The House of the Laird

by Susan Barrie

  Karen lifted the window and scattered a few crumbs on the ledge for the robin, who had the courage to remain where he was and not to fly off while operation was in progress, and then as she closed the window again she heard the door behind her open.

  It was her host who had come into the room, and as always he seemed to bring a breath of the out-of-doors with him. Karen, as she turned back to the fire and met his eyes, had the feeling she so often had nowadays, and against which she was beginning to rebel, that she had become a kind of hot-house plant ridiculously guarded against the rigors of the outer air, and as she met those cool, alert eyes of Iain Mackenzie’s, and saw the healthy glow which exercise had brought to his bronzed skin, a faint feeling of envy stirred in her, and the rebellion grew.

  He had been walking down beside the lake, which he said was now free from ice, and he went to a cabinet, brought out a decanter and glasses and poured her a glass of sherry which he handed to her.

  “Your very good health!” he said, a trifle mockingly she thought, as he raised his own glass. “If this weather continues you should be able to put your nose out of doors before very long, and then no doubt we shall see you begin to look positively robust. At the moment you certainly haven’t enough color!”

  She moved nearer to the fireplace and stood looking down into the glowing coals. She looked very slender as she stood there in her dress of fine grey wool, with a neat white collar and cuffs which lent it rather a Puritan touch. Her fair hair had grown a little longer, and was turning softly upwards on her neck like the petals of a flower, and her skin looked peculiarly flawless. Her mouth drooped a little despondently, but it was a very lovely mouth, especially as it was lightly lipsticked. She had a faint upward tilt to her small nose, too, which was also flower-like, and her long eyelashes fluttered noticeably as she stared at the fire.

  “You know,” she said suddenly, her untouched glass of sherry gripped tightly in one hand, “this is all quite ridiculous!”

  “Oh!” Iain exclaimed. He flung himself comfortably into his favorite chair, and started to feel in all his pockets for his always elusive pipe and box of matches. “What is quite ridiculous?”

  “Keeping me shut up like this, as if I were a—a precious plant, or something!” She flung back her head and looked at him, and her eyes were both hostile and accusing. “You know very well that it’s got to end sometime and as I’ve already been here several weeks the sooner it ends the better! I can’t go on living like this—accepting your charity—your—your goodness! You’ve been very kind, but—”

  “Doctor’s orders,” he murmured imperturbably, as he started to stuff tobacco into the bowl of the pipe.

  “Nonsense!” she exclaimed impatiently. “If Dr. Moffat knew the truth I’m quite sure he’d think you were eccentric!”

  “Instead of which he thinks I’m contemplating marrying you and living happily ever after!”

  There was so much faintly derisive amusement in his grey eyes as he looked up at her that she felt that revealing color, over which she had so little control, sting her cheeks, and for an instant she could not meet his eyes.

  “If he thinks that it’s simply because you—because we had to practice a deception. But I hate deception, and I hate deceiving anyone like Dr. Moffat. He’s so kind, and so nice. And I don’t like deceiving Mrs. Burns, either, or all the other people in this house.”

  “There’s only the cook, and Annie.” he reminded her. “Oh, and Prout, the parlormaid, and George, who drives my car. I shouldn’t think the news has got as far as the village yet, as we’ve been cut off for so long. But Annie may carry it there when she goes in to change her library book at the village stores. They’re served by a kind of travelling library service there, and—”

  She gave a kind of exasperated sigh which caused his eyes to twinkle under his long and very thick black eyelashes as he bent over the bowl of his pipe.

  “I don’t really believe you mind,” she said, staring at him in perplexity.

  “Quite honestly, I don’t,” he answered, and having got the pipe to work satisfactorily lay back and sent a cloud of the fragrant tobacco smoke moving stealthily in her direction.

  Karen gazed at him with her large eyes—still too large for her small, wan face—trying to solve the enigma of his bland, untroubled countenance. And as she gazed at him she could hardly believe that for nearly a month now they had been almost constant companions, sharing the faded splendors of this quiet room, with its pale green panelled walls and its gilded cornices, its mixture of period furniture and the portraits looking at them from the walls.

  This room had been untouched for many years because, it was lovely enough as it was, and there were no modern improvements that could make it more restful, or give it a greater charm. Karen had grown so accustomed to spending her evenings sitting on one side of the wide hearth while her host lounged on the other that she knew it was going to take a considerable effort to free her mind of the clinging memory of it. The memory of the damask-covered settees, and the long curtains falling before the windows, a rather deeper green than the walls, and of heavy brocade. The memory of the harp standing a little forlornly in one corner, and the piano at which Iain Mackenzie sometimes sat and amused himself—and her—with light syncopation, while the firelight played on the panelled walls, and the dusk deepened around them. The memory of a beautiful set of carved ivory chessmen, and an elegant chess board, which he brought out sometimes and set up on a small table between them; and the way in which, while he painstakingly taught her, who had never played chess before, to beat him at the game, the light from the standard lamp at his elbow discovering burnished gleams in his surprisingly black hair, while outside the snow lay hard and cold under a hard, cold moon.

