“THEY SAY SHE KILLED HIM”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 March 1941, Page 10

“THEY SAY SHE KILLED HIM”

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT.

COPYRIGHT.

BY

PEARL BELLAIRS.

(Author of “Velvet and Steel," “Christabel,” etc.)

CHAPTER VII. (Continued). She trembled as she went in, but soon realised that in that huge place she was very unlikely to see him. She was fascinated by the possibility, and yet she dreaded it. She could not remember. him without a feverish desire to escape her thoughts. She was right, she spent half an hour with the child, who was ill and feeble, collecting such information of its looks and behaviour as its mother would want to know, and came away from the hospital without seeing Dr. Trench.

But when she was on the pavement outside a voice hailed her from a motor car drawn up at the curb. “My dear - Miss Lane! For a moment I didn’t think it could be you!” It was a Miss Widdowson, the elderly daughter of a General who had distinguished himself in the Boer War. Among the Society workers for charity, whom Valerie had known in the old days, Miss Widdowson was too earnest to be regarded as anything but a bit of a nuisance; but she had found since that this amiable, rather cranky lady, was a revered and respected figure in the working women’s clubs and unemployment centres of the East End. Miss Widdowson was just about to drive away, but she switched off the engine of her car, and extended her hand to Valerie heartily. Valerie began a rather faltering explanation of why she was there. “I promised I would come. I don’t know whether I have done any good. The little boy cried for his mother all the time, and I’m not very good with children!”

A sort of sadness and hopelessness was in her tone, she always felt how dreadfully unavailing her efforts were. “Oh, but it’s so good to see somebody doing something real and practical!” Miss Widdowson exclaimed in her most bracing tone. “As a matter of fact I heard of you, I was told about you at the women’s club at Rotherhithe. Told you had been there, and about the painting materials you gave for the children —And that reminds me, I wrote to your father last night.’ “Oh, did you?” Begging for money again, of course! This time it’s for the China Relief League. We sent five hundred pounds worth of medical supplies, drugs and so on, to China last month. But now it’s a question of something much bigger and more expensive. We’re getting together a medical mission. We want to send doctors and nurses, and the equipment for an entire hospital; and though there are plenty of grand people willing to volunteer, it’s the cost of sending them that has to be met. We’re going to raise subscriptions as fast as we can. I wrote to your father last night to open the fund. He’s been so good, subscribed so often for me, that I don’t know how he’ll respond to another demand!” “How much did you ask for?” “As much as he could spare!” Valerie considered. , ■ “Would six hundred do?” “Six hundred? Oh, but I only hoped two-fifty at most!” “Miss Widdowson, could I go?” “With the mission do you mean, to China?” “Yes.”

Valerie’s face was intense. Her eyes in their heavy fringe of lashes were tragically earnest. “Well, of course, we’re only sending trained nurses, and so on!” Miss Widdowson recollected the position however, and stammered: “I suppose a willing worker, though, would be useful. An exception might be made!” Valerie nodded. She was breathless with the conviction that she must go. This was her chance. Out there, in the midst of suffering China, she might find the danger, the need for physical endurance, which would make her sacrifice as real as other people’s. She knew, and it seemed that it couldn't be helped, that she was buying her opportunuity. But the money would go to a good cause. “I’ll see my father,” she said, and paled with shame as she said it. ‘Of course, I would pay my own expen.es.” Miss Widdowson’s face, surprised, hopeful of six hundred pounds, nodded eagerly under the hood of the car. as Valerie stepped back on to the pavement, with a subdued wave of her hand. She saw her father that afternoon in his city office. He looked at her uneasily, as he did in these days, surprised by her visit, yet hoping perhaps that she was going to set his mind at rest by making some reasonable demand—such as that she should rent a villa in Carthage as she had done last year during the winter. But her face had the queer haunted yet exalted look that it often wore recently. “I met Miss Widdowson, and she said she had sent you a letter.” “Yes. I have it here somewhere! China, this time!”

“Will you subscribe to the fund?” "I suppose I shall have to," said Sir George, looking at her warily, afraid that she was about to come out with some extraordinary notion. She stood at his steel framed window looking down at the traffic in the bottom of the stone canyon of Leadenhall Street, and spoke slowly: “You said I could go on a world trip if I liked, last summer. I don’t want to go on a world trip. But I want to go to China.” “But there’s a war there! What do you want to go for?” “I want to go with the Relief League Medical Mission. I suppose it would have cost you six or seven hundred pounds to send me on a round-the-world cruise, f want you to give six hundred to China instead.” Sir George argued for some time about the danger and unsuitability of China; the unhealthy and horrible condition of the refugees.

