Master of Glenkeith (14 page)

“Yet you’ll quite cheerfully wear a pheasant’s tail

feather in your hat,” Alice Walsh pointed out sardonically.

“That’s different,” Celia declared.

“But why, darling?” Alice persisted. “You really ought to be prepared to explain such a rash statement, you know! I shall certainly come with the guns, Nigel,” she added, turning to her host. “You can very definitely count me in. I’ll even offer to load for you,” she added playfully. “Half a crown an hour. How’s that? You wouldn’t get anyone so cheaply if you searched for a week!”

“That’s true,” Celia retorted in her turn. “But perhaps Nigel isn’t looking for a bargain.”

Tessa hated it all, the thinly-veiled animosity, the scarcely-sheathed claws of these exquisite society women who attempted to hide their primitive urges under a cloak of sophistication and culture and sometimes failed as dismally as the most backward peasant. Alice Walsh wanted to marry Nigel, but she had no way of telling whether he would ask her or not. She had set about her campaign with a ruthless determination to succeed, however, which took very little into account, and certainly not the feeling of a rival in the field. And every other woman within sight was a potential rival, Tessa supposed.

She liked Celia better than Alice, although she could not pretend to understand either of them. They were both hard in their separate ways, highly polished products of a way of living which she would never know, and they bewildered her in consequence.

“Why so pensive?” Nigel asked. “Or is it that you are just sad because it will be a whole week before we meet again?”

She was forced to smile at his incredible effrontery.

“Without doubt, you are the most conceited man I have ever met!” she told him, and Andrew saw the smile in her eyes and the light in them and was conscious of sudden black anger in his heart.

Tessa, it seemed to him, was throwing herself at Nigel Haddow’s head. She had been doing that all afternoon, laughing at everything he liked to say to her, drinking too much champagne, and laughing again. Her happy laughter seemed to have taken on an edge of mockery in his brain and he could not see her without remembering how she had looked at Nigel.

The reason for it all was, of course, money. Nigel had money to burn, and he also had position. The Haddows of Ardnashee owned a thousand acres of pasture along the Dee, and deer forests and the land at Gantley besides. A wonderful “sitting down” for any girl, as his aunt had reminded him only the day before.

He found himself making excuses to Nigel, finding reasons why he could not go to Ardnashee, although he had shot with the Ardnashee guns for years.

“There’s a lot to do at Glenkeith. We’re busy getting ready for the sales.”

“Please yourself,” Nigel told him. “But remember you’ll always be welcome if you change your mind. My mother has a soft spot for you, Drew!”

Andrew knew that, and the knowledge succeeded in making him feel churlish and unkind to an old and valued friend, so that he drove most of the way back to Glenkeith without a word.

Hester found room enough for herself in the brake on the way home. She seemed almost pleased with her day’s outing, but contentment sat uneasily on Hester at all times.

“You’ll go to Ardnashee, of course,” she said to Tessa as they turned in at the farm gateway. “Nigel Haddow is the catch of the neighbourhood and he seemed to be doing his best to please you this afternoon,” she added thinly.

Tessa stared unhappily at Andrew’s unresponsive back, thinking that she did not want to go to Ardnashee, or anywhere else, without him, ever.

“It was very kind of Mr. Haddow to ask me,” was all she said.

Non-committal, playing for time because she wondered what Andrew was thinking. Yes, it was all that, but it was bewilderment, too. She could not think or know what she must do while her heart still quivered with the first sweet ecstasy of loving, and she could not look too far into the future because the present was so bafflingly confused.

Andrew put the brake away and she found herself lingering in the last of the sunshine, knowing that he must come that way to reach the house.

The sun’s rays had set a dusty gold on the fields, staining the west in flame and scarlet against a backcloth of turquoise sky, and all along the peaks of the Cairngorms the banners of departing day lay in soft streamers of violet mist. There was scarcely any sound.

Even the cattle lay still under the trees, chewing contentedly, and the dogs were too lazy or too trusting to bark as they heard Andrew’s sudden footfall on the cobbles of the yard. He had taken a long time to put away the brake.

He came towards Tessa almost reluctantly, but he could not very well pass her.

“It’s all so lovely,” she whispered tremulously as he leaned on the white-barred gate beside her. “All this glorious colour and the trees and hills so near!” “You talk as if you have grown fond of Scotland,” he said, “but surely you miss your warm Italian skies?” “Of course, I miss Italy,” she said. “All my growing-up was done there, but it was never really my own country. I always felt—different without really knowing why. Scotland could mean so much to me, if only—” He waited, but she could not tell him what she had been about to say and he felt goaded to add: “No doubt it is Glenkeith that is at fault. When you visit Ardnashee you will find it a very different proposition, I assure you. The people are civilized up there.” Tessa could not answer that, and he turned and left her

without another word.

CHAPTER VII

“I’m going down to the village,” Tessa said the following morning. “Is there anything I can bring back for you?” Hester looked up from her baking board with the hostile stare in her blue eyes which Tessa had come to recognize as part of her habitual expression.

“I can see to my own messages,” she said bluntly. “I rarely forget anything when the vans come round, and Meg will be going into Ballater with Andrew.”

It was always a point with Hester if she could mention those weekly excursions which Andrew and Margaret took to the railway terminus where Andrew picked up stores or extra fodder for the cattle while Margaret did her marketing. It seemed to fling the two young people more definitely together if Tessa knew about it, and to-day Margaret had gone off without her customary invitation to Tessa.

Feeling slightly left in the lurch, Tessa had decided to

walk to the village to explore its possibilities for her brush, but she was still eager to help Hester if she could.

