Master of Glenkeith (17 page)

He turned away to the window and stood there looking down into the starlit night.

“Enjoy yourself,” Daniel said when she bent over the bed to kiss him good-night. “You and Andrew make a braw pair!”    _

It was the second time someone had said that, Tessa remembered. There was the woman at the Games who had seen them go hand-in-hand up the hill!

The Ardnashee Daimler pulled up at the front door as she went down the stairs, but for a moment Margaret, who had been waiting in the hall, did not move. She stood looking towards the stairs as if she had seen a ghost or a vision of the future, and then she turned swiftly to the door to let Nigel Haddow in.

Nigel monopolized Tessa from that moment onwards. He sat beside her in the back of the car while his chauffeur drove them to Perth over roads silvered by the first frost of winter, and Margaret sat facing them with Andrew by her side.

When they reached the County Hall it was already gay with dancing couples, and Tessa drew her breath in at the splendour of it all. The decoration, the flowers, the beautiful women in their glittering dresses, each with her family sash pinned on her shoulder, were only a foil for the swinging kilts as the men spun round in a reel or danced the Gay Gordons to the music of the pipes. It was like something out of a dream, and Tessa went through the evening in a dream. When Andrew danced with her the spell deepened; when he spoke to her she was too happy to remember what he had said for long. All she wanted was to be with him, to dance like this, on and on in the circle of his strong arms, for ever.

When she danced with Nigel the spell was still there but it was not so strong.

It was Nigel who took her in to supper.

“You look like a little girl at her first party!” he chided gently.

“It is my first party,” she told him. “My first grownup party, and I want it to last for ever!”

As if he had taken his cue from that, Nigel danced every available dance with her in the second half of the programme and Andrew seemed quite content to stand aside. If someone else claimed Margaret as a partner, as they frequently did, he found another man to talk to or ambled out to the bar, and when they piled into the Daimler for the drive back to Glenkeith he put Margaret into the back seat with Nigel between her and Tessa and sat upright in the smaller chair in front.

It was after three o’clock and Tessa was happily tired. The car was warm from the electric heater at their feet and Nigel had tucked a fur rug over their knees for extra comfort. It was a long way to Glenkeith. A long way in the moonlight. She felt her thoughts stretching out towards Andrew, all her love wanting to embrace him, warmly, drowsily, as the car sped northwards into Glen Shee.

The mountains looked very close. She could see the dark shadows on their flanks where the trees grew thickly, and above them the moonlit peaks, and her breath came between her parted lips in a wild sort of ecstasy that was half pain and half delight. Her life might go on like this for a very long time.

The warm drowsiness blurred her thoughts and her head fell slowly sideways on to a man’s shoulder, broad and comfortable and there when she needed it. Gradually, blissfully, sleep claimed her, and Nigel let her head rest there till he was sure that his movement would not disturb her, and then he settled more comfortably with his arm about her, turning his own head for a moment to press a light kiss on her brow.

When he looked up Andrew was watching him, and something of the bitterness of gall was in his smile before he turned his eyes away.

Hester had sat up for them. It was an unusual thing for her to do, but she seemed to have expected something to have come out of this romantic excursion of theirs to Perth, although the word romance felt strange and acrid on her tongue. It was almost breakfast time, she pointed out as Nigel followed Tessa into the hall.

They drank coffee and ate bacon and eggs with the heartiness of youth, and Hester smiled thinly when she heard that Tessa had slept for the greater part of the journey on Nigel’s shoulder.

Refreshed now, Tessa poured their coffee, but she could not add her quota to the gossip about the dance. That was left to Nigel and Margaret. Like Andrew’s, it seemed, her evening had been too full of memories to bear revealing.

“I’ll be expecting you at Gantley next week-end,” Nigel said when he rose to go. “I’ve arranged a small shoot, and there will only be Ortry and the Walshes left. It’s time you saw Gantley, Tessa,” he added, “I want you to see it before the winter sets in up there in earnest.”

Andrew got up. He had lit his pipe and had been smoking it in silence while Margaret and Nigel talked.

“Count me out, Nigel,” he said. “I’ve got to go to Aberdeen to lift some cattle.”

Nigel looked across at him with a sharpened expression in his eyes.

“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to get you to go anywhere these days, Drew,” he remarked. “But if you change your mind about Gantley, you know you’ll he welcome.”

Tessa did not want to go to Gantley Lodge. Not without Andrew, but it seemed that Nigel had arranged the weekend specially for her benefit and he was not prepared to take a refusal so far as she was concerned.

“If you don’t want to come out with the guns you can amuse yourself painting along the waterside,” he told her.

When she mentioned the invitation to Gantley Daniel

Meldrum urged her to go.

“It’s a bonnie spot, and it’s not so very far away,” he said. “You’ll pass Tarland, where your grandmother was born, and you can tell me what you think of it when you come back.”

That seemed to settle the question of her invitation to Gantley, but Tessa was almost relieved when she heard that Margaret was going, too.

Nigel called for them in the Daimler on the Friday afternoon, and Andrew stood in his grandfather’s room, watching as they drove away. There was a long silence between them after the sound of the car had died on the winding drive. It was Daniel who finally broke it.

“I could have wished that you had gone with the young folk, Andrew,” he said. “It doesn’t do for you always to be up to your eyes in work day after day. It has a way of blinding you to—other things.”

“Other things might be less important,” Andrew smiled, coming over to the bed to put an affectionate hand on his shoulder. “Less important than Glenkeith.”

“You’re fond o’ Glenkeith,” Daniel said. “I know that fine, and it will never look back while your hand’s on the tiller.” The blue eyes were reminiscent for a moment. “It’s a grand heritage, lad,” he added slowly, “and it will soon be yours. Glenkeith and all its responsibilities.”

