Master of Glenkeith

by Jean S. MacLeod

  Tessa was feeling really tired now. She seemed to have come a very long way from the events of the afternoon, painfully and with a slower tread. The childish enthusiasm with which she had set out on this new adventure had sobered to a wider conception of all these invitations which Nigel Haddow had pressed upon her so compellingly and her own acceptance of them as a matter of course. Perhaps it had been the look in his mother’s eyes when they had come back to the lodge, the suggestion of permanency in her affection, which had first started this difficult train of thought, or it might just have been the moment in time when she herself had grown up.

  She felt trapped and unhappy and aware of a decision which would have to be faced in the very near future.

  She had never been lacking in courage, but she slept uneasily that night, tossing about on the narrow bed in her small, rustic-walled cubicle under the thatched eaves till the first grey shafts of dawn pierced the eastern sky.

  Rapidly the light spread until a whole wide track of it was set above the hills and the stars paled into the morning blue.

  Nigel insisted on driving her back to Glenkeith in the Daimler.

  “It’s more comfortable than the brake,” he pointed out reasonably enough. “I’d like to bet that shoulder of yours gave you hell during the night.”

  “It wasn’t very bad,” Tessa said, wondering why Andrew did not protest and say that she could quite easily cope with such a short journey in the front of the brake. “I hope nobody will alarm Mr. Meldrum or—anyone else at Glenkeith.”

  She was thinking of Hester, but surely Hester could not exactly hold her responsible for this accident!

  “I’ll go on ahead with Meg,” Andrew offered when they were ready to start. “Maybe you should see Dr. Coutts once you get there.”

  “We can’t call him on Sunday just for a little thing like this,” Tessa said. “Please don’t worry about me, Andrew.”

  “I was thinking about my grandfather,” he said. “It would put his mind at rest if Dr. Coutts had a look at your arm.”

  Nigel helped her into the Daimler, tucking the fur rug securely about her knees.

  “Are you sure you’re warm enough?”

  “Quite sure, thank you, Nigel.”

  The brake sped away ahead of them. She could see it winding along the moor road almost all the way until it was finally lost in the trees surrounding Glenkeith.

  “I can’t find any sort of words to apologize for all this, Tessa,” Nigel said at her elbow. “You know how I feel, don’t you? Desperately responsible and all that, and ready to smother Ortry at the first possible opportunity!”

  “He couldn’t help it,” Tessa said. “It was an accident.”

  “Any fool knows not to shoot at random like that,” he said contemptuously. “Andrew had every right to be furious.”

  “Perhaps he was really most furious with me.”

  He turned to look at her, knowing that they were as isolated in the back of the big, roomy limousine with Dawson driving placidly beyond the dividing screen as they would have been out on the open moor.

  “What makes you say that?” he asked. “Are you not— completely happy at Glenkeith, Tessy?”

  “It would be horribly ungrateful of me if I were not.”

  “That isn’t exactly an answer, is it?” He let his arm go lightly about her, avoiding the injured shoulder but drawing her gently towards him. “Tessa,” he said, “you know what I’ve been trying to tell you for weeks. I’ve thought about it, I suppose, ever since that day I met you on the moor when you looked more like a lost sprite materializing out of the mist than anything else. Even then you seemed no ordinary sort of person to me.” His arm tightened a fraction of an inch.

  “You know what I’m trying to say, Tessa, don’t you?” She felt breathless, even trapped for a moment.

  “Don’t say it, Nigel,” she whispered. “Not now!”

  “Why not?” He would not let her push him away, even gently. “It’s got to be said, sooner or later, between you and me. You know that.”

  “I’m trying not to know it!”

  “Because you can’t give me an answer or because you are afraid?”

  “Yes.” She felt as if she had been given some sort of respite. “Yes, that must be it.”

  He looked surprised, because he had not exactly expected such a firm rebuff, if that was what he had just received. It was difficult to tell with Tessa. She was no ordinary girl, as he had remarked.

