by Jane Arbor
“You mean you nearly ran into her car?” Caroline’s eyes were round with interest. “Do tell! You see, she is supposed to be such a marvellous driver. I don’t suppose she’d admit for a moment that anything like that could have been her fault. She absolutely lives in that Jaguar.”
“If she goes on behaving as she did today, there’s such an obvious retort to your last remark that I won’t make it!” answered Richard grimly. “Anyway, my own brief encounter with her was her fault, and I’d have told her so if she’d waited long enough to hear any observations of mine on the matter. But she was off like a streak of wind, and when I saw her out here I thought I’d ask you who she is. To give her her due, I don’t think she saw me or my car, and she doesn’t realize, at this minute, that I exist.”
He was right. Lysbet did not realize it. She had been only vaguely conscious that another car had been alongside when she had slammed the door of her own, but she had completely forgotten it when her arrival upon the lawns at last had been greeted by mock-groans, ironically faint cheers and sarcastic adjurations to buy herself a decent car, from the group of her friends with whom she usually swam and sunbathed.
She sprang at once to the defence of her beloved ‘Jag’—“Beasts,” she said briefly. “The car is running like a dream. It was Aunt Alicia, recalling her youth—’way back in the thirties.”
“My dear, what a bore!” was someone’s tittered comment.
Instantly Lysbet turned upon the speaker, and if Richard Guyse had been watching at that moment he would have realized how right he had been about her eyes. When Lysbet was indignant they were at least a couple of shades darker than when she was amused, and they had darkened now.
“Aunt Alicia’s not a bore!” she flashed. “She has as much right to talk about herself as we have about ourselves—and goodness knows, I daresay we do enough of that!”
The other girl patted her arm soothingly. “There, there!” she said. “We know all about its devotion to its Aunt!”
Mollified a little, Lysbet laughed. She glanced at the sunbrowned bodies of the young men and girls about her as she said: ‘Well, you didn’t wait for me, did you?” Her friend laughed lazily as she turned over in order to expose a fresh area of her person to the sun.
“That, Lysbet my pet, would have been asking too much—even for your sweet sake. We’ve all been in and out of the pool several times.”
Lysbet flung down her towel, her bag and her sun-glasses on the grass. “Well, who is coming in now?” she challenged.
Instantly there were eager cries of “I am” and “Wait for me” as Lysbet, walking with lithe grace, led the way towards the pool.
They stood arguing as to whether they should go in from the spring-board or from the higher platforms, but as soon as Lysbet had pulled on her helmet she settled the matter by climbing to the top board. There her white-clad figure stood poised for a moment before it flashed in an arrow-straight dive towards the sparkling water. She was shaking drops of moisture from her eyes and laughing with the sheer ecstatic joy of living as she came up beside one of the young men who had followed her in.
“Have you tried the ‘swallow’ again?” she called to him presently.
Barry Cooke shook his head and blushed beneath his tan. He had a dumb devotion to Lysbet about which everyone teased him. “No. I—I waited for you,” he said.
‘Well, let’s try some stunt dives now. Race you to the side!”
Lysbet’s arm went over her head in a perfect curve and her body took a straight line from her shoulders to the little flurry of water which marked the movement of her feet as she sped towards the bank in her favorite crawl-stroke.
Barry followed, not trying to race with her, content only to watch her.
He knew what she would say. She would begin: “Let’s try—” and go on to suggest a series of acrobatic dives which they would proceed to execute either in partnership or in ‘follow-my-leader’ fashion, most of them being extremely spectacular and all of them having more than a spice of danger about then., should they happen to go wrong.
But diving—for Lysbet—seldom went wrong. She had an instinctive feeling for timing and balance, and when she dived there were few people who did not take pleasure in watching her, And when, presently, the two of them took virtual possession of the higher diving-boards, Barry noticed that almost everyone on the lawns around the pool was watching them.
“Let’s try,” said Lysbet at last, “that dive we saw done at the Country Championships. You remember—the fancy diving they had at the end of the program? We go off the board side by side, with our ankles strapped together—”
Barry Frowned slightly. “I don’t like the idea terribly,” he admitted. “It must take such perfect timing to make sure that you both hit the water together. It would be so easy to misjudge it enough to foul the other person’s judgement too. After all, if you’re strapped together, there’s precious little either of you can do if things go wrong.”
“Rot,” scorned Lysbet. “Our timing is pretty nearly perfect— all we’ve got to do is to tie ourselves up, sound our waists and just do an ordinary dive.”
“There isn’t room for us both side by side on the springboard,” objected Barry. “Let’s try it from the staging at the side, first.”
For answer Lysbet cocked her eye appraisingly towards the top board, many feet above their heads.
“There’d be room on that one,” she said. “It’s wider than the others.”
Barry followed her glance and then looked back at her. Did she really mean she wanted to make this experiment from that height, without trying it first from somewhere less risky? If things ‘went wrong’, as he had suggested, there was very little that could be done about it. But equally, when Lysbet had made up her mind there was very little that could be done about that either. In any case, he couldn’t hang back while she set such a lead.
“All right,” he agreed. “Got anything we can tie ourselves up with?”
