MASTER OF GLENKEITH
by
JEAN S. MACLEOD
CHAPTER I
DANIEL MELDRUM sat in his room at Glenkeith looking out across the green pastureland where Meldrum cattle had grazed for over a hundred years. Three generations of Meldrums had helped to build up the Glenkeith herd, which his father had started from Tillyfour stock more than a century ago, but it was not of the black polled cattle that the old man was thinking at that moment, although they had made his name famous on three continents. At eighty-five, he had achieved most of his ambitions and he still held the reins of management firmly in his strong, work- roughened hands, but there were times when his thoughts dwelt heavily in the past, times when he wondered if the best of life had escaped him.
The future, he knew, was assured. Glenkeith’s future. It was secure in the direct line of succession and he had no
doubt about his grandson’s love of the land. This was Andrew’s country, as it was his own. He had not sent for Andrew because he wanted to discuss the future of Glenkeith or the Meldrum herd.
While he waited for his grandson to come to him with a patience which the years and a growing infirmity had fostered in him, his eyes, still vividly blue and alert for all his great age, lifted to the oblong of the window once more, roving beyond it to the distant skyline where the dark barrier of the Grampians rose starkly in the west, the Monarchs of Scotland, towering peak above peak against the blue of the August day. From where he sat he could see the whole range of the Cairngorms glittering in the sun, with Ben Macdhui rearing his hoary old head above them all, and in spite of the sunshine and the white clouds over them, he felt a harshness in these mountains that he had never recognized before. The rugged grandeur of them could so easily be the iron in a man’s soul.
Almost instinctively, he turned his eyes northwards to the more gentle Braes of Mar and the green mountains that cradled the infant Dee. Yes, he thought, it was Andrew’s country, as it had been his father’s before him.
His son was dead. When he thought of Andrew’s father a shadow crossed his face which was still hovering there when his grandson came into the room.
Andrew Meldrum, at twenty-eight, had all the marks of the north-countryman about him. He stood over six feet in his stocking soles and he was solid-looking and broad in proportion. His tread was firm and purposeful, his eyes direct as he crossed the expanse of worn carpet to where his grandfather sat.
“You sent for me,” he said.
“Ay, Andrew.” The old man nodded towards the high-backed chair facing him in the window recess. “Sit down, if you can spare me a minute. I want to talk to you.”
Andrew pulled the chair towards him without comment. It was seldom that the old man called a conference in the middle of a working day so that it was obviously something of importance that had to be said. Something about Glenkeith, no doubt, because the farm and the herd
made up their whole existence.
“I know what I’m going to say won’t please you, Andrew,” Daniel Meldrum began without further ado. “And maybe what I’m going to ask you to do will go sorely against your grain, but I want you to go to Italy right away and bring back a child.”
Andrew had not yet lit his pipe. He had struck the match and it flared for a moment in his grey-green eyes like a small warning signal of his annoyance.
“Italy?” he repeated when he had blown out the match. “Who can we possibly know in Italy?”
His grandfather’s eyes went to a letter lying open on the table at his elbow.
“Maybe you’d better read what this says for yourself,” he suggested, “and then I’ll try to explain.” Andrew reached for the letter. It was written on cheap, ruled notepaper and bore an address in Rome, and the sender had obviously had to struggle with an inadequate knowledge of English in an effort to make himself clear. What Andrew did gather, when he had reached the foot of the second page, was that the writer had many children of his own, many mouths to feed, and that he could not, therefore, take on the added responsibility of “the little one” who had grown up with his own children but who was now without a single relation since her father’s tragic death three months ago. Luigi Zanetti, as their unknown correspondent signed himself at the foot of the page, was quite sure that “the little one” would be happier among her own people.
Andrew looked up.
“But what have we to do with this?” he asked, his eyes intent on the blue ones across the recess. “We are not her people.”
For a fraction of a second Daniel Meldrum did not answer. He seemed to have forgotten Andrew, forgotten that they were sitting there at Glenkeith with the sun streaming in through the window between them and the wide pastures spread out before them. There was the look in his eyes of a man whose thoughts have gone too deeply into the past to be disturbed, and presently he said, in a low, controlled voice which Andrew knew was coupled
with an unshakable determination:
“It could be argued that way, Andrew, but I want the child brought here. She’s Veronique’s daughter by her second marriage.”
As if the match had been held again to his eyes, Andrew’s gaze met the old man’s with the flame of protest bright in it for the second time. His lips were closed in a hard line which brought a certain harshness to his expression and his whole body seemed to stiffen.
“What have we to do with that?” he demanded. “She married soon after my father died, I believe, and went to live abroad.”
“Yes, it would seem that was the way of it.”
The old man’s words sank into a deepening silence which Andrew felt that he could not break. For the first time in over twenty years they were discussing his father’s second wife, the lovely, frail creature whom Fergus Meldrum had brought back to Glenkeith as his bride four years after Andrew’s mother had died at his birth. A product of the more gentle southland, Veronique had seemed to wilt and pine at Glenkeith, the stern Scottish mountains shutting her into a prison of her own making, and then one day she had gone off into the blue, left Glenkeith and left the man who had done everything in his power to make her happy, in order to lead the life she preferred.
