by June Wright
With Delia Arkwright’s steely gaze on her, Marsh answered uncompromisingly, but now she watched a solitary yacht with a certain interest. It tacked across the rocky coastline about a mile off shore. A few white clouds sped about the sky, but the sun shone warmly and sparkled on the sea, which was now all shades of blue. She lifted her head to the slight breeze that forever blew in Matthews.
Her mood of almost pantheistic delight was broken when she saw Betty Donne standing on a jagged arm of land which formed the headland between the ocean and the bay. The nurse had not attended the funerals; neither had she waited at the luncheon-table as usual. Marsh began to walk towards her swiftly.
She was standing on an overhanging rock, her head bent to watch the breakers crash up beneath her, and did not hear Marsh’s approach.
“There has been one accident,” Marsh said curtly, putting one hand on the girl’s arm to steady her. “Dr. Kate doesn’t want another to happen. Come away from there.”
The nurse twisted out of her grasp. “Leave me alone, damn you,” she cried angrily, but she clambered back over the rocks to the path. “Did Dr. Kate send you to find me?” she asked, over her shoulder.
“No, I was just out for a walk.” The girl tried to smile. “She didn’t even know I was gone, did she?”
“I don’t know,” Marsh answered. “Where were you this morning? Why weren’t you at the cemetery?”
“Did she say anything? Was I missed?” Her voice was pathetic in its eagerness. Then her eyes were lowered and her mouth dropped peevishly. “No, she didn’t miss me. What did it matter if I wasn’t there? She had you.”
Marsh said awkwardly, “You are not so foolish as to be jealous, are you?”
Betty looked up, and her blue eyes blazed for a moment. Then she gave an odd little giggle. “You are the foolish one. What an idea! You are far more likely to be jealous of me. I went down to the hotel this morning. I knew Dr. Kate would not notice me gone. I was having a grand time with Todd Bannister while the rest of you were weeping crocodile tears at the cemetery. We get on well together, Todd and I,” the girl finished defiantly.
“That’s excellent,” Marsh remarked, although she was frowning. “I think you need some new companionship. Don’t you consider it would be a good idea if you had a complete change of scene? Leave Dr. Waring for a while. She could get in some temporary assistant. Get right away from nursing until your nervous condition improves.”
Betty Donne veered into anger again. “You are trying to push me out,” she said on a high note. “I won’t go, I tell you. Dr. Kate needs me more than she needs you. I have seen the likes of you before. They come and go; get what they want from her and then leave. But I have stayed. I’m loyal. I tell you she can’t do without me. If you try to push me out I’ll get desperate. I’m warning you—”
“Quiet!” Marsh said, losing patience. “Be quiet, you little fool. No one is trying to push you out. But it is obvious you’ll have to go soon.”
Betty Donne stopped her muttering. “What do you mean?” she asked abruptly. “I insist on knowing what you mean.”
Marsh eyed her for a moment. “You are becoming unbalanced,” she informed her bluntly. “Mr Waring’s death has been too much for you. Go while there is still the chance.”
The nurse began to chuckle. She shook all over and tears streamed down her face.
“Too much? That’s funny, that is. Too much for me?”
She collapsed on the ground and rocked to and fro with laughter. Marsh watched her, a troubled look in her eyes.
“I wish you’d go,” the girl cackled. “Go before I die of laughing.” She flung herself face down on the grey sandy soil of the path.
Marsh knelt beside her and tugged at one heaving shoulder. She had done this before, too. The firm yet gentle hand and the commanding bracing words. The combination was usually successful. But not this time. Betty Donne raised her dirty tear-streaked face from the ground. The naked hate in her eyes shocked Marsh.
“I said go away, Doctor,” and Marsh went, extremely disturbed.
She crossed the fairways of the links with her head bowed and her hands clasped behind her back. The slight peace that the sight of the white yacht on the blue sea had given her was gone, and she felt the devil’s caress once more.