  “I’m not rushing you,” he said. “You must have seen this coming for quite a bit. Surely you can give me some sort of answer, Tessa?”

  “I can’t. I can’t! I ought to tell you that it’s no use, that you ought to go away and forget all about me—”

  “But you can’t do that, either?” He smiled patiently. “You’re very young, Tessy—and very sweet!”

  “How you must despise me!” she cried turbulently. “Oh, Nigel, don’t wait for me. Don’t ask me again!” He turned her face up to kiss her full on the mouth. “You might as well ask me to jump over a cliff!” he laughed. “I think you’re worth waiting for, you see,” he added as the car turned in between the Glenkeith gates.

  Andrew got out of the brake just ahead of them and went into the house and a few minutes later Hester came out. She was in her usual Sunday black and had just returned from the morning service at the village church, but when she saw the Ardnashee car some of the habitual severity left her expression.

  “You’ll stay for a bite of lunch?” she asked Nigel. “This is most unfortunate in the middle of your weekend.”

  “The week-end was planned for Tessa’s benefit,” Nigel told her, “so it’s unfortunate in that respect. I promised her a whole day’s painting to-day, over on Loch Avon.” He looked down at Tessa with what was now quite definitely a proprietorial air. “But that can wait, like so many other things,” he declared.

  Tessa flushed, but she was glad that Nigel’s presence had blunted the force of Hester’s anger. She wasn’t exactly a stretcher case, but Hester would no doubt fed that her injured shoulder might cause extra work at Glenkeith.

  Andrew came downstairs as they crossed the hall. “I’ve broken the news to my grandfather,” he said. “He was sure to ask why we had come back so soon.” He sounded brusque and uncommunicative, and Tessa wondered, with the coldness of despair in her heart, if he had seen Nigel’s surreptitious kiss as the Daimler had slowed down behind the brake.

  She could not blame Nigel, because he, at least, had been sincere. He really wanted to marry her.

  Shaken by the immensity of the knowledge, she knew that she could not leave her decision to the distant future. She must make her mind up now. That was the only fair way so far as Nigel was concerned.

  She hurried up the stairs to Daniel Meldrum’s room. “I’m hors de combat!” she smiled. “But I’m all in one piece!”

  “So Andrew told me.” The old man still looked worried.

  “All the same, I want him to take you across to see old Coutts as soon as you’ve had a bite to eat.”

  “I’m sure there isn’t any need,” she tried to protest. “Andrew will have enough to do without going all the way to Ballater with me.”

  “He was content to leave what work there was to do behind him when he followed you to Gantley!” The blue eyes twinkled. “You can’t tell me anything about Andrew that I don’t already know.”

  But how wrong he was this time, Tessa thought. “You know him better than any of us,” she said, “but I’m sure he came to Gantley for a reason of his own. You forget,” she tried to add lightly, “that Margaret was at Gantley, too!” A shadow passed on the lined old face.

  “Ay, Meg!” he said. “I’ve often wondered about Meg, but never about Andrew. Her mother has poor Meg’s life all cut and dried for her, all planned out in the way it has to go that will best suit herself, but maybe the lass will have the sense to kick over the traces once, at least. Never let anybody lead your life for you, Tessa. It’s your own that�
�s given to you to do with as you see fit and best.”

  She turned to the window, fighting back the scalding tears of a new despair, and it seemed that the old man lying back among his pillows and looking more frail than she had ever seen him could not help her, for he did not speak.

  When she could smile at him again she turned towards the door.

  “I’d better go down now,” she said. “They’ll be wondering what’s keeping me, and Mrs. MacDonald will have the soup on the table.”

  She did not want Andrew to take her to Ballater, but his grandfather’s requests were in the nature of commands to him.

  “Get your coat on,” he said when Nigel rose to go back to Ardnashee. “We’d best check up and make sure, and then that will put everybody’s mind at rest.”

  She thought it a mere form of speech that he should have included them all, and turned swiftly to where Nigel was waiting to say good-bye.

