Doctor's Daughter

by Jean S. MacLeod

  DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER

  Jean S. MacLeod

  To Christine Helmsdale, working at Kinaird as receptionist for her father, “Young Doctor John”, it seemed that no third person could ever share the happy communion of spirit which was theirs—until the night of the storm.

  Then, sweeping in on the crest of one of the worst floods the Western Highlands had ever known, came Huntley Treverson to confound all Christine’s theories and confuse all her regulated thoughts. Trapped together in a shooting lodge, they spent a night in the hills, and from then onwards Christine’s peaceful way of life was disrupted, her immunity to love torn asunder...

  CHAPTER ONE

  It had been raining for three days, not the soft, gentle rain so usual in the Western Highlands of Scotland, but a harsh deluge beating down from a leaden sky that had filled the creeks and sent the rock-girt rivers leaping to the gray loch in cascades of churning earth and pebbles. The great forest of Mamore sighed and groaned as the wind swept through it, bending the proud heads of giant firs and disrupting its silence. Lochaber was rocked by the fury of the tempest, the lochs were full and the sound of water was everywhere.

  Christine Helmsdale had driven her doctor-father to a farm near Onich the evening before, steering the car up the uneven glen road in the darkness with the utmost difficulty, only to be forced to return without him because he had decided to remain at an old friend’s bedside until the end.

  Christine knew that her father might have done better for himself than just remain a country doctor, but he had carried on where his father had left off, and she knew that the name of Helmsdale had always been a synonym for careful attention and skill and, above all, the personal element in service. She could not count how many appendixes had been removed without fear or foreboding because “Old Doctor John” had been in attendance; and “Young Doctor John,” who was now fifty-six, had inherited all his father’s skill.

  “There are all kinds of people,” John Helmsdale always said, “and sooner or later we seek our own kind, and we’re lucky if we find them and recognize them while we’re young.”

  Christine only understood half the meaning of this, but she had thought of it often, and wondered if her father was the only person of her own kind she would ever meet.

  The other members of her family were practical; her sister Rhona was as domesticated as her mother. Neither of them were dreamers, yet such differences of spirit had never stood between them. They were a united and happy family.

  Quite often Christine wondered if her parents had ever regretted not having a son to carry on the tradition of medicine in the’ family, but never by word or implication had she sensed regret in either of them. Her father jokingly called her his “right-hand man,” and Rhona’s services were invaluable to her mother in the home. Nigel Kilbridge, who had come to Kinaird as locum tenens and stayed to go into partnership with her father, called it “the clan spirit.” There was nothing a Helmsdale did that was not supported loyally by the other Helmsdales, which was not to say that they had no differences of opinion. On the contrary, they could argue fiercely at times, arguments in which the placid Nigel took no part; but on the big issues they stood solidly as one.

  Christine thought of Nigel as she stood before the sitting-room window looking out at the rain. He had become one of “the clan,” merging with the family as a matter of course. Her fine, mobile mouth relaxed in a smile. Nigel was the brother they had never had, the son, perhaps, for whom her mother had longed.

  Twice in the next ten minutes she glanced impatiently at her watch, turning back to her contemplation of the sodden garden. Then she heard the sound of a car making its way up the driveway and hurried to the front door as Nigel Kilbridge drew up before it.

  “You’ll have to take the surgery tonight, Nigel,” she announced. “Father’s still at Letterness—”

  “No word?” His keen gray eyes went from her face to the leaden pall of the sky. “You’re not thinking of going back for him, are you?”

  “Why not?” she asked without hesitation. “I have the car and a bit of rain never hurt anyone—not this side of Oban, anyway!”

  He took the good-natured banter lightly, knowing there was rarely a sting in any of Christine’s remarks.

  “All right! I know I’m a Lowlander,” he acknowledged, “but we have our points, you know. We often drive a reliable make of car, for instance!”

  She laughed, showing two rows of perfect teeth, while her eyes twinkled appreciatively.

