Land of Heart's Desire (8 page)

When they went in search of the boat, however, she forgot all about Jane. The gleaming, chromium-plated cabin cruiser which she had. confidently expected to see moored in the bay was nowhere in evidence, but out on the blue water beyond Scoraig’s little white houses a graceful white yawl rode at anchor, waiting to set out on its maiden voyage.

“I haven’t tried her out yet,” Finlay Sutherland said. “She’s a beauty, don’t you think?”

Christine nodded. His choice had surprised her and humbled her a little, and somehow she knew, even before they stepped aboard, that he would be able to handle his new toy as efficiently as anyone on Croma.

As she helped him with the sails, a new, strong excitement ran through her veins, and as he cast off they seemed to be carried on the wings of the wind into a new world. Coming aft to take the tiller, he handed her the jib sheets and sat down comfortably by her side.

When at first she did not speak, he subsided easily into her retrospective mood, knowing that she must have sailed these seas a thousand times in all sorts of little craft.

“This is the true magic of the west,” he said at last, when they were rounding the Rhu Dearg and were almost within sight of her destination. “Blue seas and distant skies and haunted islands full of dreams!”

She could not answer him, for when he spoke like that she knew that he really loved the west, that Croma was his island, too.

Much too soon—although she was loath to admit it, even in the secret places of her heart—they had reached Port-na-Keal and were sailing in behind the breakwater to tie up alongside the narrow grey quay.

Her companion had dropped the sails expertly as they had glided in, and she threw the bow warp to a pair of waiting hands. There was always a boy of some sort on the quayside to catch a rope or run an errand or just stand and stare.

Finlay Sutherland helped her on to the quay and she held out her hand to him.

“Good-bye,” she said, “and thank you for bringing me home.” A wave of colour which she could not quite control ran up into her cheeks, confusing her. “I want to tell you that I’m sorry for some of the things I said,” she added quickly. “They were—unforgivable.”

“Don’t apologize,” he said with an odd, crooked smile. “I think I would rather have you as you were when we first met—full of fight!”

He had leaped back on to the deck before she could answer him, signalling to the boy to unfasten the mooring rope and turning his eager craft back towards the sea.

“So, you’ve gone right over into the enemy camp!” Hamish said at her elbow. “I had no idea that you knew this fellow Sutherland quite so well.”

Christine turned, surprised by his swift appearance. She had not seen him approaching along the quay, and the colour flooded into her cheeks again as he put a proprietorial arm about her shoulders and drew her close.

“I don’t know him at all,” she said. “No, not at all.” Finlay Sutherland turned at the tiller to look back, raising a friendly arm in salute before he sailed away.

“How come you were aboard his yacht, then, my sweet?” Hamish asked with a fair edge of jealousy in his voice.

“He brought me home from Scoraig. I walked across the causeway and got trapped by the tide.”

“Trapped might well be the operative word,” he suggested cynically. “When a man of Sutherland’s calibre sets out to get something he wants he isn’t usually particular about how he does it.”

Her eyes fastened intently upon his aloof face.

“What do you mean, Hamish?” she demanded.

“I mean that Sutherland is obviously determined to get Erradale,” he said, “one way or another.”

CHAPTER IV

Christine
put the last small, gilt-edged card into the last envelope and heaved a sigh of relief.

“There!” she exclaimed. “That’s the lot.” She pushed the little pile of invitations across the table towards her grandmother. “Are you tired of licking stamps?”

Dame Sarah shook her head.

“It’s something for me to do—a proud task,” she answered. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a very long time.”

She did not say that she had been looking forward for twenty years to the coming-of-age of her grandson, who had been Christine’s twin. The crushing blow of the young heir’s death had been put resolutely behind her. She thought of him often, but rarely discussed the tragedy, which had been enacted in a distant land, even with her granddaughter. It had thrust an added responsibility on to her own ageing shoulders, but she did not mind that, although Christine thought that she had looked happier and more at peace since her return.

There were occasions, however, when her own heart had contracted with something like fear as she had looked at the old lady. There was a pallor about her grandmother’s skin which made it seem almost transparent at times, and she slept a great deal during the day. The slight paralysis she had suffered handicapped her more and more and her thoughts drifted often to the past.

The day before, when Christine had come up to the turret room to explain her adventure at Scoraig, she had gone over the whole history of the island, tracing their descent right back to Sir Kenneth MacNeill, who had been a grandson of Somerled of the Isles. There had, she said, been Viking blood in their veins. Christine should be proud of that.

She had spoken, too, of the Nicholsons, hoping that Jane would accept their invitation to stay at Erradale during the forthcoming celebrations.

“Have we sent a card to Ardtornish?” she asked now, drawing the pile of envelopes towards her.

The colour flew into Christine’s cheeks.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t think it was necessary.”

Dame Sarah looked her surprise.

“Mr. Sutherland is our neighbour,” she pointed out firmly.

“And a stranger!” Christine returned.

