Scales of Justice by Ngaio Marsh Page A

in the district. Wherever she went, whether it was to attend upon Lady Lacklander’s toe, or upon the abscess of the gardener’s child at Hammer, or upon Commander Syce’s strangely persistent lumbago, she felt a kind of heightened tension in the behaviour of her patients and also in the behaviour of young Dr. Mark Lacklander. Rose Cartarette, when she encountered her in the garden, was white and jumpy; the Colonel looked strained and Mrs. Cartarette singularly excited.
    “Kettle,” Lady Lackiander said, on Wednesday, wincing a little as she endured the approach of a fomentation to her toe, “have you got the cure for a bad conscience?”
    Nurse Kettle did not resent being addressed in this restoration-comedy fashion by Lady Lacklander, who had known her for some twenty years and used the form with an intimate and even an affectionate air much prized by Nurse Kettle.
    “Ah,” said the latter, “there’s no mixture-as-before for
that
sort of trouble.”
    “No. How long,” Lady Lacklander went on, “have you been looking after us in Swevenings, Kettle?”
    “Thirty years if you count five in the hospital at Chyning.”
    “Twenty-five years of fomentations, enemas, slappings, and thumpings,” mused Lady Lacklander. “And I suppose you’ve learnt quite a lot about us in that time. There’s nothing like illness to reveal character and there’s nothing like a love affair,” she added unexpectedly, “to disguise it. This is agony,” she ended mildly, referring to the fomentation.
    “Stick it if you can, dear,” Nurse Kettle advised, and Lady Lacklander for her part did not object to being addressed as “dear” by Nurse Kettle, who continued, “How do you mean, I wonder, about love disguising character?”
    “When people are in love,” Lady Lacklander said with a little scream as a new fomentation was applied, “they instinctively present themselves to each other in their most favourable light. They assume pleasing characteristics as unconsciously as a cock pheasant puts on his spring plumage. They display such virtues as magnanimity, charitableness and modesty and wait for them to be admired. They develop a positive genius for suppressing their least attractive points. They can’t help it, you know, Kettle. It’s just the behaviourism of courtship.”
    “Fancy.”
    “Now don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, because you most certainly do. You think straight and that’s more than anybody else seems to be capable of doing in Swevenings. You’re a gossip, of course,” Lady Lacklander added, “but I don’t think you’re a malicious gossip, are you?”
    “Certainly not. The idea!”
    “No. Tell me, now, without any frills, what do you think of
us
?”
    “Meaning, I take it,” Nurse Kettle returned, “the aristocracy?”
    “Meaning exactly that. Do you,” asked Lady Lacklander with relish, “find us effete, ineffectual, vicious, obsolete and altogether extraneous?”
    “No,” said Nurse Kettle stoutly, “I don’t.”
    “Some of us are, you know.”
    Nurse Kettle squatted back on her haunches retaining a firm grip on Lady Lacklander’s little heel. “It’s not the people so much as the idea,” she said.
    “Ah,” said Lady Lacklander, “you’re an Elizabethan, Kettle. You
believe
in degree. You’re a female Ulysses, old girl. But degree is now dependent upon behaviour, I’d have you know.”
    Nurse Kettle gave a jolly laugh and said she didn’t krrow what that meant. Lady Lacklander rejoined that, among other things, it meant that if people fall below something called a certain standard, they are asking for trouble. “I mean,” Lady Lacklander went on, scowling with physical pain ahd mental concentration, “I mean we’d better behave ourselves in the admittedly few jobs that by right of heritage used to be ours. I mean, finally, that whether they think we’re rubbish or whether they think we’re not, people still expect that in certain situations we