When she reached the village she walked slowly down its one main street, liking what she saw of the row of grey stone cottages, each with its tiny, walled garden in front and late roses still blooming over the door.

Most of the cottage doors were open, with sturdy housewives scouring their whitened steps or polishing brass knobs and letter-boxes to an even greater degree of brilliance, and the glimpses she caught of the interiors of these humble little homes made her want to step inside.

At the last cottage in the row a woman stood holding a small child against the gate and Tessa smiled at her.

“Good-morning,” the woman said shyly. “It’s a lovely day.”

Tessa stopped, for this was what she had been wanting.

“It is a lovely day! Why do people say that it always rains in Scotland?”

The smile the woman gave her was slow, almost careful.

“We get a lot of rain,” she said. “But we can forget it on a day like this.”

She did not ask Tessa if she was a stranger to this part of her country. She already knew. There was not much that went on at Glenkeith or any of the larger houses round about that escaped the attention of the village.

“I was going to paint,” Tessa explained. “I wanted to paint one of the cottages and—I was wondering if you would let me do yours?” She smiled disarmingly. “Your garden is so lovely.”

The woman opened the gate, lifting the child aside.

“If you like,” she said.

Tessa spent the whole morning in the garden, and the next day, and at the end of that time she knew that the woman’s name was Isobel Ross. She looked a woman of about forty, and the child, a boy of three, was her sixth. They were a happy brood. Tessa watched them at play when they came in from school, sturdy, romping children who were a credit to Isobel as a mother and housewife.

“They get their porridge in the morning and an egg or a slice of ham,” Isobel explained shyly. “We have our own fowls and a pig, and I have a hot meal ready for them

when they come in at the end of the day. The older ones go to Ballater to the school, but the wee ones still come in for their dinner at twelve o’clock, so I’m kept busy, as you see.”

When Tessa had finished sketching the cottage, Isobel’s youngest, who informed her that his name was Sandy, came to eye her effort with characteristic Scottish reserve.

“Is that our hoose?” he asked.

“Well—it’s meant to be!”

“H’m!” he said.

“Don’t you like it, Sandy?”

“It’s all right. But I like people better. Can you draw people?”

Tessa’s eyes sparkled.

“I could draw you, Sandy, if you kept still.”

He considered the proposition doubtfully for a second. “How long would I have to keep still for?” he demanded at last.

“Oh—a minute or two till I got the pose.”

“What’s pose?”

“The way I’d like you to stand or sit. The way you hang your head sometimes when you’re thinking!”

He considered her thoughtfully.

“I’ll sit for five minutes,” he agreed.

On such brief decisions can the whole trend of the future depend.

Tessa began her portrait of Sandy two days before she went to Ardnashee, and Sandy’s mother looked over her shoulder once or twice and said that it was a good likeness.

Tessa could not make up her mind about Isobel Ross. Not quite. She liked her, and in that curious way of the sensitive soul, she felt that her liking was returned, but there was a reserve in Isobel that was not only accountable to shyness. There seemed to be a holding back, a vague restraint which kept the older woman tongue-tied most of the time, yet when Tessa announced that she would work on the portrait after this at Glenkeith, Isobel looked disappointed.

“You’ll come back, though?” she asked hesitantly. “I’d like you to come back.”

“And I would like to come!” Impulsively Tessa touched the work-roughened hand.

“Then, I’ll expect you.”

Isobel stood back and Tessa walked away.

She walked right into Andrew.

“I thought I saw you coming away from the Rosses’ cottage,” he remarked.

“I was,” Tessa answered. “I’ve been painting it, and trying to paint a portrait of Sandy into the bargain. He told me you sometimes gave him rides in the brake!”

His face softened.

“His father works at Glenkeith when we are shorthanded or when he is laid off somewhere else. He needs all the extra money he can get, and he’s a good worker.”

“I liked Isobel Ross,” Tessa said.

“What made you want to paint the boy?”

“Sandy? He suggested it and I had been wanting to do it, but I don’t know if I’m a very good portrait painter yet.” “How long will it take you to find out?”

“I don’t know. You can’t be a really unbiased judge of your own work, not when you are so chock full of enthusiasm.”

“At least you’re candid,” he said. “Am I permitted to see the portrait?”

Suddenly shy, she drew her block away.

“I don’t think so, Drew. Not yet!”

He laughed.

“You needn’t worry! I can’t draw a straight line!” he said, but he was deeply, painfully conscious of the fact that he had been guilty of something like intrusion in asking to see her work.

To his sensitive soul intrusion was the unforgivable sin, and he felt himself set farther apart from his grandfather’s ward in consequence, assuring himself determinedly that it was what he wanted.

There was, naturally, much talk of the shoot at Ardnashee. Nigel’s formal invitation had arrived the day before, but Andrew had now a legitimate excuse for refusing to go. The ram sales were on in the south and he was his grandfather’s sole representative. Tawse and Fleming would take the animals to Kelso, but a Meldrum had always been there in person to do his own buying and selling and Andrew had long since learned all there was to know about sheep and cattle.

He did not ask himself whether he would rather have gone to Ardnashee, after all. There was a lot of work to be done before the six rams would be ready for the show ring and it was his duty to see them safely off from Aberdeen.

“I’ll take you over to Ardnashee in the brake,” he offered when he met Tessa in the hall that morning. “My aunt thinks you should go.”

Tessa wondered whether she should feel flattered or not because Hester had suddenly taken an interest in her, but it seemed that Mrs. MacDonald was pleased about the Ardnashee invitation and the general supposition that Nigel Haddow was paying her more than usual attention since their first casual meeting on the moors.

Margaret hurried through her morning housework and was ready, waiting, when Tessa came down.