Jane, her face very pale in the waning afternoon light, turned to look at her.
“You mean, if the girl he loved was with them?” she asked.
“I suppose that was what I meant. Perhaps,” Christine added slowly, “I also meant that they might help him to make up his mind whether he really wanted to stay here for the rest of his life or not.”
It suddenly seemed vital to her that Finlay should stay. She did not want Croma to die, and she knew that she could not do all that had to be done alone. She needed Finlay on the island, she needed his help and faith and his trust. Without them Erradale, too, would be lost.
Jane stayed the night, but they did not talk any more about her employer. Hamish drove them up to the clachan in the brake, waiting almost impatiently as they went from cottage to cottage to see the result of the spinning. He had greeted Jane with a brief indifference, which Christine knew had hurt, but Jane said nothing. There seemed to be a tension between her and her eldest brother which went beyond the personal to a far wider issue, a suggestion of strain and disillusionment which reminded Christine forcibly of Rory and the way he had stood between her and Hamish that day on the cliff.
“What about Callum?” Jane asked as they were driving back, wrapped warmly in two newly-woven rugs which Christine was sending to Ardtornish for the exhibition. “Finlay said that you mentioned some jewellery—brooches and things—which we might have for the show. Every little helps, you know, and it is an island craft, although it’s almost a forgotten one.”
“I’ll see what Callum has on hand,” Christine promised. “We might even collect some of it before you go.”
At ten o’clock the following morning the converted lifeboat from Scoraig put in its appearance at the entrance of the harbour.
Jane and Christine, on their way back from Callum’s cottage with a box full of lovely, intricately-wrought costume jewellery which had delighted Jane on sight, halted on the brow of the hill to look down to the Port. They recognized the boat simultaneously, and almost simultaneously they became aware of conflict.
There seemed to be quite a lot of trouble about mooring facilities, and when a tall, broad-shouldered figure in yellow oilskins and a Canadian lumberjack’s peaked cap finally stepped ashore he was immediately surrounded by the small band of loafers who invariably adorned the fish quay.
“What’s happening?” Jane said involuntarily. “It looks as if Finlay is having trouble with the boat.”
Christine bit her lip.
“That’s preposterous!” she exclaimed angrily. “People don’t refuse to help with a boat. It’s an unwritten law. The ‘brotherhood of the sea’, Rory calls it.”
“Do you think we ought to go down?” Jane asked, her anxiety still audible in her quiet voice.
“Of course, we ought to know what’s happening!”
By the time they reached the harbour, however, Finlay had apparently straightened out any difficulty there might have been. A rather subdued bunch of loafers glowered at him from the shelter of a pile of fish boxes, but he did not seem to notice them as he strode towards the two girls.
“I hope Jane has managed to persuade you to come to Ardtornish,” he said briefly, holding Christine’s hand in a firm and quite friendly grip. “I think you’ll find it well worth your while.”
Christine’s heart had turned over at sight of him, but suddenly his casual friendliness was like gall. How could she go on meeting him like this, she wondered, year in, year out, even for Croma? Bitterness caught at her throat, strangling the conventional words she should have uttered; If only, her heart cried, it could have been different! But there was no turning back—ever!
Jane was showing him the jewellery.
“There could be so much more,” she explained. “Callum does not need his sight to be able to work. His skill is in his hands, and he could teach others. It would be something for him to do, something to make him feel that he is still useful, that he isn’t just—waiting to die.”
“Yes,” Finlay said, “that’s it!” He was letting the jewellery run through his fingers, looking at it as if he saw much of Croma’s future in its simple beauty. “This stuff will sell like anything once we get it on show, but it’s the tweed we have to push.” He looked across at Christine with a deliberation which she could not ignore. “That will be your part, mainly,” he told her. “Erradale can produce most of the wool.”
She nodded, remembering Hamish’s alternative suggestion for Erradale and rejecting it immediately.
“I’ll make you that promise, Finlay,” she said.
“I’ve another one. to extract,” he said as they turned back towards the harbour. “I want some of those pictures of yours. All of them, in fact.”
