Master of Glenkeith (9 page)

If Andrew was now reaping the benefit of that struggle, the inbred strength of character was still there. He came of a dour, fighting race whose emotions had been leashed by necessity, but underneath the granite-like exterior the flame of a fierce pride still burned. It had taken his ancestors to Culloden and the Covenanters to the stake. Whenever there was a cause to defend or an injustice to right or a determination firmly implanted in the individual breast, the way was clear and straight ahead.

If Andrew had already made up his mind about his way in life, Tessa realized, nothing would deflect him from his purpose. And if he had made up his mind to marry Margaret, that, too, would come about in time.

She glanced out of the window, thinking that some of the golden quality had disappeared from the sunlit fields, but Andrew and his grandfather were waiting and she followed Andrew to the door.

“You do think it’s all right?” she questioned. “I wouldn’t like to think that I had influenced him to go out against his will.”

He looked down at her with a strange smile in his eyes. “I hardly think you could do that with a Meldrum,” he said briefly. “They make up their minds for themselves and stand by the consequences.”

“But what consequences could there be?”

“None that I can see. Otherwise, I would not permit you to take him out. I don’t think you should attempt to go on to the moor,” he added. “It’s uphill most of the way after you leave the glen and my grandfather will be a

heavy man to push.”

“I’m not really so frail as I look,” Tessa protested. “Sometimes I had to work quite hard in Rome. We never had any money to employ servants. That’s why I wish I could do more here,” she added impulsively. “I could work in the house, Andrew—save Margaret a bit—let her get out with you more.”

He turned to look at her, puzzled, it seemed, by what she had said, and finally dismissing it by a rather abrupt reference to Hester.

“My aunt takes to do with the house. I have no jurisdiction in that quarter. She has always been mistress at Glenkeith.”

And will continue to be till you find yourself a wife, Tessa thought.

The wheel-chair had been abandoned in the hall when Daniel Meldrum had refused point-blank to use it, and Hester came out of the kitchen when she heard it being moved towards the stairs that afternoon.

“What’s this?” she demanded. “Are you taking the thing back to the doctor?”

“Grandfather is going to use it,” Andrew explained. “Tessa has managed to persuade him to go out.”

Harsh and tight-lipped, Hester regarded Tessa in the shaft of sunlight slanting in through the staircase window.

“She has great charm,” she observed scathingly. “Watch you don’t find yourself caught by it, too, Andrew.”

Tessa drew back as if she had been struck by the cruelly unexpected jibe. The bitter words had been a challenge, driven from the older woman by an emotion which had been beyond her control for the moment. Jealousy, perhaps, the desire to present Tessa in an unfavourable light as the enchantress who might entice a man to folly even against his better judgment, the fair siren waiting among the rocks to lure him to his willing doom.

It had been obvious to Tessa for some time that Hester MacDonald desired nothing more passionately than to see her only daughter mistress at Glenkeith, and the fact that Margaret would be marrying her first cousin in order to attain the coveted position did not seem to matter. Margaret’s feelings would scarcely be taken into consideration once Hester had made her plans, and Tessa had an idea that these plans had been completed long ago, long before she had ever come to Glenkeith, long before she had ever been heard of, in fact.

Perhaps it was only natural that Hester should wish to safeguard her daughter’s future when she looked back into her own past, but the fact remained that she would also be safeguarding her own position at Glenkeith.

Tessa hated herself for thinking about such things. She wished to live in peace with everyone at Glenkeith, if Hester would only let her.

“I’ll help you with the chair,” she said to Andrew, her voice sounding small and subdued in the awkward silence.

“I’ll manage it,” he said, “if you can go and find one of the men to help once we’ve got my grandfather into it. You’ll find Tawse working up at the north byres, or Sandy Fleming should be somewhere about. Either of them will do.”

She could not tell what he had thought about Hester’s remark and she was glad to make her escape into the yard.

Andrew carried the old man down the wide staircase with Fleming’s help. The stock-man was a small, thickset man of bull-like strength with a thatch of red hair springing up untidily all over his head when he removed his cap to come into the house, and he seemed uncomfortably in awe of Hester, although he took his orders solely from Andrew or his grandfather.

Hester stood waiting for them at the foot of the stairs, running a critical eye over her father with the same tight look on her face which she had presented to Andrew ten minutes before.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said curtly. “This isn’t Italy.”

She had barely looked in Tessa’s direction, but all the venom which lay behind her remark had been directed towards this girl whom her aged father had welcomed to Glenkeith “in his dotage,” as she had put it on more than one occasion, and Tessa was aware of a mounting tension as she followed the chair to the front door.

“Don’t fash yourself too much about us, Hester,” Daniel said. “I’m wrapped up like a trussed turkey and Tessa never seems to feel the cold. We’re only going for a turn along the burnside to have a look at the cattle. We’ll be back in time for tea.”

He was in fine spirit to-day, Tessa thought, taking the chair from Andrew and trying to forget that Hester was still standing, black-browed, behind them on the doorstep.

Andrew walked with them to the white barred gate leading to the back road and stood leaning with his arms along the top bar watching as Tessa wheeled the old man away. Perhaps he felt that she was being useful at last, Tessa mused.

The road along the burnside was narrow and white-sanded and the sound of the water was like happy laughter as it bubbled over the grey stones and eddied into deep brown pools between the boulders scattered along its course. Elder and birch grew thickly on either bank, making a green and golden tunnel of leaves for it to flow through and a deep background silence for its music. The sound of a reaper came from far off in the fields and the distant barking of a dog echoed back from the hills. It seemed as if they were closed in in some peaceful world of their own where turmoil and conflict could not reach them—until the thought of Hester sprang back into Tessa’s mind.