  “I’ll grant you that, since I was just about to borrow it! The coupe has a terrible leak just above the driver’s seat, and I don’t suppose this rain will ease up for hours yet.”

  “If you were really truthful you’d just admit that you like taking the sedan,” he returned. “It’s a most superior car, madam, and well worth your interest.” His eyes were full of laughter, yet there was a certain amount of seriousness behind them, too. “If I have an emergency I suppose I take the coupe and risk the leak?”

  She glanced at him quizzically.

  “You won’t really mind, will you, Nigel? Taking the coupe, I mean, and nobody could be so cruel as to think up an emergency on a day like this.”

  “Babies are thoroughly capable of making their appearance in any kind of weather,” he reminded her, “and it has always been my experience that they choose the most inconvenient times. However, as far as I know

  “There’s not a baby or a broken leg forthcoming this side of Fort William!” Christine removed her raincoat from the clothes tree almost eagerly, and he came up the steps to help her into it. “I’ll skip tea,” she added. “There’s sure to be something to eat at the farm, and dad may be anxious to get home before dark. The family is in the kitchen.”

  She gave him the information with the thought of Rhona in mind, believing that her sister’s shy affection for the young doctor must surely be returned, but Nigel did not respond. As he held her coat out for her she turned to smile at him and her cheek brushed lightly against his hand, causing his fingers to tighten their grip on the coat for a second before she shrugged into it and turned away in the direction of the kitchen.

  When she had disappeared Nigel Kilbridge stood gazing at the spot where her cheek had touched his flesh.

  In the kitchen Georgina Helmsdale and her younger daughter were preparing the tea. Rhona looked up expectantly as the door opened, thinking that it might be Nigel. Her quick ears had picked up the sound of his car, and Nigel’s first port of call was quite often the kitchen—especially when he had not taken time to eat a hearty lunch.

  “Oh! it’s you, Chris.” Rhona was doing her best not to show her disappointment. She had a way of hiding it behind the smile in her eyes that Christine often envied, knowing that her own emotions were frequently reflected in her candid expression for all to read. “I heard the car and I thought Nigel had come in.”

  “Nigel has gone through to the surgery, I expect, and I’m going back to Letterness. I told dad I would come, mother,” Christine explained.

  “Yes, indeed,” Georgina acknowledged. “The poor man can hardly have lasted this long and him so far gone last night.” She looked around at her daughter and nodded. “You’re well clad for the rain, but that old car of your father’s is scarcely fit for the roads in weather like this with the water flooding down the hillsides and every creek in spate for miles.”

  “I’m taking the sedan,” Christine explained, picking up a buttered scone on her way to the door. “Nigel’s amazingly trusting!”

  Nigel met her in the doorway. “I’d as soon trust anyone with my life as trust them with that car!”

  “Which means that you’re going to worry all the time I’m away?” she suggested.

  His look said
that he would have worried much more if she had been forced to go in the coupe, and Rhona, moving quietly about the kitchen collecting the china onto a tray, saw that look and read it for what it was. The color fled out of her face as she watched her sister leave. No! No! she protested inwardly while she set the last cup methodically on the tray. It can’t happen like that! But she knew that it could happen. Love could be cruel as well as kind, and nothing she could do would avert the tragedy of her love for Nigel Kilbridge. For quite surely he loved Christine, Rhona had only to look at him when he spoke to her sister to see that.

  Unhappiness submerged her for a moment like a great tide, and then she squared her shoulders and lifted the tray to carry it into the dining room.

  She was much the sturdier-looking of the two sisters, smaller than Christine by several inches and much darker, with deep blue eyes inherited from her mother’s side of the family and a small, square chin that showed courage. Her hair was short and dark and curled at the nape of her neck, and she had a fresh color that suggested the caress of sun and wind in open places. Her dark kilt was girded around her with stout leather straps on the hips, and her shoes were strong and practical. She had none of Christine’s buoyant charm, and the steady glow in her eyes was often dimmed by her elder sister’s brightness. Where Christine was the doer of deeds, Rhona Helmsdale was the one who waited. She would never have gone out to meet her happiness halfway or have sought it knowingly, just as Christine had not the patience to wait for happiness or anything else.

