Highland Mist (11 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Charles
returned to London on Monday morning, but before he left he asked Toni to forgive him if he had been bad-tempered during the weekend, and told her he would go on hoping that one day she would fall in love with him and marry him.

“I realised I took you by surprise the other night,” he said. “Having just realised something important myself I thought you would have realised it, too ... for it all stemmed from that little adventure of ours up here in February.” They were standing on the shore of the loch, and she had been talking somewhat nervously about the beauty of the scenery when he made this second appeal to her. “Toni, I must have been waiting all my life for you.” His eyes held that wry look that touched her because it was not like Charles to look as if something was beyond him, and he was very much afraid it might remain so. “Waiting for you to grow up. Only I didn’t know it!”

She wondered why it was that she couldn’t hurl herself into his arms and say, “Oh, Charles, I’ve been waiting all my life for you to become aware of me!”

But she couldn’t, because it was no longer true. Two months ago she could have said it ... but not now! A kiss had altered all that ... a kiss and a pair of hard blue eyes that so seldom softened. In fact, they had only softened for her when she was ill.

She said hurriedly:

“Charles, it’s no use. No use your hoping—”

“That you’ll grow up?”

“I am grown up, and I like you enormously, but I’ll never think of you as other than a—a friend. A very dear friend!” she added, even more hurriedly.

“Yet, if I’d lifted my finger a few weeks ago, you’d have fallen like a ripe plum at my feet?” with great dryness.

She was shocked because she knew he was speaking the truth. That night on the train, for instance ... she had wanted him so badly to notice her, as he noticed her mother!

She swallowed.

“Charles, I told you the truth when I said I thought I loved you—once. But it could only have been a kind of fascination that you had for me. An attraction because you’re so adult and polished and man-of-the-worldish ... and I thought Mummy was in love with you!”

“Your mother,” he told her sourly, “is a woman who thinks only of business and the pet schemes that occur to her from time to time. At the moment she has a scheme on hand for marrying you to MacLeod!”

Her eyes grew wide.

“But that can’t be true,” she replied. “For Euan said she has a scheme on hand for marrying me to you!”

Charles looked at first mildly astonished, and then his eyebrows went up and his eyes grew quizzical.

“Well, perhaps we none of us properly understand Celia,” he remarked. “But, whatever plan she has on hand, don’t fall in with it, little Toni, unless your heart’s in it, and you’re sure you can be happy. Better a few more years of looking after her in London than that!” He picked up one of her hands and kissed it gently. “I could offer you a lot of fun, Toni, and quite an easy life, if you’d marry me...” His voice was wistful in a way she’d never known it to be before. “I’d take such care of you, too.”

She shook her head, suddenly terribly distressed because she couldn’t marry him, and he was the man she had always thought she wanted to marry!

“You may change your mind.” But again she shook her head. “After, all you changed it before.” He smiled at her with a touch of appeal, and then went inside to pack his case for his return journey to London.

After he had gone Celia went about looking thoughtful for a few hours, and then she asked Toni openly whether Charles had asked her to marry him.

“Yes,” Toni said, and was half afraid her mother would be badly hurt.

But she needn’t have worried about Celia, for her expression clearly revealed the truth that she was not in the least hurt. She curled up on a comfortable settee in her bedroom and asked Toni to mix her a facial mask that she meant to have applied the day before, and while the unhealthy-looking beautifying treatment was in process she said there were one or two things she wanted to tell Toni about Euan MacLeod, and that she was hoping for a certain amount of co-operation from her daughter.

Toni waited—her heart beating so painfully quickly for a few minutes that it almost hurt her—and then, feeling the edges of the mask with exploring fingers, and maintaining her comfortable relaxed position on the settee (“So important to be quite relaxed when this sort of thing is being done to you!” she explained to Toni), Celia revealed:

“Euan and I have had a lot of talks, and by this time I know quite a lot about him and his past. He seems to have had rather an unhappy childhood, for his mother ran off with some man or other while he was young, and his father didn’t care greatly what happened to him after that occurred. He took to doctoring like a duck takes to water, and, as a matter of fact, it was Uncle Angus who paid for his training—but his first practice was not a success because some woman patient fell in love with him, involved him in a lot of scandal, and he gave it up and went to sea. He was reasonably happy as a ship’s doctor until some other woman complicated his life, and he threw that up, too.”

