Master of Glenkeith (10 page)

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 don’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!”

“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.”