The Gated Road

by Jean S. MacLeod

  “He’ll be back before morning.” Adam scraped back his chair and got to his feet. “I’ll take you through now, Jane,” he said.

  “Do you want me to come?” Marion asked.

  “No.” His tone had been almost curt. “We don’t want to overpower her. The doctor advised absolute quiet and the minimum of visitors.”

  “In that case,” Marion suggested, “hadn’t you better postpone Jane’s visit till the morning?”

  “I have a feeling that my mother wants to meet Jane right away,” he said, narrowing his eyes.

  Marion’s jaw tightened.

  “That must be natural,” she said, “in the circumstances.”

  Unexpectedly Adam put a hand under Jane’s arm, propelling her across the hall to a door on its far side.

  “Don’t worry,” he commanded briefly. “Leave everything to me.”

  Helen Drummond lay on a wide, old-fashioned bed in the center of this downstairs room that had been prepared for her because it had been considered dangerous to move her to her own bedroom on the next floor. She was a small woman with sparse, yellowish-white hair parted in the center and a finely boned face over which the skin seemed to be drawn too tightly. There appeared to be no flesh at all beneath it, and the hands lying idly, palm uppermost, on the quilted coverlet were thin and claw-like.

  Her son bent over her and immediately the blue-veined eyelids quivered in response to his presence. The whole pathetic little figure seemed to stiffen and then relax as he put his strong hand over the seeking fingers on the printed quilt.

  “We’re here,” he said gently. “I’ve brought Penny to see you for a minute or two.”

  He stretched out his hand and Jane came close. As she had walked across the room she had been trembling, but now she was quite calm.

  “I’ve been waiting for this moment,” she heard herself say quite truthfully. “I’ve been wanting to meet you, Mrs. Drummond.”

  Adam put her hand into his mother’s and she felt the senseless fingers quiver under the soft pressure of her own.

  The heavy eyelids quivered for a second time, opening a little to give Jane a glimpse of the bluest eyes she had ever seen. Adam bent close, but he said nothing. It had been a supreme effort on Helen Drummond’s part to see, if only for one brief instant, the girl he was going to marry.

  “Mother,” Adam said after a bit, “the first ewes are down in the pens. There will be lambs before morning.”

  Satisfaction and happiness seemed to radiate from the small figure on the bed, and Jane’s fingers closed more tightly over the useless hand she held. This would probably be the first year that Helen Drummond had not been there to see the lambs, to bring in the inevitable small, pathetic weaklings that would have to be bottle-fed before they could survive.

  Adam touched her shoulder, motioning toward the door.

  “We’re going to let you sleep now,” he told his mother. He laid his hand for a moment on the wrinkled brow in a gesture which, less than an hour ago, Jane would not have believed him capable of. It was completely tender and infinitely compassionate, and she followed his tall figure from the room with a constricting lump in her throat.

  He did not thank her for what she had done. He led the way back to the hall in silence and poured himself out a stiff drink.

  Marion was there. She appeared to smoke incessantly, even while she was sitting at a meal, and she lit a cigarette as she watched Adam drain his glass. Jane had refused the drink he had offered her.

  “How did it go, Adam?” Marion asked. “No complications, I hope.”

  “None,” he said, meeting the opaque grey eyes. “None whatever, Marion.”

  That night the first lambs were born. From her bedroom tucked securely away in the north wing of the house, Jane could hear their bewildered bleatings over in the big, strawbanked pens beyond the outbuildings. They were the first of Adam’s new flock, and a strange, warm excitement entered her heart as she lay listening. She knew that there would be more lambs—many more—before morning, some of them born out on the hillside, but these were the ewes that Adam had his doubts about, the mothers that he could not afford to lose through carelessness or lack of foresight.

  There were voices in the yard beneath her window and the swing of a lantern, its beam suddenly reflected in a yellow dagger of light across her ceiling. She had drawn aside her curtains before getting into bed, to look out at a sky already thickening with cloud, and now she pushed the blankets back and thrust her feet into her slippers to cross to the window and look again.

