The House of the Laird

by Susan Barrie

Outside the rain lashed against the windows, and the sky had darkened so much that without the firelight they would have found it difficult to see the outlines of one another’s faces. But as it was, while hailstones bounced in the garden, and lightning ripped across the sky, and one or two claps of thunder filled the air, Karen, was all too painfully conscious that the vivid flush in her cheeks was being observed with interest by the man beside her, and that he was indulging in an absorbed study of her expression.

  “Sure you won’t try a cigarette?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “No, thank you.”

  “I think you ought to cultivate a few vices,” he remarked in an amused tone. “You really are a little puritan, aren’t you? You hardly drink, and you don’t smoke, and it’s obvious you were very, very nicely brought up.” She looked at him for a moment as if she was not quite certain whether he was joking or whether he was serious, and then when she saw that there was merely the faintest suspicion of a twinkle in his eye she said to herself, trying to gather together all the shreds of her courage:

  “Now—now’s the time to talk to him! All that I’ve planned to say ought to be said now, for I’ll never have a better opportunity...”

  And then as she still peeped at him timidly she saw that the twinkle had abruptly vanished from his eyes, and he demanded so quietly that he startled her:

  “What is it you want to get off your chest, Karen?”

  “I—I—” she stammered.

  “It’s been bothering you all the afternoon, hasn’t it?” he suggested.

  “Well, not exactly—”

  And then once again his expression changed, and he leaned a little towards her. In the fire glow his eyes were dark and strange—there was something almost mesmeric about them—and his voice had a queer, mesmeric quality, too, as he murmured:

  “Do you know that we’ve been engaged—in the eyes of a good many people, at least—for very nearly two months, and apart from saluting you in a chaste fashion on arrival at Auchenwiel I’ve never yet discovered what it’s like to kiss you?”

  And before she could draw breath to answer him in any way at all his arms were about her and he was holding her close—so close that she could feel the violent beating of his heart—and he put his fingers under her chin and forced her face up and covered her mouth with his own.

  If his heart was beating wildly, hers behaved like a frantic mill-race once the moment of surprise which caused her to remain quiescent in his arms passed, and although his lips were hard and almost ruthless and seemed determined to draw her very soul out of her body, and her breathing, seemed temporarily suspended, by the time it had gone on for several long-drawn-out and utterly unbelievable seconds a kind of shivering ecstasy was flooding her whole being, and she was clinging to him, and there was a quivering response in the lips from which he at last” abruptly removed his own.

  He looked down at her as she lay against him, as limp as if she had been dissolved into his being and become a part of it, and his eyes might have been black as he asked a little harshly:

  “And do you still want to say all that you had made up your mind to say to me this afternoon?”

  She shook her head. She managed to articulate the whispered word “No,” and instantly his arms tightened about her like steel bands.

  “Is this a change of front, or are you no longer in any doubt of me?”

  She hid her face against him.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think you do.” His voice was almost stern. “I asked you to become engaged to me in earnest before you left Craigie House, and just because I didn’t put it in a way that appealed to you you preferred to credit me with quixotic notions, and to discount altogether the fact that I was ready to let you tramp all over my heart from the moment you collapsed like a piece of thistledown in my arms at Inverlochie station!” He buried his face in her hair, and she felt him quivering against her. “Oh, Karen, Karen, Karen!—do you still believe that I want this engagement of ours to be nothing but a pretence? Do you still think I could let you go away from me and lose you altogether?”

  She lifted her face. It was very white, and her eyes were enormous, and strangely luminous at the same time.

  “But—but,” she stammered unbelievingly, “you can’t mean—you can’t mean that you—that you—”

  “That I what, sweetheart?”

  “That you want”—she swallowed, and her voice trembled—“that you really want us to marry—?”

  “I can’t think of anything that I want out of life more than that,” he replied, so soberly that she shut her eyes and wondered whether she was delirious. Perhaps she had caught another chill and her temperature was skyrocketing? Or she was dreaming a wonderfully colorful dream from which she would very shortly awaken! And then she felt his fingers gently stroking her cheek, and he whispered, very near to her ear: “And you? Would you still rather we went on pretending?”

  “I made up my mind days ago that we’d got to stop the pretence,” she whispered back, some of the torment the decision had filled her with in her voice.

  “Because you couldn’t bear the thought of marrying me?”

  “Because I never dared to hope you’d ever want to marry me!”

  His arms crushed her so close at this simple confession that they almost hurt her.

  “Oh, my darling—my little love!” he exclaimed. “Why else did I so determinedly keep you at Craigie House until Aunt Horry whisked you away from me? And why was I so bitterly resentful because she did whisk you away from me? You must have known I didn’t want you to go! That night when I rang you up you sounded lost and forlorn, and I wanted to drive over at once and demand you back. I think I very nearly did...”

  “I wish you had,” she breathed into his neck. “But the sound of your voice that night was so wonderful I was almost happy afterwards. I could even bear being parted from you.”

  “Then you didn’t really want to part from me?”

