“What a clear evening,” Nurse Kettle exclaimed with pleasure. “And how close everything looks. Do tell me, Commander,” she went on, noticing that he seemed to flinch at this form of address, “with this bow of yours could you shoot an arrow into Lady Lacklander?”
Syce darted a look at the almost square figure across the little valley. He muttered something about a clout at two hundred and forty yards and limped on. Nurse Kettle, chagrined by his manner, thought, “What you need, my dear, is a bit of gingering up.”
He pushed her bicycle down an untidy path through an overgrown shrubbery and she stumped after him.
“I have been told,” she said, “that once upon a time you hit a mark you didn’t bargain for, down there.”
Syce stopped dead. She saw that beads of sweat had formed on the back of his neck. “Alcoholic,” she thought. “Flabby. Shame. He must have been a fine man when he looked after himself.”
“Great grief!” Syce cried out, thumping his fist on the seat of her bicycle. “You mean the bloody cat!”
“Well!”
“Great grief, it was an accident. I’ve told the old perisher! An accident! I like cats.”
He swung round and faced her. His eyes were misted and his lips trembled. “I like cats,” he repeated.
“We all make mistakes,” said Nurse Kettle, comfortably.
He held his hand out for the bow and pointed to a little gate at the end of the path.
“There’s the gate into Hammer,” he said, and added with exquisite awkwardness, “I beg your pardon; I’m very poor company as you see. Thank you for bringing the stuff. Thank you, thank you.”
She gave him the bow and took charge of her bicycle. “Dr. Mark Lacklander may be very young,” she said bluffly, “but he’s as capable a G.P. as I’ve come across in thirty years’ nursing. If I were you, Commander, I’d have a good down-to-earth chinwag with him. Much obliged for the assistance. Good evening to you.”
She pushed her bicycle through the gate into the well-tended coppice belonging to Hammer Farm and along a path that ran between herbaceous borders. As she made her way towards the house, she heard behind her at Uplands the twang of a bowstring and the “tock” of an arrow in a target.
“Poor chap,” Nurse Kettle muttered, partly in a huff and partly compassionate. “Poor chap! Nothing to keep him out of mischief,” and with a sense of vague uneasiness she wheeled her bicycle in the direction of.the Cartarettes’ rose garden, where she could hear the snip of garden secateurs and a woman’s voice quietly singing.
“That’ll be either Mrs.” thought Nurse Kettle, “or the stepdaughter. Pretty tune.”
A man’s voice joined in, making a second part.
Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid.
The words, thought Nurse Kettle, were a trifle morbid, but the general effect was nice. The rose garden was enclosed behind quickset hedges and hidden from her, but the path she had taken led into it, and she must continue if she was to reach the house. Her rubber-shod feet made little sound on the flagstones, and the bicycle discreetly clicked along beside her. She had an odd feeling that she was about to break in on a scene of exquisite intimacy. She approached a green, archway, and as she did so, the woman’s voice broke off from its song and said, “That’s my favourite of all.”
“Strange,” said a man’s voice that fetched Nurse Kettle up with a jolt, “strange, isn’t it, in a comedy, to make the love songs so sad! Don’t you think so, Rose? Rose… Darling…”
Nurse Kettle tinkled her bicycle bell, passed through the green archway and looked to her right. She discovered Miss Rose Cartarette and Dr. Mark Lacklander gazing into each other’s eyes with unmistakable significance.
Miss Cartarette had been cutting roses and laying them in the basket held by Dr. Lacklander. Dr. Lacklander blushed to the roots of his hair and said, “Good God! Good heavens! Good evening,” and Miss Cartarette said, “Oh, hullo, Nurse. Good evening.” She, too, blushed, but more delicately than Dr. Lacklander.
Nurse Kettle said, “Good evening, Miss Rose. Good evening, Doctor. Hope it’s all right my taking the short cut.” She glanced with decorum at Dr. Lacklander. “The child with the abscess,” she said, in explanation of her own appearance.
“Ah, yes,” Dr. Lacklander said. “I’ve had a look at her. It’s your gardener’s little girl, Rose.”
They both began to talk to Nurse Kettle, who listened with an expression of good humour. She was a romantic woman and took pleasure in the look of excitement on Dr. Lacklander’s face and of shyness on Rose’s.
“Nurse Kettle,” Dr. Lacklander said rapidly, “like a perfect angel, is going to look after my grandfather tonight. I don’t know what we should have done without her.”
“And by that same token,” Nurse Kettle added, “I’d better go on me way rejoicing or I shall be late on duty.”
They smiled and nodded at her. She squared her shoulders, glanced in a jocular manner at her bicycle and stumped off with it through the rose garden.
“Well,” she thought, “if that’s not a case, I’ve never seen young love before. Blow me down flat, but I never guessed! Fancy!”
As much refreshed by this incident as she would have been by a good strong cup of tea, she made her way to the gardener’s cottage, her last port of call before going up to Nunspardon.
When her figure, stoutly clad in her District Nurse’s uniform, had bobbed its way out of the enclosed garden, Rose Cartarette and Mark Lacklander looked at each other and laughed nervously.
Lacklander said, “She’s a fantastically good sort, old Kettle, but at that particular moment I could have done without her. I mustn’t stay, I suppose.”
“Don’t you want to see my papa?”
“Yes. But I shouldn’t wait. Not that one can do anything much for the grandparent, but they like me to be there.”
“I’ll tell Daddy as soon as he comes in. He’ll go up at once, of course.”
“We’d be very grateful. Grandfather sets great store by his coming.”
Mark Lacklander looked at Rose over the basket he carried and said unsteadily, “Darling.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Honestly; don’t.”
“No? Are you warning me off, Rose? Is it all a dead loss?”
She made a small ineloquent gesture, tried to speak and said nothing.
“Well,” Lacklander said, “I may as well tell you that I was going to ask if you’d marry me. I love you very dearly, and I thought we seemed to sort of suit. Was I wrong about that?”
“No,” Rose said.
“Well, I know I wasn’t. Obviously, we suit. So for pity’s sake what’s up? Don’t tell me you love me like a brother, because I can’t believe it.”
“You needn’t try to.”
“Well, then?”
“I can’t think of getting engaged, much less married.”
“Ah!” Lacklander ejaculated. “Now, we’re coming to it! This is going to be what I suspected. O, for God’s sake let me get rid of this bloody basket! Here. Come over to the bench. I’m not going till I’ve cleared this up.”
She followed him and they sat down together on a garden seat with the basket of roses at their feet. He took her by the wrist and stripped the heavy glove off her hand. “Now, tell me,” he demanded, “do you love me?”