Smouldering Fire

by D. E. Stevenson

  The fire leapt and crackled. There was warmth in it now—warmth and comfort and cheerfulness.

  “Take off your shoes and stockings,” he said to her. “They will dry if you put them near the fire.”

  “I’m not really very wet,” said Linda. “But you’re soaking, of course. Haven’t you got anything here to change?”

  “Nothing but a bath towel,” replied Iain, smiling. “I keep it here for bathing. But I’m used to being wet—it won’t harm me. Will you be all right while I fill the kettle?”

  “Of course,” said Linda.

  He took the kettle and went away. In a few minutes he was back, and the kettle was sitting on the fire. He saw that she had done as he suggested; her shoes and stockings were spread out on the hearth, and she was warming her bare feet, curling her toes luxuriously in the glowing warmth.

  Iain broke up some peat and stoked the fire scientifically, propping up the kettle between two small pine logs.

  “It’s a lovely fire!” Linda said. “I see you understand peat. Mrs. Hetherington Smith’s servants couldn’t do anything with the fires at Ardfalloch—we had to get MacNeil to deal with them.”

  “It takes a Highlander to deal with peat,” Iain replied. “There’s a special knack—we’re rather like peat-fires ourselves, I always think, not easily understood by the Sasunnach. We smoulder away and look as if we were half dead, but it only needs a touch and a little draught to set us ablaze.”

  “You understand the Highlander,” she said, probing for the secret in him.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Sometimes I think I understand better because I’m a mixture myself. I see both sides.”

  He rose and got a tin cup out of the cupboard, and a tin of cocoa and some biscuits. The biscuits were soft and limp, but they toasted them in front of the fire and found them eatable. They sat on the settle in front of the fire drinking cocoa out of the tin cup—turn about. Linda felt as if she had known this man all her life, she felt safe with him—completely comfortable and happy. The wind shrieked outside, questing round the thick walls like a hungry beast, and, now and then, a flash of lightning flickered through the narrow windows and a crash of thunder shook the tower, but inside it was warm and still and friendly.

  “You’re a very mysterious person,” Linda said suddenly. “I’ve been trying to think where I saw you before, and who you can be—”

  “I don’t want to be mysterious,” he said quickly. “But well, you see I can’t explain anything without explaining everything—and it would take a long time.”

  Linda laughed. “We’ve got the whole night before us.”

  Iain looked at her sideways. She was leaning forward a little with her eyes on the fire. It irradiated her pale face with glowing light. Her dark hair was damp and disordered, a damp curl lay on the cheek nearest to him in a ring. He saw again the lovely line of her throat from chin to breast.

  He thought: It’s an invitation to tell her all about myself, and his heart sang. “I’ll tell you where you saw me,” he said. “Do you remember in London, one night, at the theatre—after the play—you were waiting for somebody to fetch you? He had promised to meet you, and he didn’t come.”

  “Oh!” she cried. “It was you. How stupid of me! You took me back to the hotel in a taxi. I knew I had seen you—” She thought: What a fool I was, not to remember! And yet how could I? How could I connect the two men—the London dandy, so impeccably smart in his evening clothes and his opera-hat, and Richard’s Boatmender? But, of course, he is not a boatmender, I knew that. She said aloud, “That makes you even more mysterious.”

  Iain laughed. “I’ll tell you a little story,” he said. “There was once an impecunious Highlander with a big estate, and no money to run it with. So he let the estate to Mr. Hetherington Smith—”

  “That explains it,” she said.

  “And instead of taking himself off—as a well-brought-up landlord should have done—he remained in a little cottage by the side of the loch.”

  “You couldn’t leave it!” she exclaimed, turning and looking at him with glowing eyes. “Oh, I can understand that! Even I—seeing it like this for a few short days—I love it already. I can feel the glamour of it and how the whole valley is full of history—it is calm and peaceful and sad and happy and—and exciting. How could you go away and leave it when it was at its most beautiful best? And you—you are part of it all. You are part of its history, part of the actual soil, I feel that. I feel that you would only be half you—away from Ardfalloch.”

  He was too moved to answer her outburst. He was filled with a strange excitement, an exhilaration. It coursed through his whole body, warming him. She was everything he had dreamed—she understood everything—she was indeed his fairy woman.

  “And now it’s your turn,” he said at last. “I know nothing about you. Tell me your name.”

  “Linda Medworth,” she said.

  “Linda,” he repeated. The name was like music in his heart.

  She was silent for a few moments, battling with something in herself which urged her to tell him nothing further; and then she thought: He wants to know, and, after all, who has a better right to know all about me? He saved my life at the risk of his own. At last she said: “If you want to know about me—”

  “Yes,” he said eagerly. “Yes, of course, I do.”

  Linda told him. She found it much more difficult to tell her story to this man than it had been to tell Mrs. Hetherington Smith. She did not tell him all that she had told Mrs. Hetherington Smith, she softened it down for him, but, even so, she could feel the passion that she was arousing. Mrs. Hetherington Smith had received her story calmly—with sympathy, it is true, but with calm sympathy. This man received it with some kind of tense emotion which she could not have described and which she only partly understood. He was so sensitive to her thoughts that he guessed the pieces of her story which she had left out to spare his feelings and her own. Guessed them and laid them bare, so that she could hide nothing from him. The very calmness with which she tried to tell the tale seemed to add to its tragedy. She felt at last that her very soul was naked, and she was ashamed.

