“Why?” she asked, her blue eyes opening wide as she gazed at him.
He shrugged. He walked to the bookcase and lifted out a couple of books, and some colourful chintz curtains at the window flapped in the breeze and touched his shoulder.
“Reasons of sentiment, shall we say?” he replied at last, his dark eyebrows lifting sardonically.
Over by the opposite window Toni felt as if her pulses gave a sudden uncontrolled leap, and she waited for him to explain what he meant by reasons of sentiment. He looked across at her, his blue eyes cool and a trifle challenging, but otherwise quite unrevealing.
“Some people put up plaques,” he said, “when their houses are honoured by visits from people they want to remember. Your daughter stayed here for a couple of nights, and it was so entirely unsuited to her that I thought I owed it to her to ensure that no one like her would ever have to endure such discomfort again. Considering the time of year and the lack of amenities, she behaved like a heroine!”
And across the room his eyes grew warm and admiring for the very first time as they met Toni’s.
Celia said, “well, well!” and Charles looked even grimmer than when they first arrived at the cottage.
“She certainly did,” he agreed, and then added that he would never understand why a man who didn’t have to should have elected to live in such a place.
Euan’s eyes grew cold again.
“I offered you hospitality, but you didn’t have to accept it,” he said.
Charles replied disdainfully:
“If Toni hadn’t been with me you can take it that I wouldn’t. I would have pushed on to Inverada somehow.”
Then he went out into the garden, as if the inside of the cottage was too filled with painful memories to make it possible for him to remain any longer, and Celia followed him. She did so after another thoughtful look at Euan, and an inexplicable one at her daughter, and left alone with him Toni suddenly felt acutely self-conscious, and wondered if she wouldn’t be behaving more wisely if she plunged out into the garden after the other two.
But Euan’s voice prevented her. He asked with a coldly amused note in his voice:
“Haven’t you and the impeccable Charles made it up yet?”
She merely looked at him.
“You quarrelled last night,” he reminded her, “and he left you alone on the terrace. Your mother advised you to go after him and offer the olive branch, but for some reason you didn’t do so. Why was that?”
He extracted a cigarette from his case while he waited for her to answer. She bit her lip, and then decided to answer truthfully.
“We didn’t quarrel, but he was ... upset. And there was nothing I could do about it.”
His eyebrows ascended.
“Nothing?”
She shook her head.
“No, nothing.”
“Except marry him, of course. Which you will do eventually! And then I shall send you both a handsome wedding present!”
Suddenly she felt strangely angry with him, strangely bewildered.
“Why are you so anxious for me to marry Charles?” she demanded outright. “Why do you talk as if it’s as good as settled—when you know it’s nothing of the sort!—and it’s something that will give you great satisfaction?”
“Nothing of the kind,” he assured her, quite calmly. “Your marriage couldn’t possibly give me satisfaction, but I like people to get the things they hanker after—the things that will give them satisfaction. And as it was standing out ten miles that you were in love with Charles when you came north with him before, and he quite certainly is in love with you—although I wasn’t quite certain of that before—then the natural sequence of events is marriage. Your mother agrees with me, and we’re both waiting to shower you with rice when you come out of the church.”
His eyes were dancing with that cold mockery she so thoroughly disliked, and suddenly she bit her lip again, hard.
“Then I’m afraid you’ll wait a long time,” she said.
He studied her curiously.
“Tell me something, Toni,” he said.
She waited.
“Those two nights you spent here in this cottage you were in love with Charles, weren’t you? I mean ... it was he you wanted to sit beside you and hold your hand when you were feeling better, and every time you looked at him there was a sort of shining adoration in your eyes. It was young and pathetic, but it was there ... and that sort of thing doesn’t pass in a matter of weeks. Besides, your mother tells me that you’ve always adored your precious Charles, and now even she considers that the logical outcome is that you shall marry him.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
“Why not?” he asked.
She turned away. How could she tell him that her mother had had Charles earmarked for herself for years, and she wasn’t in the least likely to hand him over to a daughter now? And if he, Euan, was attracted by her mother...
She walked across to the couch on which she had spent two nights, and touched one of the cushions—covered now in the same chintz as the window curtains—gently.
“I shall never forget the nights I spent in this cottage,” she said, as if she was communing with herself.
Euan came up behind her.
“And I shall never forget the girl with the big brown eyes and the snow-wet hair who sat on this couch and didn’t know why she had come north at all at such a season of the year. The girl was small, cold, wet, miserable... and in love!” he added. “When you were a bit lightheaded you babbled of finding it all an adventure...” He turned away. “An adventure! As if any man with sense wouldn’t have made you turn back when you got to Edinburgh when he saw the way the weather was worsening.”
Toni sought quickly to defend Charles.
“But I know he thought we ought to turn back...”
