Christine’s heart beat stormily, hard and fast against her breast. He was impossible—a gate-crasher—an impostor, yet something vital seemed to have entered the old hall in his wake.
In full Highland evening dress, he carried the kilt magnificently and as if he had the right to wear it, she thought. But such a right did not go with the mere purchase of Ardtornish!
Flushed and resentful of she knew not what, she descended the few remaining stairs and stood before him. It was only then that she noticed the parcel he carried.
“With my most humble apologies,” he said, thrusting it into her hands. “I’ve been away from Croma for a fortnight—in Edinburgh and London—and I made the fatal mistake of not arranging for my letters to be forwarded to me.” He smiled one-sidedly. “I don’t suppose I expected anything but the usual business correspondence, and I assured myself that business could wait—for once!”
“You’re trying to tell me that you didn’t have our invitation till yesterday, of course,” Christine began frigidly.
“Until this morning,” he corrected. “I came over posthaste as soon as I knew I had been invited. I guess all this was far too good to miss,” he added, looking about him with frank interest.
The direct green eyes embraced the laden banqueting table and the flags and pennants suspended from the rafters, but they rested longest on the upright figure of her grandmother sitting in her high-backed chair. At the moment Dame Sarah seemed to be the focal point of his inmost thoughts, and Christine lowered her eyes to the parcel he had given her.
“Something from the south of the island,” he told her when he turned back towards her. “It was something I wanted you to have as soon as I saw it.”
“I—thank you very much.” She looked about her for somewhere to lay down his gift. “Perhaps I had better take it into the billiards room and put it with the others,” she suggested. “Everyone has been so exceptionally kind,” she added hastily, because the direct green gaze had become suddenly embarrassing. “I have more presents than I shall know what to do with.”
“I hope mine will be useful to you—and to Croma,” he said, relieving her of the rather bulky parcel with a complete disregard for her rather frigid smile. “Let me carry it for you. It’s quite a weight.”
She glanced back to where her grandmother and Jane were talking earnestly beside the fire, realizing that there was no way of sidestepping the issue. Finlay Sutherland had come early to offer his apologies and she had no excuse for leaving him in order to attend to her other guests.
The billiards room table was already crowded with gifts and her companion examined them with interest.
“This,” he said, picking up the brooch set with semiprecious stones which Callum had presented to her that morning, “is island work, I believe?”
“Yes,” she acknowledged. “The stones were found locally at one time and Callum McKinnis set them. He was quite an artist at it—”
“And still is,” he observed thoughtfully. “Why doesn’t he go ahead with the work?”
“He’s practically blind,” she told him bluntly. “And there isn’t a market for this sort of thing. It was lost during the war.”
“Don’t you believe there isn’t!” he returned equally bluntly. “Women—American women especially—would go crazy about it. What they call ‘costume jewellery’ sells in the States like hot cookies!”
He stood looking at the brooch for several seconds longer, turning it over in his hands and gazing at it musingly, weighing up its commercial possibilities, she supposed. Everything spoke to this man in terms of hard cash!
“Something ought to be done about it,” he said. “The old man could make quite a bit of money out of this if it was properly handled.”
“I don’t think Callum is so very interested in a lot of money,” she informed him crushingly. “Besides, as I told you, his sight has almost gone.”
“Yet he has just made, this,” he pointed out. “Or so I presume?”
“Yes, he made it specially.”
“For you?” He grinned down at her. “A very gallant labour of love!”
“I have known Callum all my life,” she said.
“And that, of course, makes a difference!” His deepening smile was half amused, half rueful. “Aren’t you going to open the parcel, even if it’s only out of curiosity?” he asked.
She had to struggle with the string and he took it from her and untied it. The paper fell away, revealing a length of beautiful, featherweight tweed woven in the softly-muted colours of the island, the sort of tweed that had been Corma’s pride for years.
“Where did you get it?” she gasped in surprise. “I thought my grandmother must be wearing about the last of our tweed. Since the mill was shut down there has only been a very little produced—like this.”
“I had great difficulty in persuading one of the Scoraig villagers to part with it,” he confessed. “But when I saw it I knew that it was just right for you. Besides,” he added swiftly, “I thought your grandmother and I might have a talk about it. Before the art is entirely lost to us, it ought to be revived. These old women who have spun and dyed and woven the tweed all their lives must pass on their secret before they die.”
She met his eyes with a quick challenge in her own. “To whom?” she demanded. “There are few young people left on Croma, and one must have a fairly large market for it before the tweed can become a paying proposition.”
“We’ll find the market,” he assured her. “What I need at the moment is co-operation. No one on the island seems able to believe in my integrity right now. They are resentful because the Nicholsons have had to go and I, a stranger—almost a foreigner, it would seem!—have taken their place.” He looked down at her when she did not speak. “Correct me if I am wrong,” he suggested.
She did not need to correct him. With the utmost insight he had sensed the islanders’ attitude and he was not perturbed. He would go his own way, riding roughshod over their feelings and sweeping their traditions aside if it suited his purpose!