  “Want to?” She looked up at him at last, fearlessly, and her eyes were like blue stars. “Don’t you understand?” she asked very softly, as if she was dedicating herself to something that awed her more than anything in life had ever awed her before. “I love you! I’ve loved you, I think, from the moment you left the porter to look after your luggage and came across and helped me pick up the money I’d dropped!”

  “And yet you said ‘No’ when I asked you to marry me!”

  She smiled at him tremulously.

  “I wanted so badly to say ‘Yes.’ ”

  “Sweetheart”—his mouth drew close to hers again—“I loved you even before you loved me! I loved you as soon as my taxi stopped behind yours and I saw you standing there so badly in need of someone, to take care of you! I blame myself because I let you travel alone that night.”

  “You couldn’t do anything else,” she excused him. “We were strangers to one another.”

  “We’re not strangers now.”

  “No,” she breathed, and turned her lips to his.

  Outside the sharp sudden ferocity of rain and thunder and darkening sky spent itself, the sun shone forth again, and the sky was once again a clear, spring blue. Inside the fire ceased crackling, and the little room became lighted by the first beams of reappearing sunlight, which found their way through the tiny window and made a golden aureole of Karen’s hair.

  Iain looked down at it where it strayed like a spun-silk cloud over his shoulder, and his fingers moved in it wonderingly.

  “Do you know what we’re going to do now?” he asked. “We’re going to get married almost immediately and you’re coming back with me to Craigie House!”

  Karen’s eyes gave away the fact that she had not yet grasped the wonder of this situation, or begun to be absolutely convinced that she was not dreaming. They were sitting side by side on the wooden bench before the dying fire, and his arms were holding her close to him, while his grey eyes were so filled with tenderness as they looked
down at her that her senses were inclined to swim, but she could not believe that it was all quite real. She was too insignificant a person for anything as wonderful as this to be really happening to her—even Aunt Horry had been astonished when she had first seen her and tried to reconcile her appearance, and her lack of sophistication and poise, her lack even—or so it must have appeared to her at that time—of a dress sense, with the fact that her nephew proposed to marry her! He who had once been engaged to marry Fiona Barrington, possessor of everything Karen lacked!

  It was the sudden recollection of Fiona which caused Karen to draw herself a mite away from the man she loved with every beat of her heart, and to look at him with a struggling doubt in her eyes—a doubt which had to be dissipated before she could begin to be sure of anything at all.

  “But are you really sure?” she asked, the doubt making her eyes look dark and uncertain, while he gazed at her with a glimmering of amazement. “I mean”—it was so difficult to find words to voice her uncertainty, but somehow or other it had to be voiced—“I’m so different—so very different from Mrs. Barrington, and you were in love with her once—”

  “My darling child,” Iain replied, very gently, “that was two years ago.”

  “Yes, but—you were in love with her, and I am different! I’ve nothing of her about me—no glamor, or—or anything like that! I’m terribly ordinary compared with her, and if I’d once loved a person as beautiful-as Fiona Barrington I’m quite sure I could never love anyone else.”

  He smiled a little crookedly.

  “Perhaps I wasn’t as deeply in love with her as you seem to imagine.”

  “But you meant to marry her!”

  “Yes; I meant to marry her.”

  Her eyes searched his face wistfully—large, shadow-haunted blue eyes that caused him to put out impatient hands and seek to draw her back into his arms. But she held him from her with determination, although the pressure of his lean fingers on her slender wrists was a little painful.

  “Perhaps I’m silly, but—to me marriage is the sort of thing one considers only once in one’s lifetime! And although I know it wasn’t your fault that those early plans of yours came to nothing, two years is not such a very long while ago, and—and you could be making a mistake. It could be pity that you feel for me, couldn’t it?”

  “If it is, it’s sufficiently strong to make me desperately anxious to have you for my wife!” with a hint of undisguised passion tautening the corners of his lips.

  She drew a long, shuddering breath, and resisted the impulse to bury her face against him .and cling to him with all her strength.

  “But pity can be very strong sometimes. And I’ve more or less forced you into this position, you know. You feel that I’m helpless, that I want looking after, and I’d much rather—much rather!—have you recognize here and now that, as a result of all my dependence on you, what you actually feel for me is a kind of fondness—that I’ve aroused all your protective instincts—than that you should find it out later on, and realize that someone like Mrs. Barrington—”

  He gripped her by the shoulders, and she thought for a moment that he was going to shake her.

  “Have you noticed any overwhelming symptoms of my admiration for Mrs. Barrington?” he demanded, with a harshness that frightened her a little.

  “No—no—” She shook her head.

  “Or, if it comes to that, has it struck you that Mrs. Barrington has been affected by a return of her once-declared passion for me? A passion which evaporated very quickly when she met someone else who was capable of arousing rather more in her!” in a cold, dry voice.

  “No—no—” Karen repeated; but inwardly she could not be so sure of this. The emotions of someone like Fiona Barrington were by no means all on the surface—not even partly on the surface!—and to the younger girl it was impossible to imagine any woman coming in contact with someone like Iain Mackenzie and not feeling certain that the world would be well lost for even a portion of his interest.

  “Then stop talking such a lot of utter rubbish!”