“I’ll get something. A scarf, or somebody’s belt—”
She flashed away, while Barry turned to climb the ladder towards the diving-board.
A few minutes later, with her right ankle strapped to his, she stood beside him at the dizzy height of the top board, holding him firmly about the waist with a complete lack of self-consciousness.
“Right. Ready?”
“Right. Ready,” she answered.
At that second the poise of their alignment was almost perfect—their readiness was as that of a single diver, instead of two. But it was at that second also from the lawns below there came a sudden, high-pitched exclamation.
“Oh, look, Richard! Isn’t Lysbet daring!” shrilled the childish voice of Caroline Ware.
For the two poised upon the diving-board it was as ill-timed an interruption as could have been made.
At the sound of her name Lysbet’s head jerked up, her body turned sideways out of its arrow-straight alignment with the young man’s, and at the point of contact with the water it was her shoulder which struck first, while the whole of his uncontrolled weight was thrown upon her.
As soon as he felt himself in the water Barry managed to kick clear of the strap which held their ankles together and he came to the surface to find Lysbet apparently unharmed at his side. But as he turned to speak to her he noticed that her body was oddly twisted, that she was using only one arm with which to keep afloat, and there were lines of pain about her mouth.
“Oh, Barry,” she began. “My arm!”
She made an instinctive effort to turn upon her back in order to float, but this was more than she could manage, with her arm trailing helplessly from her shoulder.
But Barry was now behind her, swimming on his back in a rescue position. He towed her to the bank where there were willing hands ready to help them from the water. But once there Lysbet smiled wanly, gasped out: “Oh, Barry—I’m sorry!” and promptly fainted.
“Look—she’s fainted said someone obviously.
; “Her shoulder! She’s hurt it,” said somebody else.
But it was someone else still who strode purposefully through the crowd, noted the damage in one swift, professional glance and summed up comment in his own succinct way.
“She’s a little idiot,” said Dr. Richard Guyse, as he knelt beside her on the grass.
CHAPTER TWO
For the second or third time Lysbet’s eyes opened and looked at the white unfamiliar wall a few feet away from the bed. She could not remember where she was, but it was a question, so her drowsy mind decided, which could be shelved indefinitely.
However, the fact that her patient was coming round from the anaesthetic had not escaped the notice of the young nurse seated at the bedside. With a crackle of starched apron she came forward to smile at Lysbet, who roused sufficiently to smile back politely.
“That’s good. How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” said Lysbet in a thin voice which she scarcely recognized as her own. “Where am I?”
“Cottage Hospital. Private wards. Don’t you remember being brought in?”
“Yes, of course.” Memory began to function again in Lysbet’s hazy mind. “I was doing a stunt dive with someone, and I muffed it, and we crashed on the water. I hurt my arm frightfully.”
“You broke your shoulder, you mean.”
For the first time since waking Lysbet became conscious of the cumbersome arrangement of strappings, pads and stiffness which seemed to have been substituted for what had been, only this afternoon, an efficiently functioning right shoulder.
“Oh,” she said blankly.
“Yes. You took a nasty crack. Just shows, doesn’t it, the sort of force you can hit water with?” remarked the other girl with a cheerful disregard of grammar. “You’re not feeling sick, are you?”
Lysbet shook her head. “I’m all right.”
“Well, you had attention straight away,” went on the nurse, smoothing Lysbet’s coverlet automatically. “Dr. Guyse brought you into Casualty himself and they had you in the Theatre within half-an-hour.”
“Dr. Guyse? Oh, yes—the man who brought me here. I remember coming round to hear him saying he was a doctor. Is he a Fallsbridge doctor? I don’t know him,” puzzled Lysbet.
“Oh, you mightn’t. He’s quite new. He took Dr. Mahony’s place. He attends medical cases here. Matron thinks no end of him already—”
But Lysbet’s mind had already gone off upon another track.
“Barry,” she said suddenly. “The man I was diving with—was he hurt too?”
“I don’t know. I shouldn’t think so. You were the only patient who came into Private Wards this afternoon.”
“Because,” went on Lysbet slowly, “because I missed my timing completely. I remember now—just as we were ready, somebody shouted ... I think they said something about me. Anyway, it put me off and I went flat and dragged Barry with me. Could you find out if he is all right? I’m afraid I shall worry until I know.”
At the word ‘worry’ the nurse became alert with professional care. ‘Worry’ set patients back, put up their temperatures and generally tended to undo nursing’s good work. It wasn’t to be permitted in any circumstances...
She patted the bed-coverings again, gave a deft tweak or two to the pillows and put on a cheerfully impersonal smile.
“Oh, come, you mustn’t do that, you know. I’ll do what I can, but it’s nearly eight o’clock and I was going off duty.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Is it really as late as all that?”
“Yes. I’ll tell Sister you’ve come round, and if you ask her, she’ll get someone to telephone and find out about your friend. Will that do?”
Lysbet nodded gratefully and when the girl had gone she settled back upon her pillows as comfortably as she could.