“My paintings?” She was more than surprised and unaware that he had even noticed her work. “They’re hardly up to exhibition standard,” she started to protest, but he cut her short.
“They’re Croma,” he said. “I want them to set off the tweed.”
There was no end to his demands, she thought with a little smile, and he always got what he wanted.
“I’m taking Jane back with me,” he said, “but you’ll come for Christmas, won’t you?” His face darkened for an instant. “I thought I might have been able to bring you over the new causeway,” he added, “but that can wait. Rory will come for you.”
But not you! Christine tried to keep the disappointment out of her eyes as she thanked him and promised to go, but it was there struggling with her smile and adding to the lonely pain in her heart.
When she reached Erradale House, when she had seen the Scoraig boat sail away with Finlay at the tiller and Jane standing beside him—Jane who would have made him so good a wife if his heart had not already been given elsewhere—she wondered if she had been wise to promise to go to Ardtornish for Christmas.
She remembered other Christmases, the love and affection and happiness of years gone by, and the memory swept over her like an engulfing tide. The longing in her heart was almost more than she could bear. She would go, of course, although it might only be to face added heartache, to find Finlay there with someone from his own world, one of his Canadian guests, perhaps, whom he had always loved.
CHAPTER X
Christine watched the Scoraig boat coming in from her bedroom window in the north wing. True to his promise, Finlay had sent Rory to take her to Ardtornish, but somehow she wished that she had been able to go by road, that the causeway was finished and the ford no longer cut the island in two at high tide.
The new road was so nearly finished. She had seen it the day before and there was no more than a gap left, but the green water of the Atlantic still poured through that gap and the dark, lowering clouds to the norths of Askaval suggested that Finlay was about to be beaten by the sort of storm that they had to expect at this time of year.
It was defeat by a hairsbreadth, and she felt ashamed that the delay which had caused it had come from her side of the ford. There was no doubt about it; the causeway could have been completed a week ago if there had not been so many hold-ups at Port-na-Keal.
Well, that was that, she supposed. It was no use talking to the men once they got an idea fixed in their heads. Or was it?
She saw Rory leave the boat and come steadily along the quay to climb the hill. He would be coming up for her dressing-case, but she had already sent it down in the estate car with Hamish.
Hamish had been surly and disinclined to discuss her visit to Ardtornish even when she had explained about the tweed.
“Have a good time,” he had said, but she knew that he resented the visit.
When she reached the quay Rory was nowhere to be seen. She had not passed him on the road, but he could have taken the shorter way up across the fields. She decided to wait, knowing that Mrs. Crammond would meet him and tell him that she had left.
Walking slowly along the quay, she was suddenly aware of how deserted it looked. There was always someone about at that hour of the afternoon, even i
f it was only the odd errand-boy with a basket over his arm gazing down into the water with thoughts of the wider seas in his mind. Now, however, the cobbles stretched bare to the farthest reach of the harbour wall, with only an occasional gull hobbling along in search of food or flying and swerving erratically as it rose and circled above the sea.
It was not until she reached the shelter of the fish-curing sheds that she became aware of the group of men gathered just ahead of her, gazing down at the Scoraig boat. At a glance she thought that she could identify most of them, but what froze her to the spot was the fact that Hamish was among them. He stood with his back towards her, haranguing the others with so much venom in his voice that she could hardly believe it at first.
“You don’t have to have this road across the island if you don’t want it,” he was saying. “When this fellow builds his pier at Scoraig, as he means to do, there’s not going to be much work at Port-na-Keal. Scoraig’s the sheltered side and it’s nearer the mainland. Once there’s a pier and a causeway across the ford things are going to start from Scoraig instead of Port-na-Keal. You’re going to be forgotten up here—a dead end. The steamer may come in, but the goods are going to be landed at Scoraig and brought to Erradale over this fancy new road.” He drew up his shoulders in an indifferent shrug. “Of course,” he said, “you can please yourself what you do—whether you go on unloading the material for the road or not—”
Impelled by sheer anger and shaking in every limb, Christine reached the edge of the little knot of men, and Port-na-Keal’s habitual idlers parted as if she had cleft a way through their midst with a drawn sword. Only Hamish stood his ground, surprised by her presence but smiling mockingly.
