Master of Glenkeith

by Jean S. MacLeod

  Even as she wondered if she should begin her meal without Andrew, she heard voices in the hall, going towards the front door, Andrew’s voice and another, which she supposed might be the doctor or the specialist from Aberdeen, and in a few minutes there was the sound of a car being driven away. The crunch of heavy footsteps sounded on the gravel at the side of the house and Andrew’s broad figure appeared outside the dining room window. He was walking with his head down and his face looked grey and drawn in the waning light.

  Tessa’s heart seemed to miss a beat. Was the old man dead?

  Andrew came into the room and seemed to stare at her for a split second without recognition, so that she could not find the courage to put words to her fear.

  “My grandfather wants to see you,” he said, “when you have had something to eat.”

  “Oh!” Her eyes lit with relief. “I’m so glad, Andrew! He is going to get well?”

  “He’ll live,” Andrew said, “but we can’t expect him ever to be quite the same man again.”

  She felt stricken, but she had seen so much poverty and disablement during her short lifetime in Italy that she wanted to offer him comfort.

  “It’s wonderful what can happen even in the worst of cases,” she said. “People can sometimes get about even after the most dreadful accidents as if—as if there had been a miracle.”

  “Doctors don’t often make mistakes,” he said briefly, sitting down at the head of the table and waiting for her to pour out his tea. “Not with a man of my grandfather’s age.”

  She felt silenced, inadequate in so far as she had been unable to offer him the solace he needed.

  “Will you have an egg?” she asked, sure that Hester’s first principle was to look after the needs of the body and the mind would soon adjust itself to the resulting feeling of well-being. She was also sure that Hester would consider the waste of good food one of the more deadly sins.

  “No, thanks. But you eat what you can.” He took his cup from her, pushed back his chair, and walked to the window. “When you’re ready, I’ll take you up to him.”

  It was impossible to force herself to eat after that. It was not that she was afraid of meeting Daniel Meldrum—she was more than eager for that moment to come—but it was Andrew himself who had added to her uncertainty at Glenkeith. He appeared to have withdrawn himself completely behind a facade of politeness which seemed forced and unnatural in the circumstances in which they found themselves, so that, as she followed him back up the wide oak staircase, she wondered how they were to go on living together under the same roof without some sort of explosion occurring between them. Either he must hate her or he must include her in his life, as Margaret was included, and perhaps he had already made up his mind which it was to be.

  “You understand, of course, that this is very much against my inclination,” he said, pausing with his hand on the amber knob of a heavy oak door facing the head of the stairs. “I thought your visit to my grandfather could very well have waited, but he was insistent, and finally Dr. Coutts and the specialist agreed.”

  “If you like,” Tessa said, “I won’t go in.”

  “I don’t give all the orders at Glenkeith,” he said briefly. “My grandfather is still very much in command and he is a man of unwavering determination once he makes up his mind.”

  As you are, Andrew, Tessa thought, following him into the room. Perhaps she would end up by disliking Andrew very much.

  Daniel Meldrum lay in a large, canopied bed at the far end of the room and she was conscious of two very alert blue eyes watching her progress across what appeared to be a vast expanse of carpet. She was aware, in that moment, that he did not look his great age, although his face appeared slightly shrunken, as the faces of the old invariably look in illness, and then she was conscious that it was the blue eyes which dominated everything. They were almost young and eager of a sudden, in spite of his evident weakness. He looked transfigured, as if age and circumstances and time itself had whirled back in a bright kaleidoscope of changing patterns to settle in the past and he was able to see it all with the clear and fearless eyes of youth.

  “Come nearer,” he commanded in a voice which just reached her. “Come and stand beside the bed.”

  She moved forward and the blue eyes searched her face for a long moment before he spoke again.

  “Ay, you’re like her!” he said. “For a minute I almost thought it was the same.”

  “You mean my mother?” Tessa asked, and heard Andrew turn away with a sharply-indrawn breath.

  Daniel Meldrum shook his head.

  “I was thinking about your grandmother when she was a girl,” he said slowly. “She would be about the same age as you are now when she left Scotland.”

  And you loved her, Tessa thought. You loved her! The conviction spread a warmth about her that was like some physical well-being running swiftly through her veins and she put out her hands to touch the thin fingers lying helplessly on the white counterpane.

  “I’m glad you’ve come,” the old man said. “You are to make your home here.” A spark of laughter lit the blue eyes as they moved towards his grandson, resting on Andrew’s broad back where he stood by the window looking down at the outside world where most of his interest lay. “We thought you were just a bairn,” he said. “What had Andrew to say when he first saw you?”

  Tessa felt cornered and at a loss for an answer. How was she ever to tell what Andrew was thinking?

  “He didn’t say anything,” she confessed, “but somehow I think he was—surprised.”

  Laughter to match his own tumbled in her eyes and Daniel Meldrum nodded, recognizing a kindred spirit in spite of the years which separated them.

  “Glenkeith has been too long without laughter,” he said softly, and Tessa knew that only she was meant to hear.

