Master of Glenkeith

by Jean S. MacLeod

  “What’s this?” she demanded. “Are you taking the thing back to the doctor?”

  “Grandfather is going to use it,” Andrew explained. “Tessa has managed to persuade him to go out.”

  Harsh and tight-lipped, Hester regarded Tessa in the shaft of sunlight slanting in through the staircase window.

  “She has great charm,” she observed scathingly. “Watch you don’t find yourself caught by it, too, Andrew.”

  Tessa drew back as if she had been struck by the cruelly unexpected jibe. The bitter words had been a challenge, driven from the older woman by an emotion which had been beyond her control for the moment. Jealousy, perhaps, the desire to present Tessa in an unfavourable light as the enchantress who might entice a man to folly even against his better judgment, the fair siren waiting among the rocks to lure him to his willing doom.

  It had been obvious to Tessa for some time that Hester MacDonald desired nothing more passionately than to see her only daughter mistress at Glenkeith, and the fact that Margaret would be marrying her first cousin in order to attain the coveted position did not seem to matter. Margaret’s feelings would scarcely be taken into consideration once Hester had made her plans, and Tessa had an idea that these plans had been completed long ago, long before she had ever come to Glenkeith, long before she had ever been heard of, in fact.

  Perhaps it was only natural that Hester should wish to safeguard her daughter’s future when she looked back into her own past, but the fact remained that she would also be safeguarding her own position at Glenkeith.

  Tessa hated herself for thinking about such things. She wished to live in peace with everyone at Glenkeith, if Hester would only let her.

  “I’ll help you with the chair,” she said to Andrew, her voice sounding small and subdued in the awkward silence.

  “I’ll manage it,” he said, “if you can go and find one of the men to help once we’ve got my grandfather into it. You’ll find Tawse working up at the north byres, or Sandy Fleming should be somewhere about. Either of them will do.”

  She could not tell what he had thought about Hester’s remark and she was glad to make her escape into the yard.

  Andrew carried the old man down the wide staircase with Fleming’s help. The stock-man was a small, thickset man of bull-like strength with a thatch of red hair springing up untidily all over his head when he removed his cap to come into the house, and he seemed uncomfortably in awe of Hester, although he took his orders solely from Andrew or his grandfather.

  Hester stood waiting for them at the foot of the stairs, running a critical eye over her father with the same tight look on her face which she had presented to Andrew ten minutes before.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said curtly. “This isn’t Italy.”

  She had barely looked in Tessa’s direction, but all the venom which lay behind her remark had been directed towards this girl whom her aged father had welcomed to Glenkeith “in his dotage,” as she had put it on more than one occasion, and Tessa was aware of a mounting tension as she followed the chair to the front door.

  “Don’t fash yourself too much about us, Hester,” Daniel said. “I’m wrapped up like a trussed turkey and Tessa never seems to feel the cold. We’re only going for a turn along the burnside to have a look at the cattle. We’ll be back in time for tea.”

  He was in fine spirit to-day, Tessa thought, taking the chair from Andrew and trying to forget that Hester was still standing, black-browed, behind them on the doorstep.

  Andrew walked with them to the white barred gate leading to the back road and stood leaning with his arms along the top bar watching as Tessa wheeled the old man away. Perhaps he felt that she was being useful at last, Tessa mused.

  The road along the burnside was narrow and white-sanded and the sound of the water was like happy laughter as it bubbled over the grey stones and eddied into deep brown pools between the boulders scattered along its course. Elder and birch grew thickly on either bank, making a green and golden tunnel of leaves for it to flow through and a deep background silence for its music. The sound of a reaper came from far off in the fields and the distant barking of a dog echoed back from the hills. It seemed as if they were closed in in some peaceful world of their own where turmoil and conflict could not reach them—until the thought of Hester sprang back into Tessa’s mind.

  She walked quickly then, pushing the chair a little faster along the road, as if to put greater distance between herself and Glenkeith, and soon they were in a narrow glen running away from the farm where hills came down close on either side and sheep took the place of the black cattle which she had come to associate with the whole of Aberdeenshire.

