'Have you got it? ' Ruth demanded. The girl nodded, around quickly
and took an envelope out of her grey nursing cloak. Ruth exchanged it
for a gold sovereign. Clutching the d coin the nurse started back for
the hedge.
'Wait. ' Ruth stopped her. This was her only physical contact and she
was reluctant to break it so soon. 'How is he?
'It's all there, ma'am. ' 'I know-but tell me how he looks. What he
does and says,' Ruth insisted.
'Oh, he's looking fine now. He's been up and about on his sticks all
week, with that big black savage helping him, The first day he fell and
you should have heard him swear. Lordy! ' They both laughed
together.
'He's a real card, that one. He and sister had another tiff yesterday
when she wanted to wash him. He called her a shameless strumpet. She
gave him what for all right. But you could see she was ever so pleased
and she went around telling everybody about it.
She bur bled on and Ruth listened enchanted, until: 'Then yesterday,
you know what he did when I was changing his dressing?' She blushed
coyly. 'He gave me a pinch behind!'
Ruth felt a hot flood of anger wash over her. Suddenly she realized
that the girl was pretty in an insipid fashion.
'And he said.
'Thank you!' Ruth had to restrain the hand that held her riding crop.
'I have to go now. ' Usually the long skirts of her habit hampered her
in mounting, but this time she found herself in the saddle without
effort.
'Next week, ma'am?'
'Yes,' and she hit the stallion across the shoulder. He lunged forward
so violently that she had to clutch at the pommel of the saddle. She
rode him as she had never ridden a horse before, driving him with whip
and spur until dark patches of sweat showed on his flanks and froth
spattered back along his shoulders, so that by the time she reached a
secluded spot on the bank of the Umgeni River far out of town her
jealousy had abated and she felt ashamed of herself. She loosened the
stallion's girdle and petted him a little before leaving him tethered
to one of the weeping willows, and picking her way down the bank to her
favourite log on the water's edge.
There she settled herself and opened the envelope. If only Sean could
have known that his temperature chart, progress report, house-doctor's
recommendations, and the sucrose content of his urine were being so
avidly studied, he would probably had added a ruptured spleen to his
other ills.
At last Ruth folded the pages into their envelope and tucked it away in
the jacket of her habit. He must look so different without his beard.
She stared into the pool below her and it seemed as though his face
formed in the green water and looked back at her. She touched the
surface with the toe of her riding boot so that the ripples spread and
shattered the image.
She was left with only the feeling of loneliness.
'I must not go to him,' she whispered, steeling the resolve which had