Andrew had already schooled himself to accept the fact of his grandfather’s passing, but the words smote him with a sense of shock, all the same. It was the same sort of shock which he had experienced that day in Rome when he had thought of Glenkeith and the future.

“She’s got to stay here, Andrew,” his grandfather said. “She belongs here, whatever you might feel about the past.”

A vision of Tessa’s eyes, long-lashed and sombre when she had been hurt or could not understand, rose up and smote Andrew.

“If you wish it,” he said, but he knew that Tessa would go to Ardnashee soon, as a bride.

“I would be happier in my mind if I thought you wished it,” the old man said.

“What I wish would scarcely influence Tessa,” Andrew said.

He went out, restless and uneasy, to walk the glen road till he reached the moor, and he did not return to Glenkeith until long after it was dark and he was physically exhausted.

The following day he found himself in Aberdeen with little to do once he had arranged for the transport to Glenkeith of the cattle he had bought.

Union Street was crowded with the usual Saturday morning shoppers, and when he went to see about a shipping permit for some cattle due to leave Glenkeith for the Argentine the following week, he found the wind in the dockland area bleak and cold. As he walked briskly along Regent Quay he began to think of the open moors with the sun on them, of Gantley and then of Tessa.

Well, why shouldn’t he?

He phoned Glenkeith and, to his passing surprise, Hester did not put forward her usual objections to such a hurried change of plans. She promised to pack him a week-end bag and have it ready when he reached the farm.

“You and Meg should have more time together,” she said.

He thought of Margaret as he sped towards Glenkeith, Meg who had always been there, assuring himself that there was no reason why she should ever find it necessary to go away, and then he had left Glenkeith behind and was on his way to Gantley, driving north towards the shooting lodge on the moors, his hands gripping the steering-wheel as if time itself was his enemy.

The guns were out when he reached the lodge and he followed them on to the hill. Gantley was seventeen miles from Ardnashee and fourteen from Glenkeith, a compact and well-appointed hunting lodge built of native grey stone with a thatched roof and a timbered verandah running round three of its sides.

It stood just below the tree line, sheltered on the north and east by giant spruce and larch and commanding a wide view to the west to Glen Avon and the Spey.

The country round and above it was rugged and wild, the haunt of the red deer and the golden eagle, and all about it the grouse rose, whirring, into the sky. Rivers flowed everywhere and in every direction, the swift-running, noisy Highland burns that Andrew loved and had fished from earliest boyhood.

He was quick to see what Tessa would find in a place like this with its trees aflame with autumn leaves and the colours of the moor defying description, but he thought that he would find her more readily beside the burn. There was a laughter in the water that echoed her own, a swift free quality about it reflecting her impulsive nature as in a clear mirror for all to see.

Drawing the brake up on the edge of the moor-road, he went forward over the rough grass, pausing now and then to listen for the guns, but there was no sound to break the stillness. Nigel had probably taken his shooting party up over the ridge and it was quite possible that they might have called it a day by this time.

When he reached the head of the little glen he stood for a moment in the shelter of the trees, looking down across the moor to where his keen eyes had picked up a moving object against the rock.

It moved again, and presently a single stag stood silhouetted against the sky, sniffing the air suspiciously before he called the hinds up after him. It was a magnificent sight. Andrew was down wind from where they stood and they came slowly towards him, moving gracefully down the incline to the defile of the burn. The stag had a splendid head, the strong, branching antlers rising to a perfect crown, and they were so near that he could almost see the soft black eyes as they looked timidly about them for a place to graze.

Then, suddenly, on the ridge of the moor behind them, he saw the first of the shooting party, and almost simultaneously Tessa came up from the burnside with her sketching-block in her hand. She was between him and the herd, on the far side of the burn, and the deer were between her and the guns.

For a split second Andrew watched. There was no real danger so long as the deer did not see the men on the ridge behind them, but suddenly, to his horror, a shot rang out, echoing and re-echoing against the hills.

The stag reared his head, poised for an instant on the mound where he had been watching, and then he plunged forward, away from the guns, leading the terrified herd in a wild stampede down the incline to where Tessa stood.

He moved then as if he had been impelled from a catapult, only to see Tessa drop in her tracks as she turned before the advancing herd. When he reached her, leaping the burn in one determined stride, there was blood on the half-completed sketching-block which she had dropped as she fell.

Breathlessly he threw himself to the ground, shielding her body with his, holding her so that she could not move with her head pressed close against his shoulder, but, as he had expected, the hinds had scattered wildly at the sight of him and the fleeing, pounding hooves divided on either side of them, fanning out across the open moor to safety.

It was over in a moment, but it had seemed an eternity.

He raised himself to look at Tessa and her utter pallor sent the blood rushing before his eyes for a moment. It had been a stray shot that had scattered the deer, a badly-timed effort on someone’s part as a lone bird had flown up from the cover of the bracken, but it had found an unexpected mark. Tessa had been caught in the shoulder by the shot and he picked her up in his arms as the others rushed to meet them.

“What’s happened?” Hammond Ortry’s rather vacuous face loomed before Andrew so that he longed to drive his clenched fist into it. “I say, did that last shot of mine really hit Miss Halliday? I’m so frightfully sorry, old chap. So frightfully sorry! I—haven’t—injured her, have I? I mean to say, I just saw the bird rise and I took a potshot at it—”

“And scared a herd of deer right in our path,” Andrew finished for him contemptuously. “I don’t suppose you would give that a thought. There would be nothing on your mind but the wretched bird.”

He could not hide his contempt nor his anger and he did not even try. Nigel, looking utterly ashamed of the whole business, came to his side and knelt down beside Tessa as she opened her eyes.