“He—he told you all
this
?” Toni said, staring at her mother in astonishment.

Celia smiled beneath the mask.

“Does that astonish you so much, darling? But then I’m what the Italians would call
simpatica
... and he just opened up to me! Other men have done so before.”

“Including Charles?” Toni enquired, rather dryly.

“Oh, Charles!” Celia opened one eye and gazed at her. “Well, Charles, at one time, was a little different. I used to think I might like to marry him. But I’m older than he is—yes; I recognise that! and, like Charles himself, I’m a little set in my ways, so I long ago decided it wouldn’t work. But you, darling ... for you, my pet, it could work. You would have an effect on Charles that would bring him to life, especially if you had a family ... which I couldn’t contemplate at my age!”

“Please!” Toni said, shrinking from the notion of having a family by a man she no longer imagined herself in love with.

Celia reached out for some tissues, and dabbed her fingers on them.

“Darling, you’ve got to marry some time,” she said carelessly, “and Charles would do for you beautifully. I’m surprised I never thought of it before.”

“You said that Euan MacLeod would do beautifully for me,” Toni reminded her, with a sudden flash of acute resentment at such casual interference in her life. “Because he had inherited your Uncle Angus’s money!” she added shortly.

“Ah, yes.” Celia tested the mask again, and said: “I think this can come off now, darling.” Then: “As a matter of fact, I did think Euan would make a very nice and satisfactory son-in-law, until I discovered he was hopelessly in love. One reason, no doubt, why he often appears so grim! That girl he met on board ship—a wealthy American heiress, I believe she was—hasn’t quite vanished from his life. In fact, she’s coming back into it very shortly.”

“What!” Toni exclaimed, and gave herself away so completely that Celia sat up on the settee and said the sooner she got rid of all the mess on her face the better. She glanced sideways at Toni and added: “I’d better tell you the rest, before you make up your mind you can’t marry Charles. Euan knows he was badly treated, but apparently when you fall desperately in love—and, I’ll admit, I never fell as desperately at that!—a woman or a man can do anything, and you’ll forgive them. This girl—Penelope Parsons, I believe her name is—is on a visit to Europe with her aunt, and having heard that Euan has come into a lot of money—although Euan won’t have that!—she wants to come up here to Scotland and see him again. I’ve promised to get some rooms ready for them, and they’re arriving in about a week. I thought you’d better know.”

Toni started to clear up the mess created by the facial treatment mechanically. Celia disappeared into the bathroom, but through the open door she called:

“So you see, darling, it would be very, very silly of you to let one man go when another
—the
other, shall we say?—is already more or less booked!”

For the rest of that day Toni avoided being alone with Euan, and, in fact, she endeavoured to keep out of his way so much that, two days later, he asked her bluntly why she was behaving towards him as if he had suddenly developed the plague.

“I hadn’t noticed that I was avoiding you,” Toni said stiffly.

He smiled a little bleakly.

“Is it because I was a bit crude on Sunday afternoon—when your precious Charles was here!—and said things that might have been better not said to a girl like you?” He moved nearer to her and took her hand, but she wrenched it away. “Toni, I realise you’re not quite like other girls of your age—” his usually arrogant voice was strangely diffident—“and you’re delicate and sensitive in a somewhat unusual way. Rather like ... well, I once said you reminded me of a windflower, didn’t I?”

Toni moved across the room to be well away from him. She looked out at her favourite view of the loch.

“You mustn’t exaggerate, Dr. MacLeod,” she said stiffly. “I’m not as rare as all that, and I’m not so easily shocked that you have to treat me as if I was early Victorian!”