The following morning Fergus Meldrum had been found dead at the foot of a deep gully where it had been supposed, at first, that he had gone in search of some sheep.
When Andrew had been old enough to understand these things, his aunt, Hester MacDonald, had told him the truth. Hester had not made any bones about it. She had told Andrew that his father had committed suicide because of a woman who was as frail in nature as she was beautiful in body, and Andrew had grown up under Hester’s guidance with a smouldering hatred in his heart. It had gained in strength throughout the years until now he was almost as bitter as Hester when he considered the lovely, frail Veronique.
And here was his grandfather proposing that
Veronique’s daughter should be brought to Glenkeith!
“There’s something you should know.” The far-away look was still in the old man’s eyes, revealing a close contact with the distant past which advancing age so often stimulates. “It was through me, in a way, that your stepmother first came to Glenkeith.” He paused for a moment and then he went on in a voice softened by memory: “Veronique’s mother—this child’s grandmother—was born less than a stone’s throw from Glenkeith, up there at Tarland among the hills. She was a Scot, and as bonnie a lass as ever crossed the Dee, but she took it into her head to marry a Frenchman an’ nobody could have stopped her even if they had tried.”
“I can’t see what that has to do with it,” Andrew objected. “All these years ago--------”
When he looked up he did see. For the first time in his long experience of his grandfather the old man was transparent, h
is innermost thoughts laid bare in the vivid blue pools of his eyes. Long ago, in the days that were past now for ever, he had been in love with Veronique’s mother, and whatever had come between them so that she had married someone else had no bearing now on the future.
“It was so little a thing that parted us that I can’t remember now what it was,” Daniel said, as if he had been continuing a conversation in his own mind and was only vaguely aware of Andrew sitting there on the opposite side of the recess. “A tossed head or a matter of pique, perhaps, or maybe even pride on my part after a fancied slight; but she went her way and I went mine, as maybe we were supposed to do, not being meant for each other.”
But you’ve remembered long enough to want to bring her granddaughter here, to Glenkeith, Andrew thought.
“She settled in Brittany,” Daniel went on, looking out of the window now, as if the long pageant of the years was to be seen etched against the blue and gold of the August sky. “Janet L’Estrange, a queer-sounding sort of name for a Scots lass who never had been farther than Edinburgh in all her life before! Once or twice she came back to Tarland, but we never met. I was married and settled at Glenkeith by then. I had roots here and she had torn up her roots and gone away, but years afterwards, when your father had to go to France about some cattle we had sold, I gave him Janet’s address and told him to call on the family. It seems that he fell in love with your stepmother as soon as he saw her.”
And so Veronique had come to Glenkeith! Andrew found that he could not answer. All the old rebellion, the old contempt for Veronique, was rising in him again on a bitter wave of hatred, choking against his throat so that he could not trust himself to speak.
“There’s no saying whether I did right or wrong, asking him to go and pick up these threads,” Daniel added, “but I know that I can’t be letting Janet Fraser’s grandchild run loose in a foreign country without doing something about it.”
Determination had strengthened in his voice and he was looking across at Andrew as if there could be no question of him disobeying an order.
From force of habit, Andrew thought, I’ll go. Yet as he rose to his feet something stronger than habitual obedience caused him to say:
“We could write to these people—this Luigi Zanetti. Maybe if he was paid to look after the child we could do something about it later on, when the harvest is in.” He was conscious of pushing the problem away from him in the immediate future and felt surprised at the intensity of his own emotion as his grandfather shook his head.
“I feel that we’re responsible,” the old man said with finality. “Bring the child to Glenkeith.”
“You know the time of year it is,” Andrew protested. “You can fly to Rome. It will broaden your vision, Andrew. A man can be too long in one place, too much taken up wi’ the means so that he knows nothing of the ways o’ living. You’ve been tied to Glenkeith for too long.” He stretched up and took the letter from Andrew’s hand, smiling faintly as he re-read it. “I’m not saying that you need to bring a wife back with you, as your father did,” he added, “but maybe it’s time you were thinking about getting married. I would like fine to see you settled,
Drew.”
He rarely used the abridged form of Andrew’s name, as Margaret, his cousin, used it, and Andrew knew that it was almost a term of endearment. All his grandfather’s affection for him had been in that one short word, the love which, throughout the years, had been expressed in deed rather than by word, and once again he recognized the limitation of the Scot in that respect. The turmoil and stress of emotion which lay so often in his own soul could never be expressed by the spoken word and he supposed he would go on feeling inadequate and at a loss wherever words were used. Embarrassed, too, when they were bandied about too freely to express the deeper feelings that lay close against a man’s heart.
“When do you wish me to go to Rome?” he asked.
“It could be arranged in a day or two. Margaret would drive you in to Dyce to the airport.”
“There’s no need. I could leave the car in Aberdeen.” His grandfather gave him a long, searching look. “And do the lass out of a day’s fun! Awa’ with you, Andrew, and don’t let life escape you!”