She gazed down at the tweed, wondering suddenly if her estimate of him was a little too harsh. There had been no hint of rancour in his voice when he had spoken about the opposition he had met with, only a deep and rather hurt regret. Even if he did mean to exploit Croma for his own benefit, it could mean a certain amount of prosperity for the island, too, and that was most urgently needed.
“What had my grandmother got to say about the tweed?” she asked guardedly.
“She thinks that opening the mill might be a good idea, but she has warned me, of course, that ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’!”
Christine laughed more easily.
“She would!” She turned towards the door. “She never pretends that things can be made easy for us. She maintains that life wouldn’t be worth living without some task to do, some ultimate end in view. I have never known her sit in idleness, and even now she guides Erradale from her chair.”
“She’s a wonderful old lady,” he agreed readily. “Far from being finished with our talks, we are just beginning them, I think.”
She hesitated in the doorway, looking back at the array of gifts spread out on the long table, some useful, some merely ornamental, most of them entirely personal.
Then, suddenly, she was seeing the long room as it had been in her childhood, stacked with tweed ready to be sent off to the mainland, and her grandmother at the far side of the table, between it and the deeply embrasured windows, with strong sunlight streaming in on her bowed head as she fixed the price labels on the incoming bales.
Year after year, Croma tweed had gone into the outside world from the billiards room at Erradale House, and now it seemed that she could see none of her birthday gifts but the last one, which a stranger had brought. The fine, soft length of cloth was predominantly green in colour, with all the hidden hues that the sea takes on when the sun shines down on a white-sanded bay woven into it and blended with the mauve of the young heather when it first
stains the hillsides. There was a flare of courage, like sunlight after rain, in the clear yellow of the over-check, and suddenly she found herself wondering why Finlay Sutherland should have called it “just right” for her.
Certainly she knew that it would suit her. Green always had, and perhaps he had noticed that she had yellow flecks in her eyes, little slants of gold that deepened when she laughed and sparked into amber when she was angry, although she would not have described them in such a way. “Cat’s eyes,” she had said once. “I hate them. They give away so much!”
Yet sometimes they could be softly grey, like the sea when it lies gently in the deep caverns under the rocks.
“I must go,” she told him hastily. “People are beginning to arrive.”
He stood behind in the doorway, watching as she crossed the hall to Dame Sarah’s side, a small girl who had yet a sort of regal pride about her, a suggestion of challenge in the turn of her head and an honesty of purpose in her strange, golden-flecked eyes which pleased him.
“Have you made your peace with Chris?” Jane Nicholson asked, coming towards him.
“I don’t think so.” He shook her by the hand. “She has all sorts of reservations about Croma and the stranger in your midst!”
Jane bit her lip.
“Chris is so distressingly loyal in some ways,” she answered. “It’s—Hamish, I think. She was always very fond of him.”
“And so she will continue to resent me as the usurper,” he suggested, “the main reason for your brother’s landless state. But someone else would have stepped in if I hadn’t. With you,” he added slowly, “it is different. You don’t appear to bear the smallest grudge.”
“Why should I?” Jane asked. “You paid my brother a very fair price for Ardtornish, Mr. Sutherland, and you have also offered me a job.”
“Which I hear you are going to take. I’m glad about that,” he added. “I hoped for someone who would understand about the books. As a matter of fact, I have a further collection arriving in a day or two. That was part of my reason for being in London and not knowing anything about Miss MacNeill’s invitation.” He hesitated. “How soon can I hope to see you at Ardtornish?”
“Whenever you want me to come,” Jane said, a sudden flood of warmth running into her heart at the thought of her old home. “I’m ready when you are.”
“That means now,” he assured her. “I never like to waste time. Shall we say Monday?”
Jane nodded.
“I think you’re going to be the sort of person Ardtornish needs,” she told him as they walked in the direction of the ballroom.
“And what about Croma as a whole?” he asked, taking her arm.
“That may be different,” Jane said reflectively. “Croma has never seemed to be a whole island. There has always been the ford cutting it in two.”
He glanced down at her.
“And that’s the way the MacNeills want it to stay?” he suggested.
She hesitated, wondering if she were being disloyal to Christine in discussing her attitude to Croma with a stranger. Only, in so many ways, Finlay Sutherland did not seem to be a stranger. From their first meeting he had seemed to belong on the island, no matter what Christine might think to the contrary.
“Dame Sarah would do anything for Croma,” she said, purposefully avoiding Christine’s name.
“Even to accepting me?” He smiled wryly. “Well, when you want a thing badly enough you press on with your attempts to get it, I guess! At least, that’s how it’s always been with me.”
“Wouldn’t it—rather depend on what you want?” Jane asked.
“I guess so.” The smile deepened, flooding his curious green eyes and creasing the corners of his mouth. “Maybe we don’t think so much about a thing, either, till it becomes hard to get.”
Jane stopped short, turning to face him in the doorway of the long, candle-lit ballroom which she remembered so well from her childhood.
“Mr. Sutherland,” she asked, “do you really want to own all of Croma one day?”