A voice hailed her by name, and she looked up, startled out of her unhappy pondering. On a tee situated high on a rise, Todd Bannister stood. He held a golf-stick over his shoulder and his leather bag bulging with clubs lay at his feet. He was beckoning her eagerly.
“I nearly brained you,” he called out. “Didn’t you hear my pill whistle by your shell-like ear? I yelled fore like mad. Come on up and I’ll show you how to hold a stick.”
He looked so gay and well-groomed in his grey slacks and canary-coloured pullover against the sombre green of the pine trees that Marsh climbed up to join him. She remembered that although he was just an acquaintance she had picked up on the road to Matthews, he had helped to chase the shadows away before.
“What a villainous collection of blunt instruments,” she remarked with an effort, inspecting his golf-sticks. “Do you really need them all?”
“Of course,” he insisted indignantly. “I say, how did the planting go this morning? Is the old basket really under six feet of sod?”
Marsh was kneeling on the ground, turning over the club heads. “I am relieved to see they are all numbered. You entertained Dr. Waring’s nurse this morning, I understand.”
“Who told you that? Was it frightfully wrong of me? Poor kid, she looked all in, so I fed her pink gins until she looked like one. Are you going to scold me?”
“On the contrary,” she said, glancing up at his lively face. “You did a good deed. Do you think you could keep it up?”
“Pink gins? Sure! Come along.”
“No, not me. Betty Donne. She is not altogether herself. You could help her to snap out of it.” “What’s the matter with her?” Todd asked suspiciously. “Lady Waring been beating her up?”
“Nothing organically wrong,” Marsh said evasively. “She could do with some of your cheerful companionship.”
Todd gave her an incredulous stare. “You don’t mean nuts?”
“Not yet. She’s over on the headland. Find her and show her how to play golf.”
“But I wanted to show you,” he said plaintively, thrusting his wood into the bag. He heaved it up on his shoulder. “If I play around with Betty, will you come out on the course with me one day? I don’t see as much of you as I decided to.”
“It’s a bargain,” Marsh promised, holding out her hand. Todd gripped it and then turned it palm upwards.
“So soft,” he said wonderingly. “I knew you wouldn’t be as hard to feel as you like to pretend sometimes. Friends, Marsh Mowbray?”
“More than friends,” she replied, smiling at him warmly. “Go now, like a good fellow.”
She watched him scramble down the slope and then turn to bow at her with a flourish. He called out something but the wind caught his words, so he blew her an airy kiss and strode away.
Marsh was still smiling. She felt better again.
V
Miss Jennet was at the telephone when she entered Reliance. Her hands were white with flour and she jogged from one foot to the other as she spoke. “Will you wait please? I’ll see if I can find him.”
She put the receiver down and saw Marsh. She smiled at her in relief.
“Who is wanted, Miss Jennet?”
“Michael. He is probably in his studio, and I have scones in the oven. Could you—”
“Where is the studio? I’ll find him.”
It lay in the ti-tree scrub in the opposite direction from the laboratory. Marsh approached it diffidently. She disliked young Michael intensely.
He was standing before a new canvas with a brush in his hand and was working with q
uick decisive strokes. When Marsh spoke he turned querulously.
“Damn you,” he said, thrusting his brush into a bottle of turpentine. “Can’t I have a moment’s privacy from women? First Evelyn and now you.”
“Sorry,” Marsh returned crisply. “You are wanted on the ’phone. Someone rang for you this morning. Miss Jennet is busy so I came across to oblige her.”
The boy’s sullen look became guarded.
“Who is it?” he asked, stripping off his paint-bedaubed overall. Whatever the quality of his art might be, Marsh thought, he certainly looked the part.
“He wouldn’t leave a message.”
When Michael hurried out she did not follow. Canvases were stacked around the room. They were worth looking at; a little crude in technique but boldly executed. Many of them were portraits, which she studied with tolerant interest.
