Master of Glenkeith (21 page)

Tessa drew back as if she had been struck some physical blow, not quite sure whether she had heard aright, and then she remembered Andrew’s uneasiness, his reticence when it had come to discussing the future or the past, and her heart seemed to die within her.

White and silent, she left the room and shut herself up in the little studio at the head of the staircase. It was a wet, raw day, and the chill of it seemed to penetrate right into the room, into her heart.

She stood looking about her, feeling nothing for a moment but the numbness, the terrible awareness of having come to the end of something. Glenkeith was very still. The cattle would be sheltering under the trees and the usual cheerful clatter of pails and farm implements was missing from the yard beneath her. It seemed that even Glenkeith was waiting for her to go.

The bitterness of despair closed down on her as she remembered how often Andrew had let her see that she had come to Glenkeith against his will, that he had only been obeying his grandfather’s command when he had brought her there from Rome.

And now he was master of Glenkeith. She had told him that she could not stay at Glenkeith against his will, and Hester had just told her plainly what that must be. “You don’t expect Andrew to
tell
you to go!”

No, he mustn’t tell her! Her hands were trembling as she pressed them to her cheeks. He mustn’t tell her.

As if she had been drawn there against her will, she crossed to the easel in the centre of the floor and lifted the drape from her mother’s portrait. It had been something she had felt compelled to paint, but it was still unfinished and she supposed it would remain so now. She would take it with her when she left Glenkeith, just as it was.

Looking into the painted eyes, she wondered what her mother had thought of Glenkeith all these years ago and why she had left it so soon after her husband’s death.

Hester? Had Hester MacDonald been cruel and unwelcoming then as she was now?

It was impossible to let her thoughts go farther than that. She knew that Hester had been at the farm in her mother’s time, but that was all; yet suddenly she found herself feeling for her brushes, picking up her palette as if there was nothing more important than the task of finishing her mother’s portrait in the shortest possible time.

It was the old, creative urge, she supposed, the desire to finish what she had begun, and she worked without pause till she heard Andrew come in.

He left the brake in the yard and she stood rigid with her brush in her hand till she knew that he had entered the house. In the past hour she had made her decision. She could not stay at Glenkeith, making it impossible for him to live there contentedly. She could not remain there, meeting him day after day like this, at meals and in the morning before he went out to work and at night when darkness sent him indoors to read and make out his returns beside the fire. She could not stay and see him and go on loving him knowing that he would never love her in return.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs, a man’s heavy tread that seemed to carry an intolerable burden as it came slowly upwards, and she stood with her breath drawn and her teeth fastened fiercely on her quivering lip as they halted outside her door.

It was Andrew. There could be no mistake about that, but she could not move. She could not cross the room and go to him, flinging the door wide, because of all that Hester had said, and in a split second the opportunity had passed.

Andrew had gone, walking slowly away along the corridor to his own room.

That evening, when they had finished their meal and Margaret had gone with her mother to the kitchen to wash

up, he rose abruptly and crossed to the fire.

“I’ve been thinking about the future, Tessa,” he said, cramming tobacco into his pipe with a determined concentration. “Meg says she thinks you would like to take up something apart from your painting. Something about the farm.”

His voice had been tentatively kind and she felt the words choking in her throat as she answered him.

“There’s no need, Andrew. I’m not going to stay at Glenkeith.”

His head shot up and he stood looking at her as if he had not quite expected this. Then his mouth clamped down in the old stern line and the look which she had taken for kindness or pity was driven from his eyes.

“You’ve made up your mind?” he said. “You mean to go to Ardnashee?”

She could not think what he meant for a moment, but his question seemed to demand an answer.

“I shall go to-morrow.”

He drew in a deep breath and put the pipe back into his pocket without lighting it.

“Perhaps you are right,” he said. “Nigel has a great deal to offer you.”

It was useless to protest, Tessa thought miserably. There was nothing she could make him understand, nothing he wanted to understand. There was nothing about her that would really interest him except the fact that she was leaving Glenkeith.

Somewhere at the back of her mind she remembered that she had promised to go to Ardnashee. She had made the promise to Nigel the day before Daniel Meldrum had died, but she had not made any effort to keep it until now. She had felt too crushed and unhappy to be able to think or reason clearly and Nigel had come to the funeral and had seemed to understand.

That was all over now. Andrew had accepted her decision to go to Ardnashee without protest. He had even told her that she was wise. He had agreed that the best thing she could do was to go.

What she was to say to Nigel was another matter, but she left Glenkeith the following morning, deciding to walk the three miles to Ardnashee to give herself time to think.

Andrew watched her go. He had not been able to settle to the routine tasks of the farm and had taken the brake out to test a faulty carburetor when Tessa walked down the drive. He slowed up, saying almost aggressively:

“Do you want a lift? I can take you as far as the Ardnashee gates.”

Was he so eager to be rid of her, so anxious to make sure that she would go to Nigel?

“No,” she said. “No, thank you. I would rather walk. I want to think, Andrew. I want to have time to think.”

He let in the clutch.

“Just as you say.”

She watched him drive off as if some final chance had slipped through her nerveless fingers, going in the direction of Glenkeith, where he belonged.

Glenkeith seemed strange, untried ground to Andrew as he pulled the brake up in the cobbled yard. Nothing was the same. He felt unsettled and restive, without anchor now that the old man had gone, yet there was no reason why he should feel these things. He had lived at Glenkeith all his life; his boyhood had been spent there and he had been happy to contemplate the future stretching out in the same known way until now.

