Doctor's Love

by Jane Arbor

  “You mean—you’ll expect to go on living here?”

  “Where else? I’ve made some friends around here. I like the bars in the Fallsbridge hotels and the place is convenient for all the race-courses in the southern half of the country! So why not?”

  “But you can’t! Elliott—I can’t make a home here with you, where I’m known, where Richard—”

  Eliot’s smile was unpleasant. “Well, I’m sorry but you’ll have at least to make the attempt. I expect Mrs. Tempest will prefer to live elsewhere. You’ll have to make some arrangements for her. But certainly I haven’t any intention of returning to Cape Town, either with you or alone. I hope that’s quite clear.”

  He left the doorway as he spoke and came across the room towards her. “Meanwhile, for this evening I’d planned something else which went rather awry when you came in here. I meant to wait until your aunt left us alone and then to give you—this.”

  He was very close to her now, and taking her left hand in his, he slipped a ring—a huge single diamond—on to her engagement finger.

  She could not escape, for he held her too tightly while she gazed down upon it in horror.

  “No—No!” she gasped.

  Deliberately he misunderstood her. ‘Too showy? Nonsense! Don’t forget that Fallsbridge believes that even my razor is studded with the things! Naturally, you’ll realize that this one isn’t paid for—yet, but there’s no need to tell them that!”

  She tried to wrench herself free in vain. “I can’t wear it!—I won’t! You can’t make me. It;—it doesn’t mean anything between you and me.”

  “On the contrary, I intend it to mean a great deal. It publishes our standing with each other, leaving no grounds for doubt in the minds of the busybodies. I wish you to wear it and—this—is why.”

  Before she could protest he had put an arm about her and drawn her to him. She had only one hand free with which to thrust herself back from him, and with a sudden deft movement he had pinioned that behind her.

  She turned her head away, feeling sick with the knowledge that he was going to kiss her, but for a moment he did not attempt to do so. He said softly, holding her slightly away from him as if appraising her beauty: “An engagement ring foretells—possession, doesn’t it? That’s why I want you to wear mine. Because, you know, a little pocket money, even Falcons itself, aren’t the only things I mean to possess in my good time—or would it be more considerate of me to say your good time?”

  He bent over her then, seeking her lips. His mouth was hot and demanding and Lysbet shrank at its touch. With an effort which was far beyond her normal strength she flung herself free of him, half-crying and wrenching at the ring upon her finger as she did so.

  She snatched it off, flung it to roll at his feet and evaded him on her way towards the door.

  “You may get your pocket money—” the scorn in her voice was searing—“and you may even get Falcons for yourself. But that kind of possession you’ll never get—never, as long as I live! And if that”—she pointed at the ring—“is meant to be the symbol of it you’d better take it back to wherever someone was fool enough to trust you with it. For I’ll never wear it!”

  Unperturbed, Eliot stooped to pick up the ring and thrust it jauntily into a waistcoat pocket.

  “A pity,” he murmured coolly. “But perhaps Mrs. Tempest may be able to persuade you where I can’t.”

  Half-choking upon her impotent fear and hatred Lysbet ran from him out of the room. Eliot sauntered over to the piano, picked out a few notes with an aimless finger, then walked across to the electric fire and kicked on the switch. He rang for drinks to be brought to him and stretched himself full-length upon the deep chesterfield. So it looked as if he were to spend a lonely evening after all. But it hadn’t been altogether an unprofitable one. The next thing was to fix a date for his marriage to Lysbet and to hold both women to it...

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A hand over the mouthpiece Caroline turned from the surgery telephone and gave a patient’s name to Richard at his desk.

  “Mrs. Smith? Of Acorn Street? What does she want?”

  “It’s not for herself, but for a girl who is lodging with her,” Caroline told him.

  “All right.” He took the receiver, listened, asked some questions.

  “Your lodger’s name, Mrs. Smith? Miss Geraint? Spell it, will you? What seems to be wrong? ... I see. Not on a doctor’s list. A stranger in town? Yes, certainly keep her in bed, and I’ll look in on my round.”