  When she left Craigie House she would have many memories to take away with her, and so many of them would be pleasant memories. But in the case of Iain Mackenzie these weeks of close confinement to the house and the society of a sickly young woman who had foisted herself upon him must have been weeks of pure, unalloyed boredom. Caught up in a ridiculous situation which, while it might sometimes have amused him a little, must at other times have irked him extremely, she could not understand how he so successfully turned to her an undisturbed front whenever she challenged him on the subject of their extraordinary intimacy.

  For it was one thing to pretend to having acquired a fiancée in front of servants, but to have to keep up that pretence while day after day the snow fell steadily, the drifts which blocked the roads grew deeper, and the wireless was their only contact with the outer world, had aroused her own sympathy to such an extent that she was amazed that he did not seem either to require or desire to have it poured out over him.

  Day after day his attitude towards her had remained the same—polite, attentive, considerate, even friendly. They had had many conversations, discussed all sorts of subjects, books, plays, even politics, but at the end of four weeks she was quite certain that neither of them really knew anything more of the other than when they first met. Perhaps it was because she was always on the defensive, while in him she always sensed, or imagined, that faint feeling of amusement—or derision, almost—which never allowed her to be quite at her ease (a thing which, under the circumstances, she could scarcely expect to be, as she realized) and which baffled her so much that he remained a stranger to her, in spite of the fact that the little world inside Craigie House accepted him as the man she was going to marry. Whatever the reason, she felt that the four weeks had got them nowhere as regards looking into one another’s minds.

  And now he calmly informed her that he quite honestly didn’t mind this situation, which she knew would have to end soon unless it was to become quite intolerable.

  “Perhaps you’d like to read this,” he said, removing an envelope from his pocket and tossing it lightly across to her. “It might provide you with a few ideas.”

  Karen seated herself in her customary armchair, and drew out the thick sheet of notepaper the en
velope contained. She was so surprised that he had asked her to read part of his correspondence that she hesitated before attempting to peruse the bold and yet rather spidery handwriting. It was a woman’s writing, and the notepaper was that of a well-known and very exclusive London hotel. The letter, short and to the point, ran:

  “Dear Nephew,

  Delighted, to hear your news, and anxious meet girl. Shall be returning Craigie the instant the snow clears, and then you’ll be seeing me. Fiona has agreed to stay with me for a while—met her in Italy.

  Your loving Aunt Horry.

  Karen lifted her eyes from the letter and looked in bewilderment at her host.

  “But—but I don’t understand,” she said.

  Iain smiled.

  “Well, I’ll explain,” he answered, “if you haven’t already deduced the important point about that letter. Aunt Horry—my Aunt Horatia, that is, who was named after Nelson—has been spending part of the winter abroad, but as usual she’s returned just at the wrong time, and within a matter of days she’ll be lunching here in this house, unless I make a grave mistake. I wrote Aunt Horry in Italy—because she was already threatening a return—about you, and she seems to be quite charmed by the notion of acquiring a niece by marriage. I happen to be one of her favorite nephews, and she’s always wanted me to marry. She has a house the other side of Craigie village, and once installed there again she’ll be a frequent visitor, and you’ll certainly have to get to know her. So you can’t talk about running out on me just now, even if you were fit to do so, which you aren’t yet.”

  “But—” she almost gaped at him—“you don’t really mean to tell me that you told your own relative we were engaged?”

  “I do,” with amusement gleaming in his eyes.

  “And who,” she asked, after drawing a deep breath, “ is Fiona?”

  This time the expression on his face altered, and grew hard and cold all at once—so hard, and so cold, that for just a few moments she felt that he was almost a complete stranger to her.

  “She and I were once really engaged,” he explained, in, however, an absolutely level tone, “and then she decided to drop me in favor of an old friend of mine. The marriage only lasted a couple of years, and now she’s a widow. Aunt Horry seems to have run across her in Italy and she’s bringing her back with her—for some mysterious reason known only to Aunt Horry. But—” looking at her with a mixture of cynicism and something unusually watchful in his expression, “I feel sure you’ll appreciate my anxiety to have a little protection during her visit, and what better protection could a man have from a former fiancée than another fiancée? That’s why I say you can’t run out on me!”

  Karen sat absolutely still and studied him attentively for several seconds. She was not sure how she felt about this request of his that she should act a part already distasteful to her for some while longer, under circumstances which might make it much more than distasteful, but she did know that she was secretly rather amazed within herself because of the feeling of indignation which had risen up in her when he had let her into the secret of what had happened to him not much more than two years ago.

  He who had been so kind to her—who had placed her within the sanctuary of his own house, and surrounded her with every comfort, done everything he could to restore her to health—was not the sort of man to be treated in such a cruel fashion by a woman! She felt so indignant that she actually quivered a little with it, and it showed in her eyes, and her tightening lips. She felt she despised the woman, and could do nothing but loathe her.