  When she had finished—and he had finished asking his searching questions—he jumped up and strode about the room. For the first time she was frightened of him. She thought: I ought not to have told him—how strange that he should be so upset—so angry—I ought not to have told him now. The room, which had seemed so safe and friendly, had become full of a tense atmosphere.

  “But you’re free,” he said at last, as if he were answering some unheard argument. “But you’re free now. That’s what really matters. You must forget it all—you must never think of it again.”

  “I’m not really free yet,” she reminded him. “Not until October when the decree becomes absolute. And only then if—if—”

  “If what?” he cried.

  “If nothing happens.”

  “What could happen?”

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly, and she didn’t know. She had always suffered from a curious fear of what was going to happen round the next corner. Even when life went smoothly and nothing occurred to justify her vague apprehensions, they did not altogether disperse. She had tried to face these fears and conquer them, but she could never do so entirely, she could only strain forward into the darkness of the future, expecting and fearing the unknown. She was brave in the face of dangers she could see, but she could not arm herself against shadows. These fears were her weakness. They had probably arisen in some forgotten episode of her childhood, and the experiences she had undergone in her married life had intensified them a thousandfold. She had found life full of pitfalls—joy was transitory. Sometimes she almost welcomed catastrophe as the concrete form of her fears—Here it is at last!—something seemed to say—you know now what it is, at any rate, and you can bear it.

  “But what could happen?” Iain said again, pausing in his stride and looking at her anxiously,

  “I feel somehow—I f
eel he won’t give up Richard without a struggle,” she said, trying to catch her elusive fears and pin them down. “You don’t know him as I do. He—when he sets his mind on anything, he pursues it—with all his might. It’s the same with everything—big or little—he has to have it, and then, when he’s got it, he doesn’t want it any more—”

  “But what could he do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “He’s clever, you know—in a way. Perhaps it’s silly of me, but, when I think of him, I feel—I feel frightened.”

  Iain came to the back of the settle and she felt his hands on her shoulders: they were firm hands, firm and reassuring.

  “You mustn’t be frightened,” he said quietly. “You weren’t frightened in the boat—”

  “That was different,” said Linda. “That was quite different. It was straightforward—a kind of battle. It’s people who frighten me—people frighten me when they are cruel and deceitful—and he—was both.”

  “The devil!” said Iain softly, but with concentrated rage.

  They left the subject alone after that, and talked about other things. It was too dangerous a subject to discuss; it roused their emotions. They both, in their different ways, and from their different points of view, felt that the subject had better be avoided. They made more cocoa and finished the remainder of the biscuits, and smoked cigarettes out of Iain’s case which was commendably watertight. Iain went out to look at the weather and returned to report that the wind had gone down a little and it had started to rain, but the waves had risen and were dashing over the rocks in an awe-inspiring manner.

  “I wonder whether they will think we are drowned,” Linda said.

  “No, they will know we are all right,” Iain told her. “Donald will see the light in the window of the tower and he will know I am here. He’ll come for us when the sea goes down—whenever it’s safe.”

  “I’m sorry for that young man,” Linda said thoughtfully. “He only arrived this morning, and I said I would go out with him in the boat. He rather prides himself on his rowing and that sort of thing.”

  “He was a bit of a fool—” Iain ventured.

  “Yes—that’s why I’m sorry for him.”

  “Are you worried about Richard?” asked Iain, when the subject of the foolish young man had been decently buried.

  “Only a little,” said Linda. “Mrs. Hetherington Smith is awfully kind and sensible, she understands Richard and he’s very fond of her. She won’t let Richard be frightened about me. The Hetherington Smiths have been very kind to us. The time here has been quite perfect—so calm and peaceful. It’s a pity that it’s over—”

  “Over!” cried Iain in dismay.

  Linda smiled. “The house-party has arrived in full strength,” she told him. “Some yesterday, and some to-day. It’s a very funny house-party. Nobody seems to know anybody else—and they’re all so different. I can’t quite see how it’s going to work.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Well,” she said, “you know how house-parties divide up into groups of people who are the same kind—in this house-party nobody is the same kind as anybody else. They seem to have been chosen at random. The women consist of Greta Bastable, Mrs. Hetherington Smith and me. I know Greta, of course—everybody knows her—she’s a smart London sort of person—you know the type. Greta’s bored already. Mrs. Hetherington Smith is mysterious—I like her awfully, but—Oh, I don’t know! I have a feeling, sometimes, that she’s acting a part, that she’s not really sincere; and yet I know she is sincere in her friendship for me—and for Richard. She loves Richard. It’s when she’s talking to the others—to Greta Bastable, for instance—that I feel she’s acting. She’s quite different then—not like the woman I know—or think I know. Isn’t it queer?”