  He spoke as crisply as ever, but as he replaced the receiver he was thinking that every new case now managed to look just another thing tacked on to an already intolerable amount of work.

  It had been like that since his engagement to Lysbet was broken. Since that morning of the announcement of her engagement to Eliot Bradd he had set his teeth in determination not to allow it or anything else to affect his work. Deliberately he had shut away a whole section of his mind—the part which held thoughts of her. But the memories and the reproaches went on and on ... What glamor could Eliot have had for her that he, Richard, had never sensed? Why had he ever encouraged her to go about with Mrs. Tempest and Eliot when he himself was too busy to accompany her? Or didn’t that matter—did these things happen, however little opportunity people had to meet?

  How long was it possible for her to have wanted to engage herself to Eliot while still engaged to him? Or—, Lysbet was so frank, so open!—was it possible at all? Had it all happened to her in a flood after he had been fool enough to let her go, upon the note of that criminally foolish quarrel? Or had she—had she?—deliberately trumped up that stupid issue about Caroline, simply in order to free herself to go straight into that other man’s arms?

  Reaching this point in his bewildered thoughts, Richard usually found himself as angry against Lysbet as he was reproachful of himself for having let her go.

  He had never liked Eliot Bradd. Not only now, because of Lysbet, but ever since they first met. Everything about the two men was alien, unsympathetic to the other. Richard had often wondered why Mrs. Tempest had tolerated him as a guest for so long. But he had money, of course ... That was why people were saying behind their hands that Lysbet—No, he would not start upon that futile round of thought again!

  There was something else ... Eliot had money ... At that point Richard checked. He had suddenly remembered and had begun to piece together two scraps of incomplete information which had lately come his way.

  There had been the incident of the bookmaker’s tout in the bar of the “Fallsbridge Arms.” The man had been drunk and had been broadcasting the names of some of his clients, had got them classed as ‘good payers’ and ‘bad’. Eliot Bradd’s name had been among the ‘bad.’ Richard, listening, had been amused at the time; he considered that Eliot might quite well have appeared in a sub-division labelled ‘slow’, but Richard believed that he could scarcely be a bad payer of his racing debts.

  But again, at the County Club where Richard was a newly elected member of the Committee, there had been a word passed round that Eliot Bradd had an unhealthy long account against his name for drinks and parties which he had given.

  At this point Richard made a determined effort to turn his thoughts elsewhere. Lysbet, his girl, his chosen woman, had elected to go to Eliot Bradd in preference to him. For what reason he might never know, but that he and she had failed each other somewhere—that was certain.

  At Mrs. Smith’s he stayed to ask some more questions of her before going upstairs.

  “Is this Miss Geraint working here? Do her people know she is ill?”

  “No, Doctor. I don’t know who they are. That is—Anyway, she hasn’t been in the town long enough to get a job. It was last Wednesday she came and it was over the weekend that she was taken queer. This shivering and fever I told you about—”

  “All right. Let’s have a look at her, shall we?”

  In the tiny divan-room above a girl with Saxon-fair skin and hair lay moaning and coughing d
ryly, while her head turned ceaselessly on her pillow. Richard felt for her pulse, used his stethoscope, lifted a closed eyelid, then stood in thought before beckoning Mrs. Smith from the room.

  Downstairs again, he said. “You were right to call me. Miss Geraint is pretty poorly. I’d say she is on the verge of pneumonia—probably a complication or something else she may have had recently. Now—she ought to be in hospital, and I daresay you would rather not keep her here if that can be managed?”

  “Well, there’s the—room, you see, Doctor—”

  “Yes, you’ll want—to let it. So if you will—get—her—toilet things packed, I’ll call the ambulance. But Matron will have to know a bit more about her if possible, and just now, when I asked you about her people, you sounded as if you might know more, I thought?”

  “Oh no. When she came to me she told me she had just come from abroad, though at first she didn’t say where.”

  “Did she later?”