Her grandmother looked up from her task of licking stamps.

“I haven’t met this young man,” she said, “and we’ve made an unfortunate beginning to our friendship, it would seem, through his factor. It wasn’t altogether Rory’s fault,” she went on to excuse her own agent. “The man was impossible—a loafer who had no respect for his job—and Rory can be quick-tempered and difficult to convince at times. He has a stubborn loyalty, and I suppose it was very hard for him to watch Ardtornish being mismanaged for a second time.”

Christine looked up quickly. It was very unlike her grandmother to offer such adverse criticism of Hamish, for that, surely, was what she had been doing.

“Hamish just hadn’t the money to administer the estate in the way that Finlay Sutherland is doing,” she defended swiftly. “It’s easy enough to judge when—when one isn’t in a spot like that oneself!”

“Finlay Sutherland is doing very well,” Dame Sarah agreed, ignoring the second half of her observation. “And he’s doing it practically by himself. I hear that he feels he can manage the estate without an agent—that he intends to be his own factor. That’s spirit for you!” she added delightedly.

“I suppose it is,” Christine agreed. “But it has all been made so easy for him. There isn’t another invitation card left, by the way,” she added almost with relief.

“We can write a letter,” her grandmother decided. “I owe him some sort of recognition, and I’m sure he will understand that I could not make it a personal call.”

Christine drew pen and writing-paper towards her with reluctance. Her heart was beating hard and fast and the bright colour still lingered in her cheeks.

“Do we have to do this?” she asked. “We don’t really know him—”

“We never shall if we don’t set about making the effort,” Dame Sarah declared. “Besides, it would be an unpardonable affront to ignore him.”

“What do you want me to say?” Christine took up her pen, biting nervously on the end of it as she waited. “He won’t accept, of course.”

“What makes you think that?” her grandmother asked. “Didn’t he bring you home from Scoraig? And you told me he was ‘quite pleasant’ about it.” The blue eyes twinkled. “That’s always a start, isn’t it?”

Wishing that her heart wouldn’t beat so fast, that her foolish emotions were not always so perilously near the surface, ready to spill over at every unguarded moment, Christine did not answer.

“You can say ‘thank you’ for the salvage operation he performed yesterday,” the old lady suggested, “and hope that he will come and make himself known to us on the twenty-seventh. He’ll know all about it, of course, already—the whole island is agog with preparations—but he’ll be waiting for his official ‘bidding’, like the others.’

“I think it ought to be as formal as possible,” Christine insisted. “After all, he’s only just come to Croma.”

“Yet I think he means to say,” Dame Sarah said with a small, rather secret smile. “I’ve been hearing quite a lot about him, one way and another. I’d like to meet him. Word your invitation in the way you wish, though. You’ve met the young man. I haven’t.”

Christine was quite determined, however, that it should be her grandmother’s invitation that finally went to Ardtornish, and not a special one of her own. When she thought back over the events of the day before she had no intention of letting Sutherland humiliate her a second time by refusing her “bidding” to her coming-of-age.

Would he refuse? she wondered, her errant heart pounding swiftly as she penned the half-dozen or so rather
frigid lines
which thanked him for his trouble of the day before and extended to him Dame Sarah’s invitation to be present at Erradale House on the twenty-seventh. It was only two weeks ahead, but he had plenty of time to consider it and refuse to come if he wished.

For the next few days she was aware of a strange restlessness which took her often on to the moor when her tasks about the house were done.

Most of the preparations for the great day at Erradale House were well ahead, and Rory seemed to be deeply involved in the villagers’ plans to provide her with a birthday surprise. He was busy about the estate all day and spent hours in conference with her grandmother or at the village hall in the evenings, so that she rarely saw him, except at a distance. He lodged in the village because the existing factor’s house was far too big for him and had not been occupied since the death of Ewan McQueen, who had been Dame Sarah’s agent for forty years.

It was common gossip on the island that Ewan had flourished mainly by touching his shabby old deerstalker respectfully and murmuring “Yes, ma’am” or “No, ma’am” at the right moment, but that was by the way. Erradale had been prosperous enough at the beginning of their partnership and it had been no fault of Ewan’s—nor of Dame Sarah’s—that death duties and other misfortunes had emptied the coffers and brought them perilously near to bankruptcy.

Waiting for time to pass, Christine considered, was the hardest task of all. She wanted to hurry it on, but time went slowly on Croma. There was time to do so much.

Without her quite realizing it, a new, strange excitement had taken hold of her and she wanted to rush forward to ·its culminating point, which was surely her forthcoming birthday. She wanted to hurry the days along to that special day of meetings and the promise of fulfilment which it seemed to hold for her.

Several times, on her way over the moor, she met Hamish returning to Port-na-Keal with a gun over his shoulder and a brace or two of grouse in his bag. She had never liked the thought of the birds being shot in cold blood like that, but Hamish only laughed when she told him so.

