Strange Recompense (3 page)

Once, when she opened the door noiselessly, she found Topsy dozing in the chair beside the window and marvelled once again at the capacity of nurses in general for hard work and an ever-cheerful disposition. Surely, she mused, they must be born and not made!

Topsy’s patient had not stirred, but even Ruth could see that she was sleeping naturally now. She closed the door with a sigh of relief, thinking that it remained only to wait for Noel’s verdict when he came home some time after six o’clock.

Wondering why this case should suddenly have come to mean so much to her, she saw her brother’s tall figure approaching from the direction of the hospital and glanced hastily at the clock; it was a full hour before his usual time for returning and she knew that anxiety about his new patient must have brought him.

“How is she?” he asked without preliminary. “I thought I would pop over and have another look at her.”

“She appears to have been sleeping quite naturally most of the afternoon,
”
Ruth told him. “Nurse Craven has been with her, and there has been no sign of complications.”

He nodded, pausing by the closed door of the sitting-room, his face gravely thoughtful as he turned over a possible suggestion in his mind, but he went on into the room without communicating his thoughts to his sister, and Ruth turned back to the kitchen to prepare his evening meal.

She was peeling potatoes when Sara Enman appeared at the back door for the second time that day.

“I’ve just come off duty,” she explained, “and I wondered if there was anything I could do for you. About the girl, I mean,” she added when Ruth looked puzzled. “Has Noel notified the police yet?”

“I don’t know.” Ruth felt vaguely irritated by the question for some unknown reason, wishing, almost, that Sara had stayed away. “He’s with her now, as a matter of fact. I suppose he’ll want to check up on her reactions as soon as she returns to full consciousness.”

“There’s a police surgeon to do that sort of job,” Sara returned sharply.

“Oh! Tim won’t mind!” Ruth smiled. “Anyway, I believe he’s still away in London.”

She thought of Tim Wedderburn, slow, stolid, not given to a quick decision, but universally liked wherever he went. They called him Doctor Watson even to his face, and he laughed quietly at their joke and went on doing his job slowly but surely.

“That doesn’t exactly make Noel responsible for all the police cases that come in while he’s away,” Sara remarked dryly. “He’s far too busy to be bothered with routine stuff like this, and I understood he was operating this afternoon.”

“Yes,” Ruth said, “but he must have got through early. He came in just before you did.”

For the first time in their long acquaintance she was finding it difficult to understand Sara
,
thinking of her unexpected visit as bordering on interference, but that was unreasonable where an old friend was concerned. Ever since her recent illness small details had been apt to take on undue importance, and she made up her mind to speak to Noel about it whenever a suitable opportunity presented itself. A tonic or something was probably all she needed.

“Has she been sleeping all this time?” Sara asked, still determined to pursue the one subject which interested her. “I wonder what line Noel proposes to take. I would suggest sodium pentothal. You get a lot out of them that way.”

“The ‘truth drug’,” Ruth mused. “It always seems—rather cruel to me, dragging, a person’s secrets from them ruthlessly like that, perhaps against their will.”

“One has to be ruthless in our profession on occasion,” Sara remarked, examining her well-kept fingernails with minute attention. “Especially with the criminal classes. People who are trying to hide something, for instance, don’t react normally to the usual methods.”

Ruth flushed. Could Sara be suggesting that the girl she had picked up on the moors was a criminal? Briskly she thrust the suggestion aside.

“Noel expected that there might be a report of an accident when he phoned the police,” she said, “but I haven’t had time to ask him what he has done. I’m hoping he’ll
s
tay over for a meal and not go dashing back to work till all hours without a bite,” she explained as she turned to put the potatoes on the electric cooker. “Will you stay, Sara?” she invited. “There’s quite enough for four.”

“That girl would be far better over in the wards,” Sara said decisively, as if she could not let the subject of Ruth’s
protégé
e drop even to answer her invitation. “I can’t stay this evening,” she went on regretfully. “I’ve got a pile of corrections to wade through, test papers and the usual reports to check. Matron leaves almost everything like that to me these days,” she complained. “She takes it for granted that. I live only for my work, as she does.”

“Never mind!” Ruth consoled. “You’ll disillusion her one of these days!”

She was not quite sure what she meant by that, she mused, as she watched Sara walk away in the direction of the nurses’ home. Perhaps she meant that Sara would get married quite soon. She had done remarkably well in her chosen profession, rising to the position of ward sister and senior sister with amazing rapidity, and she was not quite thirty, but Ruth knew that she would never let professional advancement stand in the way of marriage.

If Ruth had automatically expected Noel to marry Sara one day, she had kept that to herself, too, and her brother’s confidences had certainly never run to the subject of marriage, with Sara or anyone else.

Ruth waited for him in the dining-room and she saw him come towards her across the hall with the same thoughtful expression that had been in his eyes when he had first come in.

“Ruth,” he questioned, coming to the point immediately, “could you possibly cope with a patient in the house for a day or two?”

S
h
e looked beyond him to the half-open door of the sitting-room. “You want to keep her here under constant observation?” she surmised.

He nodded.

“She can have the spare room for as long as you think fit,” Ruth agreed without the slightest hesitation. “I won’t mind a bit.”

“It will mean a good deal of extra work for you, cooking meals and that sort of thing,” he warned. “If there’s any nursing to be done, of course, we can call in help from the hospital.”

“Will she be able to take a normal diet?” Ruth asked as he followed her into the kitchen. “There’s some soup she can have now, and the remains of the chicken we had yesterday.”

