The House of the Laird (18 page)

But Karen was seeing her way all too clearly. In fact, it was the only possible way ahead of her, and at the bottom of her heart she had known this for weeks. Fiona Barrington was right when she said that there was nothing about Karen to hold a man like Iain—in fact, the only really amazing thing was that he had ever been attracted to her at all. And, of course, he hadn
’
t, really. It had been pity in the beginning, and now he probably felt responsible for her, and at all costs he was determined to go through with this idea of marrying her because she had already shown how little she was capable of looking after herself.

But, in time, the tie between them would pall abominably, and also he would have lost Fiona for the second time. Just now he might be feeling sore with Fiona—secretly willing to punish her—but when he awoke to the full realization that by his own act he had put another barrier between them, he was almost certain to be horrified by what he had done. And by that time it would be too late!

Karen, viewing the whole matter as calmly and dispassionately as if she had never had any feelings whatsoever, and was incapable of even a twinge of self-pity—odd though it was, she felt rather like something that had been cast up by the tide, and without enough energy to be vitally concerned about anything so purely personal as her own interests—knew that there was only one thing for her to do, and she was going to do it.

She went to her window and looked out. The stars still seemed to be shining thinly through a curtain of mist. There were hardly any cars left in the drive, the music of the orchestra had died away, and the house itself was becoming very silent.

She slipped out of her lovely white evening gown and the tartan sash that had filled her with so much pride all evening, and putting on a dressing-gown lay down on the outside of her bed to wait until the house was completely silent, and the daylight was not far away. Her wrist-watch said four o
’
clock, which meant she had another full hour, and more, before dawn began to break. But in the interval she did not dare to close her
eyes, even if she felt like sleep—which she did not!—and as soon as the first faintly greyish light began to steal in through her windows she slipped like a shadow from the bed and started to dress feverishly.

She would have to leave all her things behind—but that didn
’
t matter, because they were not really her things. Only the heavy tweed coat which Aunt Horry had had made for her she decided to wear, as a protection for one thing against the raw chill of the morning, but chiefly because Aunt Horry
had
had it made for her, and it would be something belonging to these past few weeks that she could keep and treasure.

She felt that the writing of a note to leave behind her was a gesture which she disliked because of the drama which clung to it, but it had to be done because no one must suffer any anxiety on her account, and minds had to be set at rest. The letter (addressed to Aunt Horry and not to Iain) said simply that she had made up her mind to leave because after much thought she was certain it was the wisest course, and offered thanks to her hostess for all that she had do
ne
for her. Then she placed it in a prominent position on the dressing-table and turned to leave.

She spared herself that last look round the room, with its security and its comforts, which might have caused her to weaken, and because she was so anxious that no one should be disturbed by her departure or attempt to prevent it she took off her shoes and carried them until she reached the bottom of the wide staircase.

The hall was almost in complete darkness, because as yet the dawn light had not found its way into it, and she did not dare to switch on any electric light in order to unfasten the great front door. This meant that she had to fumble in the gloom with latches and bolts, tugging at them breathlessly, and
w
ith fear in her heart lest someone should overhear and appear at the top of the staircase.

But no one did overhear, and the bolts were kept so well
-
oiled that, despite their cumbersomeness, after a few moments they yielded to her tugs, and the front door at last opened so suddenly that it took her a little by surprise.

The cold, dank air of a misty March morning rushed in and past her face, and she shivered a little after the warmth o
f
the hall. But in a moment she was outside, her breathing not quite so agonized, the rawness
and the coldness causing her to forget for a moment the urgency of all this.

And then she closed the door silently behind her. Spirals of cotton-wool-like vapor drifted towards her,
wreathing about her like gossamer scarves, and she realized that it would probably be very misty out on the moor. But she had only to cross a very small portion of it in order the reach the village and Nannie McBain
’
s house. And once at Nannie McBain
’
s the only thing she had to do was to persuade her old nurse somehow or other to get a taxi that would take her t
o
the station at Inverlochie.