  He stood up, and with his hands still retaining possession of her wrists he jerked her up almost violently into his arms, holding her so helplessly crushed against him that their two bodies seemed to become dissolved into one another, and the heavy laboring of his heart beneath her cheek was more reassuring than any words he could have uttered. She sighed ecstatically this time, and when once again he forced her face up and lowered his mouth hungrily down upon her own she yielded it with an eagerness there was no disguising.

  He kissed her hair and her eyes, her soft throat and her cheek, and then once again her lips, and he whispered:

  “I love you! There’s no pity about it! I love you!...”

  And then when he lifted his head he noticed for the first time that the rain had ceased, and the sun was shining. Karen, bemused by her own happiness, noticed these things also, but it was Iain who became instantly practical and recollected that they had a considerable walk before they could reach Auchenwiel, and if they were to do so before another spring storm burst upon them it would be as well if they refrained from lingering in the dark little cottage.

  “I want to get you home without your being soaked,” he said, taking Karen’s arm and leading her to the door. But as she looked back at the small, bare room, with the embers of their fire still glowing in the grate, and the wooden bench still drawn up before the fireplace, she thought with a rush of half wistful regret that it was a pity to have to leave it. Ugly though it was, devoid of all comfort, it was the place where she had been happier for a short while than she had ever been in her life before.

  One day, she thought, they must come back to it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  That night, at Auchenwiel, both Aunt Horatia and Fiona sensed that there was something different about the attitude towards one another of Iain and the girl he had announced he was going to marry. It was not so noticeably different that anyone could have commented on it, but it was different. Karen had some strange, luminous quality of happiness about her, and Iain’s eyes rested on her very often. Not only did she turn pink under his look, but it was noticeable that she no longer avoided the direct gaze of his eyes as she had up till today. Indeed, once or twice Aunt Horry caught the two of them looking at one another so hard, and in so revealing a manner, that she said to herself: “Oh, ho! So things are not quite the same between them as they were! Something has happened!”

  Fiona Barrington, in a cloudy black dress that seemed to clothe her white body in a shadow rather than conceal it with material, lay back languidly in a corner of a deep couch and watched them discreetly but often over the book she was reading. She, too, was aware that something had happened—probably out there on the moor that afternoon, she thought—and instead of appearing golden her eyes grew dark like cairngorms, and her silken eyelashes hid them broodingly.

  No one played bridge on Sunday night, because Aunt Horry was a little fixed in her ideas about the appropriate manner of keeping Sunday, and they all retired to bed at a reasonably early hour. Karen, who received an extra affectionate kiss from Aunt Horry when she said goodnight, had already slipped into bed, and was sitting hugging her knees and staring with that same bemused look of happiness on her face into the shadows of the softly-lighted room, when the knock came on her door, and thinking.it was either her hostess or Mrs. Barrington she called “Come in.”

  But it was Iain who entered. He was wearing his kilt, and the velvet doublet and lace jabot which Karen was certain became him more than they could possibly become any man who did not possess his sleek, well-held head and broad shoulders, his grey eyes with the thick black eyelashes fringing them, and beautifully shaped mouth and square jaw, to say nothing of his lean, graceful figure and slightly arrogant stride.

  He noiselessly crossed the space between the closed door and the bed, and Karen instinctively pulled the bedclothes up about her slim shoulders that were only otherwise covered by a flimsy pink nightdres
s. But he smiled at her much as he might have smiled at her before that afternoon had provided each of them with some quite imperishable memories, and sat down on the side of the bed, reached for her lacy pink bedjacket and handed it to her.

  “I know this is a little irregular,” he said, his smile becoming faintly amused as he noted how swiftly she draped the bedjacket about her shoulders and huddled herself into it, “but there were things we should have discussed this afternoon which we did not discuss, and we had no opportunity to do so this evening. So as I was quite sure you wouldn’t yet be asleep I decided to come along here now and talk them over with you. If my aunt saw me on my way she’s not the type to think unpleasant things, and I took care that no one else should see me.”

  He reached out and lightly touched her hand as it clutched the edge of the sheet.

  “How small you look in that big bed,” he said gently.

  “Do I?”

  “Yes.” Very small, and very—” Whatever it was he was going to say he changed his mind about doing so, but his eyes said all sorts of unspoken, things to her, and she felt the color rising in a hot, revealing tide to her cheeks. He told her abruptly, “I’ve got to leave for London tomorrow.”

  “Oh, no!” Karen exclaimed, and so far forgot the unusualness of the situation as to reach out and grasp at his hand also.

  “I’m afraid I must.” He looked down at the small fingers entwining themselves almost convulsively about his, and then he carried them up to his lips and kissed them lingeringly. “That was one thing I meant to tell you this afternoon, only somehow—somehow we didn’t seem to find much time for the discussion of ordinary prosaic things, did we?” smiling at her.

  “No.” But her eyes had clouded so much that there seemed no longer to be any light in them. “Oh, Iain—must you?” London seemed so far away—almost at the other end of the world—and she couldn’t bear the thought of having to do without him now that at last they knew that they meant so much to one another. They had been together for so many weeks—even at Craigie House he was only a few miles away. But London! London, where they had first met. Where she had first seen him unloading his suitcases from the taxi...