Andrew was still smiling at that final, typical sally when he reached the foot of the broad staircase which led from the long hall at Glenkeith to the rooms above, and almost as if she had materialized out of the dark shadows of the hall itself, his aunt came across the paved floor to confront him with her thin smile. “Well, Andrew,” she said, “are you going to Rome?”
“It looks that way,” he answered. “I’d better phone Dyce and see about a plane.”
Hester MacDonald’s straight brows went up, the eyes beneath them a stony blue.
“So you’re not to take time to go by any roundabout way,” she commented dryly. “You are to spend extra money and fly there to bring this child back because of an old man’s whim!”
The cold, harsh venom of her voice was nothing new to Andrew. He had heard it before, always coldest and harshest when Hester was discussing money or the past, and he supposed that the past held nothing of tenderness for this woman whose marriage to a drunken ghillie had been considered a mistake by her family. Her widowhood had brought Hester back to Glenkeith when she had been most needed. She had cared for him from earliest childhood because of the friendship which had existed between her and his mother, but the milk of human kindness had turned sour in Hester long ago. Left with two children to support, she had been glad enough to return to Glenkeith, but her pride had suffered in the process and Daniel Meldrum had never quite been able to forget that she had “married ill”.
“Whatever the whim,” Andrew said, “he’s quite determined about it.” He turned towards the open door, subconsciously seeking the freedom of Glenkeith’s broad acres and the wide sky above his head. “Will you pack me a bag, Aunt Hester? A grip will do. Just enough for a couple of days.”
“Margaret will pack it for you,” she said, drawing in her thin lips so that her face looked more gaunt and devoid of colour than ever. “She’ll take you to the airport.”
He nodded, deciding not to argue. The path of least resistance was the easiest way with Hester MacDonald. She had been mistress at Glenkeith for so long that her authority in such things was more or less accepted by everyone.
He strode away towards the fields, thinking that Hester had exerted that authority at Glenkeith all her life, and suddenly his grandfather’s words came back to him in the full clarity of their meaning.
“I’m not saying that you need to bring a wife back with you, as your father did...”
The words stuck in his mind, emphasizing all the horror of his father’s untimely end. Although the verdict had been brought in as death by misadventure, he had never thought to question his aunt’s contention that Fergus Meldrum had taken his own life and that his second wife’s conduct was the cause of his action, and suddenly he was stricken by the thought that he might even be going in search of the child of the man with whom she had fled.
Yes, Hester had hinted at that, too. He did not know how long after his father’s death Veronique had married,
but no doubt it would have been fairly soon.
In a confused and bitter state of mind, he folded his arms along the top of a barred gate, staring unseeingly at the black cattle in the field before him, wondering if he had any right to bring Veronique’s child to Glenkeith knowing the havoc which the mother had wrought there long ago.
“A penny for them, Drew!”
Without turning, he knew that it was Margaret, coming up from the hen-coops with the daily quota of eggs which she would wash and pack carefully into the big wooden crates for Sandy Gordon to collect in the packing-station van.
“You look as if you had all the cares of the world on your shoulders,” she added when he turned to smile at her.
“They’re not so much cares as prejudices, Meg,” he admitted as she came to lean beside him on the gate.
&n
bsp; “Because you have to go to Rome?” Her gentle, dark eyes were softly questioning. “Mother told me about the letter this morning,” she added. “She said Grandfather told her last night and explained that he wanted you to go.” She gave him a swift, sideways glance. “It might be fun, Drew, having a child about the place, and a girl, too,” she added. “What age is she?”
“I don’t know.” His voice sounded flat and uninterested. “I can’t see that it makes a great deal of difference, can you?”
He looked down at her, wondering why she did not answer him immediately. Her plain, honest face, with its ridge of freckles across the nose, was so familiar to him that he never stopped to wonder if Margaret could be considered attractive in the generally-accepted meaning of the word. She had always been at Glenkeith. They had been brought up together, and she belonged there, and quite often he had asked her advice in moments of indecision about the farming where he supposed that her views might help, but apart from that he had never thought deeply about Margaret or his dependence upon her.
“You don’t want her to come,” she said, making it more of a statement than a question which he must answer. “It won’t help, Drew, and it will only make the child unhappy in the end. If she’s at all sensitive she’ll feel your resentment and react to it accordingly.”
“I won’t have anything to do with her,” he reminded her stiffly. “I won’t be her guardian.”
“Not at the moment,” she said, “but afterwards, Drew. Glenkeith will be yours when the old man dies.”
A denial rose in Andrew which he could not crush. It was almost a repugnance, although he had accepted the thought of Glenkeith and his personal responsibilities long ago with justifiable pride and a strong sense of dedication.
“Why had this to happen?” he demanded savagely. “Things were going on well enough as they were.”
“It’s—the sort of question that no one can answer, Drew,” Margaret said, conscious that she was seeking for words as blindly as Andrew did at times. “It’s something to do with inadequacy, perhaps, or maybe it’s just the way life has of jerking us out of our complacency.”
Master of Glenkeith Page 1