  Christine settled herself comfortably behind the steering wheel with that thrill of expectation rarely absent when she was allowed to try something new, and set the windshield wipers into motion. They swept across the glass, but almost immediately the torrential rain ran down to obscure the view. It was going to be difficult driving all the way to Letterness, she mused—difficult, but fun!

  Through the windshield she could just see the road ahead for perhaps a hundred yards, and even above the sound of the engine she could hear the noise of water. They had been listening to that sound at Kinaird for days: water rushing steadily downhill; water draining from the eaves and rushing along the gutters; water flowing strongly in the creeks and swirling in the deep pools. And always the thought of the rising loch and the knowledge of the havoc that could be wrought by flood was in the back of their minds.

  The trees on the glen road tossed and writhed before the onslaught of a wind that whipped them viciously hither and thither, bending them to its will. Twigs and branches were strewn along the way, and everywhere was the smell of wet earth. Not the sweet, pungent smell of earth happy under a summer shower, but earth saturated with moisture, beaten down by it, defeated.

  The road went downhill, dipping toward the loch, and here and there it disappeared under water. She had tramped that road to and from school for more than ten years, four times a day, and had walked it twice on Sundays to the parish church on the lochside that served Kinaird and the adjoining community of Kilcraven.

  The loch was full and the wind was blowing toward the Lochaber shore, whipping the gray water into rolling walls crested with angry white. A gray pall of mist hid the glens and mountains of Ardgour. There was no break in the sky, nothing but the steady downpour of rain.

  The daylight was beginning to fade behind the mist and low-hanging clouds. She thought of the journey back in the darkness, but would not let that daunt her. Her father would tell her stories about other and far wilder nights than this; when cattle had been swept away and drowned in the loch and great trees had been cracked in two or torn up by their roots and flung from the high precipices above the glen.

  There was a sense of security about driving a car as powerful as the sedan and she pressed on. Was it a false security? Twice she battled through a swirling flood, and still the road had not begun to climb. She tried to remember exactly where the river came down from the lakelet, where the trees parted in a narrow glen that led only to the gray strip of water locked in among the hills, but her memory failed her. She gripped the wheel and drove on, bending forward in concentration until, suddenly and without warning, the car began sinking deeper and deeper into flood water until her engine spluttered and stopped altogether.

  “Oh, darn!”

  She bit her teeth on the sharp exclamation of annoyance, sitting for a moment in a vain effort to see through the windshield and over the hood in front of her, and then she opened the door.

  A spatter of rain met her as she gazed down at a sea of mud and water.

  “Well,” she said aloud in irritation, “I suppose I’ve had it, and that’s that!”

  With the water swirling around her knees, she saw the necessity of abandoning the car altogether and reaching higher ground for her own personal safety, and with one backward glance at the pride of Nigel Kilbridge’s heart, she plunged toward the hill.

  Climbing steadily, she saw the road submerged ahead for perhaps two hundred yards and the wind whipping the water into tiny, disgruntled waves.

  She battled against the rain, climbing higher on a sheep track through bracken that came breast high, and then she stood arrested by a sound. Above the noise of the wind and rain she thought she heard the pulsing beat of a car’s engine. Then, as suddenly as it had come, it stopped. The ensuing desolation of the landscape seemed doubly impenetrable because of that sudden hope of rescue, and she felt cold and lonely for the first time. Then lights flashed, twin points of yellow reassurance beyond the flood. They stayed on for a full minute before disappearing again, but already she was on her way back down to the road, plunging through heather and bracken, taking a diagonal course along the hillside toward what must undoubtedly be a second car.

