XXXV
Almamanaged to make an exchange with one of the nurses at Oakdene, so that she herself could be with Con and be doing duty at the same time and yet not leave St Barnabas’s any shorter-handed than it was.
It was a bit irregular, perhaps, but it was either that or giving up nursing altogether, which she had no wish to do till the war was over.
But be with Con, now that she had got him back from the dead, so to speak, she vowed she would, cost what it might.
“If anyone needs me it is my husband,” she told Mrs Matron, “and I’m going to stick to him no matter who else suffers.” At which the Matron smiled indulgently and arranged matters as she wished.
“It is dreadful for Dr Dare,” she said. “And we must do all we can to help. I saw about it in the papers.”
“He was very much put out about that. He can’t imagine where they got hold of it.”
“He’s to have the D.S.O. too, I see. And I’m sure he deserves it. What is he going to do?”
“He’s going on with his own work. Young Grant, who saved his life, and stuck to him all through, and brought him home, is just splendid. He’s a medical, you know, though he hadn’t quite finished his courses. He’s to stop and be Con’s hands, but I imagine his head will do good service as well. They did a certain amount of study while they were in Germany, to keep their minds off other matters, and they’re setting to work again at once.”
“That’s fine—for both of them.”
But before that week was out they had another surprise in a visit from Sir James Jamieson, the Harley Street brain-specialist.
He was a tall, white-haired man, with a forehead like the dome of St Paul’s, only much whiter. He knew more about brains than any man in Great Britain, and, in spite of a life devoted to other people’s aberrations, was of a most genial and jovial disposition, and of a very tender heart.
“Well?”—was his surprising greeting to Con. “When are you going to be ready to start work with me?”
And Con gazed at him in incredulous amazement, behind which sprang up and fluttered a wild incredible hope.
Sir James, he knew, loved a joke. But he was the last man in the world to spin a joke against a man left handless against the world.
“Do you mean it, sir?” gasped Con, shaken out of his natural politeness by so stupendous an instant levelling of all the barriers he had seen in front of him.
“Mean it, my dear boy?—of course I mean it. Do you suppose I’ve wasted precious hours coming down into the wilds of Willstead to say things I don’t mean? I wanted you before and I want you more than ever now. Those miserable devils didn’t chop off any of your brain, did they? Well, it’s your good, sound, searching brain I want. We’ll find hands for you all right. There is no lack of hands in the world, but brains are sadly lacking, I’m sorry to say, and what there are are not all what they might be.”
He had talked on, like the perfect gentleman he was, to give Con time to recover himself.
And now Con looked at him with shining eyes,—eyes in which the light of a new great hope in life shone mistily through the excitation of his feelings, like stars shining up out of the sea,—and he said, “You make a new man of me, Sir James.... I feared ... and now——” and Sir James, being a Scotchman himself, understood better than all the words in the world could have told him.
“Now I want a cup of tea,” said the great man jauntily, “and if the two Mrs Dares are available it would be a pleasure to me to make their acquaintance.”
Con, without moving, touched a button under thecarpet with his foot and Robert Grant, who had fixed it up for him only that morning, came in.
“This is my good friend, Robert Grant, Sir James,” and the old man and the young one, in acknowledging the introduction, glanced keenly at one another for a moment and appeared mutually satisfied. “Would you beg my mother to join us, Robert, and tell them to send in tea at once. And then if you’d slip across and ask my wife to come over for a few minutes I’d be much obliged.”
“Who’s he?” asked Sir James, as Grant vanished.
“He saved my life out there and has been everything to me these last five months. He’s a medical, and the best fellow alive. He’s consented to be my hands.”
“Good! I like the looks of him.”
“He’s better even than he looks and his brain is quite all right. He’s one of the exceptions. We’ve drawn very close together these months out there. He’s consented to stop with me, but he’s got ambitions of hisown——”
“Of course,—being a Scotchman.”
“And I’m hoping that he won’t really be sacrificing himself entirely by devoting himself to me. We did a certain amount of study out there and he’s getting quite keen on the brain.”
“We’ll find him his place all right. Keen men are none too plentiful—especially on the brain.”
Mrs Dare came in, and Alma a few minutes after her, and when they had been made to understand the wonderful news, while Sir James drank his tea, they were almost as much overcome as Con himself had been.
When they tried to express a little of what they felt about it, Sir James genially stopped them with, “You see, I want him. I don’t know any other youngster whose ideas chime with my own as his do. And I like that Grant boy. And I like you two. I’m inclined to think we shall all get along uncommonly well together. You have lost a son out there, Mrs Dare.”
“Our youngest. He was just nineteen.”
“I saw about it. It is sad for us to lose them so youngand in such a way. But the gain is all theirs when they die as your boy did, and we may not mourn unduly. My dear lad died in South Africa and in very much the same way—trying to save a friend. After all—it’s a noble death to die. And you are nursing, my dear?”—to Alma.
“Wounded officers at Oakdene, next door. I was at St Barnabas’s but I made an exchange. You see, I hadn’t seen my husband since the morning we were married.”
“Quite right! Your experience will at all events bring sympathy to his work.”
“That’s why I took up nursing, four years ago.”
“Good girl! You’re the right kind for a doctor’s wife,” and then he shook hands with them, patted Con on the shoulder and bade him get ready for the move into town, shook hands cordially also with Robert Grant and told him they would know one another better before long, and then hurried into his impatient motor and whirled away back to town.
“Now isn’t that wonderful?” said Con, with a happier face than he had worn since Landrecies.
“He’s splendid,” said Alma. “I love him already.”
“For your sake I am very thankful, my dear boy,” said his mother. “God is very gracious to us. If He takes, He also gives, and His ways are very wonderful.”