Master of Glenkeith (24 page)

I shall be waiting for your answer at Beauvais, where you first found me.

Your devoted wife, Veronique.

“Does it make a difference?” Isobel asked, coming back into the room.

“I don’t know.”

Tessa’s mind felt numb, too numbed for thought.

“All these years afterwards,” Isobel said. “I don’t suppose it can matter, but I had to keep the letter. Sometimes I thought of taking it to Glenkeith even after Mr. Meldrum died. I thought I would give it to Andrew, and then I thought it might only distress him and remind him of his father’s sudden death.”

“He has never forgotten it,” Tessa said. “It has always haunted him.”

It was then that she knew what to do. She took up her own letter and opened it, slipping the yellowed envelope bearing her mother’s inside. The address on the smaller envelope was still quite clear. Fergus Meldrum, Esquire, Glenkeith.

How could she explain it, if, indeed, it needed explaining?

I know this will make a difference to your view of the facts of your father’s death, Andrew (she wrote). He died, you see, without ever knowing that his wife had left Glenkeith. Isobel Ross was to have given him this letter from my mother, but she didn’t take it to Glenkeith that night. In the morning your father was found dead in the quarry, where he had gone to rescue some sheep on his way home from Aberdeen. He never did return to Glenkeith. He never knew that your Aunt Hester had successfully broken up his home. ”

She wondered if she was being unfair to Margaret, who was to be Andrew’s future wife. She didn’t know. She only felt that she had to be fair to her mother’s memory and show Andrew the truth for his own peace of mind, and she thought that Margaret would understand.

She had made no plea on her own behalf.

“I still want you to take my letter to Glenkeith,” she told Isobel. “Will you do it?”

“If that is what you wish.”

What more could she wish for?

She spent that night at Glenkeith, tossing from side to side on her narrow bed, wondering how else she could have done this thing, hoping that she had not made any mistake, and early next morning she told Hester that she would go.

“I’d like to say good-bye to Mrs. Haddow,” she said. “She was always very kind to me when I went to Ardnashee.”

“How do you propose to get there?” Hester enquired coldly.

“I can walk. I can leave my grip in the village and come

back in time to catch the twelve o’clock bus.”

Hester glanced at the clock on the mantlepiece behind her.

“You’ve played your cards badly,” she observed sourly. “You might have been the future mistress of Ardnashee.”

Tessa could not answer her. She saw so plainly that Hester’s own desires would always colour her conception of other people’s and that nothing would convince her that materialism was not the whole of life. Power was an obsession with Hester MacDonald, power in the small domestic sphere, but it was as heady a potion as anyone could have swallowed. No scruple would hinder her; nothing would ever convince her that love was important, too.

“I’ll send Tawse or Fleming down to the bus with your bag,” she suggested, making the gesture out of a belated sense of guilt which was very short-lived. “You needn’t carry it.”

That was all. Tessa wondered if she had expected kindness at the last, the half-indulgent kindness of the victor towards the vanquished, and then she knew that she could not expect Hester MacDonald to react in any ordinary way. Hers was the deliberate and calculated cruelty of the warped nature whose bitterness strikes out in all directions because of the fancied injustices of the past, and she had no experience to help her deal with it.

She walked to Ardnashee, only to be told by a servant that Mrs. Haddow and her son had left for London the day before. Was there any message she would like to leave?

“I came to say good-bye?” Tessa said, “and thank you to Mrs. Haddow. Will you tell her?”

The girl nodded, thinking that she had never seen Miss Halliday looking so pale and unhappy before.

Tessa came away from Ardnashee with a keen sense of desertion, an admission of weakness which she made in her own heart, because it was more than foolish of her to suppose that a meeting with Mrs. Haddow would have made any difference to the present situation.

It would have meant her leaving Scotland on a small wave of warmth, however, but perhaps it was just as well that she had not seen Nigel’s mother, after all. It would have been difficult to say good-bye, and her heart had been twisted by so many silent good-byes that morning.

She made her way to the village and boarded the stationary bus. This was the end, the final step.

CHAPTER XI

MARGARET sat in the brake on the way home from Perth, staring straight in front of her and wondering what Andrew was thinking about. He had been unusually quiet for the two days they had spent away from Glenkeith, quiet even for Andrew, and now she knew that he had been thinking about Tessa.

She knew Andrew was in love with Tessa.

How did she know it? Was it instinct, she wondered, that had told her all these weeks ago when he had first brought Tessa back to the farm and her own heart had quailed at the sight of them together?

Tessa was nowhere to be seen when he parked the brake in the yard, but Hester came to meet them with a smile on her lips.

A smile of triumph? Margaret’s heart contracted at the thought.

“I’ve kept a meal for you,” Hester said. “I put it in the oven to keep it hot when I got your telephone message from Blairgowrie.”

They had decided to press on at Blairgowrie without waiting for lunch. Andrew had seemed anxious to get back to Glenkeith.

“Where’s Tessa?” he asked when he drew out his chair and saw three covers set instead of the usual four.

“She’s gone.” Hester’s mouth was thin. “She asked me to tell you. She’s never been really settled, Andrew. It was all too quiet for her here. Like her mother, she had a craving for the bright lights and the gay life of the Continent. Scotland was far too staid for her and she

didn’t like the idea of work. Maybe she thought that now your grandfather has gone she would be expected to do something about the house to justify her keep!”