  “Time’s up, I’m afraid,” Andrew announced, turning and coming towards them. “You know what the doctor said. Five minutes, and maybe ten to-morrow!”

  “Coutts is an old woman and sometimes he fusses like an old hen with her first brood o’ chicks!” the doctor’s patient declared. “I have the use o’ my speech back, haven’t I? And my sight. What more can the man want? He could get me out of here in a week, if he tried!”

  It was obvious that he had not been told about the paralysis of his limbs, and Tessa found herself looking hastily away from the blue eyes and up at Andrew.

  “You do mean that I can come back to-morrow?” she asked.

  Looking down into her eyes, he seemed to close a heavy door between them.

  “My grandfather has asked you to come,” he said.

  CHAPTER IV

  FROM that moment onward Tessa knew that her way had been cut out for her at Glenkeith, planned and willed by two people, who, for a reason that she might one day discover, resented her presence there from the first.

  Hester MacDonald made it abundantly clear that there was no need for her help in the house, no niche she could possibly fill, and although Margaret would have found her something to do outside it was left for Hester to decide.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” Hester told her bluntly.

  “Unless you want to leave Margaret without a job.”

  With no desire to usurp anyone’s position at Glenkeith, Tessa found herself wandering about the farm and walking for miles along the country roads in her inadequate sandals, often coming to grief on the spongy moorland when she ventured farther afield.

  It was on one of these excursions that she first saw Andrew really angry. She had watched him supervising the herding of some cattle earlier in the day and knew that he had sold two of his prize heifers to a buyer from the south because he had discussed it with Margaret, only including her in the conversation to explain that Aberdeen-Angus cattle were much sought after all over the world. Later, he had driven off with the two animals in a box-trailer, presumably to take them to Aberdeen where they would be put on rail for their destination.

  On a sudden impulse she had
almost suggested that she might go with him to buy some shoes, but something shy and half strangled within her had made her hesitate.

  In the end he had gone off so quickly that she had not been given an alternative.

  Margaret and her mother had been baking when she reached the kitchen. It was Tuesday and the routine at Glenkeith never varied.

  “Would you think it fun if I showed you how to make an Italian dish some time?” she had asked, gazing at the large triangular scones which Hester turned on a girdle over the fire with clockwork regularity till she had a sizeable pile covered with a white cloth on the dresser behind her. “There are so many tasty savouries, and my mother taught me to cook when I was quite young. We use wine a lot in our cooking—”

  She had broken off, aware of the frigid silence which had greeted her remarks and of Margaret’s embarrassed preoccupation with the partridge she was plucking.

  “We’ve managed quite well at Glenkeith for the past forty years on the food I’ve cooked,” Hester had said, “and we don’t like our meat poisoned with wine. These daft-like ideas are best left to the Italians and the other folk that enjoy them. There’s nobody at Glenkeith likes anything other than plain fare, not even Andrew.”

  “He liked it well enough in Rome,” Tessa had pointed out before she realized the extent of the mistake she had made.

  “He would be too polite to say,” Hester had informed her crushingly, and she had come away and found her sketching-block and carried it out on to the moor.

  She had walked fast to cool her indignation, coming farther than she had ventured before. The path she had followed when she had left the main road had begun to climb soon afterwards and the firs and silver birch of the glen had given place to the mountain ash, which she had already learned to call the rowan.

  How much nicer a name it was to describe the slim, silver-boled tree with its soft, grey-green leaves almost hidden by the clusters of scarlet berries which she longed to paint against the muted green and gold background of the September hills! Margaret had told her that when the bracken began to die the whole moor was aflame with colour, and already the tips of the first fronds were turning palest gold.

  There was amber light, too, in the shaft of birch that speared the pine wood to its heart and a promise of glorious autumn everywhere she looked. There was a sort of colour madness in her veins, she supposed. She loved it, as she had loved the warm Italian sunshine, and the thought of it drew her on irrespective of time or distance.

  Soon she was high on the moor, climbing away from the wood, gathering long purple spikes of heather to thrust into the belt about her waist and tossing her hair back in the wind like a delighted nymph who has come across something different and more exciting than her forest glade.

  At times she ran, but once or twice she sank deep into unexpected bogland, the wet sphagnum of the hillside, spongy and treacherous as she trod on it. But it was lovely, too, gold-starred with tiny flowers like trapped sunlight!

  It was not until the mist came down that she really noticed it. If she had seen it gathering on the hills she had thought it ethereally beautiful, not knowing how swiftly and treacherously it could cut her off.

  Finally it was the cold that sent her back by the way she had come, searching for the path that went down beside a rushing brown burn, but the mist caught up with her, rolling across the hills until even the path ahead of her was obscured. There was an eerie stillness about the moor now that the wind had dropped, and the mist intensified it. The birds had ceased their singing and she could not see the sun.

  It was madness to run, but she found herself running blindly when the mist lifted for a moment and she could see the path. Her heart began to pound uncomfortably, a step away from fear, and she found herself thinking of Andrew, not as a means of rescue but as the implement of censure.