  “Well yes, though not meaning to, I think. But I got an idea it was South—Africa—Cape Town.”

  “I see. Well, did—you get any other ideas—what—she was here for, whether she has friends in Fallsbridge or anything else that might help?”

  “Well—no.”

  “Bit of a mystery, Miss Geraint, eh?”

  Mrs. Smith bridled. “Well, Doctor, I didn’t question her about her business, if that’s what you mean! It’s not my place—”

  “I know, I know! And ordinarily it wouldn’t be your ‘place’ to pass on anything she happened to tell you in conversation. But it’s our duty to trace her people if we can. After all, you wouldn’t like it if a daughter of yours were as ill as this girl and you weren’t told!” Richard advised.

  Mrs. Smith’s guarded face softened. “That’s right,” she nodded. “But she didn’t tell me, like, anything about herself. It was only some questions that she began to ask—”

  “What about? About Fallsbridge? About getting a job?”

  “Oh, no. About—people here.”

  “People? People she knew?” (The Spanish Inquisition, pondered Richard, must have been an extremely leisurely affair. It took time, this sort of thing.)

  “No. That is, I don’t know whether she knew them or not. At least, she may have known Mr. Bradd, but—”

  Richard’s contemplation of the Inquisition ceased with a jerk.

  “Mr. Bradd? Mr. Eliot Bradd?” he demanded.

  “That’s right. Mr. Eliot Bradd.”

  “You say she seemed to know him? Or didn’t she?”

  “I don’t know. I—”

  “Well, do you know him? Were you able to tell her anything about him?”

  “I told her what I knew. You see, my boy is a waiter up at the County Club and he has pointed out Mr. Bradd to me. I’ve never spoken to him or course, but my boy told me he is a friend of Mrs. Tempest and Miss Marlowe’s and that he’s been staying out at Falcons since last summer.”

  “So that’s what you told Miss Geraint?”

  “When she asked about him, yes. She asked so casual-like that I didn’t know whether she knew him or had just heard about him—from friends of her own, maybe. That’s what I thought.”

  “I see. Well, we may have to get in touch with him about her. Did Miss Geraint mention anyone else? Ask about anyone else?”

  The woman hesitated. Fallsbridge was a small place and there was scarcely anybody in the town who did not know of the relationship in which Lysbet Marlowe had stood to Doctor Guyse and the one in which she now stood to Eliot Bradd. She looked a little covertly at Richard as she answered: “Yes. She asked about—Miss Marlowe.”

  “What about her?” Richard’s voice was sharp.

  “Well, what she was like. How old she was and whether she was very rich. And she wanted to know the whereabouts of the house, Falcons, and how to get to it.”

  “So you don’t think she knew Miss Marlowe, even if she knew Mr. Bradd? What did you tell her, Mrs. Smith?”

  “Well, what she wanted to know. There didn’t seem any harm. I said Miss Marlowe and herself might be much of an age and to that she said: ‘I’m nearly thirty. Is she as old as that?’ So I said, ‘No, I thought Miss Marlowe was well short of twenty-five’ and I said maybe Miss Geraint herself looked younger than she was because of being so fair, like. So then I told her about Mrs. Tempest and how it was her who had the money, not Miss Marlowe. And it was then that she seemed all surprised.”

  “Surprised?”

  “Yes. She tried to contradict me. She didn’t know anything about Mrs. Tempest, but she said she knew for a fact that Miss Marlowe was an heiress to a lot of money. So I said that she might be one, but that we hadn’t heard about it. I thought afterwards that I might have said—’If you know so much, why ask me?’ but I didn’t.”

  Richard said nothing, for a moment. Then he asked. “Did you, by any chance, know that Mr. Bradd and Miss Marlowe were engaged to be married?”

  Mrs. Smith’s embarrassment was painful to see. “Well, yes, Doctor. I—I had heard something about it.”

  “And did you mention it to Miss Geraint?” (Not that there was any doubt about the answer, thought Richard. Mrs. Smith must have had a field-day in discussing Lysbet’s affairs with this stranger.)