“Ah!” Euan exclaimed, with a kind of mocking triumph. “So it was you! You who were so set on enjoying your little interlude with Charles that you wouldn’t turn back! I knew I hadn’t made a mistake about you. I’ve seen too many young girls like you on board ship—particularly on holiday cruises—young, eager, ardent...”
Suddenly she felt her indignation with him get quite out of hand, and she stamped her foot.
“I may be young, but I’m not eager and ardent,” she denied furiously. “And, if you must know, I once had a girlish crush on Charles, but it’s cured now. It will remain cured!”
“Ah!” he exclaimed softly, and came across the room to her. “And since when have you been cured of worshipping the one-and-only Charles? Has it anything to do with the two nights you spent in this cottage?”
“Nothing at all,” she answered him, not quite truthfully, but with vehemence.
He picked up one of the cushions of the couch, and then tossed it back into place.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said, his blue eyes narrowed to mere gleaming slits as he looked down at her. “Charles Henderson may persuade you that you haven’t quite got over him—yet!—and marry you, but there’s one thing he’ll never do. I have deprived him of something, haven’t I? The sweetness of a young girl’s unkissed lips!”
She felt the scarlet creeping up the back of her neck.
“How did you know I’d never been kissed?”
He laughed, with sudden enjoyment.
“I didn’t. But it seems that you—hadn’t—doesn’t it?”
Toni was never more thankful than she was at that moment to hear her mother’s voice as she came moving briskly into the cottage.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Charles returned to London on Monday morning, but before he left he asked Toni to forgive him if he had been bad-tempered during the weekend, and told her he would go on hoping that one day she would fall in love with him and marry him.
“I realised I took you by surprise the other night,” he said. “Having just realised something important myself I thought you would have realised it, too ... for it all stemmed from that little adv
enture of ours up here in February.” They were standing on the shore of the loch, and she had been talking somewhat nervously about the beauty of the scenery when he made this second appeal to her. “Toni, I must have been waiting all my life for you.” His eyes held that wry look that touched her because it was not like Charles to look as if something was beyond him, and he was very much afraid it might remain so. “Waiting for you to grow up. Only I didn’t know it!”
She wondered why it was that she couldn’t hurl herself into his arms and say, “Oh, Charles, I’ve been waiting all my life for you to become aware of me!”
But she couldn’t, because it was no longer true. Two months ago she could have said it ... but not now! A kiss had altered all that ... a kiss and a pair of hard blue eyes that so seldom softened. In fact, they had only softened for her when she was ill.
She said hurriedly:
“Charles, it’s no use. No use your hoping—”
“That you’ll grow up?”
“I am grown up, and I like you enormously, but I’ll never think of you as other than a—a friend. A very dear friend!” she added, even more hurriedly.
“Yet, if I’d lifted my finger a few weeks ago, you’d have fallen like a ripe plum at my feet?” with great dryness.
She was shocked because she knew he was speaking the truth. That night on the train, for instance ... she had wanted him so badly to notice her, as he noticed her mother!
She swallowed.
“Charles, I told you the truth when I said I thought I loved you—once. But it could only have been a kind of fascination that you had for me. An attraction because you’re so adult and polished and man-of-the-worldish ... and I thought Mummy was in love with you!”
“Your mother,” he told her sourly, “is a woman who thinks only of business and the pet schemes that occur to her from time to time. At the moment she has a scheme on hand for marrying you to MacLeod!”
Her eyes grew wide.
“But that can’t be true,” she replied. “For Euan said she has a scheme on hand for marrying me to you!”
Charles looked at first mildly astonished, and then his eyebrows went up and his eyes grew quizzical.
“Well, perhaps we none of us properly understand Celia,” he remarked. “But, whatever plan she has on hand, don’t fall in with it, little Toni, unless your heart’s in it, and you’re sure you can be happy. Better a few more years of looking after her in London than that!” He picked up one of her hands and kissed it gently. “I could offer you a lot of fun, Toni, and quite an easy life, if you’d marry me...” His voice was wistful in a way she’d never known it to be before. “I’d take such care of you, too.”
She shook her head, suddenly terribly distressed because she couldn’t marry him, and he was the man she had always thought she wanted to marry!
“You may change your mind.” But again she shook her head. “After, all you changed it before.” He smiled at her with a touch of appeal, and then went inside to pack his case for his return journey to London.
After he had gone Celia went about looking thoughtful for a few hours, and then she asked Toni openly whether Charles had asked her to marry him.
“Yes,” Toni said, and was half afraid her mother would be badly hurt.
But she needn’t have worried about Celia, for her expression clearly revealed the truth that she was not in the least hurt. She curled up on a comfortable settee in her bedroom and asked Toni to mix her a facial mask that she meant to have applied the day before, and while the unhealthy-looking beautifying treatment was in process she said there were one or two things she wanted to tell Toni about Euan MacLeod, and that she was hoping for a certain amount of co-operation from her daughter.