  It was early yet, of course, and he might not have returned to Glenkeith, but she did not feel that she could tide over this adventure without his knowing about it.

  Then, out of the stillness, came a sound she had least expected, the muffled beat of a horse’s hoofs as it picked its way across hard ground just ahead of her. She could only judge the distance by the sound, but she ran towards it thankfully, and suddenly a horse and rider loomed out of the grey pall ahead of her.

  The horse saw her and reared immediately, startled by her unexpected presence, and a man’s voice exclaimed impatiently;

  “What the devil—! Steady, Bess! Steady, old girl! It’s nothing to climb into the air about!”

  Horse and rider became one, and Tessa found herself looking up at a tall, dark man with a thin, eagle- featured face who was gazing at her now with a faint mockery in his eyes. Under the straight dark brows they looked almost black, but the flicker of amusement in them gave her confidence.

  “Don’t tell me!” he said. “Bess has been frightened by a nymph or a kelpie! ”

  Tessa looked at him and her anxiety melted in an answering smile.

  “If I knew what a kelpie was I could set about reassuring Bess,” she said.

  “Since you’re doubtful on that point you can’t be a good Scotswoman,” he told her, smoothing the mare’s satin neck with a firm, gloved hand. “I was suspicious about that when I first saw you.”

  “About me not being a Scot? My grandmother was,” Tessa declared. “Does that make it any better?”

  “A little. Didn’t your grandmother warn you not to go wandering on strange moorland with a mist coming down?”

  “I didn’t see the mist till it was too late.”

  “What were you looking at instead?”

  She flushed.

  “Everything else. The rowans and the colour of the bracken and the birch trees down in the wood.”

  “You’re quite sure you don’t live in the woods?” He dismounted, throwing the rein over his arm. “Where do you live, if it isn’t too great a secret?”

  “At Glenkeith.”

  She saw the surprise in his eyes and the dark brows went up, accentuating it.

  “Glenkeith?” he repeated. “Since when?”

  “Just over a week ago. My mother used to live there.”

  He said: “You’ve come a long way from Glenkeith. Did you know?”

  “I suppose I must have done. Several kilometres, I expect.”

  He looked at her more closely.

  “So you’re not even English?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “You don’t measure your distance in miles!”

  “All the same,” Tessa said with a small toss of her head, proving him wrong, “I am!”

  He laughed into her challenging eyes.

  “This is something!” he said. “You live at Glenkeith and you’re English, but you measure distances in kilometres and you have the faintest—just the barest ghost—of an accent. Not French. I would recognize that, but you’ve spoken some other language, something warmer than English, I think, for many years.”

  “You sound like Sherlock Holmes!”

  “Believe me, I’m not! I’m labouring under difficulties trying to think who you can possibly be.”

  “Perhaps I should leave you believing that I’m a kelpie, but I don’t think I can do that, even though it would be fun to disappear into the mist and keep you guessing!”

  “Do you think I’m the sort of person who should be kept in the dark?”

  She considered him frankly. He was much too handsome, in a dark, virile way which suggested that much of his time might be spent out of doors, in the saddle, no doubt, where he looked superb. The well-cut riding breeches and hacking jacket might almost be a uniform with him, and he was as tall as Andrew if not quite so well set up.

  It did not seem strange to her that she should measure this chance acquaintance by Andrew’s standard. Andrew was the only Scotsman she knew and he had seemed typical of his race.

  “I think I should be getting back to Glenkeith,” she said without answering his question. “In a little while they wil
l miss me and begin to look for me, and that might upset them.”

  “Do you mean that it might upset Mrs. MacDonald — or Andrew?” he asked.

  A smile broke over Tessa’s face, the wide, friendly smile which revealed the attractively uneven line of her teeth and broke a network of tiny laughter lines at the corners of her eyes.

  “Then you know the Meldrums,” she said.

  “Very well. Or, at least, I know Andrew very well — and Meg.”

  She felt relieved.

  “I’ve come to live at Glenkeith,” she told him. “My mother was Andrew’s stepmother, but that was before I was born—before she married my father. Does that sound complicated?” she asked. “It means that Andrew and I are not really related at all.”

  He looked at her quizzically, puzzled, perhaps, by the strange circumstances which had brought her to Glenkeith, but he said almost instantly:

  “We’re neighbours, more or less. My name’s Nigel Haddow, and we were bound to have met sooner or later.” “Because you live near here?”

  “I live at Ardnashee, over there beyond these trees.” He nodded vaguely into the barrier of mist where the dark outline of a wood could just be seen. “It’s much nearer than Glenkeith and I propose to take you there.”

  She drew back, looking down at her drenched skirt and sodden shoes.

  “Oh, but I couldn’t!” she objected. Mrs. MacDonald would never forgive me for paying calls like this. I couldn’t possibly come, thank you all the same.”

  “And you couldn’t walk all the way back to Glenkeith in that state,” he told her firmly. “You really ought to have some sensible shoes.”

  “Yes, Margaret said so, and I realize that now,” Tessa confessed, looking down at her feet with a rueful smile. “They were all right for Italy,” she said.