“You’re squeamish!” he said. “You’ve been too long away in the south—too taken up with painting pretty pictures!”

She felt unaccountably hurt by that, so that when she took her sketching block with her, she put it resolutely away when she saw him approaching. He had a too-disturbing influence upon her. Always when she saw him striding towards her across the heather she would be reduced to the old, hopeless fascination, recognizing how desperately attractive he was and how far away.

Sometimes, though, she wondered if she might not be growing up to meet him. Hamish had been a little kinder, a little more considerate and willing to please, of late, paying her more attention in his charming, off-hand way.

She did not know how long he intended to stay on Croma, living at the MacNeill Arms and shooting over MacNeill land at her grandmother’s invitation. There were days, too, when he went off on long and, no doubt, expensive forays after the sharks which abounded in The Minch between Tiumpan Head and Muldoanish, and nights when, apparently, he was the life and soul of male carousal on his return. Was he, she wondered, a selfish man?

She could not think of Hamish with any certainty. He was still the hero of her girlish dreams, still the heartbreakingly attractive laird of Ardtornish who had suffered the loss of a splendid inheritance through no fault of his own.

As the days passed she began to find an outlet for her emotions in the work she loved. She painted vigorously, hiding the completed canvases away in her room almost guiltily, as if they had no place at all on Croma.

But they were Croma. Each new picture reflecting the surprising blue of loch and sky was better than the last. The high, rock-girt crags of Scuirival and the rounded shoulder of Askaval, with the scarves of mist blowing across them, came to life beneath her brush with all their power and mystery subtly revealed, although she was completely unaware of the fact. Her painting had become an outlet for so many things and she continued with it primarily because it brought her a strange sort of consolation as well as filling in the time.

Answers to her grandmother’s invitations came in
batches with
the bi-weekly mail, but most of all she was delighted with the news that Jane Nicholson would reach the island a few days before the twenty-seventh. She had expected Jane earlier, but apparently she had been held up in Edinburgh, discussing a job.

“Jane is coming on Tuesday,” she told Hamish when they met, and was surprised by his quick frown.

“So I believe,” he said. “I’ve just had a letter from her.” The frown left his brow as he added: “Poor Jane! I suppose she’ll set her cap at this fellow Sutherland. It’s the only way to get back to her old home.”

A quiver ran through Christine at his words. It was hardly anger, yet she was quick to protest in his sister’s defence.

“Jane wouldn’t do a thing like that!” she cried. “Wouldn’t she?”

He put his foot up on the rock where she had been sitting before he had climbed up to her through the heather. “You evidently don’t really know my sister, Fair Lady! Jane is obsessed by the thought of belonging. It was tearing up roots—like tearing out her heart, in fact—when we had to leave Ardtornish.”

“But surely it was like that for you, too?” Her eyes were intent and steady on his, wishing that he did not seem amused. “It meant that to you, Hamish, didn’t it?”

“Not in the same way.” His admission sounded brutal, attacking the very foundations of Jane’s loyalty—and her own. “It’s all rather difficult to explain. Perhaps I couldn’t to you, Chris.” He bent forward, drawing her deliberately into the circle of his arms. “You’re so young and so intense—so very deeply steeped in tradition. It would be difficult. But a man doesn’t think that way, you know—not always.”

“Some men do!” She made a small, helpless movement to free herself, but he continued to hold her, and his nearness, the fact that he was looking at her now as if he meant to possess her for the rest of his life, drove all argument and all further reasoning out of her heart. “You’re trying to deny it because it hurts,” she whispered, “because there’s nothing you can do about it now, but I know how you must feel—deep down.”

He looked at her as if he were not quite sure what more he could say, and then he bent his head and kissed her, briefly and expertly, on the lips.

“No,” he agreed, “there’s nothing I can possibly do about Ardtornish, short of wishing Jane the best of luck!”

The thought of Jane and Finlay Sutherland disturbed Christine far more than she cared to admit, but she was scarcely prepared for the shock she received when Jane finally arrived at Erradale.

She went down to the Port to meet the steamer, leaving instructions with Rory to collect his sister’s luggage.

“Jane!” she cried excitedly when she saw the tall, familiar figure coming down the gangway from the afterdeck. “Jane, it is good to see you!”

“And you!”

Jane Nicholson looked down at her from her superior height, smiling warmly. She was a dark girl, with deep-set brown eyes and hair parted severely in the centre and swept back in two raven wings to the nape of her neck, a girl who, with all the mystic romanticism of the Isles in her blood, thought deeply and contemplatively before she embarked on any project which might have a profound bearing on her future. It gave her a serene and balanced appearance which Christine had not yet achieved, although it did not mean that Jane reached her decisions any the easier.

“How does it feel to be almost twenty-one and an heiress?” she asked.

“I don’t know about the heiress part,” Christine smiled, “but it’s certainly something of a responsibility to be almost twenty-one! I’ll live it down, no doubt, in a week or so!”