What was it, then, that had changed?

The question burned against his mind for the best part of an hour before he found himself in the house, in the business-room, flicking over a sheaf of Ministry notices which he did not really read.

Tossing them to one side at last, he crossed to the door with his hands thrust deeply into his breeches pockets and his mouth grim. What was he going to do with the future?

Subconsciously he knew that he did not want to answer that question and, on an impulse, he found himself mounting the stairs to his grandfather’s room.

It had been tidied and put decently under dust sheets, by Hester or Meg acting on Hester’s orders, and he felt as if he were left staring at the blank pages of an unfinished manuscript.

The room had nothing to say to him, no help to offer.

He had come here in the past whenever he had been uncertain about anything and the old man had always given him his advice, but now he had to stand alone, to make his own decisions and profit or lose by them as the case might be.

Grimly he turned towards the door, closing it behind him. Well, that was that!

He made his way to the head of the stairs, but before he reached them something made him turn to look at the halfopen door of Tessa’s studio.

For weeks past she had been working in there, working almost feverishly. What had she been doing?

Without thought of intrusion this time, he opened the door and went in. The studio had a communicating door into his grandfather’s bedroom and he noticed with a sense of shock that Tessa had packed most of her belongings into a neat pile beside it. There were canvases and boxes full of paints and brushes, and he had a sense of coming upon something that he ought to have known about long ago, although nobody could have expected him to take an active interest in art. It was outside his knowledge, far and away beyond his ken.

Curiously, he moved towards the uncovered easel in the centre of the floor where Tessa had been working before she had left for Ardnashee, driven to contemplate the portrait which had taken shape beneath her clever brush.

He stared at it incredulously at first. It was what he believed was called a self-portrait, the artist’s impression of her own personality, probably painted through the big gilt-framed mirror hanging on the opposite wall, and even he could see that it was a remarkable likeness.

It was not until he looked more closely, drawing back the window curtains with a certain amount of impatience, that he realized it to be the portrait of a much older woman. The years had etched lines on the face looking at him out of the canvas which they had not yet drawn on Tessa’s faultless skin, and the deeply-set, smiling eyes held a hint of tragedy and regret which he hoped that Tessa would never know.

Shocked beyond measure, he realized that he could only be looking at a portrait of Tessa’s mother, the lovely, faithless Veronique.

He drew back involuntarily, but something in the painted eyes held his resentful gaze while slowly he reached the conclusion that Tessa must have painted her mother as she had known her to satisfy some desire in her

own heart, almost, it seemed, to prove something.

The soft, deeply-shadowed eyes looking back at him from the easel kept him standing there, and they did not seem to be the eyes of a woman who had cheated in her marriage, casting aside every vow she had made to go off with a lover. They were not the eyes of a woman who had abandoned love and affection and a home, flinging them to the four winds of heaven for a whim. They were not the eyes of a woman who could betray overnight all that she had once held dear.

What, he wondered, was the real secret of Veronique?

He even thought, in that moment, that Tessa might have been trying to show him the truth about her mother until he remembered that Tessa was on her way to Ardnashee, to Nigel and the future as Nigel’s wife.

Baffled, he found it impossible to reconcile the two events, and because he had failed to think clearly and objectively for the first time in his life, he turned on his heel and left the portrait to the empty room.

Margaret met him in the hall, and because she had known him for so long she saw that something unusual had disturbed him.

“Can I do anything, Drew?” she asked impulsively.

Andrew looked at her as if he had only just seen her.

“Do anything?” he repeated. “Why should you? You are not Tessa’s keeper, nor am I.”

So, it was Tessa! She might have guessed as much, Margaret thought, looking down at her hands as if she found them suddenly empty.

“Has she gone to Ardnashee?” she asked.

“What else could we expect?” he said without answering the direct question. “We made it too uncomfortable for her here at Glenkeith.”

“But surely,” Margaret cried, “you didn’t throw her into Nigel’s arms!”

He moved abruptly so that she could no longer see his face.

“If she wanted to be there nothing could have kept her from going.”

Margaret stood where he left her, watching him ride away on Lucy, down the drive and out of sight. She wondered if he remembered that he had last saddled the mare for Tessa so that she could ride out on to the moor with Nigel Haddow. Was he torturing himself with that thought as he dug his heels into the mare’s red flank and galloped her recklessly down the glen road?

“So, you’ve let him go! You’ve let him slip through your fingers, at last!”

She recognized the grimly scathing voice but did not turn. Her mother, she knew, was standing in the doorway behind her and had overheard all that had passed between her and Andrew. Well, what did it matter, Margaret thought. It was only the truth and her mother would have had to hear it, sooner or later.

When she looked at her, anger and near-defeat burned in the gaunt face which she could never remember softening, even as a child, and the cold eyes were fastened upon her with ill-concealed contempt.

“You are a fool, Meg!” Hester said beneath her breath, as if she would not be able to restrain her. “You could never see any farther than what was right in front of you. You never looked to the future, to being here at Glenkeith for the rest of your life! You’ve always been content to let things drift, to wait till they came to you!”

Margaret looked at her and her eyes were suddenly full of unshed tears.

“Andrew would never have come to me,” she said simply, “if I had waited all my life. He is not in love with me.”