The Last of the Kintyres (4 page)

It was a lonely place, yet the house itself was lovely. Long and low and white, it nestled in a cleft of the rock with a natural terrace of unbelievably green grass in front of it and the cliff behind, and all its windows were open to the last of the sun.

The sunshine seemed to
li
e on it like a benediction, that old house that had seen so many suns go down, and suddenly an overwhelming sense of loss gripped Elizabeth by the throat. She could not think nor reason clearly, and she had not the power to thrust it away.

The sun sank abruptly, going down behind the mountains of Mull as if a light had been extinguished in a distant room, and she shivered involuntarily in the paler aftermath. It was as if all warmth had suddenly gone out of the day.

Caroline Hayler drew the car up on the gravelled stretch in front of the main door and a man’s tall figure made its appearance in the shadowed porch.

In that moment Elizabeth knew that Sir Ronald Kintyre was dead.

Hew Kintyre came slowly towards them. He had the look of a man who had received a crippling blow, yet Elizabeth was instantly aware of the determination in him to keep his grief to himself. His mouth was set and the granite line of his jaw looked harder than ever as he surveyed them for a moment without speaking. Then, clearly and concisely, he said:

“I’m sorry you had to come at such a time. My father is dead. He never regained consciousness, which was perhaps for the best. The specialist has just told me that he would have been a cripple for the remainder of his life. He was a most vigorous man. It would have been a living death to him,” he added, as if for his own comfort.

All that day, Elizabeth thought, while they had been travelling hopefully towards Ardlamond, he had been here alone with the prospect of death, helping an old man along the last, difficult mile.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that we’ve—thrust ourselves on you like this—at such a time—”

“Hew, my dear! this is really dreadful. Dreadful for you!” Caroline had passed Elizabeth and taken Hew Kintyre by the arm, but he seemed to stiffen at her touch. Perhaps he could not bear any man’s—or any woman’s—sympathy. He was a lone wolf and wanted to suffer alone, to lick his wounds in silent obscurity. “When did it happen?” Caroline rushed on. “I haven’t been gone so very long. Not more than three or four ho
ur
s.”

“It was less than an hour ago.” Hew ran a hand through his hair in a gesture which seemed to break, for a moment at least, the iron barrier of reserve which he had raised between him and the outside world. It was the action of a boy, perplexed beyond reasoning, yet, almost instantly, the man was in command again.

“I’m sorry I could not get to the station to meet you,” he apologized, turning to Elizabeth. “I hope you will excuse me. You will find the house rather chaotic, but at least your rooms had been prepared for you.”

It was no
tim
e to tell him that they would not stay, Elizabeth decided. No time to promise to rid him of his responsibility for them as soon as ever they could. In fact, it was no
tim
e to say anything very much, since Caroline had already asserted her prior claim to his attention—her right, it would see
m
, to be with him in this hour of need.

Yet for a split second he did not move away from the door. He seemed to be standing between even Caroline and the interior of the house, where death had set its s
ea
l
.

“Come inside, Hew,” Caroline said. “I’ll see to everything.”

“There’s nothing very much to see to, Carol,” he told her distantly. “Mrs. Malcolm has already done all there is to do.”

In the dimness of the hall behind him a small woman in a grey tweed skirt and a knitted cardigan hovered in the shadows.

“Jessie,” he said, “this is Miss Stanton and her brother. Will you see that they are made comfortable for the night?”

“Look here,” Tony suggested clumsily, “if we’re going to be in the way we could quite easily go back to Oban—”

“Or come over to the castle,” Caroline Hayler supplemented. “I wouldn’t mind a bit, Hew,” she added carefully, “if it would be any help to you.”

Elizabeth felt her throat go dry and humiliation rushed the angry tears to her eyes, but Hew Kintyre said firmly enough:

“I don’t think there’s any need to trouble you, Carol, thanks all the same. Miss Stanton and her brother were expected, and we have everything prepared.” The grey figure of Jessie Malcolm was still hovering at his elbow and he turned to Elizabeth to explain: “Mrs. Malcolm is my father’s housekeeper. She will see you to your rooms.”

Tony, with a suitcase in each hand, turned back to where Mrs. Hayler stood on the doorstep.

“I hope we will see you again,” he said far too eagerly. “And—thanks for the lift!”

Caroline’s finely-pencilled eyebrows shot up and she glanced at Hew, amused by the impulsive little speech, it would seem.

“If you’ll come this way,” Mrs. Malcolm said at Elizabeth’s side, “I’ll show you upstairs.”

Elizabeth followed the stout little figure towards the staircase, painfully aware of the fact that Tony was deliberately lagging behind, as if he could not bear to let Caroline Hayler go.

On the top landing the housekeeper paused, waiting, and he was forced to come up behind them.

“Sorry!” he apologized. “I must have been daydreaming.”

“I’ve put the young gentleman in here,” Mrs. Malcolm said, opening one of the many doors along a wide gallery which looked down into the hall.

Caroline Hayler was still down there with Hew. Elizabeth could hear her slightly high-pitched voice coming up from the shadows and Hew’s monosyllabic rejoinders. She could not make out what they said, but already she had been made aware of a sympathy between them. Caroline had suggested that, pointedly, more than once.

“Sir Ronald wanted you to be on the other side of the house, Miss Stanton.” Jessie Malcolm’s voice brought her thoughts back to the present. “I think your brother will be comfortable enough here,” she added. “It used to be Mr. Hew’s room.”

