The House of the Laird

by Susan Barrie

  She found that the business of emptying the teapot, heating the water and making the tea occupied her shaking hands for some little while, and for the time being she thought of nothing but her urgent desire for something hot and reviving inside her. And the tea, drunk out of a cracked cup which she had also discovered, did banish the chill from her weary limbs, and acted like a renewed lease of life, especially while she was thankfully sipping it. although afterwards she felt so pleasantly drowsy that she longed to curl up on the hard, bare floor and go to sleep.

  She must have fallen into a doze as she sat on the bench, for when at last she roused herself and looked at her watch it was close upon mid-day. She looked through the window and saw that the mist was still pressing against the front of the cottage, and that if anything it was a trifle thicker than it had been before.

  She nodded again, while the warmth of the oil stove filled the room, and all sorts of improbable dreams caught her up like winged things and carried her away from the cottage. There was one in which Iain carried her off, and in which he was so ready to forgive her for running away that it was obvious she had not upset him very greatly by attempting to vanish out of his life. And there was another in which Fiona Barrington lectured her severely for being so stupid as to lose her way, and then ordered her out into the mist again.

  She awoke with a little start, realizing that she had been just about to tumble off the bench on to the floor, and then saw by her watch that it was four o’clock in the afternoon. Four o’clock, and the mist had thinned considerably outside, but it was already growing dark, and she didn’t think she could risk losing her way a second time by venturing forth in that uncertain light, and with the mist liable to clamp down again at any moment.

  It would be better to remain where she was until morning at least.

  She heated up the remains of the water and made herself some more tea, then, resigning herself to having nothing whatever to eat, and feeling hungry at last after so many hours of eating nothing at all, she combed her hair in front, of her handbag mirror, decided that her sleep had revived her a good deal, and sat waiting for the night to deepen around her and render the little living-room of the cottage dark except for the light from the oil stove.

  Once or twice the thought intruded that since no one knew where she was she could have caused a certain amount of consternation at Auchenwiel as a result of her (as she now viewed it) extremely undignified action. She had been so kindly treated that her act of running away was rather like an ungrateful visitor departing without thanks. It horrified her to think that she might be thought ungrateful. She did not dare to dwell consciously upon the thought of Iain at all, for whatever his reactions to her departure he was the man she would never stop loving with all her heart and soul, and without him the future was bare and bereft as a wintry prospect.

  And despite her determination not to think of him she was just beginning to ask herself whether—whether perhaps—he might, on the discovery of her note, have been just a little upset—concerned was the more likely word—when a noise outside the closed front door brought her upright on the bench, and as the door opened all her pulses started to clamor wildly.

  Iain stood looking at her with so much sternness on his face that it was almost-unrecognizable, and if he was relieved because he had run her to earth it certainly was not given away by his expression.

  “So here you are!” he said.

  Just four words, but they rang like a kind of knell on her ears, and as he moved towards her she rose in a kind of panic to confront him.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “I’d have found you before, but the fog was too thick,” Iain said, and even his voice was the voice of a stranger—polite, but not particularly concerned. “We searched this morning, after, we found you were not with Ellen McBain, and the search has gone on all day, hampered by this confounded mist. How long have you been here?” She thought that he looked pale, and his eyes were hard and frosty as he studied her. “You seem to have made yourself quite comfortable,” glancing at the stove.

  “I—y-yes—” She didn’t know what to answer, or how to answer, and her heart was laboring so heavily that she thought he must hear it in the quiet of the little room. With a purely mechanical gesture she put both her hands up over it, as if an attempt to clutch at it, and at the same time she, too, lost so much color that her eyes looked enormous in the dim lights. “There was no wood, but I found this stove. I’ve been here for hours—”

  “Then you didn’t spend much time out there on the moor?”

  “No.” There was little point in telling him how long she had wandered before she stumbled by accident across the cottage—their cottage, as she had once thought of it—and, in any case, he didn’t look as if such a piece of information would particularly interest him. He looked like a judge who had found a prisoner guilty, and was not prepared to hear anything that would soften the punishment he had decided upon. This was at once so clear to Karen that her legs began to feel weakly incapable of supporting her body, and she sank down again on the bench from which she had only just risen.

  “Have you had anything to eat?” he asked curtly. “I suppose you haven’t.”

  “I—I made some tea,” she admitted. “There was some in a tin—”

  But before she could say anything more he had turned and left her, and she heard his footsteps moving away down the path, and the garden gate clicking. Then she distinctly caught the sound of a car door opening and closing, and when he came back to her he was carrying a thermos flask and a heavy plaid rug which he held out to her.

  “You’d better wrap that round you,” he said. “It seems warm in here after the air outside, but you’ve been sitting here for hours and you’re probably chilled. As soon as you’ve had some of this hot coffee I’ll get you into the car and take you back to Auchenwiel—for tonight, at least. Tomorrow you’ll probably like to join your Nannie McBain.”