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

But although she w
as certain that by this time she knew fairly well the portion of moor she had to cross, having walked on it most days when it was fine, it was astonishing how a thin curtain of mist could give it an entirely different appearance. And in places the mist was not so thin—in fact, there were pockets where it was quite thick. Karen
’
s first indication that she might not be following the right path was received when she found herself near the edge of a reed-fringed pond, which was certainly not normally encountered on a walk to the village.

The pond looked dark and stagnant in the eerie grey light, and the reeds bending back from it were brown as yet. Karen turned away hurriedly, and found herself confronted by a couple of moorland sheep that looked positively enormous as they loomed up in front of her. She heard a frightened bleat, and then
both the sheep bounded away, and once again she was alone and now all but hemmed in by a cloying blanket of dense white mist.

She wasn
’
t really alarmed at first, because she felt sure that if she kept on walking she would be bound to arrive in the midst of another comparatively clear patch before long, when she could take her bearings and look for something familiar, such as the cairn of stones she had passed so often, or the sudden steep declivity in the ground at the foot
of which was a shepherd
’
s hut, protected from the prevailing wind.

Whether it was because she had already arrived on lower ground, she could not tell, but the mist grew thicker with every step she took, and at last she felt
c
ertain that she was going round in circles, because she again came up against the edge of the pond after keeping moving for about a quarter of an hour. Even then she was not really alarmed, because the mist must thin as the sun rose higher in the sky—or so, in her ignorance of that part of the world, she thought.

But after walking for another half an hour and arriving nowhere she began to be aware of an uneasy cold feeling inside her, and to realize that she had behaved in the stupidest manner possible, rushing out into the early light without paying any real heed to the weather, or giving a thought to the fact that these were the Scottish Highlands. For all she knew to the contrary the moor might go on indefinitely, and even if it didn
’
t, in this blanketing mist her hopes of finding herself suddenly back upon the
road were probably dim in the extreme.

She was also vexed to the point of tears because once again she had proved herself incapable of arriving at the end of a journey she had set out to accomplish without help from anyone else. She had left London without much thought when she was still quite unfit for travel and had involved Iain in all sorts of unnecessary complications because of her very lack of thought, and that should at least have been a lesson to her. But now, unless she was very lucky, there
w
as
no one about who could help her, and if the midst remained obstinate and refused to lift, how on earth was she going to get to Nannie McBain
’
s cottage?

She recalled scraps of conversation she had listened to at various times—even as far back as the times she had stayed with Ellen McBain—to the effect that the mist sometimes hung about the mountain tops for days, so why should it not linger here on the moor, which, after
a
ll, was a considerable distance above sea level?

In desperation she pressed on, realizing that but for the thickness of her good tweed coat she would be shivering uncontrollably, and that already her hair was wet through and clinging in soaking tendrils to her brow and at the back of her neck. She began to be so tired, too, that she longed to sit down on every hummock of grass she came across, but she knew that one of the surest ways to catch another
chill
was to sit down for any length of time in her cold, wet state on ground that would be even more wet. And as, once she sat down, she might not find it so easy t
o
drag herself to her feet again, she fought against her weaker inclinations and kept on.

She might not have been quite so easily exhausted, she realized, if she had had some breakfast inside her before she started off, having had nothing to eat
since
dinner the previous night—for Fiona Barrington had spoiled any appetite she might have had for the wonderful cold supper which had been served soon after midnight—and it was now
,
by her watch, very nearly ten o
’
clock.

She had been wandering on the moor for over three hours!

It seemed to her incredible. She was also feeling a little vague about things generally. She kept seeing vivid mental pictures of Iain, fresh and shaved and alert in his well-cut tweeds, on his way down to breakfast at Auchenwiel, and Fiona joining him at the well-loaded table. He would help her to dishes fr
o
m the sideboard, and she, too, would be wearing beautifully-cut tweeds, and perhaps a gold charm bracelet on her slender wrist, and pearl studs in her shapely, shell-like ears. And probably
neither of them was yet aware that Karen was not in her room, because the maid might have thought she was sleeping late when she did not answer her knock, and left her undisturbed. People did sleep late after a dance which had kept them up and presumably enjoying themselves until the small hours, and only the Mrs. Barringtons of this world were possessed of the amount of energy to rise in time to join the one man who most interested them at the breakfast table.

