Master of Glenkeith (22 page)

“Love,” Hester informed her stonily, “never brought anything to Glenkeith but disillusionment. It’s high time you realized that, madam, as I had to do! It’s time you thought of the future without worrying so much about

‘love’!”

“You married for love,” Margaret sought to remind her.

“And where did that get me?” Hester demanded bitterly. “Back here in my father’s house, where I was never wanted!”

“Please, Mother!” Margaret pleaded. “You must have been happy at some time in your life.”

“I sometimes wonder when that was! It wasn’t when I first came back to Glenkeith and realized what a mess I had made of my life, but it may have been after that when my father had ceased to cast my mistakes back in my teeth

and had accepted me.”

“As mistress here?” Margaret felt that she was beginning to understand and a cold sort of horror took possession of her. “That’s what you always wanted,” she whispered. “That’s what you’ve been—planning for all along.”

“Can you blame me?” Hester’s face was pinched and grey. “I sank my pride and came back here when my brother’s wife died, and I promised to bring up his child so that you and Robert should have a decent home and a good upbringing; and then the reins were taken out of my hands by a chit of a girl he picked up in France.” “Veronique!” Margaret said beneath her breath.

“I did these things for you, Meg, and for Robert,” Hester went on relentlessly. “And then Robert was killed. That was a blow in the face to me, but I meant you to stay at Glenkeith. I was determined that we should both stay, and I am still determined. I have no wish to be told for the second time in my life that a chit of a girl from a foreign country is about to take my place!”

“But I can’t see what right we have,” Margaret protested. “If Andrew wants to marry Tessa—”

“How can he want her,” Hester demanded harshly, “when he knows the truth about his father’s death?”

“You
told him that!” Margaret gasped. “It was you who told him!”

“He had to know, sooner or later,” Hester returned ruthlessly. “He would have heard it from some other source if it had not come from me, so I would advise you not to waste your time thinking about such things.”

Margaret did think of it, however. It was constantly in her mind so that she found difficulty in sleeping and concentrating on what she was doing. The daily task became laborious and when she met Andrew in the house she was awkward and tongue-tied in his presence.

“Meg,” he said the day after Tessa’s visit to Ardnashee, “I’m going to the Perth sales. I’ll be away for two days. Would you like to come with me? The Gilchrists will put you up and we can do a show or two while we’re down there.”

She looked at him uncertainly, but, after all, it was the sort of thing she and Andrew had done often enough in the past.

“Do you want me to ask Tessa?” she said.

He looked away from her gently questioning gaze. “There wouldn’t be any point, would there? It looks as if she may be going to announce her engagement to Nigel Haddow at any moment.”

And you don’t want to be at Glenkeith when she does, Margaret thought, with the agonized certainty of someone who can see so clearly through the eyes of love.

“If you want me in Perth, I’ll come,” she told him, although she felt that there would be no pleasure in the trip for either of them.

Tessa accepted the news as she did most things these days, in a frame of mind that left her sick at heart but curiously insensible to added pain. Saturation point seemed to have been reached long ago in that respect and her misery would not overflow in the relief of tears. She saw Margaret in love with Andrew and he with her, accepting it as the natural, the inevitable result of their long and mutual attraction to Glenkeith, and she told herself that she had no right to grudge Margaret such ultimate happiness.

Hester looked pleased when she heard about the proposed visit to Perth.

“The Gilchrists have been asking you to go for months,” she pointed out. “You should have gone in the summer, when Jessie got engaged to John MacFarlane.”

Her glance in Andrew’s direction suggested that engagements might be in the air, and Tessa turned away disconsolately, wondering how long it would be before she could look at Andrew and hear his voice without that gripping sensation in her throat which threatened to choke back utterance every time she tried to speak.

The brake set out for Perth early on the Thursday morning and she stood at the front door waving till it was out of sight. The gesture was purely mechanical because her heart felt crushed and her thoughts refused to turn to the ordinary events of the day.

Hester had gone into the house ahead of her, but she found her lingering in the hall, as if she had something of importance to say.

“Are you going to Ardnashee this afternoon?” she enquired stonily. “Or will Nigel Haddow be coming here?”

“Nigel won’t be coming.” Tessa’s voice was flat and unemotional. “We—haven’t made any arrangements.” Hester’s greying brows came together in a quick frown. “Maybe you wanted to go to Perth,” she suggested. “But Andrew wanted to take Meg alone. They must want to be on their own some time. If I know Andrew,” she added, “he’ll have his own reasons for this trip.”

She looked steadily back at Tessa, her blue eyes narrowing determinedly. “Their engagement has been in the air for months, and this should just about settle it, she intimated. “They’ll marry in the spring, though Andrew can’t be looking forward to having two women in the house.”

“You and Meg?” Tessa asked, surprised that Hester should have thought of showing so much consideration to the young married couple.

“I have always been at Glenkeith,” Hester retorted. “It was you I meant. You and Meg. You can’t expect a man to want to support two women when one of them has no claim on him whatever.”

White-lipped, Tessa turned to face her.

“I never expected Andrew to do that!” she cried. It never entered my head. I have always been willing to work for a living. I would have worked here at Glenkeith if only you had let me, but you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t,” she added passionately, “for some reason of your own.
You
didn’t want me at Glenkeith, Mrs. MacDonald! You didn’t want me right from the beginning.”

Hester moved then with the swift, cunning movement of the panther who sees the moment ready for the kill.

“Do you think that Andrew wanted you any more than I did?” she demanded. “Do you think he
liked
the idea of living with you in this house?”

“What had I done?” Tessa whispered. “He didn’t know me till he came to find me in Rome.”

