Master of Glenkeith

by Jean S. MacLeod

  “I know that!” Tessa returned impulsively. “And perhaps I am being foolish expecting Andrew to expand immediately, like Luigi or Maria and all the other people who made up my life in Italy. Most of them were artists,” she added. “Friends of my father. Some of them were even successful artists, and we all helped one another. Perhaps it was because we understood how difficult it is to live without help and understanding at times.”

  “And Andrew is sufficient unto himself!” Nigel mused. “Or believes himself to be!”

  “No one is, surely!” Tessa contradicted with the keen insight born of experience which surprised the man by her side until he remembered her youthful background. “We all need someone, sooner or later, someone so utterly dependable that there can be no question of sacrificing pride or anything else when we accept them. My father and mother were like that. They were so sure of each other’s love that they never stopped to think about it, but they knew that it was there all the time, like a sort of wall about them. It wasn’t a high wall, either, closing them in from the outside world. They loved people, and I think they made lots of people happy, just looking at them.”

  “It’s a wonderful picture,” Nigel said, glancing down at her with a deeper expression in his eyes. “It’s a pity it’s so rare.”

  “Do you think it is?” Tessa asked. “I know so many happy people.”

  He thought of Glenkeith and Ardnashee, where his mother lived alone when he betook himself to London on occasion, and somehow he felt curiously ashamed of his seeming neglect of his old, ancestral home. He had an abiding love for Ardnashee and in many ways he was a good laird, but he had always liked to feel free to come and go at will. The estate was well maintained because he had never known what it was like to be in need of money, but now he began to wonder if the personal touch wouldn’t have done more for Ardnashee than all the money in the world. He called himself a man of the world. He had travelled extensively and he had rooms in London where he went periodically to look after his other business interests, and he had never been fully conscious of the need for roots.

  Recently, however, he had known an increasing awareness of the pull of Ardnashee, which he had recognized far more strongly as a boy, when he had looked forward with impatience to the long summer vacations which would take him back to Scotland and the untrammelled freedom of the moors.

  He filled his lungs full of the keen, pine-scented air as they breasted the last slope, glancing down at his companion as she strode beside him. She was so many things, this Tessa who had come so unexpectedly into his life bringing the warmth of Italian skies in her smile and the laughter of the southland in her eyes. Child and woman, nymph and sprite! And to-day she strode beside him like a happy boy, long-legged, eager, ready for any adventure, yet still in awe of Andrew Meldrum because she did not understand him.

  He frowned as he thought of Andrew, but only momentarily. It was difficult to feel disgruntled with anyone while Tessa was by one’s side, he mused.

  “We’re almost there,” she cried. “Do you think you will be able to do something about the chair?”

  “I can try,” he promised. “And if not, I can always get you back to Glenkeith!”

  Daniel smiled when he saw who had come to his rescue.

  “I might have known you’d be after the fish on a day like this, Nigel!” he said. “How were they biting?”

  “Coming up to the fly as if it were a magnet!” Nigel assured him. “Now that you are out and about, sir, why not have a turn with the rod yourself? We could play them together along this stretch of the river.”

  Daniel smiled at the fantastic suggestion, but he did not dispute it, taking it for the kindly encouragement it was meant to be. He would never hold a rod again, far less play a salmon, but there had been none better at the game than Dan Meldrum, in his day! Such things were the tender memories of age which no amount of infirmity could ever take away from a man, and he clung to them as something that would serve him now that the power of his hands was gone.

  “See what you can do with this useless contraption,” he said, indicating the chair. “It surprises me that a man with the intelligence of Will Coutts would send such a frail bit thing to Glenkeith!” he added deprecatingly.

  “The doctor wouldn’t mean you to come climbing on to the moor with it,” Nigel grinned. “Though he might have known you!”

  “It was my idea,” Tessa confessed. “I wanted to come.” “Not any more than I did,” the old man declared “This breath of moor air has done me more good than all Willie Coutts’s pills put together. I needed it. It was what I was wanting. That and a sight o’ the cattle!”