  He stood in the hall at the open door, looking very tall and distinguished in his well-cut tweeds, and she thought how handsome he was and how kind, but it was all very remote. She could not think of Nigel yet in connection with her own future.

  “Has Glenkeith done anything for me?” he asked when they were alone for a moment. “Has the frigid atmosphere of your homecoming made you change your mind?”

  She flushed scarlet.

  “You know that you would not want it that way,” she said. “To feel that I was—accepting you as a means of escape!”

  “I think I could even take it that way, Tessy,” he said. “You see, I happen to be very much in love with you, my dear!”

  Andrew stood waiting for her beside the brake.

  “I wish you didn’t care so much, Nigel,” she said passionately. “It would make it easier.”

  “To refuse me?” Nigel looked down at her as they walked out into the sunshine, drawing her sound arm through his in an intimate little gesture which she could not avoid. “I’m not going to accept that, whatever you may say,” he declared.

  Andrew drove in silence all the way to Ballater and Tessa could not help him with the conventional remark. It was beyond her. She was more fully aware than ever of the barrier between them, and it seemed to be a barrier which he had erected even before they had met. All the way she found herself thinking about her mother, remembering that she had been married to Andrew’s father and that she must have left Glenkeith immediately after his death.

  She could not understand why these simple facts could make Andrew resent her, but it seemed that it was hopeless to try to offer him her friendship, far less her understanding. If she only knew what he felt about her mother ... but she was too perplexed, too deeply conscious of her own bruised love, to ask.

  Dr. Coutts looked surprised when he saw them, but he said that he could not improve on what Andrew had already done. When he had looked at Tessa’s shoulder he assured her that it was good for many years to come. He had a jocular way with him which made light of the trifling things of life.

  “A flesh wound, more or less,” he said. “A bit like first love when it’s not going the way you would like it! It’ll soon heal, and you’ll forget all about it!”

  A flesh wound! Tessa kept repeating the cynical little phrase all the way back to Glenkeith. It wasn’t true! First love was deep and painful, leaving a scar that would remain on your heart for ever! She would never forget Andrew and never forget Glenkeith, no matter how far she went away from them.

  A small, quivering sigh escaped her and Andrew half turned in his seat.

  “Cold?” he asked.

  She shook her head, too choked by emotion to answer him, and he turned back to the wheel. He could still remember her nearness as he had held her up there on the moors, the soft touch of her that had run like wildfire through his veins, shattering everything in a mad confusion of doubt. He had lifted her into his arms with the memory of his grandfather’s words ringing in his ears, the warning the old man had offered laughingly that first day when he had sent him off to Rome in search of a child. “I’m not saying that you need to bring back a wife.... ”

  That was what his father had done. He had brought Veronique back to Glenkeith, and Veronique had been Tessa’s mother.

  He steeled himself to think of the girl by his side as light and even fickle, as her mother had been before her, but he was barely convinced, even when he knew that Nigel Haddow had just asked her to marry him.

  Somehow, he was sure of that, and he called himself a fool for his momentary lapse out there on the moors. Responsibilities, even to Glenkeith, were never meant to go as far as that. He had been trying to persuade himself that Tessa was different.

  He drove on in silence and Tessa clenched her sound hand by her side and tried to thank him for coming to her assistance.

  “I know I must be a great burden to you, Andrew,” was how she put it, “but I am trying to say thank you for what you did yesterday.”

  “It was nothing,” he assured her formally. “Anyone would have done the same. Haddow, for instance, must be feeling that he was cheated out of the chance of a lifetime.

  It would have put you in his debt instead of leaving him with a feeling of guilt.”

  She dismissed the jibe about Nigel, her whole body quivering with the spent effort at understanding.

  “Is responsibility all you ever think about?” she cried. “Is it—such a tremendous thing that it overshadows everything else?”

  “It can be almost crushing at times,” he said.

  Something hurt and tremulous rose defensively in her at the brief finality of his words.