  As he poured the coffee the full implication of his words struck her like a douche of cold water. Although it was true that she herself had taken the initiative and run away in a childish manner—a pitiably childish and undignified manner, as she realized now!—and left him with only the most uninformative of notes to explain why she had done so, somehow in her innermost being there had been an unacknowledged confidence that he never would actually let her go! How, otherwise, had she been able to run away from him?—when the mere sight of him, with his, dear, dark head and his strong, dark face, the quiet lines of the mouth she loved so much, the thick eyelashes that hid the grey eyes as he concentrated on the task of pouring her coffee, was enough to set her trembling like an aspen with the realization of what she might have lost? Might have lost—?

  There was no doubt about it now—she had lost him! By her own act—by her complete lack of consideration, not only for him but for his aunt, who had befriended her; she had done something so strongly opposed to his own nature and the code he set himself that even the thought of her as someone with whom he might have to spend the rest of his life was a distasteful idea which he recoiled from.

  She held out a shaking hand for the coffee, and managed to take a few gulps without spilling it. He started to pace up and down the little room behind the bench.

  “That note you left,” he remarked, almost casually. “Fiona was able to shed a certain amount of light on it, because apparently she had a talk with you last night. She had no idea at the time that you were capable of anything so dramatic as stealing out of the house before any of us were up, but at least she was honest enough to come to me and tell me what had happened.”

  “She—told you?” Karen managed to articulate, as if in unbelief. “She told you that I—that she—?”

  “Oh,” he answered, looking at her with a faint uplifting of his eyebrows, “we’ve known each other for so long that we’ve never really had very many secrets from one another. Fiona is a bit impetuous, that’s all—but she knows now that I decided long ago that so far as she and I were
concerned marriage would never again be in the picture. No one with any sense touches a live electric wire twice, and in the course of time one learns that the live electric wire was there for a purpose. In my case it almost certainly saved me from a disastrous marriage.”

  “Then—then you—” Karen shifted the beaker of coffee from one hand to the other, and did not dare to lift her eyes above the level of the stove—“You hadn’t planned to ask her to marry you again before you met me?”

  “I certainly hadn’t! I had no thought of marrying anyone when I met you.”

  There was a silence, while she wondered whether any young woman in the whole world, of her age and with so much offered to her, had behaved with such crass stupidity! More than that, she had so disbelieved in the love that was offered to her that she had poured scorn on it by accepting without question the word of another woman that it was not really hers, and never would be hers. And by so doing the affront she had offered to Iain was surely unforgivable?

  He suddenly ceased his restless pacing, and stood looking down at her.

  “Now that we’ve cleared that little matter up,” he said, “and if you’ve finished your coffee, I think we ought to go. It’s clear now, but the mist might sweep down again at any moment.”

  “Yes—very well.” She stood up at once, and still without looking at him she handed over the empty flask. She felt so deathly miserable in that moment that she did not notice his eyes alight upon the ring she was wearing on the third finger of her left hand. It was her engagement ring, and even in the dim light from the stove the opal revealed a dozen lovely colors, and the diamonds were sparkling like star-shine.

  “I see,” he observed, in a very cool, strange voice, “that you’re still wearing my ring! Isn’t the usual procedure to wrap it up in the note that you leave behind and hope tacitly that you’ll receive it back in due course through the post as a little memento of what might have been? But I suppose you left so hurriedly that you never thought of that?”

  For the first time Karen was stung to the point of feeling a wounded indignation rising up in her, and for the first time she lifted her eyes to his face, and the blue and the grey ones met and continued to meet for perhaps a full half second. Then a flood of painful color rushed into her cheeks. Her lip quivered, and to stop it quivering she caught it up fiercely between her teeth, so that a drop of blood spurted.

  “I—I did forget—” she stammered, and made a quick wrench at her finger and removed the ring. She held it out to him. “I’m so sorry,” she told him, barely above a whisper.

  Coolly he accepted the ring and dropped it into his pocket.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Karen turned away and took a few blind steps towards the door. She reached out just as blindly for the handle, and her fingers were grasping it and she was striving ineffectually to turn it when she heard him come quietly up behind her. The subtle change in his tone would have escaped her, but his hand grasping her arm was real enough.

  “Wait a moment,” he commanded her. “I want to ask you something before we go out to the car. I want to ask you how you would have felt if I had behaved as you behaved to me this morning? Even allowing for the fact that Fiona probably upset you last night—and I think that was what she intended to do!—had you so little belief in me that you preferred to believe her before me? Had you so little thought for what I might feel that you considered my reactions to your departure, without any clue as to where I might find you, were not really worth bothering your head about?”

  Karen turned to him then and looked up at him. Her face was anguished, and his words had filled her with so much acute distress that it was well-nigh impossible for her to say anything at all in her own defence. And she hadn’t really got any defence, because she hadn’t considered him, and only now was she realizing just what she might have done to him.

