The Last of the Kintyres (3 page)

“You only met him for a moment or two,” Elizabeth pointed out. “And anyway, we managed to survive it! We may not have to meet him here, you know.”

“No,” Tony agreed absently. “I can’t see anyone who might answer the old man’s description,” he added as the carriage door swung open. “Supposing we’re not met? What then?”

“We’ll just have to find our own way to Dromore,” Elizabeth decided, although she was suddenly and most acutely aware of disappointment. “I suppose there’s a bus to the village.”

One glance down the long platform before their fellow travellers had started to swarm off the train had shown her that, at least, Hew Kintyre was not waiting there to greet them. Had she really expected him to come, she wondered, or was it only because everything about this mountain-girt stronghold with its face turned to the sea reminded her of
him
most forcibly?

Tony began to collect their luggage. He travelled untidily, with numerous small bags, and he had brought along some old fishing tackle and a bicycle, which she offered to recover from the luggage van.

When she returned to the carriage most of the other travellers had reached the ticket barrier and there was no sign of anyone left waiting on the platform.

“It looks pretty much as if we’re to be our own reception committee,” Tony remarked, coming up with a porter. “Perhaps Hew Kintyre had a say in the matter, after all.”

Elizabeth, still keenly aware of her disappointment, turned to him with a questioning look.

“He doesn’t really want us here, does he?” Tony said. “I thought that was fairly obvious when we met.”

“We’re not going to worry about that,” she answered defensively. “And anyway, I don’t think he’d bother to say we shouldn’t be met. It wouldn’t gain him anything.”

“It might give him a lot of satisfaction, though, and he might succeed in freezing you out,” Tony answered. “I dare say he could see at a glance how sensitive you were as soon as he met you.” His eyes scanned the scattered groups beyond the barrier and came to rest on a line of parked vehicles in the sunshine outside. “I suppose we’d better see if we can grab a taxi.”

“We can’t afford a taxi all the way to Dromore,” Elizabeth cautioned. “It’s a considerable distance, and Ardlamond Lodge is well beyond the village. Right on the coast, in fact.”

“Are you for Ardlamond?” the porter asked, overhearing their conversation and touching his cap. “You’ll be met, I’m thinking,” he added before Elizabeth could say anything. “The car will be for you. It’s generally parked in the yard.”

They came out into the sunshine just as a large white car swung into the parking enclosure. Tony looked at it and whistled his approval.

“That’s something!” he declared appreciatively. “It’s a Cadillac.”

Elizabeth was looking beyond the lines of the big American car to the girl driving it. She was an arresting-looking person, faultlessly dressed in cream shantung, with a large black hat shading her eyes, and her deep sun-tan suggested that she had spent time in a warmer climate than the west coast of Scotland. Her vividly red lips were parted in a half smile as she looked about her, as if she expected to see someone she knew.

To Elizabeth’s utter surprise she hesitated only for a fraction of a second before she got out from behind the wheel and came directly towards them.

“You must be Tony and Elizabeth Stanton,” she suggested, holding out an immaculately-gloved hand. “I’m sorry to be so late, but I had quite a lot of shopping to do and your train was in right to time.” Recovering from her surprise, Elizabeth found herself taking the slim, gloved hand and wondering why she did not like this newcomer very well. It was ridiculous, of course, to form such a swift opinion about anyone, and only a few minutes before she had been telling Tony that first impressions were sometimes misleading.

Tony, for his part, seemed completely taken aback by the encounter and left her to do the talking.

“Of course you don’t know who I am,” the tall girl said before she could think of anything to say. “My name’s Caroline Hayler. I ought to have explained right away that I’m a near neighbour of Hew Kintyre’s. Hew was in rather a spot, so I offered to help by coming to meet you.”

Elizabeth managed to say “How do you do?” thinking how frigid her voice sounded all of a sudden, and Miss Hayler laughed.

This must all seem rather odd to you,” she agreed, “but there’s rather bad news from Ardlamond. Sir Ronald has had a stroke and is quite seriously ill. Hew had to go to the Lodge right away and, of course, there was no question of his being able to come to Oban. Hence me!”