  Before she reached the chair where her dressing-gown lay she was shivering. It had become intensely cold and the first flakes of snow were slanting against the panes, sticking to the glass before they slid gently down to form a white irregular ridge at the bottom of the window.

  She watched until she saw Adam come hurrying towards the house with something white huddled in his arms. Before she was quite aware of what she was doing, her heart had given a great bound of excitement and she was struggling into her clothes.

  I’ve got to help, she thought. I want to help.

  It was bitterly cold in the bedroom and she was hardly equipped for a midnight foray out of doors, but the urge to go down to the others was too strong to be thrust aside once she had acknowledged it.

  The hall, which Adam had called the “house-place,” was deserted, although a good fire still burned in the wide grate and a silver tray lay set under a covering tablenapkin. It had been put down on a low stool beside one of the big leather chairs and was evidently meant for Adam when he came in, placed there by Marion before she had gone to bed.

  She found herself considering Marion’s efficiency in all things, the other girl’s manner of appearing to be infallible and necessary where Adam’s welfare was concerned, and suddenly she felt that it might be better if she tiptoed quietly upstairs again before anyone had seen her.

  For a moment she had forgotten that she had come to High Tor uninvited and unwanted, in her sister’s stead.

  Beyond the house-place, in the brightly lit kitchen, she suddenly heard the sound of voices—Marion’s voice and Adam’s—raised in argument.

  “It’s utterly ridiculous, Adam! They’re weaklings,” Marion was saying. “You’d be wasting time and money on them, and they’ll only be a damned disgrace to the whole flock!”

  “They’re the first.” Adam’s voice was doggedly determined. “The ewe is good stock. If it hadn’t been for that fall she had over the quarry face...”

  “The lambs would have been all right,” Marion finished for him with cold deliberation. “But she had the accident and the lambs are weaklings.”

  There was a sudden heavy silence, as if a look of Adam’s had frozen the words on Marion’s lips.

  “All right,” she said, at last. “What do you want me to do with them?”

  “Bring them in here. I can’t just wring their necks without giving them a chance.”

  Adam’s voice had been harsh, his words very much to the point. Jane stood listening as the sound of footsteps sped away across the yard, Marion’s angry, defiant steps, and Adam’s treading more heavily.

  Somewhere in the kitchen a faint bleating disturbed the silence, a small, pathetic, tender sound that took Jane to the half-open door and then on to her knees before the fire. A small, newly born lamb was lying there on a length of rough towelling and some straw, and she was bending over it when Marion came back with two even smaller scraps in her arms.

  Their eyes met and Marion said sharply:

  “What do you want?”

  “I heard this little thing bleating,” Jane faltered, confused into incoherence by the look of steady hatred in the older girl’s eyes.

  “We haven’t time to play with the lambs,” Marion informed her scathingly. “You’ll only find yourself in the way.”

  She dropped the two newcomers on to the warm straw, turning toward the inner hall to find herself a cigarette, which she lit with a spill at the fire.

>   Jane continued to kneel on the rug, gazing at the three newly born lambs. They all looked curious enough, she thought, with their dangling black legs and tiny, bleating mouths seeking the sustenance their mothers denied them. She wondered if the ewes were dead or merely injured and what had happened to the other lamb of the first pair. They were generally twins.

  She looked up at the sound of a step in the yard outside and saw Adam at the open door. He looked in at her uncertainly.

  “I thought I might be able to help,” she explained. “You could tell me what to do.”

  For a moment it looked as if he were about to refuse, and then his eyes fastened on the lambs on the rug and he said slowly:

  “You could see what you could do with them. They may never be up to much, but we can always try. It would be a shame to put them out without giving them a chance.” He turned away. “Doris will fix the bottles for you,” he said. “They have milk, sugar and water at first. You feed them like a baby.”