“I’d like it that way,” he said without hesitation. “That’s what I had in mind when I first came here. There was a suggestion, you know, that the old lady wanted to sell. I got the idea that she wanted to turn it into money—”
“And then Chris came back!” Jane mused. “That made a difference, you see. To Dame Sarah, anyway.”
“I guess so.” He looked reflective, wondering about Christine, perhaps. “Will she stay the course, do you think?”
“Chris?” Jane had never considered the question with any seriousness until now. “If there was something—vital for her to do, I think she would. At the moment she’s restless because she has had to give up her work in Paris and there’s so little here to occupy her energies. I think she feels that the past two years have been wasted, her own talent submerged in a sea of duty, if you care to put it that way.”
“Is she a good artist?” he asked.
“I think she could be. I know it’s very close to her heart.”
“And she’d jettison Croma for it if it wasn’t for the old lady?”
“No!” Jane protested. “I didn’t mean to imply that. Please don’t think that Christine is weak.”
He smiled at that.
“I’m quite convinced on that point,” he said. “ ‘Stubborn’ was the word I had in mind.”
Jane looked up at him, not knowing what to think, and from the far end of the room, where she was leading off the dancing with Iain Kennedy, one of her grandmother’s oldest tenants, Christine saw that look and wondered what could be keeping Jane and her prospective employer standing there in such earnest conversation.
A Highland ball, such as Dame Sarah had planned, left very little time for conflicting thoughts, however. The day, which had held its own excitement, gave way to an evening of pure magic, for the great house seemed enchanted, with its draped tartans and the rows of coloured lights festooned among the dark trees of the moorland garden. The effort had been entirely Rory’s, and he was more than proud of the result, although he had spent a sleepless night wondering if the electricity plant would stand up to the added load.
The candles in the ancient sconces along the walls had been the answer to that and they lent their own soft, deep glow to the proceedings, touching the faces of the young dancers with an added beauty and laying kindly fingers on the features of the old.
There was never a moment for resting. Dance followed dance with an urgency which seemed to suggest that the revelry might never cease, and Christine barely sat down for a minute at a time. A spontaneous gaiety bubbled up within her as she whirled around the polished floor, shining in her eyes for all to see. She danced the reels with all the vigour of youthful abandonment and went through Petronella with an air. It was only when Finlay Sutherland had partnered her in the Dashing White Sergeant and twice in the Gay Gordons that she began to realize how well and easily he was fitting in.
“How do you know our dances?” she asked him as they swung round to the music of the pipes. “I should have thought that they would have all been strange to you.”
“I took the trouble to learn,” he told her. “We dance some of them in parts of Canada, too. People took their pleasures as well as their sorrows with them when they left Scotland for the other side of the Atlantic, you know.”
“When did your people emigrate?” she asked more generously.
“Thirty years ago.”
“Not very long,” she said.
“No—not in actual time. In achievement, though, it can cover a great deal. Thirty years ago Canada was a brave land of promise, the hope held out to people who saw nothing but hardship for them here.”
“And yet you have come back,” she reminded him as the music ceased.
He looked down at her amid the general applause.
“ ‘But still the thoughts are true, the heart is Highland’,” he quoted.
“ ‘And we in dreams behold the Hebrides!’ ”
She ha
d almost whispered the final words of the revealing couplet, and sudden tears stung at the back of her eyes, of which she was youthfully ashamed. That could not be why he had come to Croma, she thought, trying to harden her heart to this man who had come to buy Erradale and possess the whole of Croma for some whim of his own—the love of possession, no doubt, because he had left Scotland in infancy with nothing.
Yet he had not appeared to be ashamed of his family’s humble beginnings, and that was in his favour. He had come of sturdy Highland stock, and that was enough for him. What his father had done had been accomplished by the twin attributes of perseverance and dogged determination to succeed, allied to a strong constitution and the will to work twenty-four hours a day, if need be.
They had been fighters, and something told Christine, as she walked back across the candle-lit room with her hand lightly on the sleeve of his green velvet jacket, that Finlay Sutherland had not laid down his sword.
Well, if he wanted all Croma, they would see! Her grandmother, too, was a fighter!
The strange thing was, though, that Dame Sarah seemed to favour him.
“Come and sit beside me, Mr. Sutherland, and get your breath back,” she invited as they reached her chair. “That wildly enthusiastic granddaughter of mine is dancing mad. She never rests!”
“She’s certainly full of energy,” Finlay Sutherland agreed. “I haven’t seen her miss a reel yet.”
Christine flushed because he had noticed that much about her when she didn’t think he had noticed her at all. Almost immediately, however, Hamish was at her side, claiming her for the next dance.
Dame Sarah’s astute old eyes followed their progress down the long room before she spoke again.
“I’m sorry you came on a wild goose chase when you first came to Erradale, Mr. Sutherland,” she said briefly. “I had intended to sell the estate if Christine did not show any interest in the place,, but now things are different. If she will stay here—marry and settle down, I suppose I mean—Erradale may well weather the financial storm. One grows tired of constant striving, perhaps, if there is no reasonably sure end in view,” she added more slowly. “It is a weakness of which I am now greatly ashamed,” she confessed.
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