She gave Elizabeth a quick, calculating look which appeared to dismiss her as a rival, but suddenly she looked again.

“I had no idea you were grown up,” she said. “Hew rather implied that you were both very young.”

“I don’t know what impression Mr. Kintyre formed of us,” Elizabeth answered stiffly, “but I certainly didn’t expect him to meet us off the train. We were told that we would be met but I expected Sir Ronald—”

She hesitated, fully aware now of all that had happened in the interval of their journey from London. “This is such a dreadful thing to have happened to him,” she said, forgetting her momentary chagrin. “I think you said he was rather seriously ill, Miss Hayler?”

“Mrs. Hayler,” the tall girl corrected her surprisingly. “I’m afraid it was quite impossible for Hew or Sir Ronald to send anyone else to meet you,” she added. “Ardlamond was in chaos when I left there this morning, and I offered to collect you in case you would find difficulty in getting there. It’s quite off the beaten track, you know.”

There was a thin look about her mouth in repose, Elizabeth thought, which made her look older than she had seemed at first glance.

“Do you think we ought to go in the circumstances?” she asked. “If Sir Ronald is so very ill?”

“Where else could you go?” Caroline Hayler asked the question with barely-concealed irritation. “I understand that you have come to stay for some time—that you are Sir Ronald’s wards.”

“My brother is Sir Ronald’s ward,” Elizabeth corrected her. “I am twenty-two.”

Again Mrs. Hayler looked her surprise, although this time she made no definite comment. Instead, she glanced in Tony’s direction.

“Is this all the baggage you have?” she asked, surveying the motley array at his feet. “Or have you a trunk as well?”

“No, it’s all here—in bits and pieces, I’m afraid!” Tony smiled, and Elizabeth’s heart gave a strange little nervous lurch. He seemed completely bewitched by this stranger. “Are you sure you can stow it all away without it inconveniencing you too much?” he added.

Caroline Hayler laughed.

“Of course we can!” she agreed pleasantly. “The boot is enormous. Please move my t
h
ings around to suit yourself,” she added, opening the wide flap at the back of the car. “All sorts of odds and ends appear to accumulate in a car this size!”

Tony was obviously impressed, and now Elizabeth could smile at the inevitability of it all. What boy wouldn’t be bowled over when confronted with such a car?

“This is very kind of you, Mrs. Hayler,” she said while they waited for Tony to stack the last of their luggage into the boot. “I hope we’re not taking you back to Dromore before you had planned to go?”

“Not really,” Caroline Hayler said indifferently. “I’ve been in Oban since before lunch.” She took a gold cigarette case from the large patent-leather handbag she carried and offered it to Elizabeth. “Do you smoke?”

“Not very often,” Elizabeth said, “but I feel as if I need one now. This has been quite a shock.”

“It has to all of us,” Mrs. Hayler agreed, offering the case to Tony before she extracted a cigarette for herself and fitted it carefully into a gold-and-onyx holder. “And more especially to Hew,” she added. “He hadn’t counted on taking over his father’s responsibilities, you see, for a very long time.”

She paused, inhaling deeply, and to Elizabeth it seemed that she was deliberately allowing the necessary time to elapse for her carefully chosen words to sink in. Whatever Caroline Hayler’s position was at Ardlamond, she was evidently intent upon conveying the true situation to them straight away.

“You know, of course, that Sir Ronald has been—slightly muddled in his thinking since his wife’s death,” she went on. “He lived in the past a great deal, as old people generally do. The distant past
.
” She shot Elizabeth a quick look. “That’s no doubt why he felt that he owed some sort of allegiance to your mother—”

Elizabeth flushed scarlet.

“Mrs. Hayler,” she asked idly as Tony shut the boot, “did—someone ask you to put this point of view to us, or are you doing it entirely of your own accord?”

“On my own accord, up to a point,” Caroline Hayler admitted studying the tip of her cigarette. “But I think I know how Hew feels. After all, he will be responsible for you now, you know, and he really has plenty of troubles of his own, both at Ardlamond and Whitefarland. He farms at Whitefarland
,”
she added by way of explanation.