  In less than an hour they had come right into the heart of the green mountains with the higher peaks of the

  Grampians rising all about them and beyond the head of the glen the great free reaches of the open moor.

  Impulsively she wanted to reach them.

  “Are you tired?” she asked. “Shall we turn back?”

  Daniel met her mood.

  “On you go!” he said. “It’s early yet. When you get to the bend in the road, yonder, you’ll see the whole of Morven Hill and the Cairn Gorm beyond it, and if you’re lucky you’ll see Balmoral through the trees.”

  When they reached the bend in the road they were higher than Tessa expected. The broad panorama of the Dee lay before them in all its proud beauty and they could see, far beneath them, the spire of Crathie church and, across the shining river, the distant turrets of Balmoral half-hidden in the trees at the foot of Craig Gowan.

  It was a day of vistas, bright and clear as far as the eye could see, and the lazy murmur of bees in the heather was faint, drowsy music on the gentle wind.

  Tessa felt that she had never been so happy in all her life, because to be loved was the crown of all happiness, and surely the old man loved her? She wanted to speak to him about her mother, but because of what Hester had said that day when Andrew had first brought her to Glenkeith, she could not. She must leave him to speak first, though she would not believe all that Hester had said, that her mother had brought bad luck to Glenkeith when she had married Andrew’s father.

  “I wish we could go on and on!” she cried impulsively. “Over the next rise and the one after to see it all!”

  Daniel Meldrum smiled at her eagerness.

  “We’d need a flying carpet for that,” he said, “and maybe we’ve come far enough for one day. The road’s been getting pretty rough this last mile and it’s time we were turning back, anyway. We can come again. Now that I’ve got over being pushed in a chair like a bairn, I’ll want to be taken out regularly, I suppose!”

  “It’s been wonderful!” Tessa said, looking down the winding road and not wanting to go back. “It’s been everything I ever imagined it would be!”

  He nodded his white head, but he did not ask her who had told her about Glenkeith. It seemed that he did not want to dwell on that part of the past which was so deeply overshadowed by his son’s death.

  Half-way down the glen a rough sheep track ran off over a hump-backed ridge and he pointed towards it as they neared it.

  “When I was younger,” he said, “I used to fish up there at the Linn. Would you like to see the salmon jump?” he asked with a bright gleam in his blue eyes. “It’s just the day for them, but we’ll not have to make any noise going up over the bridge!”

  Rain and the odd hill burn had come down on either side of the bridge and Tessa had to push hard in an effort to guide the chair away from the softer ground, but once on the bridge itself her task was easy. These little grey hump-backed bridges which were to be found on all the roads round Glenkeith were a constant delight to her, and she leaned over the moss-grown parapet of this one and gazed down at the brown water flowing beneath her.

  “Does Andrew fish a lot?” she asked.

  “He used to, but now he never seems to find the time. He used to fish the Ardnashee Water with the young Haddows regular
ly, and Nigel still comes up here occasionally.” He gave her a quick look. “I haven t seen anything of Nigel Haddow since I took to my bed,” he observed.

  “He has been to ask for you, though!” Tessa assured him.

  “Or to see you?” he chuckled.

  Tessa flushed.

  “He didn’t come for that reason,” she said. “Anyway, I was away at Ballater with Margaret getting my shoes.”

  “He’d be a disappointed man,” Daniel teased. “But maybe he did come to speir after me when all’s said and done. He was always a nice lad, and I taught him to hold his first rod and cast his first fly!”

  “He and Andrew are friends then?”

  “Very old friends, although the Haddows had a fancy education in England and Andrew went to Aberdeen to the

  College there.”

  Tessa laughed.

  “Does that make a difference?” she asked.

  “Some folk think it does, but I never could see it. Oxford maybe set a kind of polish on Nigel Haddow, but it didn’t make a better farmer out of him! Ardnashee cattle have still a long way to go before they can come up to Glenkeith standards, and you can’t judge a man by the cut o’ his waistcoat.”

