The Wildest Rake

He smiled comfortingly. ‘Doctors do not die,’ he said lightly. ‘Instead, they get drummed out of town when their patients die.’

‘Don’t make a joke of it,’ she protested. ‘You must know how ill you look.’

‘I have looked just so for years,’ he said, shrugging.

Ellen came in with wine and some pewter cups. She smiled at them both, encouragingly, as though they were children.

‘Drink this right away,’ she urged. She glanced at Andrew, searchingly, and her eyes brightened even more. ‘Ah,’ she said to Cornelia, ‘You have done him good. He looks better.’

Then she went out again and Andrew laughed, boyishly. ‘She nags like an old hen. She is almost as bad as you.’

‘I am glad someone is taking care of you,’ Cornelia said. She remembered, with a bitter pang, that Nan had prophesied that Ellen would marry Andrew. She had jealously resisted the idea, but now she saw that such a marriage might be good for him.

She drank the wine he poured for her, looking around the untidy, cluttered room, thinking heavily that if marriage could put colour into Andrew’s cheeks and make him look less worn, she would bear it somehow, at whatever cost.

Andrew watched her. ‘You have been to your father’s house, I suppose?’

She looked at him, flushing. ‘Not yet.’

He frowned. ‘That was not wise. You should not have come here first.’

Their eyes met and held. She saw, in his, a strange brilliance, a secret pleasure that she should have come to him. Then his lids dropped and hid the look.

‘I had to see you,’ she said slowly. ‘I think I am going to have a baby.’

He looked up quickly, a smothered exclamation on his tongue. A round red spot came into each cheek. He turned and walked away, head stooped.

She watched him nervously, suddenly aware of the deeply buried emotions which were coming to the surface in this moment of stress. Her own feelings were tortuous. She was torn between joy in the realisation that Andrew was not as indifferent as he had pretended, and a strange feeling of hesitation, of indecision.

She had not, she knew now, come to Andrew with the old love. Her fondness for him had brought her, it was true, but it was to Andrew as a doctor that she had come. Her pregnancy had made her long for the security and comfort which he had always given her when she was ill as a child. No stranger could have reassured her natural fears so well.

She did not want him to reveal his passion to her. She wanted him to be calm, gentle, soothing.

She felt, unfairly, that he was failing her.

He turned round again, his face under control, and smiled. She felt her spirits lift in relief. That brief, revealing torment had gone from his face, from his eyes. He looked as he had always looked: sure, confident, impassive.

‘Have you seen a doctor?’

‘No,’ she said eagerly. ‘I wanted you. I was not certain. I thought you would tell me if it was true or not.’

‘

I cannot examine you,’ he said, almost harshly, staring at her. ‘You are not my patient now. You must get another doctor.’

Her lower lip trembled. She stared at him, desolate. ‘But, Andrew, that is why I came—you cannot refuse me.’

His features tightened as though she had struck him. ‘You must know why I cannot do it,’ he said very quietly. •

She drew a sharp breath, taken by surprise, and turned away, tears stinging at her eyelids.

When she came to him she had thought that he would react to her news with quite different emotions, and his veiled reference to their relationship dragged down from her eyes the scales she had worn there for so long, showing her how much she had misunderstood and wrongly interpreted in the past.

‘I am sorry,’ she said faintly. ‘I have been selfish.’

He took her hand, rubbing it in an absent manner. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have never known you to be selfish.’

‘Then you have never known me. I have behaved like a child. Only a child would have so thoughtlessly come here today.’