I know she did, because I asked her after you’d gone to bed. You haven’t any right to interfere like this!”
Rather pointedly—perhaps even a little cruelly, she thought afterwards—Joanna glanced at her watch. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I asked Mrs. Carnehill whether you would like to go on as before. But Dr. Beltane is coming this morning, and it is getting late—”
“Late! As though Beltie cares, so long as he can get asked to lunch! Why, it isn’t half-past eight! And Roger hates being dragged out of sleep just for tea!”
“He was already awake,” Joanna pointed out dryly. Then she went on more gently: “But does it really matter who takes his tea? He is still drinking it. Why don’t you take the dogs in and talk to him as you usually do, until I am ready to give him his blanket bath?”
Shuan stared, hostility mixed with incredulity in her eyes. “You don’t really want the dogs in Roger’s room. He said you didn’t.”
“It’s a matter of entire indifference to me, until I’ve had the doctor’s orders to the contrary.” Joanna felt suddenly that, given a little more provocation, she might smack Shuan—quite pleasurably.
“Well, you won’t get those. Beltie doesn’t care what we do so long as we keep Roger happy.” And Shuan swept on across the hall towards Roger’s room, the dogs dragging tautly on the leash and her head held very high in an absurdly childish attempt at dignity.
As Joanna went about her work her feeling alternated between extreme irritation and an odd sympathy for Shuan. She felt irritated when she remembered that Mrs. Carnehill had told her she was eighteen, so that was fully old enough to control her manners, and she felt sympathetic when, from her own superior heights of twenty-five, she looked back and realized how pitifully easy it was to be hurt—at eighteen!
She began to wonder, too, what sort of an ally this ‘Beltie’—Dr. Beltane—would prove to be. On the telephone she had liked the sound of his voice, but Shuan seemed to set such store by his authority that she had already begun to feel prejudiced against him.
At breakfast Mrs. Carnehill announced that she must go to Dublin, but that ‘Beltie’ was to be duly invited to lunch if he wanted to stay.
“He’ll want to,” interposed Shuan.
“Yes. He usually does,” relied Mrs. Carnehill placidly. “Though I’ve never known, really, how he has the time—”
“What time may I expect him?” asked Joanna.
“Oh, say about eleven. Maybe later. Shuan dear, Justin is coming to dinner tonight—did I tell you? I forgot I was going to Dublin, but I dare say I shall be back.”
“Is René coming too?” inquired Shuan.
“Well, I didn’t ask him particularly, but if he does, be nice to him, there’s a good girl.” Mrs. Carnehill toned to Joanna. “You’ve met Justin McKiley; René Menden is a young Belgian who is studying farming on the estate,” she explained. “He is living with Mr. McKiley at the Dower House—”
“—When he isn’t living here” put in Shuan pertly.
“Shuan, that’s not fair! He very rarely comes here unless he is asked. And his manners are charming.”
“He goggles so! He clicks his heels when he bows, and he wanted to kiss my hand!” objected Shuan.
“Well, you can hardly measure his behaviour alongside that of the corner-boys of Tulleen!” was Mrs. Carnehill’s dry comment. “He is a stranger to our country, and it’s for us to try to understand that his ways are different. But you’re not very tolerant, are you, alannah?” she added more indulgently as she saw from the girl’s face that the rebuke had been taken.
It was a little later, when she was searching—rather hopelessly—through the papers on her desk for some details of Roger’s hospital treatment required by Joanna that Mrs. Carnehill said reflectively:
“D’you know, I think young Menden believes he is in love with Shuan.”
“In love?” echoed Joanna. “But—she’s only a child!”
Mrs. Carnehill looked over her shoulder to give her gentle smile. “She is eighteen. And wasn’t I married myself within a year of the selfsame age!”
“She doesn’t love him?” Joanna put the question while she tried to assimilate this new idea about Shuan. Certainly she found it difficult to associate with her any emotion as mature as—love!
“No. I’m sure not. And I don’t think it has occurred to her that his ‘goggling,’ as she calls it, is part of his complaint. I can only hope that she won’t hurt him too much, unwittingly.”
Joanna said carefully: “She is very devoted to Mr. Carnehill, isn’t she?”
“Why, yes. And I’ve been so grateful for it. For the brother—and—sister relationship between them that made it possible, I mean. Until you came, I don’t know what I’d have done without her. Now you are here. I’m glad she can be relieved of some of the duties which I should have expected her to tire of, long since. But now she ought to get out and about more. I confess I
’d like to see her considering the possibilities of René as a companion—”
“She doesn’t seem anxious for freedom. She is very single-minded,” murmured Joanna.
“Single-minded—in her devotion to Roger, you mean? Yes, I know.” Mrs. Carnehill smiled a little sadly. “Why—she sometimes finds it necessary to protect him even from me!”
“From you? I don’t understand?”
“Well—you’ve heard for yourself how Roger feels about—about all this?” She waved an expressive hand over the littered desk. “And sometimes Shuan takes sides with him against me. As if she didn’t understand—even if he can’t be expected to!”
Her bright eyes clouded as they had done yesterday and Joanna, herself ‘understanding’ very little of the cause of the conflict between her patient and his mother, thought it best to make no direct comment. Instead she held out her hand to take the medical notes which her employer had just unearthed, as she said gently:
“Shuan is very young. And as intolerant as youth itself. Perhaps one ought to remember that—all the while!”
Mrs. Carnehill smiled. “You talk as if your own youth weren’t still in a cloud about you, my dear!” she chided. “And you at the very age to be my own daughter, if I had one!”
Then, tacitly, the subject was dismissed. From then on, until Mrs. Carnehill’s final departure by car for Tulleen station, the preparations for the journey took on a kind of crescendo of flurry, shared by every active member of the household, including Joanna.
As the car disappeared down the weedy drive Shuan turned away, saying ungraciously: “I’m going to exercise the dogs.”
Joanna watched her go, thinking that she must take her own advice by being as tolerant as possible of the girl’s gaucherie. She remembered Shuan’s passionate exclamation of last night. What was it, Joanna wondered, that she did not ‘understand’?