“There’s nothing whatever wrong with her appetite.” He was standing by the window looking out, not really seeing the scene in front of him but engrossed in the fascinating study of a new case. “Amnesia—the blotting out of memory—a forgetting,” he mused. “Names, identity, home, have all been swept away behind the dark curtain.” He turned abruptly. “Only those who have experienced it can possibly know the terrible desolation of not being able to remember,” he said quietly.

“How will she react?” Ruth asked. “Now, I mean, while her mind still remains a blank?”

He looked up quickly.

“Don’t make the mistake of imagining that this girl isn’t capable of understanding in the ordinary way,” he said. “To my mind, that is the tragedy of it all. The amnesiac looks completely normal, and he keeps his ordinary faculties. It’s just that one particular part of his brain is sealed off—for a day, perhaps for a week or even for months. Sometimes an operation is necessary. Traumatic amnesia is caused by a blow on the head and until the pressure is lifted surgically nothing will give back the memory of what went before.”

“Months, you said?” Ruth asked sharply. “Perhaps even years. Do you think that—”

“
I can’t afford to think,” he said almost as sharply. “Medicine is largely a process of elimination. We try this and that, rejecting where we
h
ave no success, trying some other way. Amnesia is quite often a shield behind which certain minds seek to avoid the unpleasant in life.”

‘Somehow I think this is different,” Ruth said, “and so do you. That girl in there isn’t an ordinary type. Her clothes are good and her hands and her hair are well cared for. She speaks nicely, too. There’s something behind all this, something deeply tragic, perhaps. I wish we could discover what.”

The girl was sitting up on the settee, propped by cushions, her face slightly flushed, her eyes painfully questioning as they searched first Noel’s and then his sister’s.

“The police?” she asked huskily. “Have they found anything?”

Noel put down the tray and Ruth noticed that the handkerchief and powder compact were missing from the table. The purse was missing, too—all the girl’s pitiful little possessions. Noel seated himself on the edge of the settee and watched her eat.

“Take your time,” he commanded. “We’re keeping you here with us for a day or two until we can establish your identity.”

“Here?” There was relief in the blue eyes raised to his. “But I shouldn’t impose myself on you like this. You don’t know who I am. I don’t even know my own name!”

“We are going to try to find that out,” Noel said gently, but with a firmness Ruth knew of old. “I’m wondering about this,
”
he added when she had finished the soup. “Will you need it? It belongs to you.”

He produced the handkerchief and powder compact, and the girl put out her hand to take them, her brow still puckered as she examined the scrap of linen with the embroidered name uppermost.

“Anna,” Noel said, and waited.

There was no doubt that the name struck a chord somewhere, but it failed to bring the full response he had optimistically hoped for, and he left it for the present.

“Anna will do as well as any other name just now,” he said. “It has been accepted as a matter of course,” he explained to Ruth as he stood up, “so that it quite possibly does belong to the past. It is not violent enough, however, to shock the senses completely and produce a stronger reaction. You might follow up the embroidery line, by the way. Tomorrow will do. See if she did that sort of thing, either as a hobby or as an actual means of earning a living.” He turned to his patient again, feeling her pulse and nodding his approval, and when he had gone from the room Ruth went forward to the settee.

“You remember me?” she asked, and was relieved beyond measure when the girl smiled quite naturally.

“Of course! You were the lady who helped me on the moor.”

“My brother is doing all he can to help, too,” Ruth said. “He understands this thing so well.”

“Yes,” the girl said, her eyes lowered to the tray she held across her knees, “he is very kind.”

“We’re going to call you Anna,” Ruth said. “It’s the name worked on your handkerchief, so we feel that it must be yours.”

“Yes, it is my name,” the girl said with a conviction which sounded helpful. “I feel that it is something I know, something I’ve been used to all my life.”

“Every little thing helps, all those little details adding up to a whole,” Ruth encouraged cheerfully. “Do you think you can manage the remainder of your dinner alone, and I will go and help my brother to his?”

She found Noel standing by the table in the dining-room with a pre-occupied look in his eyes.

“She is quite prepared to accept the name Anna,” she said. “It must be her own, because she feels that she has lived with it all her life.”

“She’s married, by the looks of things,” said Noel. “There’s a ring on the third finger of her left hand. I wonder,” he added suddenly, “if that might help.”

“By the markings, you mean? I dare say it might.”

“She seems so young,” she reflected aloud. “Too young to be married and have come to this because of it.”

“That may not be the idea at all,” her brother pointed out restlessly. “We’re only surmising at present, and I hope to heaven we’re wrong in that respect. I’ve seen far too much of that sort of misery in my time.”

His answer had been emphatic, and she knew that he could not find it in his heart to blame Anna beforehand for a marriage that had come unstuck.

CHAPTER TWO

EVEN IN THE corridors of the hospital, where accident and death walked hand-in-hand with every day, the story of the mysterious stranger held the attention of doctors and nursing staff alike. Anna’s past was still a mystery after twenty-four hours of country-wide investigation had passed.

She sat up in bed, pressing her hands closely over her face.

“If I could only
think
!”
she said aloud. “But I can! I can think, and that’s the most dreadful part! The truth is that I can’t
remember
!”

She turned at a slight sound near the door, to find Ruth standing there with a concerned look in her eyes.

“If you feel well enough,” she said, “my brother thinks you might get up. It’s a lovely day, and we could go into the garden.”

Anna slipped down between the sheets, drawing the bed-clothes up under her chin.

“Does he want me to see the police?” she asked.

Ruth crossed to the bed, sitting down on the edge of it.

“Anna,” she said gently, “whatever my brother asks you to do will be for the best. Please try to believe that and trust him. He does not intend to hand you over to the police unless they insist. In a small place like Glynmareth we work very much together and you are still in need of a certain amount of medical attention. Even if the police had picked you up yesterday you would probably have been brought to the hospital for my brother’s verdict.
”