The House of the Laird (11 page)

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

T
his Sunday afternoon t
he sun shone, and a lark sang high in the air. They trod briskly over the new green grass that
w
as forcing its way through the dead bracken, and occasionally Iain looked sideways at Karen. She was wearing the new tweed coat Aunt Horatia had had made for her, and her shining curls were free to the wind and sun.

Whenever Karen also turned impulsively sideways and met the faintly perplexed, faintly amused grey eyes that were resting on her, she wondered whether he had recognized that the coat was new and that it was definitely not in the same class as her own cheap tweed, and whether perhaps she ought to tell him about his aunt’s generosity. Then she decided that that could come later, when she made her appeal for a
return to normality
^:
and all the appalling dullness that normality would inevitably mean for her.

Just for the moment, while they swung together side by side across the crisp turf, her courage failed her, and she was glad to give way to weakness and postpone the serious conversation that she herself had scheduled for that afternoon.

When they came to rough or uneven bits of ground Iain took her arm, and she wanted to shut her eyes and treasure the feel of his firm fingers holding her strongly by the elbow. She thought that if they could only go on like this through life—even if there were no Craigie House, and no Auchenwiel, and not very much money or the means of making life secure—then all the days ahead of her would be a kind of benison, and all she would ever ask for.

Once she did give way to weakness for a few moments and shut her eyes, and when she opened
them again she caught him looking at her in concern.

“Are you feeling tired?” he asked.

“No—no.”

A cloud had swept across the face of the sun, and as the wind blew strongly in their faces it carried a few drops of rain with it. Iain swore softly, and looked around for some sort of shelter.

“There’s going to be a shower,” he said, “and you’ll get wet, and it’s all my fault. My wits must have been wandering.”

Then they both noticed a tumbledown-looking cottage standing off the beaten track only a few hundred yards away from them. At first glance it might have been a shepherd’s hut, or something in the nature of an outbuilding, but it was not. It had once been a strongly built grey stone cottage, and even now the roof was good, and the panes of glass in the windows were intact. There was a tiny
unkempt
wilderness of a garden in front of it, and Iain took Karen more firmly by the elbow and led her up to the front door. When he turned the handle it opened, and just as the rain came down in earnest, driving in its usual uninhibited fashion across the moor, they were able to seek shelter in a small dark room which smelled strongly of damp and wood smoke.

Karen found her handkerchief and wiped the rain-drops from her face, and she shook them at the same time from her hair. As Iain looked down at her he saw that her cheeks were pink as a result of that hurried dash up the garden path, and her eyes were not only very blue but shining.

“Well, we were lucky!” he said, and looked about him at the humble interior of the cottage. That it had been recently occupied was obvious, for although it was bereft of furniture there was a wooden bench in front of the fireplace, ash in the grate, and a pile of wood on the stone hearth. He took one look at the wood and gave vent to a low
pleased whistle, and then he added:
“
Indeed, I think we were very lucky, for although this shower won’t last long we might as well warm ourselves up while we’re waiting.”

And while Karen watched him he bent and filled the grate with sticks, and ignited them by means of an old
newspaper which was lying conveniently to hand, and a box of matches from his o
w
n pocket. As the flame sprang up the chimney and the dark little room became irradiated with ruddy golden light he looked up at the girl and smiled at her. “How’s that for service?” he asked.

She smiled back at him. She was a little bemused by the suddenness with which they had been forced t
o
desert the open and, until a few minutes before, smiling moorland, land find themselves in this modest abode which, although it plainly no longer fulfilled the functions of an ordinary cottage home, was accustomed to providing shelter for-whoever it was who had kept the room supplied with kindling and firewood. And at the same time she was fascinated by the movements of the tweed-clad figure
who
had so promptly taken advantage of the facilities that were offered them and brought the little room to life with color and warmth, and watched him dusting his hands on his snowy cambric handkerchief with the awareness that her heart was thumping rather wildly, and that, words would not come easily to her lips. But he
did not seem to notice this, although he did look at her rather keenly before he pulled forward the bench for her to sit down
.
And when she sat down and stretched her hands to the blaze, not so much because she felt the need of the warmth
but
because she was conscious of the necessity to do something with them, he took the vacant place beside her and observed:

“Although this house is empty and a bit derelict it’s probably used by a shepherd, or someone of the
sort, and I hope he won’t feel very badly treated
when he discovers how much of his store of wood we’ve used.”

Outside the rain lashed against the windows, and the sky had darkened so much that without the firelight they would have found it difficult to see the outlines of one another’s faces. But as it was, while hailstones bounced in the garden, and lightning ripped across the sky, and one or two claps of thunder filled the air, Karen, was all too painfully conscious that the vivid flush in her cheeks was being observed with interest by the man beside her, and that he was indulging in an absorbed study of her expression.

“Sure you won’t try a cigarette?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“No, thank you.”

“I think you ought to cultivate a few vices,” he remarked in an amused tone. “You really are a little puritan, aren’t you? You hardly drink, and you don’t smoke, and it’s obvious you were very, very nicely brought up.” She looked at him for a moment as if she was not quite certain whether he was joking or whether he was serious, and then when she saw that there was merely the faintest suspicion of a twinkle in his eye she said to herself, trying to gather together all the shreds of her courage:

“Now—now’s the time to talk to him! All that I’ve planned to say ought to be said now, for I’ll never have a better opportunit
y...”

And then as she still peeped at him timidly she saw that the twinkle had abruptly vanished from his eyes, and he demanded so quietly that he startled her:

“What is it you want to get off your chest,
Karen?”

“I—I
—”
she stammered.

“It’s been bothering you all the afternoon, hasn’t it?” he suggested.