  “Will Andrew be showing at Perth?” Nigel asked as he stooped to consider the broken wheel. “I wondered if he’d be letting it go this year.”

  “And let you in with your Ardnashee seconds? No fear!” Daniel declared with a twinkle. “It’s the only way you’d win with that Ardnashee Glory of yours, of course,” he added with a wicked chuckle. “But maybe if you were to put your heart into breeding decent stock you could come a close second to Glenkeith!”

  “If I spent all my time at Ardnashee, you mean?” Nigel said. “As Andrew does at Glenkeith.”

  “You’d get results,” the old man told him more seriously.

  “Maybe I shall.” Nigel straightened, his dark eyes full on Tessa’s absorbed young face where she sat watching on the parapet of the bridge.

  She could be so many things to a man, he thought abstractedly, and already she seemed to be fitting in up here in their mountain stronghold, whatever was happening at Glenkeith. In her honey-coloured tweeds she wore now as naturally as any Scotswoman, she still possessed a sort of piquant charm which set her apart. She was different. Fey was almost the word he sought when he saw her with that far-away look in her eyes and the softly expectant smile on her lips. He could imagine her painting very well and meant to ask her about her pictures at the first opportunity.

  With a final effort he jacked up the chair on a handy boulder and tapped the wheel into place, but the hub had gone and Tessa thought that it, too, must have come off farther up the glen road.

  “Well, we can get down as far as the car like this,” Nigel decided, “and then we can either stow the chair in the back or leave it in the clearing till we can collect it. It will be perfectly safe.”

  Tessa thought, however, that she would rather wheel the empty chair all the way back to Glenkeith. It would give her time to adjust herself to the thought of Andrew and save him coming all the way up the glen for it later on.

  “I could be back in plenty of time for dinner,” she suggested, “and Mr. Haddow will have got you to Glenkeith before anyone has started to be anxious.” Behind the thought had been a sudden desire to be alone, a desire she had only experienced on one or two occasions in the past when she had come face to face with some important issue and needed time to consider it, to think it out clearly and to her own personal satisfaction. The thought in her mind now was her attitude to Andrew, this strange feeling which the very mention of his name produced in her, the subtle, almost inevitable sense of conflict in the future which would so surely involve them both.

  At times it ran in her veins like fire, the desire to be noticed by him, to be considered, like a wilful child’s obsession with an adult who has already dismissed it.

  Perhaps that was how Andrew really saw her, as a child, wilful and headstrong where her own desires were concerned, and she did not know how she was to make him see differently.

  Slowly, carefully, she helped Nigel to transfer Daniel Meldrum into his car.

  “We’ll strap the chair on to the back,” Nigel decided. “There’s plenty of room if I rest it on the hood cover.”

  “I could quite easily walk with it,” Tessa protested.

  “There’s absolutely no need,” said Nigel firmly. Did he

  know that she shrank from encountering Andrew right away? Did he guess that she was almost afraid, with her heart beating like a cornered
wild thing against her breast? There was no answer to that question. Not yet.

  Nigel drove steadily along the glen road, far more steadily, Tessa realized, than he would have done if they had been alone. The car was cut out for speed and even on the winding glen roads she could imagine him going fast, but to-day he had a passenger who must be treated with the utmost consideration and Nigel Haddow was essentially thoughtful, although he had also learned to be selfish. His mother was a woman who had given unstintedly, asking little in return, which had not been really good for her children, and since her older son had been killed in an accident she had lived solely for her one remaining child.

  “You’ll be going to the Gathering next week?” Nigel asked as Glenkeith came into sight. “I hear that it’s to be bigger and better than ever this year and the stewards are expecting a record crowd. All we need is a good day for it. ‘Royal weather’, in fact!”

  Old Daniel turned to Tessa in the back seat.