  Was he really indifferent, Jane wondered, or did he care about even the weakest of his flock?

  She lifted a small, protesting lamb and laid it on her knees, and he came over and ran his hands over the thin little body with an expert’s touch. Looking at its twin, he watched the small creature’s attempts to stagger to its feet with an amused half smile in his eyes, but he went out again without saying any more.

  CHAPTER TWO

  For the next two days there was very little done at High Tor apart from bringing lambs into the world. The snow, which had fallen steadily all through that first night and the next day, lay on the hills like a spotless white blanket making nothing of distances and magnifying all the farmyard sounds a thousandfold.

  Across the moor came the intermittent bleating of sheep and the occasional sharp, staccato barking of a dog as Wisp and his master toured the hills or one of the other collies set out with a shepherd in search of straying ewes.

  A bright turquoise sky with a rim of feathery cloud crowned the far reaches of the moor, and when the sun set it left a casque of gold on the distant Cheviot. Hartsgarth and Moss Paul on the Scottish side of the Border were wraiths with violet shadows in the folds of their white cloaks, and High Tor itself knew the sudden peace of the eternal snows.

  There was so much work for everyone to do that Jane’s efforts were taken almost for granted. Doris, the kitchenmaid, had shown her the strength of the mixtures for the bottles and she made them up herself now for the regular three-hourly feeds.

  Nigel had come home, and between them they sat with his mother. As the snow had come to blanket the harsh, rough edges of the moor, an all-pervading sense of peace seemed to have descended on Helen Drummond’s sickroom. The small, silent figure still lay inertly on the big, brass-railed bed, but once or twice Helen had opened her eyes and gazed at them with the fullest understanding.

  When it first happened Jane had been tempted to rush out and call Adam, but in the end she had told him quietly.

  “Your mother can see us. Her eyes are quite clear, Adam. She recognizes us now by more than the sound of our voices.”

  He had looked at her in frank relief and gone to sit with Helen for an hour. Although he should have been resting to prepare himself for the rigors of another night on the hill, Jane would not offer him that sort of advice.

  The doctor came, toiling up over the snow-blocked moor, getting through to them in spite of the handicap of an old car that had refused to go any farther when it was halfway along the gated road.

  “I’m in a drift,” he told Nigel, much as his counterpart in a busy town practice might have said that he had been held up in a traffic jam. “You’ll have to give me a hand out with that tractor of yours.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Nigel promised. “Once you’ve seen Mother, it won’t take us long.”

  When the doctor came back from Helen Drummond’s room, Adam was waiting for him in the hall. Jane had prepared a tray with sandwiches and coffee and was carrying it through when the two men met.

  “There’s been a change,” Doctor Fenwick said. “A change for the better. One can never really tell in these cases,” he added, as if his own surprise was at least equal with theirs. “Something happens and the will to live comes back; the vital spark is rekindled.”

  Adam stood looking at him for a long moment.

  “You’re telling us, of course, that she will live?” he said at last.

  “I’m telling you that there is every chance that she will recover, Adam.”

  There was a long-drawn, shuddering sigh and Adam covered his face with his hands.

  “Thank God!” he said. “Thank God!”

  Jane put down the tray and tiptoed away.

  Out in the deserted kitchen, with the snow piled soft and high on the window-ledges, she knelt down in the bright clear light beside the lambs and wept with thankfulness. In two days—in less than forty-eight hours—Helen Drummond had come to mean this to her.

  Nigel came lumbering through on his way to get the tractor, his young, amazingly boyish face wreathed in the smiles of his relief.

  “Isn’t it wonderful news?” he said. “Mind you, she’s not out of the wood yet, old Fenwick says, but she’s got a chance—a mighty good chance, I guess, if he’s admitted it at all. And that’s what matters. We’ve got to see that she pulls through.” His face sobered and the old shadow came back into his blue eyes. “It was awful—just standing by and watching her going out like that, without a word—without even knowing we were there.”