She walked quickly then, pushing the chair a little faster along the road, as if to put greater distance between herself and Glenkeith, and soon they were in a narrow glen running away from the farm where hills came down close on either side and sheep took the place of the black cattle which she had come to associate with the whole of Aberdeenshire.

In less than an hour they had come right into the heart of the green mountains with the higher peaks of the

Grampians rising all about them and beyond the head of the glen the great free reaches of the open moor.

Impulsively she wanted to reach them.

“Are you tired?” she asked. “Shall we turn back?”

Daniel met her mood.

“On you go!” he said. “It’s early yet. When you get to the bend in the road, yonder, you’ll see the whole of Morven Hill and the Cairn Gorm beyond it, and if you’re lucky you’ll see Balmoral through the trees.”

When they reached the bend in the road they were higher than Tessa expected. The broad panorama of the Dee lay before them in all its proud beauty and they could see, far beneath them, the spire of Crathie church and, across the shining river, the distant turrets of Balmoral half-hidden in the trees at the foot of Craig Gowan.

It was a day of vistas, bright and clear as far as the eye could see, and the lazy murmur of bees in the heather was faint, drowsy music on the gentle wind.

Tessa felt that she had never been so happy in all her life, because to be loved was the crown of all happiness, and surely the old man loved her? She wanted to speak to him about her mother, but because of what Hester had said that day when Andrew had first brought her to Glenkeith, she could not. She must leave him to speak first, though she would not believe all that Hester had said, that her mother had brought bad luck to Glenkeith when she had married Andrew’s father.

“I wish we could go on and on!” she cried impulsively. “Over the next rise and the one after to see it all!”

Daniel Meldrum smiled at her eagerness.

“We’d need a flying carpet for that,” he said, “and maybe we’ve come far enough for one day. The road’s been getting pretty rough this last mile and it’s time we were turning back, anyway. We can come again. Now that I’ve got over being pushed in a chair like a bairn, I’ll want to be taken out regularly, I suppose!”

“It’s been wonderful!” Tessa said, looking down the winding road and not wanting to go back. “It’s been everything I ever imagined it would be!”

He nodded his white head, but he did not ask her who had told her about Glenkeith. It seemed that he did not want to dwell on that part of the past which was so deeply overshadowed by his son’s death.

Half-way down the glen a rough sheep track ran off over a hump-backed ridge and he pointed towards it as they neared it.

“When I was younger,” he said, “I used to fish up there at the Linn. Would you like to see the salmon jump?” he asked with a bright gleam in his blue eyes. “It’s just the day for them, but we’ll not have to make any noise going up over the bridge!”

Rain and the odd hill burn had come down on either side of the bridge and Tessa had to push hard in an effort to guide the chair away from the softer ground, but once on the bridge itself her task was easy. These little grey hump-backed bridges which were to be found on all the roads round Glenkeith were a constant delight to her, and she leaned over the moss-grown parapet of this one and gazed down at the brown water flowing beneath her.

“Does Andrew fish a lot?” she asked.

“He used to, but now he never seems to find the time. He used to fish the Ardnashee Water with the young Haddows regularly, and Nigel still comes up here occasionally.” He gave her a quick look. “I haven t seen anything of Nigel Haddow since I took to my bed,” he observed.

“He has been to ask for you, though!” Tessa assured him.

“Or to see you?” he chuckled.

Tessa flushed.

“He didn’t come for that reason,” she said. “Anyway, I was away at Ballater with Margaret getting my shoes.”

“He’d be a disappointed man,” Daniel teased. “But maybe he did come to speir after me when all’s said and done. He was always a nice lad, and I taught him to hold his first rod and cast his first fly!”

“He and Andrew are friends then?”

“Very old friends, although the Haddows had a fancy education in England and Andrew went to Aberdeen to the

College there.”

Tessa laughed.

“Does that make a difference?” she asked.

“Some folk think it does, but I never could see it. Oxford maybe set a kind of polish on Nigel Haddow, but it didn’t make a better farmer out of him! Ardnashee cattle have still a long way to go before they can come up to Glenkeith standards, and you can’t judge a man by the cut o’ his waistcoat.”

“I liked Nigel Haddow,” Tessa said. “He was kind and

g
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Daniel grunted, saying no more, and they waited in silence for the fish.

“Oh, look! Look there!” Tessa cried as a silver streak shot clear out of the water just above the bridge. “Do they always do that?”

“Always—when they know they have an audience who’ll make plenty of noise!” he returned dryly.

“Now you’re teasing me and we must go!” she said, pushing the chair back down the ramp of the bridge, but suddenly it tipped lop-sidedly and there was a small, sharp scraping sound as a wheel ran free and the axle bar grated on the roadway.

Horror stricken, Tessa watched the wheel careering down the path ahead of them, gathering speed as it went.

“That’s done it, and no mistake!” Daniel grinned. “Now you’ll have to run all the way to Glenkeith to bring it back!”

“But it’s serious!” Tessa cried, feeling that something had suddenly caught her by the throat. “How are we ever going to fix it to the chair again? We never should have come this far!”

She was thinking of Andrew’s warning and her heart was full of apprehension, especially when she thought of her charge and the wheel-less chair and the evening coming on.

“Better catch it before it ends up in the river!” Daniel suggested.

She ran then, madly, precipitately over the rough ground, chasing the wheel, and finally caught up with it in the ditch at the junction of the path and the road.

She picked it up and stood looking at it almost as if it had been guilty of murder, and then she carried it slowly back to the bridge.

“It looks as though something has snapped,” she said helplessly.

“Let me have a look at it.”