  It was a big, black sports model driven expertly onto high ground in the lee of the hill and sheltered from the loch water by a group of crags jutting out like a small headland. The driver was striding up across the heather toward her.

  He came by a path rising steeply from the shore, his height accentuated by the long raincoat securely buckled at the waist. His head was down and his face obscured by the brim of a battered felt hat that appeared to have weathered many such gales. He carried a gun under his arm and a game bag was slung across his shoulder.

  When he saw her he stopped in his tracks, completely and frankly amazed at the sight of a girl abroad on such a day and in such a place.

  “You’ve been stranded?” he asked. “I thought the flood looked much worse farther on. It has been bad enough the way I’ve come, and it is still rising. Are you completely waterlogged?”

  “Completely! I’m afraid I drove my car straight in, like a fool, and now I’ve settled down nicely—in a ditch!”

  “Bad luck!” he acknowledged. “Did you have far to go?”

  “I was going to Sma’ Glen to pick up my father from a farm there.” Christine was aware that she had seen this stranger somewhere before. “What is the road like beyond the water?”

  “Pretty hopeless, even if you could get through the flood. There are boulders down and by this time I should imagine there might be a tree or two. I thought of turning back myself,” he admitted, “but I don’t think I could possibly get through again. It sounded very much as if the lake had started to empty down the hill.”

  She looked toward his car lying high and dry off the road. “You’ve parked very nicely,” she observed while her mind still searched for a clue to his identity. “You would be quite warm and dry there for an hour or two, at least.”

  “I have thought of something much better than that,” he told her with a faint smile. “Behind us, there’s a reasonably comfortable shooting lodge.”

  It was then that she knew who he was, and the name of Treverson rushed in upon her recollection with relief and gratitude. He was old Ben Treverson’s nephew. His uncle’s shooting lodge had been built years ago among the hills between Kinaird and the Sma’ Glen. She could remember her father saying Ben Treverson was full of daft ideas, but that he had plenty of money to indulge them and that,
anyway, it gave work to a lot of idle folk in the glen at that time.

  “The most sensible thing we can do is to make for the lodge,” young Treverson suggested. “There’s shelter and we can dry our shoes and hope for the best.”

  Christine glanced down at her sodden brogues and up again at the leaden sky which held out no promise as it pressed down against the hills.

  “It doesn’t look as if it’s ever going to clear,” she agreed. “It might be safer to go to the lodge.”

  He turned without further comment and led the way up through the heather along a track that had become a rushing torrent. He crushed the bracken down in places with his stout boots so that she might pass. Already her coat was saturated with rain. It was an old one and not proof against such a deluge and she was damp and uncomfortable long before they had reached high ground and the squat outline of the Treverson shooting lodge loomed out of the dusk.

  Exhausted by the buffeting of the storm and the stiff climb, she saw it as sanctuary, saw its weathered timbers and sturdy gray walls of native stone as a shield against more than the elements.

  “What is it one feels in a storm like this?” she found herself asking her companion as he reached down a key from above the door. “Is it the strength and magnitude of nature, or is it just plain fear?”

  “A little of both perhaps—awe mostly, I think, but I have to confess that I love a storm.”

  “Today, however, it has held you up?” she suggested. He shrugged indifferently.

  “In a way, I suppose it has. I had a dinner engagement at Bramshaw Mains, but I don’t think anyone will worry very much when I don’t turn up. My uncle knows how unreliable I am.” Huntley Treverson opened the heavy wooden door with difficulty and Christine followed him into the lodge, which consisted of one big, circular room from which opened three others. It smelled damp and had not been greatly used. A big open fireplace with a rough stone chimney reached up through the rafters, and a monk’s bench that had evidently seen service as a table stood in the corner. Sheepskin rugs lay on the wooden floor and on the rough log walls was a selection of firearms obviously collected over a period of years by an enthusiast. Two comfortable-looking chairs stood one on each side of the fireplace, and there were others, crudely made from ash and deerskin, placed against the walls.