  “I think she knew,” Jane said, getting to her feet to stand beside him. “Semi-consciousness is a peculiar thing, Nigel. You lie there in a sort of half-world, suspended in a kind of vacuum, but every now and then the real world—the world you knew and loved—comes close. In these moments you see it very clearly and freshly, as if a veil had been torn away—”

  She broke off, smiling at him because he looked so surprised.

  “You won’t understand that if you’ve never experienced it,” she told him, “but I think we’ve got room for a lot of hope now.”

  “Yes, sure!” He moved in the direction of the yard. “I’d better go and dig the doctor out,” he suggested awkwardly.

  He paused on the threshold, however, to look back at her, embarrassed because of something he felt that he must say.

  “It’s since you came,” he got out stiltedly. “I can’t help feeling that you’ve made a difference. Mother worries about us, I guess,” he added ruefully. “We’ve been a wild lot at times, I suppose.” He opened the door and the clear cold air came in with a rush. “You’ll stay?” he asked. “You won’t let Marion chase you away?”

  It was Jane’s turn to look surprised, but she should have remembered that Nigel was half afraid of Marion.

  “I don’t think Marion has anything to do with it,” she said firmly.

  “You don’t know Marion,” was his immediate answer. “She has something to do with everything, But you are engaged to Adam and you’ll stay on now, won’t you?” he asked again.

  “I don’t know,” Jane said uncertainly, wishing that he had not put the question.

  “We could beat Marion together,” he went on with an intense sort of urgency on his handsome flushed face. “It wouldn’t be like the other time when things went wrong for Adam. We could stick together,” he repeated awkwardly, as if he had already said too much. “It isn’t really so desperately lonely up here when you get to know your way about. I’d teach you to ride and you could follow the hunt, if you like that sort of thing. And there’s always the odd party or two. We sometimes have quite good parties,” he added with a grin.

  “I’m sure you do,” Jane smiled.

  “And you will stay?” His eyes were eager.

  “It will depend on Adam,” Jane told him.

  When the door closed she stood for a long time staring down at the lambs and wondering why he had been so insistent about the length of her stay at High Tor. He had practically enlisted her help against Marion
, but the words that had sunk most deeply into her mind had come out of the past. It wouldn’t be like the other time when things went wrong for Adam.

  What had gone wrong? Marion had already hinted at a past love affair, but there was nothing else to guide Jane to the truth. Nigel’s uneasiness and evident distrust of Marion stemmed from something personal, she supposed, but it was difficult not to remember that Adam had just lost out to love for a second time.

  When she thought of Penny now she felt deeply ashamed, intensely aware of lasting injury and her own invidious position at High Tor. She had been there two days now and had seen little of Adam Drummond other than the busy farmer intent upon bringing a new flock into the world, but she had also become aware of a man with a selfless determination in life. Marion’s estimation of him had been blunt and almost casual, but it had called up a picture that was easy enough to accept up here on the open moor, the picture of a man dedicated to the task of rebuilding a family fortune and perhaps a family name.

  Ruthless and even arrogant on occasion, he had reason for pressing home every advantage. When she thought sometimes of the man she had imagined he would be, she almost squirmed where she stood.

  “You’ve heard the doctor’s verdict, Jane?”

  Adam had come up behind her. How long he had been in the kitchen she did not know, but she thought that he could not have overheard her conversation with Nigel, otherwise he might have challenged it.

  “Yes,” she said, turning toward him. “It’s wonderful. I can’t tell you how pleased I am. Somehow,” she added quietly, “I seem to have come to know her very well in these past two days.”

  “Yes,” he said somewhat flatly, “I realize that you have been very accommodating.”

  “It was the least I could do.”

  He took a quick turn about the room, his hands thrust deep in his breeches pockets, his brows drawn in a dark frown.