It was girls like Karen, who had been ill, and who were cosseted in case they should become ill again, who were a nuisance to other people because of the amount of care it was necessary to expend on them, and who would make a man like Iain feel that he had been unfairly trapped into marriage if the life-guardianship of such a girl should fall to his lot.

Karen found that she was stumbling a little as she forced herself to go forward, and she began to long almost feverishly for the power to pierce the endless wall of mist with her straining eyes.

Then at last, she came up against something new—or it was new when she first caught sight of it, and found herself leaning partly over it. It was a fence, and as the mist was playing one of those tricks when it pretended to thin she could see that it enclosed some sort of a wild and tangled garden—the garden of a cottage!

Feverishly, not daring to hope, she felt her way along the fence until she came to a tiny, swinging, open gate, and passing through it, she soon discovered she was on a hard brick path which led straight to a front door, looking like a hollow cavity in the mist as she gazed at it. And then, when she reached the door, exhausted though she was, and well-nigh sobbing as a result of her fear that .the cottage might dissolve into nothing but a kind of mirage, she knew that she recognized the door
and
that the entire front of the cottage—or as much as could be seen of it—was also familiar to her. She had seen it for the first time on a Sunday afternoon about a couple of weeks before, and for that reason alone it was the most blessedly familiar cottage she could never have come upon. It meant that at
least she was no longer lost, and that inside, unless the door was locked, there would be shelter for her.

But the door was not locked. It yielded to her touch just as it had yielded to Iain on that golden Sunday afternoon, and inside it was just as empty as it had been then, with the bench before the fire, although there was no little pile of kindling and faggots on the stone hearth waiting and ready to be coaxed into a blaze.

But the bench was the most welcome sight Karen had seen for a long time, and she staggered towards it and dropped down on it with the knowledge that after another quarter of an hour out there on the moor she would not have had the strength to reach it. She would probably have fallen in her tracks and become so numbed with the cold and the misery of it all that anything might have happened to her. But, as it was, she was safe again—safe from the risk of exposure, from the frightening desolation of the moor and the horror of being lost on it, and safe from the nightmare of keeping moving in a world where everything around her was still and dark.

By degrees, as she sat there, her exhaustion passed sufficiently for her to realize even more keenly than she had done how much she had been spared. For even if the mist did not disperse for another twenty-four hours, at least she would be able to find her way back when it did lift, and in the meantime she had a roof over her head, and four stout walls to enclose her.

After a time she began to look about her, and saw that there was another door which probably led to a small back room. When she penetrated into that room she found that it was hardly more than a store room, but inside it was a decrepit oil stove, with a box of matches on a shelf.

On hands and knees she discovered thankfully that the stove did
work, and also that it was filled with oil—whoever used the cottage was plainly i
n
the habit of keeping it supplied with the means of heat, at least—and she carried it back into the bigger room, where it quickly began to remove the chill from the atmosphere. Then she returned to the store to conduct an exhaustive search for anything else that might be of comfort to her just then, and found a brown earthenware teapot full of stale tea
-
leaves, a tin of tea and some sugar, but no milk or anything else apart from a tin kettle filled with water.

She found that the business of emptying the teapot, heating the water and making the tea occupied her shaking hands for some little while, and for the time being she thought of nothing but her urgent desire for something hot and reviving inside her. And the tea, drunk out of a cracked cup which she had also discovered, did banish the chill from her weary limbs, and acted like a renewed lease of life, especially while she was thankfully sipping it. although afterwards she felt so pleasantly drowsy that she longed to curl up on the hard, bare floor and go to sleep.