Master of Glenkeith (2 page)

Hester MacDonald’s straight brows went up, the eyes beneath them a stony blue.

“So you’re not to take time to go by any roundabout way,” she commented dryly. “You are to spend extra money and fly there to bring this child back because of an old man’s whim!”

The cold, harsh venom of her voice was nothing new to Andrew. He had heard it before, always coldest and harshest when Hester was discussing money or the past, and he supposed that the past held nothing of tenderness for this woman whose marriage to a drunken ghillie had been considered a mistake by her family. Her widowhood had brought Hester back to Glenkeith when she had been most needed. She had cared for him from earliest childhood because of the friendship which had existed between her and his mother, but the milk of human kindness had turned sour in Hester long ago. Left with two children to support, she had been glad enough to return to Glenkeith, but her pride had suffered in the process and Daniel Meldrum had never quite been able to forget that she had “married ill”.

“Whatever the whim,” Andrew said, “he’s quite determined about it.” He turned towards the open door, subconsciously seeking the freedom of Glenkeith’s broad acres and the wide sky above his head. “Will you pack me a bag, Aunt Hester? A grip will do. Just enough for a couple of days.”

“Margaret will pack it for you,” she said, drawing in her thin lips so that her face looked more gaunt and devoid of colour than ever. “She’ll take you to the airport.”

He nodded, deciding not to argue. The path of least resistance was the easiest way with Hester MacDonald. She had been mistress at Glenkeith for so long that her authority in such things was more or less accepted by everyone.

He strode away towards the fields, thinking that Hester had exerted that authority at Glenkeith all her life, and suddenly his grandfather’s words came back to him in the full clarity of their meaning.

“I’m not saying that you need to bring a wife back with you, as your father did...”

The words stuck in his mind, emphasizing all the horror of his father’s untimely end. Although the verdict had been brought in as death by misadventure, he had never thought to question his aunt’s contention that Fergus Meldrum had taken his own life and that his second wife’s conduct was the cause of his action, and suddenly he was stricken by the thought that he might even be going in search of the child of the man with whom she had fled.

Yes, Hester had hinted at that, too. He did not know how long after his father’s death Veronique had married,

but no doubt it would have been fairly soon.

In a confused and bitter state of mind, he folded his arms along the top of a barred gate, staring unseeingly at the black cattle in the field before him, wondering if he had any right to bring Veronique’s child to Glenkeith knowing the havoc which the mother had wrought there long ago.

“A penny for them, Drew!”

Without turning, he knew that it was Margaret, coming up from the hen-coops with the daily quota of eggs which she would wash and pack carefully into the big wooden crates for Sandy Gordon to collect in the packing-station van.

“You look as if you had all the cares of the world on your shoulders,” she added when he turned to smile at her.

“They’re not so much cares as prejudices, Meg,” he admitted as she came to lean beside him on the gate.

“Because you have to go to Rome?” Her gentle, dark eyes were softly questioning. “Mother told me about the letter this morning,” she added. “She said Grandfather told her last night and explained that he wanted you to go.” She gave him a swift, sideways glance. “It might be fun, Drew, having a child about the place, and a girl, too,” she added. “What age is she?”

“I don’t know.” His voice sounded flat and uninterested. “I can’t see that it makes a great deal of difference, can you?”

He looked down at her, wondering why she did not answer him immediately. Her plain, honest face, with its ridge of freckles across the nose, was so familiar to him that he never stopped to wonder if Margaret could be considered attractive in the generally-accepted meaning of the word. She had always been at Glenkeith. They had been brought up together, and she belonged there, and quite often he had asked her advice in moments of indecision about the farming where he supposed that her views might help, but apart from that he had never thought deeply about Margaret or his dependence upon her.

“You don’t want her to come,” she said, making it more of a statement than a question which he must answer. “It won’t help, Drew, and it will only make the child unhappy in the end. If she’s at all sensitive she’ll feel your resentment and react to it accordingly.”

“I won’t have anything to do with her,” he reminded her stiffly. “I won’t be her guardian.”

“Not at the moment,” she said, “but afterwards, Drew. Glenkeith will be yours when the old man dies.”

A denial rose in Andrew which he could not crush. It was almost a repugnance, although he had accepted the thought of Glenkeith and his personal responsibilities long ago with justifiable pride and a strong sense of dedication.

“Why had this to happen?” he demanded savagely. “Things were going on well enough as they were.”

“It’s—the sort of question that no one can answer, Drew,” Margaret said, conscious that she was seeking for words as blindly as Andrew did at times. “It’s something to do with inadequacy, perhaps, or maybe it’s just the way life has of jerking us out of our complacency.”

He glanced at her sharply, realizing that he had never heard Margaret speaking quite so seriously as this before, that they had met in the past mostly on a plane of light banter which had concealed their deeper and more personal feelings.

Fleetingly he wondered what his real feelings were for this girl whom he had known all his life. She was his cousin—his full cousin—but somewhere at the back of his mind he recognized a difference, a reservation, perhaps, as if the blood ties were not the only ones that had bound them together during the past few years.

“I’m taking you to the airport,” Margaret said in lighter vein as he relieved her of the egg basket and carried it towards the house for her. “Don’t dare to try to put your foot down on that one, Drew! It means a day in Aberdeen for me, which I’m not likely to get for some time after you come back.”

He supposed that she meant that her mother would find a child in the house a disadvantage, creating more work and causing a reversal of some of Hester’s carefully-planned routine, and for the first time he wondered how closely the changes would touch his own life.