  “I know that—that my running away was inexcusable,” she managed at last. “But it wasn’t because I wanted to hurt you! I would never willingly do that. Only I’ve always felt that, by comparison with Mrs. Barrington, I had so little to offer you. And she pointed out that I had placed you in an impossible position, and that you were too kind ever to let me think that I had. She told me that if I married you I would be ruining three lives, and I couldn’t bear to ruin yours.”

  “So you decided it had better be your own?”

  Her eyes were rather dazed as they gazed back at him—dazed and weary and utterly unhappy.

  “It didn’t seem to matter so much about me.”

  She turned away again, her shoulders drooping, and once again, she started to fumble with the door handle.

  “Karen!” he exclaimed, and because she could not see him she could not tell whether it was exasperation that filled his voice, annoyance, indignation, or a blend of all three—spiced with something that might have been a peculiar brand of humor. “When you’re my wife will you promise me you’ll stop having such a humble opinion of yourself? And will you also promise me you’ll have a little more regard for my feelings, because my opinion of you is almost exactly the same as it was when I first saw you, and the value I place on you is rather high!”

  “Oh!” Karen exclaimed, and spun around to stare at him unbelievingly. Her eyes hung upon his dizzily, imploringly, and then with a sudden, radiant light in them: “You mean—you don’t mean—”

  “I do,” he answered, so quietly that she uttered a sound between a gasp and a sob.

  Then she was in his arms, and clinging to him. His lips were on hers, and he was kissing her wildly, impetuously, almost despairingly, as if her loss was something he knew only too well could never be repaired, and he had been so terrified that he had lost her that when he found her he could not resist the temptation to punish her just a little.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The porter was stowing the light luggage away on the rack, while the heavier luggage, including several pigskin suitcases and a trunk or two, was already disposed in the guard’s van. The compartment was first-class, and looking about it Karen realized that this was the first time she had travelled in so much comfort, unless, in the days before she could remember things clearly and before her parents had suffered their disastrous financial crash, they had found it unnecessary to limit themselves to third-class tickets when they journeyed from place to place.

  She sat down in a corner seat, while Iain rewarded the porter—who was none other than the man who should have relieved her of her ticket on the night she first arrived in Inverlochie, and who was looking at her with a polite, pleased smile of recognition iii his eyes—for his exertions. And then he crossed over and sat beside his very newly-made wife, while the porter slammed the door upon them, and the train started to move slowly out of Inverlochie station.

  Once again the steep High Street was bathed in late afternoon sunshine, and once again the narrow church steeple was silhouetted against a background of jagged purple mountain and rose-flushed sky. The woods clothing the lower slopes were greener now, and there were bright flashes of running water finding their way down from the heights, and all the burns around Inverlochie were rippling with movement, too. And the air was much milder—it was no longer freezingly cold.

  Iain sat looking closely at his wife as she averted her face from him and watched the tiny platform slide away from them. She was wearing a pearl-grey outfit, and a little jewel-blue velvet cap which clung closely to the back of her head and allowed her soft, fair curls to escape below it and form a kind of nimbus about her face. Her skin looked soft like the petals of a flower, and there was an unmistakable light blush on her cheeks, and her long eyelashes were inclined to droop over her eyes.

  Iain said quietly:

  “Well, Mrs. Mackenzie! There’s no backing out now!”

  Karen turned to him at once, and her shyness vanished as if it had never been. She answered him reproachfully:

  “As if I would want to back out! As if I could want to back out!”

  He smiled at her a
nd put his fingers under her chin and lifted it.

  “So sure?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t be more sure!”

  A vivid flush of earnestness overspread her face, and her eyes gleamed at him under her lashes with the same jewel-like brilliance as her blue velvet hat. Her mouth looked soft and tremulous—and very, very inviting.

  He kissed it, softly, lingeringly.

  “I’ve told you so many times I love you,” he said hoarsely. “I shall go on repeating it at intervals throughout our lives, but I hope you’ll never again disbelieve me when I say it. You won’t, will you, my darling?”

  And because the way she looked at him was sufficient answer in itself he caught her into his arms and buried his face against the softness of her hair. He kissed her again, only not so gently this time, and when at last he lifted his head her lips were tingling and scarlet from the almost bruising contact with his. His grey eyes looked dark and brooding like the summits of the mountains surrounding Craigie House.

  “I love you, I love you,” he said.

  “I love you,” Karen answered, clinging, to him almost fiercely. “I’ll never stop loving you!”

  “If you ever do, I promise you I’ll punish you much more severely than I did yesterday afternoon!”

  “Was it only yesterday afternoon?” She put back her head against his shoulder and looked up at him. It was incredible that so much had happened since he had come.to her out of the mist and the dusk of only the afternoon before. He had taken her back to Auchenwiel and handed her once more over to the care of his aunt, who had reproached her neither by word nor look, while Fiona was no longer a member of the household, and seemed to have been called away hurriedly for some reason.