“I don’t want to pay six hundred to have you run your head into that kind of thing!" He grumbled on and at last said what he wanted to say: “You haven’t been yourself since that Trench affair —that’s at the bottom of all this nonsense, and I know it!” In all those months he hadn’t mentioned Peter Trench; Valerie had fancied that he hadn’t realised. But behind his preoccupied manner he was not so blind. He saw. “Daddy, do this for me,” she said at last. Sir George opened his cheque book, shaking his head. He looked worried, and anxious, and upset. CHAPTER VIII. If Simon Trench had been a reader of the illustrated weeklies it would never have happened; in all probability he and Valerie would never have met again. “One of those who will be with the medical mission to China is Sir George Lane’s daughter, Valerie, one of the loveliest of the younger set,” wrote one gossip writer. But Trench didn’t read the illustrated weeklies.

What happened was that Dr. Wellwyn, one of his colleague at the East End hospital, was approached by Miss Widdowson, and the first thing that Trench heard of the mission was that Wellwyn was going to China with it. Except to say: “Sorry I’m not going instead.” Trench didn’t give the matter much attention. But his wish to leave England was genuine. He had had three years in the hospital, and he was feeling stale. The depressing effects of Peter’s death and an attack of flu brought on by overwork had given him a craving for change and distraction that he had never known so strongly in his life before. And then Wellwyn nicked his finger with a knife in the operating theatre and developed a septicaemia. Four days before the mission was due to leave for China he was still having a fight to hold his own. “You said you were sorry you weren’t going instead,” he hold Trench. “Here’s your chance, if you want it. I can propose you in my place.” Trench thought it over and accepted. There was not much time for discussing in the next four days the details of the mission. Beyond seeing the secretary of the Relief League and knowing that there were twelve nurses and two other doctors going, Trench had no idea who any of them were. The only clue, could he have known it, was the queer behaviour of Eileen Allen. She had been out of a job again, and he had been keeping an eye on her; he had lent her some money which she had paid back, and through the intervention of an aunt, she seemed to be on her feet again. But he felt he couldn’t go away without making sure that she was not in want of anything. He found five minutes to go in to her studio and tell her he was going. “To China?” she repeated. “With a medical mission to the war front.”

“You don’t mean this China Relief League mission?” she said, looking at him very queerly. “That’s the one,” said Trench. “What?” she cried, her eyes blazing with scorn and indignation. “You, too!" And she burst into a wild laugh. Trench was astonished, and couldn’t think what she meant, or what was the matter with her. She wouldn’t explain herself. She glowered at him; she replied rudely when he asked if she needed anything. “If I can do anyhing for you write to me care of the China Relief League Headquarters in Hong Kong,” said Trench. But she would not appear to take any notice of the address, and Trench came away feeling thoroughly irritated and annoyed. He thought she was mad.

But he had done his best, and he had little time for thinking about her. He went aboard the passenger liner Mahal at Tilbury, a member whose name was not even down on the list of mission personnel, still unaware of the reason for Eileen’s anger with him — having, in fact, forgotten all about it. He arrived late, ran into the secretary of the Relief League in the crowd on the promenade deck, and was introduced to Doctors Macey and O’Connell, his colleagues on the mission. He was just in time to be praised by Miss Widdowson, and endure congratulatory inspection by the Duchess of Kelmore, patron of the China Relief League. The word “wonderful” had been constantly on Miss Widdowson’s lips for the last half hour. “You wonderful people who have responded so heroically to our call!" “The wonderful support we have had in response to our appeal!" The Duchess shook the three doctors by the hand—she had already shaken hands with the twelve nurses and the matron who were travelling Tourist B. “Thank you, Duchess,” said Trench, after the Duchess had assured him personally how grateful everybody was to him for taking Dr. Wellwyn’s place, and how deeply sensible she was of the professional sacrifice ho must be making. Ho found time, in the distraction of the moment, when he was still wondering if he had got all his bags aboard, to wish that people would not assume that he was going to China solely for the sake of the Chinese. He was going' because he had studied tropical medicine with a view to going East some day, and because, since Peter's death, England had become intolerable to him. (To be continued.)