  No wonder that in spite of their enforced intimacy, all the long evenings, and the many daylight hours, they had spent together, there had always been that something about him which had baffled her. He was impervious—safely entrenched behind the armor of what had probably been the one great love of his life—to any other woman, whether young or old, beautiful or just a rather colorless slip of a girl like herself, who had fainted in his arms on a railway station platform! It wasn’t that she had ever wanted him to pay her any serious attention—even to notice her, apart from the ridiculous helplessness which had claimed his sympathy—but even if she had, he would not have noticed her! In spite of their pretended engagement, which surely didn’t deceive even the servants, she might have been a member of his own sex who was enjoying his hospitality, and benefiting from his undoubted kindness. A young boy in his house, someone who aroused a certain protective instinct in him, but who would never get behind the uninformative mask of his face and really know him.

  And he had been hurt by a woman who was now proposing to step back into his life and perhaps hurt him again! It was preposterous—it was unthinkable! Her quivering indignation told her that something must be done about it.

  “How long is she likely to stay?” she asked. “This—this ex-fiancée of yours?”

  “I haven’t any idea,” he replied, with a return of his usual lazy smile, “but I wouldn’t demand your protection too long if you felt the situation was impossible.”

  She was silent again for perhaps another full minute, and then she said quietly:

  “I don’t suppose it would be all that impossible, as I’ve already posed as your fiancée for nearly a month. And I feel that I owe you something. It’s been worrying me that I couldn’t think of a way in which I could repay you for all that you’ve done for me. But if—if deceiving your aunt, and this—this Fiona—would be some sort of repayment, then I’m quite willing to continue with the deception.”

  For a moment she was surprised because he did not appear to grasp at her ready compliance with all the gratification she had expected of him, and in fact, just for a bare half-second, she thought that something in his face was an indication that he was uncertain. He looked at her, and the cool grey eyes seemed to soften in a way they had never quite done before, and she felt that he was about to say something almost impetuous.

  But if he was he changed his mind, and instead he said, with just the merest touch of mockery in his smile:

  “Well, in that, case, I shall probably have cause to be grateful to you—and I am grateful to you now! But I don’t really think I shall seriously require any protection from Mrs. Barrington. It would be flattering myself too much if I imagined that she still had any interest in me, but she was always very fond of my aunt. However, on the principle that there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, the fact that you are apparently willing to consider me as a life partner will remove any impression that I’ve become a woman-hater, or something of the sort, all as the result of one ill-fated romance.”

  “There’s just one thing,” Karen said diffidently, as she stared at the fire in order to avoid having to meet his eyes. “You don’t think that perhaps—that when you see her again you might wish—wish you hadn’t attempted to deceive her? Discover that you don’t need any protection—?”

  He shook his head, his expression bleak again.

  “Even allowing for the fact that the flesh is weak, I don’t think so,” he answered.

  But Karen wondered, as she ventured to steal another look at his face.

  He glanced up quickly and met her eyes, smiling a little mockingly as he asked:

  “Well? What is it you want to know?”

  “Is she attractive?” Karen asked.

  “Fiona Barrington?” He lay back in his chair and studied the glowing logs in the fire. “She was much more than attractive and she can’t have altered greatly in less than three years. She is also extremely beautiful, and although beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I think most people would agree with me that she is—quite something!”

  “I see,” Karen said, and her voice sounded rather flat.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The next day she had a letter from Nannie McBain, full of affection and concern for her welfare, and stating plainly that there was little likelihood of her being back at her cottage for several weeks to come. But the letter concluded on a relieve note, because she had heard all about Karen’
s engagement to Iain Mackenzie, and although Ellen was obviously puzzled as to how this had come about, she was also delighted. The Mackenzies were a fine family, and Craigie House was so near to her own cottage that it would be lovely when she did finally return home to know that in future she would be living practically on Karen’s own doorstep. Karen was a lucky girl, and she congratulated her very heartily.

  Karen felt slightly appalled when she had got to the end of this letter, pleased though she was to have at last some direct contact with her old nurse, and she carried it down into the library where the master of the place was at that moment sorting his own letters, and showed it to him.

  After he had read it he looked up at her with an unmistakably amused grin.

  “Amazing, isn’t it, the way news gets around? And to think we’ve been snowed up for the past month.”

  Karen’s blue eyes looked dark with apprehension as she gazed at him.

  “Are you quite sure we’re not storing up for ourselves a lot of trouble?”

  “My dear child, what trouble could you store up for yourself?” he demanded lightly, as he carelessly ripped up a pile of envelopes and dropped them into the wastepaper basket. “When the time comes you’ve merely got to let it be known that you couldn’t endure the thought of marrying me after all, and just drift away out of my life! It will be simplicity itself, and in the meantime I’m helping you to solve your own most urgent problem.”

  He glanced out of the window at the sun, making a splendor of the lawn that had been so recently hidden beneath a mantle of snow, and he added as if he had received a sudden inspiration

  “And do you know what I’m going to do now? I’m going to get out the car and take you for a short drive, which will at least be a change for you. So pop upstairs to your room and wrap yourself up warmly. We mustn’t risk your catching a chill, but we must let you have a little air.”