The thought of Barry had brought her back rather sharply to the memory of her accident. How could she have been such an idiot as to muff it like that? Someone on the lawns had called to her, or had spoken her name at the split second at which she and Barry had been at the ‘ready’. If she had been diving alone she would have been able to wait and to recover her balance; having tied herself to Barry meant that she had to go off the board at the instant at which he was ready—and disaster had lain in wait.
Barry hadn’t wanted to do that dive from the top board. It had been rather mean and foolhardy of her to insist. And that reminded her of something else which she had forgotten in the anaesthetized mists of the last hour or so. As that new doctor who had brought her here had come to her on the Club lawn she had rallied sufficiently from her faint to hear him say in just so many wards that she was a ‘little idiot’.
Well, so she was! But how could he have guessed that it had been she who had persuaded Barry to the dive, instead of the other way about? Next time she saw him,’ she’d ask him ... She supposed he would come to see her before they let her go home.
But about going home—: had anyone, she wondered in sudden panic, told Aunt Alicia of her accident, or seen that her car had been taken back to Falcons?
That nurse had promised that the Sister would be coming to see her, but no one had been near her yet. An irritable sense, that she was being neglected and ill-used began to creep over her, and she rang her bell sharply. Was she the concern of nobody in this establishment?
Her indulgence in self-pity was short lived, for it was only a minute or two later that a bright-faced buxom Sister came into the room and inquired smilingly: “Well, how are we?”
Lysbet smiled back and found herself willingly handing over a half-proprietary share of her broken shoulder by saying in reply: “We’re fine, thanks!” But she added anxiously: “I was wondering—how long must I stay here? You see, I don’t know if my aunt, Mrs. Tempest, knows about my accident, or whether the car went home, or anything?”
“Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to stay for a few days at least,” answered the Sister. “As for your aunt, she’s waiting downstairs to see you now. I think the friend with whom you were diving—a Mr. Cooke, would it be?—took your car home for you, and brought Mrs. Tempest back with him.”
“Oh, I’m glad,” exclaimed Lysbet in relief. “That means Barry wasn’t hurt himself. Could my aunt come up to see me now?” she added eagerly.
But Mrs. Alicia Tempest, it seemed, was not ‘waiting downstairs’. With the autocracy which characterized many of her actions and which wealth enabled her to indulge to the full, she had waylaid a nurse from another ward entirely, detailed her to ‘show her up’ and was already at Lysbet’s door.
Her eyes softened to tenderness at sight of Lysbet and she rested one exquisitely gloved hand on the bedrail as she bent to kiss her niece lightly on the forehead.
“Darling!” she said in her attractively modulated voice. “What have you been up to?”
“She’s lovely—and kind—and I love her!” thought Lysbet quickly as she had often done before. And, also as before, was acutely conscious of the contrast between them. There was that matured assurance of Aunt Alicia’s which sometimes seemed almost to rebuke the leaping pulse of Lysbet’s own youth. And there was her beauty—a beauty of silvering fair hair expensively dressed, framing a face whose complexion had every care and treatment known to Bond Street, a beauty of white, tapering fingers, a beauty of figure and of dress where line and cut and material had always to be part of an exquisite whole ... And there was her wealth—the wealth from which, to Lysbet who had nothing, nothing had hitherto been grudged. Yes, Lysbet decided, Aunt Alicia had every right to her own admiration and gratitude—and love.
She smiled up now a little sheepishly, depreciatingly.
“I’m afraid I’ve been—a little idiot,” she said.
For answer Aunt Alicia smiled her thanks for the chair which the Sister offered her. Incidentally, Sister Monahan was left with the impression that she would have been thanked in just the same impersonal way had she been a mere probationer, but of this Mrs. Tempest was autocratically ignorant.
&n
bsp; “So Barry,” she told Lysbet as she sat down. “Whose idea was that foolish dive? Yours or his?”
“Mine, Aunt Alicia. He didn’t want to try it. He said it might go wrong—and it did.”
“M’m. I thought it sounded as if it might have emanated from you. Er—just the slightest bit circus-acrobat of you, wasn’t it, darling?” inquired her aunt evenly. “After all everyone—including yourself and Barry—must know that you dive pretty well by now, without your wanting to indulge in pieces of exhibition of that sort. However—blaming you won’t mend your poor shoulder! We shall have to see about getting you home—”
Lysbet flushed, wondering how it was that with a single cool word or two Aunt Alicia could make her feel ashamed, rather foolish and far younger than her twenty-three years. But before she could reply Mrs. Tempest had set back her chair and was standing up.
“I’ve got the car waiting,” she said. “I expect Nurse here will help you to dress.”
Lysbet glanced at the Sister and noticed with amusement tinged with dismay that her stature had seemed to increase by inches. Indignation at being referred to as ‘Nurse here’ was drawing her to her full height and she looked ready to wither Mrs. Tempest with a few well-chosen words, when the door opened and a fourth person entered.
At sight of him Sister Monahan made an automatic movement of smoothing out her apron over her hips and setting her cuffs; Mrs. Tempest turned to survey him without recognition, while Lysbet saw in him her self-constituted knight-errant of that afternoon and of whom she had only the most hazy recollection.
Richard Guyse cast a glance of inquiry towards Mrs. Tempest but his real attention was for Lysbet.