She was standing in front of the easel when Michael came back. The outline was enough for her to recognize his new subject. It represented a scene she herself had witnessed—the imbecile boy, Sam, standing before the kitchen range with a long knife in his hand.
“Well?” asked Michael harshly. “Do you like my pretty picture? Shall I give it to my mother when I finish it?”
The boy’s eyes were bright and his dark hair hung untidily over his forehead. He seemed strangely exultant. When he reached for a bottle which stood on the window-sill his hands were quivering.
“Drink? Never mind. I am used to drinking alone. Go on. Unleash your gentle tongue. But do you mind if I continue with my work?” He selected a tube and squeezed it on to his palette.
“Why must you be so beastly to your mother?” Marsh asked in exasperation. “She is such a fine person. Now your father is dead she must need you.”
Michael finished off his drink. “You amuse me, Doctor. You don’t know what the hell you are talking about. You never saw my parents together. She doesn’t need me or anyone else, unless she can possess them entirely.”
He turned round, palette and brush in hand. His eyes were gleaming excitedly. “So far she has had everything her own way, but just wait a while. Just wait, Mowbray, you poor simpleton.” His voice had begun to rise dangerously.
Marsh left him without another word. She was a bit frightened of Michael Waring when he became uncontrolled. He could so easily have been the person who had attacked her in the laboratory.
His eyes were still fever-bright when she saw him at dinner that night, but he drank only water at the table and refused a liqueur in the living-room.
Laurence Gair managed to draw her aside and murmured cynical surprise over his abstinence.
“Don’t tell me the influence of a good woman has been the means of his refusing this excellent Benedictine. I saw you going to his studio. Did you point out the error of his ways, my sweet? Dr. Kate needs a strong manly son in her hour of trial. Was that it? Don’t scowl so fiercely, Marsh, or she will notice and call you to her side under some perfectly unnecessary pretext. Smile distantly, so as to show her your interest in me is negligible. I arouse you neither to anger nor passion.”
“Larry,” Marsh said wearily. “The only emotion you arouse in me is doubt of everything true and sincere and honest. You try to corrupt everything you come into contact with.”
He smiled swiftly down at her. “I will mend my ways when you come to your senses, Marsh. The seeds of doubt I have sown will ripen for your ultimate good. Then you may reform me. How are the investigations progressing?”
She frowned at him in warning.
“Still trying to deceive yourself, Marsh? You are investigating but you won’t admit it even to yourself.”
“Maybe I am trying to understand a few things,” she said tersely. “But it is only to stop your foul insinuations. And when I do, Larry, I won’t rest until I make you pay for your injustices. You are by no means in the clear yourself.”
She was rewarded by a sudden change through his expression, as though she had sent him off balance. She pressed her attack. “Last night I went to the laboratory. I went to look for something which I thought might help my—my problems. Someone snatched the torch away and attacked me in the dark.”
“And you think it was I?” Gair suggested gently.
“It may have been. You see how little I trust you, Larry.”
His face darkened. “Marsh, you idiot!” he said, in an angry undertone. “You are not helping yourself any by accusing me.”
“I am not accusing you, Larry. I merely stated that you yourself are not above suspicion.”
He muttered something and went back to the coffee-table. Katherine Waring looked past him to Marsh as she handed him his cup and saucer. A sudden warm smile lightened her apathetic features, as though she knew that in the brush between them Marsh had gained the ascendancy.
Marsh then turned her attention to Evelyn Peterson. She knew that Dr. Waring did not intend to have any direct contact with the nurse, and that it was left to her to act as the intermediary.
Evelyn was sitting slumped back in a deep chair, staring into the fire sullenly and oblivious of Henry Arkwright’s repeated efforts to engage her attention. She caught Marsh’s eye and jerked her head almost imperceptibly towards Katherine Waring, but when the girl regarded her serenely her gaze became sullen again. The reflection of the flames danced in her dark eyes for a moment. Then she looked at Marsh once more and from her to Michael Waring. There was a world of meaning in that lazy speculative stare and the girl felt suddenly uneasy.