“That’s not true!” For a split second before she had issued her impulsive challenge Margaret MacDonald had known a soul-searing temptation to keep quiet, to let her mother have her way, but even her despairing love for Andrew and the feeble hope that, with Tessa gone, he might turn in her direction for Glenkeith’s sake, could not obliterate Margaret’s inbred sense of justice. “You know that you would never let Tessa help in the house, not matter how often she offered! You know that you crushed her out, trying to make her feel not wanted, trying to make her so unhappy here that she would go!” She turned to Andrew, her face pale and set. “That’s what has happened, Drew!” she cried. “Tessa’s gone, but she has been driven away. She’s been hounded out of Glenkeith by my mother!”

“You fool!” Hester gasped. “You silly, sentimental fool!”

Andrew swung round on his heel and made for the door, and after a moment or two of crushing silence, Margaret followed him.

She found him in the yard starting up the brake.

“Drew—where are you going?”

“To look for Tessa.”

“Bring her back,” she whispered. “Bring her back with you, Drew.”

He did not answer her, but long afterwards, when she had married Nigel Haddow and gone to live at Ardnashee, Margaret knew that her hopes of Andrew’s love had perished completely in that moment. It was many months before she was able to accept the thought of Nigel and “second best” and to see that it still might be worth having. They had been brought up together, they both loved their Scottish heritage, and Margaret knew that she would make Nigel the kind of wife he needed.

Andrew drove towards Ardnashee in a state of mental torment, sure that Tessa must have gone when she had left

Glenkeith, only to be met by checkmate on the Haddows’ doorstep.

Miss Halliday had been there to say good-bye earlier in the day, he learned. The master and Mrs. Haddow were in London.

The thought crossed his mind that Tessa could be on her way to London to join Nigel and his mother and it pulled him up short.

He was on his way back to Glenkeith, repelled by the bewildering thought of its emptiness, but drawn back by the same sort of ties which eventually made Nigel return to Ardnashee. It was his home.

Tawse was in the forecourt, looking sheepish, he thought irritably.

“What is it, Tawse?”

“About Miss Tessa, sir.”

“Yes. Yes, man, what do you know?”

“She left the village on the twelve o’clock bus. I took her bag down to it on Mrs. MacDonald’s orders.”

He would kill Hester, Andrew thought, getting back into the brake, if any harm had come to Tessa!

He realized now what he had been struggling with for days, what Tessa had been trying to tell him about her mother through the portrait she had painted, but what did Veronique matter? What did the past matter, or the future either, if he had lost Tessa by his own blindness and stupidity?

The hard core of pride in him had gone. He loved her and the past was dead. If she could forgive him, he would bring her back with him, back to Glenkeith, where she belonged.

“Have you any idea, Tawse, where she was going?” He was past caring what the servants thought, past caring about anything apart from Tessa.

“To London, I think. She said something about getting the train at Ballater, but there isn’t one for half an hour, sir. It’s the only train after twelve.”

Andrew took one look at his watch and put his foot hard down on the accelerator. He had half an hour, and even that might not be enough, but if he missed the train at the railhead he would follow it to Aberdeen and to the devil with speed limits or anything else!

The train had gone when he drew the brake up on the station approach. He had seen the white curl of smoke from it as he had swung round the final bend, but he had come on. Well, the next stop was Aberdeen!

It was then that he saw Tessa. She was coming towards him out of the station with the ridiculous carpet bag she had brought with her from Italy, and she looked more like a deserted waif than ever.

“Tessa!”

He was out of the brake, taking the bag from her, throwing it into the back and holding the door open.

“I couldn’t go,” she said.

“Get in.” He stepped back to make way for her. “Get in and tell me afterwards.”

She looked small and pinched and cold and infinitely forlorn sitting there beside him, but they had reached the entrance to the glen before he pulled up and turned towards her.

“Now,” he said, “tell me why you went away.”

“I couldn’t go away.” The thin thread of her voice almost escaped him. “I had made a promise, you see.”

“What promise?”

The blood was beating in a wild tumult through his veins, singing in his head, and he longed to crush her in his arms, but he gave her time to realize that she was safe, that she was going back to Glenkeith, in spite of Hester and in spite of everything.

“It was your grandfather,” Tessa whispered. “He said: ‘Never leave Glenkeith until Andrew himself asks you to go!’ ”

“Because he knew,” Andrew said, taking her into his arms with all the passionate hunger of an intense nature that has waited too long for its complete fulfilment. “He knew that I loved you, Tessa. He was wise enough to see it, even with all the obstacles in the way.”

He crushed her to him, kissing her fiercely and then tenderly, letting his strong fingers stray through her softly-ruffled hair with a fond wonderment.

“Andrew,” she said at last, when the sun had gone down behind the green shoulder of Morven Hill and all the mountains in the west were aflame, “when did you get the letters?”

“What letters? You went without leaving any word. That was the part that stuck in my throat most—going without a word.”

Tessa put her head on his shoulder.

“There was a letter,” she said. “One from my mother and one from me, but it doesn’t matter about them just now. I’ll let you read them both some day.”

It was weeks before he knew the truth, because Tessa hugged the fact to her that he had loved her in spite of everything, and in those weeks much that had been Glenkeith was changed.

Margaret went with her mother to the cottage at Rosehearty to see her settled there with her increased allowance which Andrew granted her on condition that she would leave the farm, and Tessa and Andrew were married the same day.

It was a quiet wedding in the village church at eight o’clock in the morning, but most of the village turned out to see it and wish the happy pair good-luck.

Andrew drove away from Glenkeith with a lightness in his heart which he had never experienced before, except, perhaps, on the journey to Amalfi. And they were going to Amalfi again! He put his arm round his wife’s shoulder, drawing her to him as he turned the brake towards Aberdeen, where they would join the south-bound train.

“Whose idea was it, anyway, that we should go back to Italy for our honeymoon?” he asked.