  Mrs. Smith fidgeted. “Yes, Doctor. I did tell her.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Well, she said ‘Oh’, and she seemed to go rather white, like. But she didn’t say any more, and this morning she didn’t get up and when I took her breakfast I could see she ought to have a doctor and—”

  Richard cut her short. “And the rest we know. And so, thank you Mrs. Smith for telling it all so clearly, and the Almoner can follow up the clues you have given me. Meanwhile, have her ready for the ambulance, won’t you?” And to her hesitant question as to whether she could let the room again at once, he had a decisive answer.

  “Yes, certainly. Miss Geraint is likely to be in hospital for quite a time,” he said.

  While he went upon the remainder of his round and took his surgery in the evening Richard deliberately did not think of the implications of what he had heard in the morning. He had duties to other patients, than the fair, unconscious girl up at the hospital.

  But when surgery was over and Caroline had fluttered home he went out into the foggy night and drive over there.

  While he waited for the hospital’s resident physician to join him he stood at the girl’s bedside watching her and deciding upon her treatment. Her breathing came heavy and stertorous and the restless movement of her head upon the pillow continued unceasingly. And every now and again from between her dry lips there came a word upon her breath—a word which, had Richard not been able to guess what it was, he would scarcely have recognized—the single Christian name—’Eliot’.

  When Doctor Pillew arrived and they had decided upon their patient’s treatment and drugs they adjourned to the ward-sister’s office before Richard went home.

  Pillew nodded his head over his shoulder towards the ward. “By the way,” he asked, “has anything turned up about our mystery girl’s people? Does nobody know anything about her?”

  Richard hesitated. Then: “Only her name, apparently.”

  “What was she doing in Fallsbridge?”

  Richard shook his head. “Not a clue.”

  “Well—her luggage?” persisted Pillew.

  To that Richard could answer without subterfuge. Nothing at all. No former address. No letters.”

  “ ‘Out of the nowhere into here’ in fact?” quoted Pillew.

  “Out—as you say—of the nowhere into here,” echoed Richard.

  But as he crept home through the fog, driving his car at no more than walking pace he began to have time to think, to fit this and that together until he had at least the outline of a pattern to his thoughts. There was many a missing piece as yet—maybe even when the pattern was complete it would mean nothing of significance
to him. But when Elsa Geriant could tell him what she knew —and dreamed—of Eliot Bradd he would know how and why she had come out of the ‘nowhere’ into the ‘here’ that was his world—and Lysbet’s.

  The girl’s illness took it course, aided by the modern drugs which lessen the tension of the long wait upon a ‘crisis’. Richard saw her daily and watched with satisfaction the process of drastic treatment which was fighting and would ultimately drive the fever out of her body.

  Her delirious mutterings became completely incoherent and then ceased altogether. She gradually became conscious and later came a day when she was able to smile weakly at her nurses and at him and he knew that she was safe.

  After that she became stronger every day and at last he judged that, if he were gentle enough he must ask her to tell him what he wanted to know—of herself and of what she knew of Eliot Bradd.

  One afternoon he asked for screens for her bedside and began quietly:

  “You know, Matron has given me a job “

  Elsa Geriant turned puzzled blue eyes upon him. “A job, Doctor Guyse? I don’t understand?”

  “The job of asking you some questions about yourself.” He glanced quickly away from her as he saw the guarded look which crossed her face, and went on casually while he looked out of the window: “Records and things, you know. Routine hospital stuff. They have to have ’em.”

  “Yes, of course.” She sounded relieved. “They don’t know anything at all about me, do they?”

  Richard grinned at her. “Well, you weren’t exactly up and coming with personal information when you came in, you see! All we know of you was your name—from your landlady.”

  Again that guarded look appeared. But she said simply: “Oh—Mrs. Smith? She’d have been able to give you that—Geraint—Elsa Geraint.”

  Richard nodded. “Yes, we got that. But what we really needed and didn’t get was a home address for you—somewhere where we might have written—or cabled—to tell your people that you had been taken ill.”