She packed his grip for him and drove the brake to Dyce with the quiet confidence which was an essential part of her make-up, but Andrew could not imbibe the peace of Margaret on that gentle August day. For the first time in his life he was out of tune with his surroundings as they journeyed along the familiar Dee-side road, past Balmoral and Crathie and Ballater, with green Culbleen and “Morven of the Snows” smiling down at them and the deep glens and their silences pressing close on every side.

“You’ll not be away long,” Margaret said, but thereafter she felt tongue-tied and inadequate, unable to offer him the help he needed because of some strange new quality of deepening reserve which had fallen between them in the past forty-eight hours.

If Andrew was suddenly seeing life through a glass, darkly, she also was confused and uncertain about the future, and as the plane took off and rose into the blue above her head she strained her eyes to watch the window in the long silver fuselage where he had settled for the beginning of his journey.

He waved and she waved back, but there was a sudden sinking at her heart as she stood there. The plane rose and circled and flew southwards until there was nothing left for her to see but a diminishing black speck against the sky, and finally she turned away with a sigh.

There were so many tangled webs at Glenkeith, and hers among the rest!

CHAPTER II

ANDREW reached Rome in a fine drizzle of rain so different from anything he had expected that he came to the conclusion that the element of surprise was never very far removed in life. It was, in fact, a constant factor, and here he was in Italy to prove it, bowling swiftly down the length of the Corso on a humid August afternoon in a ramshackle taxi whose interior smelled strongly of garlic and whose driver sang lustily between bouts of good-natured abuse hurled at his fellow countrymen as they

sped across the road almost beneath his wheels.

Melancholy, Andrew recognized, had no part in the Latin character. In spite of the rain which had swept across the airfield from the Sabine Mountains, there had been smiles everywhere and a ready courtesy which had passed him swiftly through the Customs and found him the taxi in next to no time. It was not till he was within sight and sound of the city, however, that he had recognized the persistent suggestion of adventure which had been with him most of the way.

In spite of his irritation, in spite of the fact that there was so much waiting for him to do at Glenkeith, he was conscious of a curious sort of fulfilment in coming here, a broadening and expansion of the mind, perhaps, as his grandfather had suggested.

Yet there would be little time to gaze at Rome. He had promised to return to Glenkeith as soon as possible, and at any moment now he would have the added responsibility of a child on his hands.

He looked through the window, seeing the white marble buildings on either side of the wide, straight highway like a colossal wall closing him in, and suddenly he gripped the open frame, as if he would escape before it was too late.

The gesture irritated him. What he was doing was a duty, a job of work, he assured himself. It would soon be over and he would be back at Glenkeith and everything would be the same.

The taxi turned off the main thoroughfare and went in under an archway to trundle down a narrow street with an ancient pavement of cobbles, and he thought that nowhere else in the world must there be such a pomp of gates and walls and towers and columns soaring like steeples into the sky.

If he had come to Rome for any other reason he would have walked the streets until he was exhausted, drinking in the wealth of beauty that was her past, treading back along the years to those ancient days when one man, robed in purple on the Palatine, was a god on earth and swayed the destiny of half the world. The grandeur of ancient Rome had always fascinated him as a boy, although he knew nothing of its art, but he was in Rome only for a day.

Hastily, he glanced at his watch as the taxi drew up at the approach to a narrower archway which he supposed was his destination. It was twenty minutes past three.

“Signor!” the driver announced, leaning back from the wheel to address him through the half-open screen. “The Via Media!”

Andrew paid him and went in under the arch, finding himself in what was obviously a poor quarter of the city in spite of its close proximity to the almost fabulous Corso. It seemed respectable enough, however. The rain had slackened a little and the sun had thrust its way through the canopy of grey cloud above the city, raising little spirals of steam from the paving stones as he walked across them.

The street was numbered the opposite way from the arch and he was soon to discover that there was a happy-go-lucky inconformity about the numbers, presumably because the larger mansions of what had once been a good residential quarter had been divided up into numerous flats. He hesitated about asking advice in a neighbourhood where English might be quite unknown and walked doggedly on. He had no knowledge of Italian, but had allowed himself to be buoyed up by the hope that Signor Zanetti’s English might at least be as fluent as his written effort which had started him on the journey from Glenkeith.

When he thought of Glenkeith it seemed very far away, yet, curiously enough, the thought of his grandfather was in no way remote. The old man seemed to march beside him along the worn cobbles with all the determination of his Celtic nature uppermost, brooking no delay in the carrying out of his plan, suffering no slightest excuse to deflect him from his purpose.

At the far end of the street he came to a second archway and was almost swept bodily off his feet by the impact of a group of children set free by the cessation of the rain to run headlong into the enclosed
piazza
which was an ideal playground. They were young and brown and boisterous, like most children of their age, and in their midst ran a slim, tall child, older than them yet in some strange, undefinable way at one with them.

Andrew found himself looking at the girl longer than he should have done. With her short, wind-blown hair framing a pointed oval face, there was something almost gamine in her appearance, an urchin-like quality that suited her and the circumstances in which he had run up against her, but when he looked directly into her eyes for one fleeting moment in passing he felt disconcerted, almost stunned. They were wide and dark, with a violet blueness in their depths which surprised him to the verge of shock. They seemed to hold the suggestion of some deeper quality which the laughing mouth belied.

A creature of unexpected passions, he mused. A child hesitating on the threshold of womanhood.

The conflicting thought followed him through the arch and up a broken flight of stone steps to a dilapidated villa smothered in creepers which had been broken up into several dwellings reached by a narrow stone balcony running round three sides of the central courtyard.