  “I know you resent my being at Glenkeith, Andrew,” she whispered. “I know you never wanted me to come. Don’t ask me how I know. It was there to see, I think, right from the beginning, only—only I was too young and too foolish to recognize it! I was sure that I was wanted, you see. Your grandfather’s letter made that seem possible when I read it all those miles away in Italy, and he was just the same when I got to Glenkeith. He was what I had expected. It was only you and Mrs. MacDonald who were different. Perhaps I should have recognized it that day at Amalfi. You didn’t want me. I should have seen that, Andrew. I was too big a responsibility, and there was something more. But the responsibility will do for just now. I shall relieve you of my presence as soon as possible. I could not stay at Glenkeith against your will. When you are master here, I shall go.”

  They were back at Glenkeith and Andrew brought the brake to a standstill in the yard. He sat behind the wheel while she opened the door on her own side, staring through the windscreen at the old, lichen-covered house, but he did not speak.

  Tessa sat in the seat beside him for a full minute without moving, and then she ran from him across the cobbles. Andrew stirred then, attempting to call her back, but words, as ever, failed him. He had not the mastery of words, as Nigel had.

  CHAPTER IX

  TESSA found herself avoiding Andrew during the days that followed as once he had sought to avoid her.

  Bewildered and uncertain, she faced the future with the one strong conviction that she could not leave Glenkeith while Daniel Meldrum still remained alive, but the old man slept more and more these days and so she was thrown even more on her own devices.

  Naturally, she turned to her painting, but even that gave her little joy until she conceived the idea that was soon to become an obsession with her.

  The suggestion that she should attempt a portrait of her mother came to her out of the blue the day after she had returned from Gantley. It had become essential to her to try to put what she knew of Veronique Halliday, who had once been Veronique Meldrum, down on to canvas, but why she was doing it was difficult to say. The thought of the portrait nagged at her every waking moment. It was almost as if she had to prove something, if only to herself.

  The weather had broken, the long, sun-filled autumn days giving place to rain and a biting wind which swept in from the North Sea with the sting and lash of fury in its breath. She found herself huddlin
g over the fire in Daniel Meldrum’s room because it was so cold in her own and she would not ask Hester for the extra fire.

  Hester resented her more and more as the weather drove her indoors, but she still would not allow her to take any active part in the work about the house. It was Margaret’s “place,” she pointed out, to lay a table and help with the washing up. She had always done it ever since she was a child. Tessa was made to feel that she was trying to drive Margaret out.

  Nigel Haddow came to Glenkeith twice during that week to ask about the injured shoulder, and Hester went out of her way to see that Tessa and he were left alone for part of the time, at least. She called Margaret out of the sitting-room on a trivial errand on both occasions and suggested to Andrew that he would be intruding when he attempted to join their unexpected visitor.

  “It’s plain enough who he has come to see,” she observed, and Andrew took himself off to the stable again, calling himself a blind fool for not being able to see for himself why Nigel had come to Glenkeith.

  Tessa realized that Nigel would not wait for ever for an answer to his proposal of marriage. There was a suggestion of determination about him now which reminded her of Andrew, and when he rode over to the farm

  ten days after her accident and saw that her arm was out of the sling, she felt that he had made up his mind to settle the issue between them one way or another.

  “Ask Andrew to let you borrow a horse for an hour,” he commanded, “and get Meg to lend you her jodhpurs. I want you to come across the moor with me. It’s a fine day.”

  It was useless to argue that she could not ride anything like well enough to keep up with him. This was not to be a trial of horsemanship or even one of endurance. All he wanted was to ensure that they would be alone long enough to thrash their problems out to his satisfaction.

  “Must we?” Tessa asked. “Must we go to-day?”

  “I think so.”

  She met Margaret in the hall.

  “Meg—Nigel has come.” She paused uncertainly. “He wants me to ride out across the moor with him. I thought I might borrow your jodhpurs.”

  Margaret gave her a swift look.