  “I liked Nigel Haddow,” Tessa said. “He was kind and

  gay”

  Daniel grunted, saying no more, and they waited in silence for the fish.

  “Oh, look! Look there!” Tessa cried as a silver streak shot clear out of the water just above the bridge. “Do they always do that?”

  “Always—when they know they have an audience who’ll make plenty of noise!” he returned dryly.

  “Now you’re teasing me and we must go!” she said, pushing the chair back down the ramp of the bridge, but suddenly it tipped lop-sidedly and there was a small, sharp scraping sound as a wheel ran free and the axle bar grated on the roadway.

  Horror stricken, Tessa watched the wheel careering down the path ahead of them, gathering speed as it went.

  “That’s done it, and no mistake!” Daniel grinned. “Now you’ll have to run all the way to Glenkeith to bring it back!”

  “But it’s serious!” Tessa cried, feeling that something had suddenly caught her by the throat. “How are we ever going to fix it to the chair again? We never should have come this far!”

  She was thinking of Andrew’s warning and her heart was full of apprehension, especially when she thought of her charge and the wheel-less chair and the evening coming on.

  “Better catch it before it ends up in the river!” Daniel suggested.

  She ran then, madly, precipitately over the rough ground, chasing the wheel, and finally caught up with it in the ditch at the junction of the path and the road.

  She picked it up and stood looking at it almost as if it had been guilty of murder, and then she carried it slowly back to the bridge.

  “It looks as though something has snapped,” she said helplessly.

  “Let me have a look at it.”

  Daniel inspected it carefully before he shook his head.

  “Short of having the local smithy on tow, we can’t do very much about it,” he said. “The pin appears to have snapped farther up the road.” He looked down at the axle digging itself into the soft surface of the bridge, considering the position with the utmost calm. “I think you’ll have to go back to Glenkeith and bring help,” he said. “If it’s Andrew you meet first,” he added, seeing her stricken face, “you can tell him that it was my fault we came off the road at all. You can say that I wanted to see the salmon jump just this once while I was here anyway.”

  “How could I tell him anything but the truth!” Tessa cried miserably. “He’ll know it was my fault. He’ll know it was I who wanted to come and you who had been trying to be kind!”

  “And supposing he did know?” the old man queried. “There’s nothing so very desperate about losing the wheel off a chair!”

  Perhaps that was true, Tessa thought, but the inference seemed to go deeper than that, embracing dependability and trust and a question of obedience. Andrew had advised her not to come up on to the moor and it would look as if she had defied him.

  “It’s going to take me more than an hour to get to Glenkeith and back,” she said.

  He smiled up at her.

  “I can sit and talk to the fish,” he suggested.

  What would she say to Andrew when she reached Glenkeith? Tessa felt the breath coming fast between her set teeth as she hurried off after pulling the chair into comparative safety at the side of the bridge. Perhaps she might even be lucky enough to get to Glenkeith and back

  before he returned from Ballater with Margaret.

  Her cheeks were flushed with her exertion now, her hair blown back in the light wind, and she was glad that the road went straight to Glenkeith with no conflicting byways leading from it to confuse her.

  “Hold on, there! Why so fast on such a glorious day?” Nigel Haddow, in rubber waders up to his thighs and a tweed deerstalker pulled down to shade his eyes, came up towards her out of the shelter of the trees along the burn. “Oh!” she cried. “Oh, I’m so glad to see you!”

  He grinned broadly.

  “A most uninhibited remark and pleasantly flattering!” he assured her. “To what do I really owe the compliment, though? Are you running away from Andrew?”

  “No. No, don’t be silly!” she gasped breathlessly. “I was going back to Glenkeith to fetch him.”

  “In all that hurry?”