“Ah!” he exclaimed, as if light had suddenly broken over him. “It was that kiss you objected to! I ought to have realised that a girl like you...”

“A girl like me will probably collect a good many kisses before she decides she’s discovered the brand to take seriously,” she told him flippantly, and saw his dark face grow gradually darker, and infinitely more bleak than she had ever seen it before. “Now, tell me all about these friends of yours who’re coming to stay,” she said conversationally, perching herself on the arm of a chair and looking at him expectantly. “Mummy says it’s someone who’s terribly important to you—at least, one of them is!—and we’ve got to make her comfortable. She suggested that I give up my room, and I honestly don’t mind...”

“Thank you,” he said stiffly, “but it won’t be necessary for you to give up your room. There are heaps of rooms here at Inverada.”

“But if she’s as important as all that,” looking at him without the slightest sign of embarrassment, and plenty of interest, “mine is a very sunny room, and—”

“Keep it!” he said, as if he was issuing an order. She shrugged her slender shoulders.

“Just as you wish. But if I was renting this house, and it was someone important to me—”

“Charles, for instance?”

“Well, if you like, we’ll say Charles,” and she smiled at him. “He’s quite the nicest man I’ve ever met, and I’d certainly want him to have a comfortable room if he was coming here for the first time. And this friend of yours—”

“Concentrate on giving Charles a more comfortable room when he comes here the next time, and then perhaps he’ll stay longer than a weekend,” Euan advised her curtly. “And if you don’t want to lose him to someone who’s had designs on him for a long time you’d better be a little cleverer than you are!”

With which parting shot he left her alone in the room, and Toni’s cheeks burned. Did he honestly and seriously think she was competing with her mother for Charles ... the man she had known all her life?

If he could think that he must have a very poor opinion of her, indeed ... and a very poor opinion of her mother!

Yet, a couple of days later, she came upon a piece of evidence which seemed to indicate that, however high or low his opinion of her mother, she had for him a very definite attraction.

Euan had decided, after all, to give up his own room to his special visitor—it was one of a small suite which comprised a sitting-room and a bathroom as well, and it was there that he had established himself when he took over Inverada as Celia’s tenant. Celia had asked Toni to aid in the switching of the rooms by emptying some of Euan’s drawers for him, and carrying his things into the room he had selected as a temporary room. Toni was going through the top drawers of his old-fashioned dressing chest and putting piles of his socks aside for mending—a task she intended to undertake herself, even if another woman was soon to have the right to look after his wardrobe—when she came upon a crumpled scrap of fine lace-edged handkerchief, and without it being necessary to look at the initials in the corner she knew that it was one of her mother’s. The scent which still clung to it was Celia’s special perfume.

Toni stood for a few seconds staring at the handkerchief unbelievingly, and then she crumpled it up into a ball and put it in her pocket. She thought of the young American girl—Penelope Parsons—who was arriving at the house in a few days, and she wondered what she would have to say—and how she would feel!—if it was she who had come upon the handkerchief in Euan’s drawer.

She wouldn’t be coming to Inverada at all unless she had some sort of interest in Euan, and although apparently she had once used him badly there might be some excuse for that. Perhaps she hadn’t realised how strongly she was attracted to him ... or perhaps she had been afraid of opposition from her family. But now that Euan was no longer a poor ship’s doctor, dependent on his salary, she quite obviously had serious thoughts of him, otherwise she wouldn’t be coming to Inverada!

And Euan must once more have serious thoughts about her, otherwise he wouldn’t want her to come to Inverada! Yet Celia, with her loveliness and her charm and her sympathy, must have captivated him, too.

Otherwise he wouldn’t keep her handkerchief tucked away in his drawer!

Toni didn’t know whether she would rather he was attracted to her mother or to Penelope Parsons, but she did know that she would be very much upset in future when she remembered that he had once kissed her ... and changed the whole course of her life!