  “That will be a sight for you!” he told her. “The Highland Games. You’ll not have seen anything like them, even in Rome!”

  “No, but I’ve heard about it,” Tessa said, forgetting about Andrew. “And I’ve always hoped I should see it one day. Oh! I hope we can go!” she exclaimed. “I hope nothing will stop us from going!”

  “Why should it?” Daniel said. “We all look forward to it from one year to the next and the pipers are already blowing for all they’re worth up on the hill! Did you not hear them this morning when you were standing out yonder at the moor fence?”

  “Yes,” Tessa said, “I heard them.”

  “You’ll hear them again at the Gathering,” Daniel promised. “And you’ll see the dancing, and men tossing the caber and all the other trials of strength we go in for up here in our wild hills! And the Queen will be there and perhaps some of the other members of the Royal party

  from Balmoral.”

  “The Queen!” Tessa said. “How wonderful!”

  She was already in a day-dream from which nothing would shake her, and Nigel Haddow saw it and understood.

  When they came to Glenkeith Andrew was standing in the stable yard beside the brake. He looked as if he had just returned from Ballater, but Margaret was nowhere to be seen.

  “Andrew!” Tessa cried excitedly, “we will be going to the Highland Gathering, won’t we? Mr. Haddow and your grandfather have been telling me all about it, and your grandfather says you should win quite easily at putting the weight!”

  “You see,” Nigel commented mildly, “you have a champion already, Drew!”

  Andrew was looking from the chair on the back of the car to his grandfather comfortably installed in front.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Nothing, really,” Nigel informed him before Tessa could think of what to say. “I gave them a lift back because they had a shaky wheel. I did what I could about it, but you’d better have a look at it, Drew, before they go out again. It wants a new pin and another hub.”

  He had dismissed the whole incident as something quite trivial, and Tessa supposed that it really was. After all, here they were back at Glenkeith, safe and sound, with no real harm done. They were not even going to be in Hester’s black books by being late for a meal!

  “You’ll stay and have a bite of dinner with us, Nigel? Daniel invited, but Nigel was forced to refuse.

  “My mother is having some company to-night,” he explained. “She has invited some people up for the Games and she believes in having them here in good time! You remember Alice Walsh and her brother from Edinburgh,” he added, turning to Andrew. “They were here for the Gathering two years ago and have always wanted to come back.”

  He helped Andrew and Tawse to carry the old man into the house, and when he came out Tessa was still standing

  beside his car surveying the damaged chair.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as Andrew came up behind them. “I hope it can be mended. It just—came off.”

  It sounded a limp, even a lame excuse, and she had not intended to offer it, but somehow Andrew made her feel like a child, and a thoughtless one at that.

  “I’m not worrying about the chair,” he said almost frigidly. “Tawse will see to that in a couple of minutes. I’m glad you enjoyed your walk.”

  She had not told him that she had enjoyed it, for he had not asked, but he had taken it for granted because she had met Nigel.

  “I did enjoy it, very much,” she found herself saying, and then the warm friendliness of the ride back to Glen-keith in Nigel Haddow’s car when he had told her all about Braemar, made her add: “It was wonderful to be out and to see the moors for myself. They were purple and gold and red to-day,” she added softly.

  Nigel Haddow smiled as he got in behind the wheel. “See you at the Gathering, Drew!” he said lightly. “Au revoir, Sprite!” he added to Tessa. “I’ll be looking out for you!”

  Andrew stood in silence, watching the car disappear and appear again on the winding drive as it made its way between the rhododendron bushes, a red streak scintillating in the sunshine between the polished green of their leaves.

  Tessa remained very still, conscious of the man by her side as she had never been before, aware of tension reaching almost to breaking point between them as each waited for the other to speak.

  She did not know what to say. Words eluded her because, suddenly, there was nothing but feeling in her heart, and then conventional words came pouring out, as far removed from what lay deepest within her as the trivial round can be from the soul-shattering experience which comes only once or twice in a lifetime.