“I didn’t know,” Elizabeth answered in a small, tight voice. “And I didn’t expect him to have responsibilities where Ardlamond was concerned. Perhaps,” she added hopefully, “he won’t have to shoulder the added burden of Ardlamond, after all. Sir Ronald may get better.”

“We must hope so, although he could never be completely cured.” Caroline Hayler heaved a sigh which might have been one of regret. “Oh, dear! I’m afraid I’ve spoken completely out of turn,” she added repentantly, “but you must put it down to impulse and the fact that I’m very, very
fond of Hew. In fact,” she confided on some sort of impulse, “we should have married long ago, and that would have taken care of everything. We were engaged,” she added, “before my present marriage, but in those days we were
both
so hopelessly poor!”

Things had so obviously changed for Mrs. Hayler that Elizabeth found nothing to say. She had married since those “hopelessly poor” days, and the Cadillac and the model suit and the expensive accessories were the fruits of that marriage. But where was Mr. Hayler? Waiting at Ardlamond or at Dromore, perhaps, for his wife’s return. Caroline Hayler had said that she was Hew Kintyre’s nearest neighbour and there seemed to be a certain amount of friendly intimacy between them, but she could not ask this woman for the details of her friendship with Hew. It seemed only too plain that he had not
min
ced matters when he had discussed them together with his other “responsibilities”.

Tony came round from the back of the car and quite deliberately Caroline Hayler made room for him in front. Elizabeth took the back seat beside a white French poodle, which she had not noticed until then. It sprang up from the floor when she got in and tried to lick her face.

“Down, Louise! Down, you bad dog!” Caroline reprimanded. “The lady doesn’t like to be kissed by strange little girls!”

Tony laughed obligingly, settling himself in the front seat with obvious satisfaction, and Caroline drove away.

Elizabeth’s impressions of that first drive along the lovely, indented coastline of Lome were necessarily blurred because of her anxiety about the man they had come all this distance to meet. Already Sir Ronald Kintyre had become a personality to her and she had allowed her mind to drift back in fancy down the years to those far-off days when he and her mother had been youthful sweethearts.

What a love story it must have been, cradled here among these everlasting hills with their deep blue lochs opening out to the sea and a myriad islands set along the horizon for them to sail among!

Yet nothing had come of their brief idyll. They had gone their separate ways, and now their children were meeting, after thirty years
...

She thrust the thought of Hew Kintyre from her. How obvious he had made it that he did not share such sentimental illusions about their meeting! Yet she felt more sure, with every minute that passed, that Sir Ronald had always cherished a very tender memory of his first love. And once or twice she had surprised a gentle smile in her mother’s eyes as she had spoken about Ardlamond and the past. There had been that day when she had been reading aloud from the book of poems and had come unexpectedly on five lines which had caused her to close it almost immediately.

“
I
shall be telling this with a
sigh,”
she had read

“
‘
Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood and
I—

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference’.’’

“We’re
almo
st
there now,” Caroline Hayler announced. “You can see the islands out in the firth today. They’re rather lovely with the sun on them” Away to the west the Islands lay like a string of green beads on a bed of blue-green water—Seil and Easedale and Luing and Shona and the distant, misty Isles of the Sea. Scarba was a black bastion to the south, but Mull had captured the sun and her sheer red basalt cliffs reared up against a sky of flame and turquoise with the yellow banners of departing day trailing across it like golden veils. They lay across the brow of Ben More and trailed lightly on Ben Talla, drifting down into the great glen which cleaved the island in two.

It was sheer magic, and Elizabeth filled her heart with it, knowing that this was all and more than she had expected of her mother’s country.

The road they had taken wound round the head of a loch and climbed and wound again, an easy, meandering road which finally turned towards the west, straight into the setting sun.

For a moment that strange flaming light blinded her and then, looking down towards the sea, she saw Ardlamond Lodge for the first time.

It stood on a promontory above a small, secluded bay closed in by a long green island from the full rush of the Atlantic tide, and it looked so remote that time itself seemed arrested there. Gulls lifted and wheeled from the island’s pinnacles of rock, flying towards the land, and she seemed to hear an echo of their incessant crying deep in her heart.