When she went to her room that night she did not immediately prepare for bed. Evelyn was certain to come, so she waited, smoking a cigarette restlessly and trying to make up her mind how to deal with the situation. Somewhere below the surface of her mind was a small feeling of resentment that Katherine Waring had given her the responsibility.
Evelyn came just before midnight. She was dressed in a negligé of apple-green chiffon which flowed softly about her, disguising her extreme slimness, and her dark cloudy hair hung around her shoulders. But her vivid mouth was set and her eyes were cold and hard.
“What’s the verdict?” she asked at once, setting her back to the door.
“Dr. Kate refuses to give you the papers,” Marsh said, and waited. She thought she could detect a look of fear behind the anger in Evelyn’s eyes. Katherine Waring was not to be intimidated so easily.
“The woman’s sticking her neck out. Did you tell her what I would do?”
“I told her,” Marsh replied, watching the nurse closely. She was striding up and down, fierce short steps of impotent rage. She caught up the fragile material of her gown, wrenching it between her fingers.
Marsh said coldly: “Dr. Kate told me what was in the papers. She will not permit you to continue with a nursing career.”
Evelyn stopped. “And if I promise that, will she return them?”
“I think she might.”
The nurse laughed savagely. “You think wrongly. Katherine Waring will never let them go unless I force her. She will keep those papers and wait for the right moment. I know her, the cold-blooded devil.”
Marsh was silent, waiting for the girl’s anger to subside, and hoping that the problem would be taken from her shoulders.
Evelyn saw the cigarette-case lying open on the dressing table. She snatched up a cigarette, lit it with shaking fingers and continued her agitated pacing. Presently she began to smoke more slowly. Her dark eyes became veiled and a little smile twisted her mouth.
“Okay,” she said nonchalantly, going to the door. “That’s that for the moment. So far she has the whip hand, but we’ll just see what happens later. Good night.”
Marsh shut the door with a faint sigh of relief. Then her brows drew together. Something Evelyn had said disturbed her with its familiarity. Then she remembered that Michael Waring had issued almost the same warning that afternoon, and at the thought of Michael she
experienced a sudden pang of fear. A fear that she had not felt before, even when Laurence Gair had poured his barbed hints into her unwilling ear. Michael was dangerous. His wildness and his unbalanced youthful outlook could do more harm than an adult approach to destruction.
And Michael was up to some immediate mischief, Marsh knew. His sudden politeness to his mother’s guests, his abstinence and the air of restrained excitement which had followed on a mysterious telephone call all pointed to imminent danger.
She stripped off her long dinner-gown and climbed once more into her slacks and dark pullover, conscious of the fact that she was tossing aside her newly resolved principles. She smiled wryly when she remembered them and Evelyn Peterson’s advice against wandering around in the dark, and then defended her action by thinking that this situation was different. She would be an observer, not a participant this time. Michael was up to something and needed watching. She was not being foolhardy.
She opened the door of her room slightly and crouched on the floor to wait. The boy’s room lay opposite. She could see a light under his door, but after a while it was extinguished. Her crouching position soon made her stiff, but she did not move. After a half an hour of discomfort she was rewarded by the sound of a creak and caught a faint movement along the passage. She waited for a minute to pass before she, too, slid out of her room and proceeded cautiously towards the stairs.
A faint slit of light was being played about in the lower hall as she descended. It paused and she sank behind the banisters. Then Michael’s head was visible as he bent over the lock of the door. As he went out Marsh moved quickly after him.
There was some scuffling on the verandah and a whine from the dog, Rex. She was near enough to hear Michael mutter: “Not tonight, old chap. You’d better go into the garage or you’ll rouse the house.”
She waited behind one of the pillars of the verandah until he had put the dog away before she ventured down the steps. Her rubber-soled brogues made no noise, but Michael was on edge. She could guess by the movement of the light that he was glancing over his shoulder, and she felt a slight nervousness in turn as she followed the light through the ti-trees.