  “Do try to be serious,” she begged unfairly. “There’s been an accident. I took Mr. Meldrum for a walk in his wheel-chair and one of the wheels came off. I expect I shouldn’t have gone so far, but it was such a lovely day and you walk farther than you imagine when you’re pushing a pram or a chair. It seems to help you along. It’s not like walking alone. We went as far as the head of the glen,” she rushed on, “and on our way back we turned off on to a side track to watch the salmon jumping. I hadn’t seen them before—”

  She broke off, looking up at him helplessly, and behind his smile she could see that his dark eyes were faintly concerned.

  “And after all this you lost a wheel?” he mused. “Was that all that happened?”

  “Isn’t that enough?” she demanded. “I’ve had to leave Mr. Meldrum up there alone.”

  “He won’t mind that,” he told her calmly. “He’s fished up there for hours in his time, but we can soon put the loneliness right and we might even be able to do something about the wheel!”

  He didn’t mean to let her go back to Glenkeith for help,

  Tessa realized, drawing in a deep breath of relief.

  “You always seem to be coming to my aid,” she said. “You must think me a complete idiot by this time!”

  He did not tell her what he thought of her as they went back by the way she had come. Out of the corner of her eye when they had met she had seen a scarlet sports car drawn on to the grass at the side of the road overlooking a long stretch of tree-shaded water where the boulder-fringed pools were brown and deep, and she supposed that he had parked his car there to fish after they had passed up the glen. It had not been there when she had wheeled Daniel Meldrum’s chair along the white-sanded road or she would have noticed its gay paintwork against the green, bright and sleek and challenging, the sort of car that she would have expected Nigel Haddow to possess.

  “Where were you exactly when the wheel came off?” he asked.

  “At the hump-backed bridge this side of the moor.”

  He whistled.

  “You had come quite a way.” He glanced down at her brogues. “But I see that you are better equipped for walking now.”

  “Andrew insisted that I bought more sensible shoes after your first rescue!”

  “Andrew is a great believer in sensible things,” he said briefly. “Would you rather he had come to your rescue this time?”

  She felt the hot colour of swift embarrassment running up under her skin to stain her cheeks a vivid scarlet.

  “No, I d
on’t think so,” she said. “He would have been very—impatient.”

  “Or very angry. I wonder which?” He smiled sardonically. “You should never let anyone see when you stand too much in awe of them, my dear Tessa.”

  Her flush deepened.

  “I don’t think Andrew would even be interested,” she said, and could have bitten out her tongue as soon as she had admitted it.

  “Because of Meg MacDonald?” he asked, laughing. “You know that they’re full cousins, of course? It doesn’t seem to concern Mrs. MacDonald over much,” he added when she did not answer him. “She’s quite determined to marry Meg off to Andrew at the first possible opportunity!”

  “I can’t see why—unless they are in love.”

  “It would ensure Mrs. MacDonald’s position at Glenkeith, for one thing. That’s what she wants more than anything else.”

  “But surely if—”

  “Andrew is not in love with Meg?” he finished for her. “It would be difficult to know with Andrew. Like most Scots, he has a way of keeping his deeper feelings masked, so that it would be impossible to tell what he was thinking even if you tried. He’ll have his own opinions about marriage and his own plans for the future, but you won’t get the slightest hint of what they are from Andrew till the time comes.”

  “You seem to know him very well.” The conversation had left Tessa curiously depressed. “I don’t think I shall ever get to know Andrew.”

  He smiled down at her.

  “Will that matter very much?” he asked.

  “I like to—live peaceably with the people about me,” Tessa said. “In Rome we were all very happy together— very gay. We were poor, of course, but it didn’t seem to matter. There was the sunshine and Luigi’s ever-growing family, and the flowers, and laughter everywhere. We shared things, and that way our troubles never seemed to be quite so bad!”

  He seemed to be thinking over what she had just said with an eye to the future.

  “I don’t think you can ever expect Andrew to share his burdens,” he said at last. “He’s not exactly made that way. It’s probably difficult for you to understand this north-country reserve of ours, but we mean well, all the same. To use a platitude, our hearts are generally in the right place!”