  “I do so hope we can go to the Gathering, Andrew.

  I hope we can all go. Your grandfather said that there was

  no reason why we shouldn’t, and I think he meant that you had always gone, that it was a sort of—family event in your lives at Glenkeith.”

  He looked down at her and as swiftly away again, with an expression in his eyes which chilled her and almost made her gasp for breath, and the viciousness of his reply surprised even himself.

  “I have no time to waste with going to Games!” The harsh, uncompromising statement seemed torn out of the very roots of his being, but she had no way of recognizing that.

  Swift, bitter retaliation, which was no more than the measure of her own hurt, rushed instantly to her lips.

  “You would rather go to a cattle show?” she suggested, stung to the retort by the mere fact that her lips were trembling and her eyes were threatening to fill with ears.

  “I really might have expected that.”

  For a moment Andrew stood staring at her before he turned on his heel without a word and strode off, feeling that he had been held up to ridicule as a gauche farmer and angry about it when he had no real right to be.

  What a woman thought of him—this one woman—was neither here nor there!

  CHAPTER VI

  DURING the next week, while she thought constantly of the great spectacle of the Highland Games, looking forward to it even in the face of a bitter disappointment because Andrew had refused to go with them, Tessa spent nearly all her time out of doors in the autumn sunshine, transferring to canvas or her painting block all the light and colour of the autumnal scene at Glenkeith and beyond.

  In these bright September days, while the sun still retained some of its summer warmth, Daniel Meldrum could sit beside her in his chair, sometimes watching her as she worked, absorbed in her task, and sometimes just lying back and dozing in the shade of a rough stone dyke where she had found shelter for him out of the wind.

  They asked nothing better than to be constantly

  together, the old man with his race already run and the young girl with all her life still before her. A contrast, perhaps, but a renewal for Daniel of so many things.

  He spoke to her more of her grandmother than her mother, Tessa realized, but that was possibly because he had known her grandmother better, or perhaps it was because old people lived farther and farther in the past
as time went on.

  Over and over again he told her about the Games until, when the great day finally dawned, she could scarcely suppress her excitement.

  “You’ve seen it all before,” she said to Margaret as they sat over an early breakfast, “but it’s so new to me. Will all the men wear their kilts and have a ‘bonnet’ like Grandfather Meldrum’s?”

  “I expect so,” Margaret laughed, “when they know you are to be there! They couldn’t possibly disappoint you! Even Andrew will have to put on his kilt to-day.” Tessa flushed, wondering why Andrew hadn’t already told Margaret that he would not be going to the Games. “I persuaded him to change his mind,” Margaret said slowly, as if she had read Tessa’s thoughts. “He can’t go on being ‘too busy’ for fifty-two weeks in a year.”

  “You forget the week—or part of a week—he spent in Rome,” Tessa pointed out heavily, because the fact that Andrew had decided to join them at the Games, after all, did not seem to have anything to do with her. It was Margaret who had made him change his mind.

  “I think he enjoyed those few days, all the same,” Margaret said. “He told me that he would like to go back again some day.”

  Tessa looked the surprise she felt.

  “I thought I was boring him, taking him to Amalfi,” she said. “He seemed, all the time, to be wanting to get away, back to Glenkeith.”

  Margaret bit her lip and did not answer. She knew all about the tragedy of Fergus Meldrum’s death and she had a pretty shrewd idea what Andrew’s reactions would have been when his grandfather had first issued his ultimatum and told him to bring Veronique’s daughter to Scotland. She could not blame Andrew, and at first she had wanted to resent Tessa for his sake, but now she could not. Tessa was too eagerly happy and spontaneously friendly for that, and most of Margaret’s native reserve had gone down before her overtures.

  Not so Andrew’s. Margaret had watched him wrap himself in a cloak of reticence which confused and shocked her, shutting himself away from all contact with them except in the day-to-day running of the farm. She felt that she could not reach him and was saddened by the fact.