Elizabeth had the impression of getting to know Hew Kintyre much better in the few minutes it took her to glance round this room than she would have done in months of casual meetings. Everything in it reflected an active boyhood, with guns and fishing
-
tackle lying haphazardly on cupboard tops and group photographs of school and college activities adorning the walls. The essentials of furniture were strong and good. There was nothing ornate that could get in a boy’s way, and the wide window that ran the full length of one wall remained uncurtained. In it was framed a breathtaking view of hill and loch, where a
sailing din
ghy
might have lain moored in days gone by, to be seen immediately on rising and last thing before going to sleep.

There was no dinghy down on the loch now.
The
boy who had gone to sleep and wakened in that bright little room had grown up. He didn’t even live here any more. Something—life itself, perhaps—had changed
him
into a morose and sombre man.

Sharply she turned from the view of the hills, leaving Tony to settle down in a room which obviously delighted him.

“You’re not really far away from your brother,” Mrs. Malcolm informed her as they continued along the corridor,
tu
rning
sharply at the end of it into what appeared to be another wing of the old house. “You’ll get all the sun here, right through the day. The mistress liked the rooms that faced the sun.”

“She was an invalid, wasn’t she?” Elizabeth asked.

“Yes, but a happy one,” Mrs. Malcolm said. “Everything that could be done was done for her and she took her trials and troubles philosophically. She had a great heart, and she was only too th
ankf
ul that she was granted the sight of the sea here at Ardlamond. Sir Ronald was such an active man that there was always something new for her to hear about.”

She opened a door into a large bedroom with windows on two of its walls through
w
hich flooded all the
pearly-grey light of evening.
T
h
e sky to the west had still a warmth of colour and the mountains of Mull looked purple against it, far and mysterious, with all the magic of distance in their hidden glens.

“I wish I had known Sir Ronald,” Elizabeth said impulsively. “I feel that I’ve missed something that—should have belonged to me.”

“He was a fine old gentleman,” Jessie Malcolm said with tears in her voice. “And I’m glad he died the way he did, without having to suffer too much. You would have loved him,” she added simply.

“Mrs. Malcolm,” Elizabeth found herself asking impulsively, “did you know my mother?”

Jessie smiled, warming to her immediately.

“Fine I did, miss,” she said. “She used to come here when the old laird was a young man. She was a bonny girl, like yourself. She had the same colouring and the same bright, honest eyes. There weren’t so many cars in those days to take folks off to Oban or Edinburgh or such like at a moment’s notice and the young folk made their fun at home. Many a grand ball I’ve seen here at Ardlamond,” she mused, “and up at the castle, too. But things have changed now, although maybe we’ll be seeing something of the old entertaining at the Castle before long now that Mistress Hayler has come back.”

Her tone was suddenly dry, as if she had no great affection for Caroline Hayler and never could have.

“I wondered,” Elizabeth confessed, “If Mrs. Hayler had always lived here.”

“She’s lived hereabouts for quite a while, but not always up at the Castle. She bought that when her rich Canadian husband was killed in an air accident less than a year ago. Before she met him she was plain Caroline McArthur of the Letter Farm up the glen.” And in love with Hew Kintyre even in those days, Elizabeth thought. Why, then, had they never married?

“In these days we were
both
so hopelessly
poor
,”
Caroline had said, but was that all?

“I never had much time for Caroline McArthur,” Mrs. Malcolm added tightly. “She was educated away from the glen, and it gave her big ideas. She came back with all sorts of fancy notions in her head. Then, when she met money and married it, there was no holding her. She always had an eye for the young master— the new laird, I should be calling him,” Jessie amended sadly. “A body just canna’
think
about that so soon,” she excused herself, wiping away a tear. “And what Mr. Hew is going to be laird to I just don’t know, because Ardlamond hasn’t been paying its way this many a day, and Whitefarland isn’t on its feet yet.”

“Whitefarland?” Elizabeth echoed. “That’s where—Mr. Kintyre lives, isn’t it?”

“If you can call it living!” Jessie agreed. “It’s been one long struggle, if you ask me, against odds. He’s had nothing but bad luck since he went there. He could have done well enough with a better start, but Ardlamond was in debt and he wouldn’t ask for help. He wouldn’t have his father sell Ardlamond either, because it had been in the family for so long. He just struggled on.” Jessie crossed to the wardrobe, opening the double doors. “You see, he
is
Ardlamond. He was
born
to it and he can see a long line of Kintyres stretching away behind him who all did their best for the place, and he’ll work to do the same till he drops.”

Elizabeth was at the window, and suddenly she understood so clearly what Jessie Malcolm was trying to convey. This lovely spot, carved out of the rock and all but surrounded by the sea, was well worth any man’s struggle, yet there was so very little to sustain it. Whitefarland, if it was a sheep farm of any size at all, might have done that in time, but now there would be death duties to pay and all sorts of other things to take into consideration.

“We’ve chosen the wrong time to come, Mrs. Malcolm,” she said with a small, regretful sigh.

“I’m not so sure about that,” Jessie returned. “Maybe it was the right time, if you ask me.”

The blunt rejoinder surprised Elizabeth, but she did not question it. She had gossiped enough to Jessie, and perhaps Hew Kintyre would be waiting for her to come downstairs.

What could she say to him, knowing what she did now? Only that she and Tony would efface themselves as quickly as possible, even before the old laird’s funeral, if he so desired.

CHAPTER TWO

HALF an hour later Elizabeth descended the staircase in search of Hew, still not quite sure of what she was going to say to him and far more conscious now of his new status as Laird of Ardlamond than she had been when he had first told her of his father’s death.

The feeling that they were here under false pretences had grown and strengthened during the interval, blotting out the sense of homecoming which had wa
rm
ed her heart as the big American car had covered the
miles
between Oban and Dromore.