  “Who else is there?” Iain asked. He had sat down on the wide stone hearth at her feet—he could see her better like that—and he wanted her to go on talking so that he could watch her and see the swift expressions chase each other across her face.

  “Mr. Grant Stacey, for one,” she said. “Have you heard of him?”

  “Who hasn’t heard of him!” Iain said. “He’s come for the shooting, of course. I wonder if he’ll do any stalking while he’s here.” It gave Iain a moment’s pleasure to think that this man—so well known in sporting circles—was going to shoot his birds.

  “It’s too hot for stalking—so he told me,” Linda said. “But he means to have a day before he goes—yes, he’s come for the shooting, and something else. I don’t know what it is. Mrs. Hetherington Smith began to tell me and then stopped herself suddenly.”

  “He’s a big financier,” Iain told her. “And I heard—or read—that he’s floating a new company. I’m an ignoramus on these subjects—”

  “That’s what it will be,” said Linda. “And then there’s the foolish young man—Jim Wyllie his name is—and Desmond Cray. He’s a sort of ‘man about town,’ rather a ladies’ man. They’ve come for the grouse shooting, of course. And there’s a funny little man called Proudfoot, and Colonel White—”

  “They do sound a mixed bag!”

  “Yes, they are—and, lastly, Sir Julius Hastie.”

  “Sir Julius Hastie!” Iain exclaimed. “Do you mean the Harley Street doctor? He generally goes to Cluan. Why has he deserted Cluan, I wonder?”

  “Well,” she said, smiling a little. “I rather think he has come for me—he likes shooting, too, of course—”

  “He can have the shooting,” Iain said, in a voice grown suddenly gruff—“but he can’t have you.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  He reached up and put a hand on her knee. “You know why he can’t have you,” he said, trying to speak lightly. “He can’t have you because you’re mine.”

  “But I don’t know you,” said Linda, almost tearfully. “I don’t know you—”

  “You can know everything,” he told her. “I won’t hurry you, my dear. Say what you want to know and I’ll tell you.”

  She did not speak nor move, she was too shaken, too utterly bewildered, not only at what he had said, but at her own reaction to his words. If she had been told that she would allow any man to go so far without turning upon him and destroying his mad delusion she would have laughed. (It was a mad delusion, of course, to think that she was his—or could ever be his. She had made up her mind to remain single in future—marriage was a much overrated state.) But somehow she could not turn upon this man and destroy his delusion—and she liked—yes, she actually liked the feeling of his hand upon her knee.

  After a few minutes Iain began to tell her about his life. He told her of his grandmother, and his parents, and about Janet, and Donald, and all about his childhood at Ardfalloch, and how he and Donald had grown up together and had run about the glen, bare-legged, fishing the burns and climbing the trees and bathing in the loch.

  “Those were the days!” he said. “Perhaps the happiest days of all. Donald and I were a couple of ragamuffins—our kilts were always in ribbons, but we didn’t care for that. Then I went to school—it was pretty grim at first, for I was as proud as the devil and as wild as an unbroken colt. I settled down after a bit, of course, and bent my neck to the yoke. I left school when I was eighteen and joined up—it was 1918. I had a week of war before the Armistice—just one week. Wasn’t that queer?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He drew up his knees and gazed at the fire. “For four years we had thought of little else but the war. It over-shadowed everything all my school days—(You won’t remember, of course, but it was like a big shadow behind everything. Behind every footer match and every lesson—was the war). Fellows left school and joined up, and were killed; or came back and showed themselves at school in their uniforms with a little moustache—those funny little moustaches, they looked as though they had been gummed on to the familiar face that you knew so well!—How we envied those fellows! What heroes they were to us! And then, suddenly, I was eighteen myself, and I was in the mid
st of it, training and growing a little moustache on my own lip—it seemed queer. They didn’t give you very much training in those days. And then—again it seemed sudden—I was in France, fighting, really fighting at last—and then the Armistice came. It was all like a dream—things happening so quickly one thing after another. I had a week of war—it was enough really—enough to cure me of wanting war. I saw the horribleness of war in that week. I saw people killed. I was on the Rhine after that, and it seemed to me the most curious thing of all, that, after hating the Germans like poison for four years, you couldn’t go on hating them. They were rather nice, really, when you could get at them at all.”

  “What happened next?” she asked, for he had fallen silent as if that were all he was going to say.

  “My father—died,” Iain said. “My father’s death was a tragedy—he was killed. My mother was there and saw it happen, she was devoted to him, bound up in him—there was nothing else in her life that mattered—so—part of her died then, too. She—she has never been—never been herself since then. It was rather a dreadful house to come back to. Everything was so different—so dreadful.”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “To come back and find it all so changed from what you were looking forward to—”

  “Janet helped me,” he said. “It was Janet who insisted that I should go to Oxford. My father had arranged it all before he died—that I was to go to Oxford when I was demobilised. But afterwards I felt there was so much to do here—so many responsibilities, I didn’t see how I could go. Janet made me. She said my father had wanted it, and, of course, that was true. Janet took it all on her own shoulders—she did everything. I couldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been for Janet.”

  “I should like to see Janet,” Linda said.

  “You shall see Janet,” he replied, looking up at her and smiling.