“THEY SAY SHE KILLED HIM”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 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 VIII. (Continued). He was thankful to see the Duchess, and the appeal secretary, and the treasurer, and other members of the China Relief League go off the boat when the trumpets blew. Free from Miss Widdowson’s praises, he could stand with the other passengers at the promenade deck rail, and watch the crowd on the wharf while the “Mahal’ made every heart jump with a blast on her siren in warning of departure. Trench stood beside Dr. O Connell, the youngest of the trio bound with the mission for China. Dr. O Connell s relatives were all in Ireland, and he had no one to wave to on the wharf, so he was craning his neck to get a. glimpse of the Tourist B deck. “So they’ve put the nurses down there, have they?" he said, and asked Trench, by way of explaining an otherwise uncalled-for interest: “Do you think they’ve put our society ’lovely' down there—or— is she in the first saloon?” “Society ‘lovely?’ ” repeated Trench somewhat puzzled. "Didn't you know?” said Dr. O'Connell; and he explained. “We've got Sir George Lane’s daughter with us — Valerie Lane; the girl whose picture one sees so often in the illustrated weeklies.” Trench dropped the cigarette he had lighted after the departure of the China Relief Committee. He didn't speak until he had picked it up. “Are you sure of that?” With his heart pounding with astonishment it seemed impossible to make his voice casual. "Surely,” said Dr. O’Connell, politely. “Wasn't it in one of the papers this morning? And Miss Widdowson mentioned it herself just now.” Trench stood stunned. The clamour of departure about him, the tramp of feet, the chatter, the rattle of donkey engines, the hooting of tugs mingled with his thoughts in one confused discord. He had noticed Sir, George’s name at the head of the list of subscribers to the Mission on a leaflet Wellwyn had shown him, after he had written to Miss Widdowson saying he would go. But if he had known that the girl was going to China nothing kould have induced him to go. And so that was why Eileen Allen had been so indignant. "You, too!” she had said. Presumably she fancied that he had chosen, to go because he was attracted to Valerie, as Peter had been. A tremor underfoot, a chorus of farewell cries rising from the crowd on the wharf drew his attention. Handkerchiefs were waving all along the rail. Slowly, slowly, the ship began to edge from the wharf. Trench wondered if any man but himself had ever committed a blunder of such magnitude. CHAPTER IX. Valerie had been aboard the Mahal for three days before she found out that Trench was with the mission. She was not travelling first class, as Doctor O’Connell imagined. She was sharing a four-berth cabin with three other nurses in the Tourist B. Parting with her father, who had argued to the end, plus very bad weather and the effect of innoculations against cholera, typhoid, and smallpox, combined to make her sea-sick for the first two desire lay in her berth, and on the third morning, she tottered round queasily, in a state of deep depression. She wondered what she was doing there. In her physical discomfort she seemed to have lost sight of the spiritual necessity which had led her on, from Peter’s grave in Hertfordshire, to a life of effort. She wanted to lie down and die of weariness. She heard the other nurses talking about the three mission doctors travelling in the tourist class. On one occasion when she was lying seasick, she actually heard them discussing "the one who is taking the place of the doctor from the East London who couldn’t come.” But they didn't mention his name Valerie remembered the conversation afterwards and wondered what she would have thought if they had. A copy of the passenger list which had been given to her lay in the rack over her berth, but she had been too weary to look at it. On the third day, Miss Gallagher, the matron in charge of the nurses, announced that Dr. Macey wanted six nurses to volunteer for a special typhus vaccine with which he was experimenting, so that they could get over the effects before the ship came into the tropics. None of them looked very enthusiastic as they had only just got over the effects of vaccination and innoculation for other epidemic diseases. Valerie, anxious to pull her weight, volunteered immediately, though she was feeling far from well.With five others she went along to the Tourist B surgery which Dr. Macey was using by courtesy of the Mahal’s surgeon. She knew Dr. Macey, because it was to his consulting room she had been sent for her inoculations before sailing. She was one of the first two nurses to go into the surgery for the typhus vaccine. Dr. Macey was there, with his hand bandaged. He had damaged it during the rough weather in the Bay of Biscay, and he had asked Trench to do the job for him. Trench, in a surgical coat, wearing rubber gloves, and holding a hypodermic syringe, was sufficiently unlike the Trench she had met to throw Valeric into confusion. The shock of recognising him was physical, rather than mental . . . She knew, yet couldn't believe that it was he— —1 He was bending over a steriliser and did not see her. Closing the door after herself and the other nurse, she leaned

on it for a moment to steady herself. He straightened, saw her there, and it only needed the sudden colour in his face to tell her she wasn’t making some delirious mistake ...