“But he knew your mother,” Hester reminded her. “He knew all about her. He knew how she killed his father, not in cold blood, perhaps, but as surely as if she had driven a knife into his heart.”

“It isn’t true!” Tessa sobbed, bewildered and struggling with anger and injustice. “You are saying this for your own ends.”

“What motive could I have to twist the truth?” Hester demanded coldly. “Andrew hates the thought of you at Glenkeith and always will,” she added brutally. “How could he help it when your mother betrayed his father and sent him to his death? He’s been brought up with that truth all his life, remember!”

“Because you told him! Because you wanted it that way!” Tessa cried.

“Someone else would have enlightened him if I hadn’t. Someone outside the family,” Hester said. “It was common knowledge at the time, a nine days’ wonder that spread like wildfire between here and Aberdeen. There’s nobody on Deeside who wouldn’t remember all about it if they were asked,” she added convincingly.

“I won’t believe it!” Tessa said again, but she knew that she could no longer hammer against the granite that was Hester MacDonald.

“Whether you believe it or not hardly matters,” Hester assured her. “Andrew knows that it is true.”

“Why did he keep it from me?”

“Would you expect any man to tell you a thing like that unless you found out about it for yourself?” Hester asked. “He lived constantly with the thought while his grandfather was alive because the old man was in his dotage and wanted you here. He had been in love with your grandmother, it seemed.” Hester’s laugh was unpleasant. “Love has played a few strange roles at Glenkeith, even in my day,” she added sourly.

“If you’ve ever been in love,” Tessa said brokenly, “you would know why Mr. Meldrum brought me to Glenkeith. I was the past to him, something left of it that he could hold on to at the end, and I’m glad of it. I’m glad I was able to come to Scotland for that reason alone! But now—”

Hester waited, not trying to help. She knew that she had won her victory, for all the signs of defeat were there on the girl’s pale face, coupled with the agony of sudden resignation.

“I can’t expect to stay here,” Tessa whispered at last. “Even before Andrew comes back I must go away.”

“I think you are wise,” Hester said, “but you must please yourself, of course. It is something that only you can decide,” she added magnanimously.

“What else is there for me to do?” Tessa asked.

With a dignity which she did not know she possessed, she turned from the older woman and began to mount the stairs, reaching the top with the feeling that her trembling limbs would not carry her a step farther. Her mind, fastening on mechanical things, willed her to go on, however, but when she reached her own room the effort had exhausted her.

She did not ask herself if she believed all that Hester had told her, but she knew, without doubt, that Andrew believed it.

Here was reason for the reserve which she had always felt existed between them. Here was the barrier itself. Whatever had happened all those long years ago it still mattered to Andrew. He was still bitter and hard and unforgiving.

Trying to see the situation through his eyes, she felt that she had no right to blame him, but she could not, on the other hand, condemn her mother.

The mother she remembered had not been false. She had been gay and gentle and kind—and sometimes sad in retrospect—but she had loved Glenkeith. Tessa knew that without a doubt.

She could not go into the studio again where the portrait of her mother stood with its face to the light. It would break her heart to look at it. She must leave it there for Andrew to do with as he willed.

Perhaps he would even destroy it when he knew that it was Veronique.

Slowly, heartbrokenly, she began to pack her clothes into the grip she had brought with her from Rome, remembering how Andrew had carried it to the plane for her that sunny day when she had left Italy with him, her hopes high, her thoughts in the clouds. Even then she must have loved him, impulsively, subconsciously, because there had been a joy about going, an ecstasy she had never experienced till that moment.

Every detail of that first journey together was clear in her mind; the sun, the flowers, the warmth that was Italy, but here in the north she had found other things to twine around her heart. The high, clear sky above the hills with the cloud shadows racing over them would always be her memory of Scotland, and the gold of the birch and the grey stones of little churches like Crathie, and the red deer with their shy eyes and the whirr of the grouse above the open moor.

It would all be dear to her no matter how far she had to go to try to forget. There would always be the memory of Glenkeith and an old man who had loved her and tried to make her happy and welcome there.

If it had been different, she thought. If only Andrew had been able to accept her and love her, too!

C H A P T E R X

AN hour later Tessa sat before the writing-table in her bedroom trying to compose a letter to Andrew. She could not leave Glenkeith without a word, nor could she think of anything to say to him that was near the truth and yet avoided it.

Anything so subtle was utterly foreign to her straightforward nature, but she could not distress him by bringing up the past. It would be impossible, too, to say where she was going. She did not know.

“Dear Andrew,” she wrote a dozen times, tearing up the heart-cry which had followed because it was so easy to read her love into it, and then she wrote half a page, simply and directly, which told him nothing.

Dear Andrew

I am going away because I can no longer stay at Glenkeith. Don’t think that I have been completely unhappy here, will you? I have been happy in a good many
ways,
but it is best now that I should go. I hope that you and Meg will find all the happiness you deserve in the future.

Tessa.

When she had folded it and sealed it into an envelope she wrote Andrew’s name on the outside and sat for a long time staring into space.

What was she to do? The thought disturbed her, but it was not of primary importance, somehow. The most important thing, the first essential, was that she must not be at the farm when Andrew came home.

Fleetingly she considered Nigel Haddow, but as swiftly dismissed the suggestion. She could not go to Nigel when she had already turned down his love.

She closed her eyes, remembering the look on Nigel’s face when she had said that she could not marry him. Baffled, hurt, half unbelieving still, he could not quite credit the fact that the first woman he had ever asked to become his wife should have turned him down for no better reason than the fact that she was not in love with him.