Toni waited—her heart beating so painfully quickly for a few minutes that it almost hurt her—and then, feeling the edges of the mask with exploring fingers, and maintaining her comfortable relaxed position on the settee (“So important to be quite relaxed when this sort of thing is being done to you!” she explained to Toni), Celia revealed:
“Euan and I have had a lot of talks, and by this time I know quite a lot about him and his past. He seems to have had rather an unhappy childhood, for his mother ran off with some man or other while he was young, and his father didn’t care greatly what happened to him after that occurred. He took to doctoring like a duck takes to water, and, as a matter of fact, it was Uncle Angus who paid for his training—but his first practice was not a success because some woman patient fell in love with him, involved him in a lot of scandal, and he gave it up and went to sea. He was reasonably happy as a ship’s doctor until some other woman complicated his life, and he threw that up, too.”
“He—he told you all this?” Toni said, staring at her mother in astonishment.
Celia smiled beneath the mask.
“Does that astonish you so much, darling? But then I’m what the Italians would call simpatica ... and he just opened up to me! Other men have done so before.”
“Including Charles?” Toni enquired, rather dryly.
“Oh, Charles!” Celia opened one eye and gazed at her. “Well, Charles, at one time, was a little different. I used to think I might like to marry him. But I’m older than he is—yes; I recognise that! and, like Charles himself, I’m a little set in my ways, so I long ago decided it wouldn’t work. But you, darling ... for you, my pet, it could work. You would have an effect on Charles that would bring him to life, especially if you had a family ... which I couldn’t contemplate at my age!”
“Please!” Toni said, shrinking from the notion of having a family by a man she no longer imagined herself in love with.
Celia reached out for some tissues, and dabbed her fingers on them.
“Darling, you’ve got to marry some time,” she said carelessly, “and Charles would do for you beautifully. I’m surprised I never thought of it before.”
“You said that Euan MacLeod would do beautifully for me,” Toni reminded her, with a sudden flash of acute resentment at such casual interference in her life. “Because he had inherited your Uncle Angus’s money!” she added shortly.
“Ah, yes.” Celia tested the mask again, and said: “I think this can come off now, darling.” Then: “As a matter of fact, I did think Euan would make a very nice and satisfactory son-in-law, until I discovered he was hopelessly in love. One reason, no doubt, why he often appears so grim! That girl he met on board ship—a wealthy American heiress, I believe she was—hasn’t quite vanished from his life. In fact, she’s coming back into it very shortly.”
“What!” Toni exclaimed, and gave herself away so completely that Celia sat up on the settee and said the sooner she got rid of all the mess on her face the better. She glanced sideways at Toni and added: “I’d better tell you the rest, before you make up your mind you can’t marry Charles. Euan knows he was badly treated, but apparently when you fall desperately in love—and, I’ll admit, I never fell as desperately at that!—a woman or a man can do anything, and you’ll forgive them. This girl—Penelope Parsons, I believe her name is—is on a visit to Europe with her aunt, and having heard that Euan has come into a lot of money—although Euan won’t have that!—she wants to come up here to Scotland and see him again. I’ve promised to get some rooms ready for them, and they’re arriving in about a week. I thought you’d better know.”
Toni started to clear up the mess created by the facial treatment mechanically. Celia disappeared into the bathroom, but through the open door she called:
“So you see, darling, it would be very, very silly of you to let one man go when another—the other, shall we say?—is already more or less booked!”
For the rest of that day Toni avoided being alone with Euan, and, in fact, she endeavoured to keep out of his way so much that, two days later, he asked her bluntly why she was behaving towards him as if he had suddenly developed the plague.
“I hadn’t noticed that I was avoiding you,” Toni said stiffly.
He smiled a little bleakly.
Toni moved across the room to be well away from him. She looked out at her favourite view of the loch.
“You mustn’t exaggerate, Dr. MacLeod,” she said stiffly. “I’m not as rare as all that, and I’m not so easily shocked that you have to treat me as if I was early Victorian!”
“Ah!” he exclaimed, as if light had suddenly broken over him. “It was that kiss you objected to! I ought to have realised that a girl like you...”
“A girl like me will probably collect a good many kisses before she decides she’s discovered the brand to take seriously,” she told him flippantly, and saw his dark face grow gradually darker, and infinitely more bleak than she had ever seen it before. “Now, tell me all about these friends of yours who’re coming to stay,” she said conversationally, perching herself on the arm of a chair and looking at him expectantly. “Mummy says it’s someone who’s terribly important to you—at least, one of them is!—and we’ve got to make her comfortable. She suggested that I give up my room, and I honestly don’t mind...”
“Thank you,” he said stiffly, “but it won’t be necessary for you to give up your room. There are heaps of rooms here at Inverada.”
“But if she’s as important as all that,” looking at him without the slightest sign of embarrassment, and plenty of interest, “mine is a very sunny room, and—”
“Keep it!” he said, as if he was issuing an order. She shrugged her slender shoulders.
“Just as you wish. But if I was renting this house, and it was someone important to me—”
“Charles, for instance?”
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