Valerie, with blood humming in her ears, as dizzy as though the deck had suddenly fallen from under her, managed a nod in return, and hung on her door handle hoping her faintness would pass. The other nurse, a broad-faced, spectacled girl, took the injection first. “I expect you’re tired of injections,” Dr. Macey remarked cheerfully. “I think I’ve had about enough!” said the nurse, laughing. Trench said nothing. It was over in a minute. He prepared another needle. “Thank you!” said the nurse. “Not at all!” said Dr. Macey, facetiously.

Neither of them noticed Valerie’s stunned white face, nor the consciously rapt attention of Trench on his job. "How can it be?” Valerie kept thinking. “Flow can it be that he should be here?”

In a daze, half of embarrassment, half of sick fear and shrinking from Trench, and what she felt to be his dreadful hatred of herself, she stepped forward in response to Dr. Macey's “Now then!" when the needle was ready. The nurse helped her to slip her arm out of the sleeve of her woollen costume. Trench’s nearness made Valerie shake. He was a rubber-gloved hand holding a syringe, a white-coated shoulder, an expressionless face that she could glimpse out of the corner of her eye, but dared not look at. What was he doing there?

She had a sense of nightmare. She was haunted. He was retribution, vengeance, the glittering needle a symbol of torture —!

Her arm freed from the sleeve, she stood there . . .

He had taken her wrist, he bent to look more closely, she felt his fingers on her forearm.

“That arm is still suffering too much from the effect of vaccination, I think! What about the other?”

His voice was quiet and formal. The nurse helped her out of her other sleeve, noticing the whiteness of her shoulders, as well as the exquisite quality of the hand-embroidered slip which moulded Valerie’s fresh young form.

Dr. Macey came to examine the other arm.

“That one’s not much better!” he said. “What did you have in that one —typhoid?” "It will have to be in the leg," said Trench.

Valerie swayed slightly, and Dr. Macey noticed the ghastly whiteness of her face.

“It’s all right,” he encouraged her. "He won’t hurt you!” Valerie slipped down her stocking. The nurse held her elbow to steady her. The light glittered on the needle as Trench bent down —Valerie shut her eyes, but could not shut out the array of little black dots which was dancing in front of them.

It was only a prick. But it was too much for Valerie’s nerves. “Now rub that, will you?” _ said Trench. But Valerie didn't hear him. She went down like a log.

Trench, straightening up, could only open his startled arms to catch her as she fell forward.

He found himself supporting the dead weight of her body and conscious of a faint perfume from the silky softness of brown hair on the head drooping on his chest. "Oh, dear, dear!” grumbled Dr. Macey.

"She’s been sea-sick for two days!" the nurse explained, as she relieved Trench of the hypodermic he was still holding. He swung Valerie off her feet, and carried her lo the couch in the corner of the consulting room. Half conscious, she clung to him and began to cry as ‘he laid her down. "I hope the rest of them won't do this!” said Dr. Macey ruefully. Trench detached the fingers clinging round his neck, with a sense of something more than mere hands twining round his soul. His mental revolt from the loveliness of the face so near his was violent . .He left the nurse to coax sal volatile between Valerie’s quivering lips, and turned away to get on with his job. The next batch of nurses came in.

Macey now and again glanced at the couch, but Trench worked diligently, and paid no attention to it. When the fourth injection' was over, he took advantage of the departure of two patients and the entry of two more, to move over to the couch for a moment. Valerie, still pale and weak, was lying supine, but conscious. He gazed down at her; and in the eyes of each the baffled soul looked out for an unguarded instant, unconcealed. She asked in a low. quivering voice: "Why are you here?" And Trench replied quietly: “Because I didn’t know that you would be!" Five minutes later one of the nurses helped her off the couch and she walked out of the consulting room, shaken, humiliated, in despair . . . (To be continued.)