“Well, not exactly—”

And then once again his expression changed, and he leaned a little towards her. In the
fire glow
his eyes were dark and strange—there was something almost mesmeric about them—and his voice had a queer, mesmeric quality, too, as he murmured:

“Do you know that we’ve been engaged—in the eyes of a good many people, at least—for very
nearly two months, and apart from saluting you in a chaste fashion on arrival at Auchenwiel
I’ve never yet
discovered what it’s like to kiss you?”

And before she could draw breath to answer him in any way at all his arms were about her and he
was holding her close—so close that she could feel the violent beating of his heart—and he put his fingers under her chin and forced her face up and
covered her mouth with his own.

If his
heart was beating
w
ildly, hers behaved like a frantic mill-race once the moment of surprise which caused her to remain quiescent in his arms passed, and although his lips were hard and almost ruthless and seemed determined to draw her very soul out of her body, and her breathing, seemed temporarily suspended, by the time it had
gone on for several long-drawn-out and utterly unbelievable seconds a kind of shivering ecstasy was flooding her whole being, and she was clinging
to him,
and there was a quivering response in the lips from which he at last” abruptly removed his own.

He looked down at her as she lay against him, as limp as if she had been dissolved into his being and become a part of it, and his eyes might have been
black as he asked a little harshly:

“And do you still want to say all that you had made up your mind to say to me this afternoon?”

She shook her head. She managed to articulate the whispered word “No,” and instantly his arms tightened about her like steel bands.

“Is t
h
is a change of front, or are you no longer in any
d
oubt of me?”

She hid her face against him.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do.” His voice was almost stern. “I asked you to become engaged to me in earnest before you left Craigie House, and just because I didn’t put it in a way that appealed to you you preferred to credit me with quixotic notions, and to discount altogether the fact that I was ready to let you tramp all over my heart from the moment you collapsed like a piece of thistledown in my arms at Inverlochie station!” He buried his face in her hair, and she felt him quivering against her. “Oh, Karen, Karen, Karen!—do you still believe that I want this engagement of ours to be nothing but a pretence? Do you still think I could let you go away from me and lose you altogether?”

She lifted her face. It was very white, and her eyes were enormous,
and strangely luminous at the same time.

“But—but,” she stammered unbelievingly, “you can’t mean—you can’t mean that you—that you
—”

“That I what, sweetheart?”

“
That you want”—she swallowed, and her voic
e
trembled—
“
that you really want us to marry
—
?”

“I can’t think of anything that I want out of life more than that,” he replied, so soberly that she shut her eyes and wondered whether she was delirious. Perhaps she had caught another chill and her temperature was skyrocketing? Or she was dreaming a wonderfully colorful dream from which she would very shortly awaken! And then she felt his fingers gently stroking her cheek, and he whispered, very near to her ear: “And you? Would you still rather we went on pretending?”

“I made up my mind days ago that we’d got to stop the pretence,” she whispered back, some of the torment the decision had filled her with in her voice.

“Because you couldn’t bear the thought of marrying me?”

“Because I never dared to hope you’d ever want to marry me!”

His arms crushed her so close at this simple confession that they almost hurt her.

“Oh, my darling—my little love!” he exclaimed. “Why else did I so determinedly keep you at Craigie House until Aunt Horry whisked you away from me? And why was I so bitterly resentful because she did whisk you away from me? You must have known I didn’t want you to go! That night when I rang you up you sounded lost and forlorn, and I wanted to drive over at once and demand you back. I think I very nearly did...
”

“I wish you had,” she breathed into his neck. “But the sound of your voice that night was so wonderful I was almost happy afterwards. I could even bear being parted from you.”

“Then you didn’t really want to part from me?”

“
Want
to?” She looked up at him at last, fearlessly, and her eyes were like blue stars. “Don’t you understand?” she asked very softly, as if she was dedicating herself to something that awed her more than anything in life had ever awed her before. “I love you! I’ve loved you, I think, from the moment you
left the porter to look after your luggage and came across and helped me pick up the money I’d dropped!”

“And yet you said ‘No’ when I asked you to marry me!
”

She smiled at him tremulously.

“I wanted so badly to say ‘Yes.’
”

“Sweetheart”—his mouth drew close to hers again—
“
I loved you even before you loved me! I loved you as soon as my taxi stopped behind yours and I saw you standing t
h
ere so badly in need of someone, to take care of you! I blame myself because I let you travel alone that night.”

“You couldn’t do
anything
else,” she excused him. “We were strangers to one another.”

“We’re not strangers now.”

“No,
”
she breathed, and turned her lips t
o
his.

Outside the sharp sudden ferocity
of
rain and thunder and darkening sky spent itself, the sun shone forth again, and the sky was once again a clear, spring blue. Inside the fire ceased crackling, and the little room became lighted by the first beams of reappearing sunlight, which found their way through the tiny window and made a golden aureole of Karen’s hair.

Iain looked down at it where it strayed like a spun-silk cloud over his shoulder, and his fingers moved in it wonderingly.

“Do you know what we’re going
to do now?” he asked. “We’re going to get married almost im
m
ediately and you’re coming back with me to Craigie House!”

Karen’s eyes gave away the fact that she had not
yet grasped the wonder of this situation, or begun to be absolutely convinced that she was not dreaming. They were sitting side by side on the wooden
bench before the dying fire, and his arms were hold
i
ng her close to him, while his grey eyes were so filled with tenderness as they looked down at her that her senses were inclined to swim, but she could not believe that it was all quite real. She was too insignificant a
person
f
or anything as
wonderful as this to be really happening to her—even Aunt Horry had been astonished when she had first seen her and tried to reconcile her appearance, and her lack of sophistication and poise, her lack even—or so it must have appeared to her at that time—of a dress sense, with the fact that her nephew proposed to marry her! He who had once been engaged to marry Fiona Barrington, possessor of everything Karen lacked!