“I thought you were entertaining Rory,” he observed. “He went up to the house ten minutes ago.”
“I’m not interested in Rory at the moment,” she told him, her voice so shaken that it sounded like a stranger’s. “What I am interested in is what you have just been saying, Hamish.”
He took out his cigarette case, watching her carefully as he extracted a cigarette and lit it, flicking off his silver lighter and returning it to his pocket with a deliberation which only served to infuriate her the more.
“I’ve been giving these fellows a little pep talk,” he explained lightly. “They’ve got to know their own minds, sooner or later, even on an island like Croma.”
“Your mind, don’t you mean? You weren’t helping them!” Angry contempt edged her voice now. “You were doing your best to incite them to some sort of rebellion:—and these men aren’t Croma! They’re the riff-raff one can find anywhere—in big ports, in city streets, standing around in village squares—the type of people who will never be any more than hangers-on in life, the beachcombers, the parasites! These are the people you hope will destroy what Finlay Sutherland has set out to do on this island, but I won’t let you. Do you hear? I won’t let you!” He laughed, and her anger died suddenly, giving place to a dreadful, chilling sense of disappointment.
“I had faith in you!” she cried. “I didn’t think you would—stoop to a thing like this!”
“My dear girl,” he said, “aren’t we becoming a little hysterical? What exactly have I done? I have only been trying to point out to you, in one way or another, that you are about to lose Croma!”
“That isn’t true.” Her voice was quite calm now. “We are working together, as we always should have worked, for Croma, as a whole. It is one island. It always has been. We are only making it more secure.”
“Please yourself,” he shrugged. “But if you want me to go on working here I have no intention of working to Sutherland’s orders.”
She bit her lip, but her mind was already made up.
“Are you offering me your resignation, Hamish?” she asked.
He laughed.
“That’s about it. Though, if I were you, I would think pretty carefully about accepting it. If I go, who, for instance, could you employ?”
Something that had been like a load on her shoulders seemed to be gradually slipping away.
“I shall manage,” she said proudly. “I’m sorry, Hamish, but I do think it would be better if you went.”
He looked back at her incredulously.
“Just as you wish,” he said, and walked away, but there was an angry gleam in his eyes as he looked down at the Scoraig boat and she felt her heart beating hard and nervously as she watched him.
“There are people who build and others who only seem able to destroy.” The words her grandmother had used all those months ago suddenly echoed in her ears, as if Dame Sarah had been standing there on the rough cobbles by her side, repeating them now when their meaning had suddenly been made so clear.
Deeply upset by the unexpected encounter, she stood waiting for Rory’s return, yet there was something almost of relief in her thoughts of Hamish. He had never been right for Croma. His easy-going irresponsibility was not the stuff that the island needed, and somewhere in the past few weeks his charm had ceased to hold her. She had been in love with love, absorbed by a dream which she had woven round a romantic figure of her girlhood, and this was the result.
When Rory came she wondered if he could sense the tension in her. He would not speak about it, of course, and she turned the conversation to Ardtornish as he helped her on board.
“I’ve been working on the causeway most of the time,” he told her as he let out the throttle and the heavy, seaworthy old boat nosed its way out of the harbour. “It’s all but finished. You’ll get a look at it when we go past the Rhu Dearg. It shows up better from the water.” He glanced up at the sky as they cleared the twin quays and breasted the swell beyond them. “If this storm would keep off for twenty-four hours we could get the bridge section in place. That’s all there is to do.”
The sky to the north looked anything but promising. Leaden clouds had been building up all morning and a heavy darkness hung over the sea. Askaval stood out starkly against it, black against grey, and the higher pinnacles of Scuirival were already hidden from view. There was a curious, molten look along the horizon and a stillness on the surface of the water that was ominous.
Christine fastened her oilskins more securely about her and went to stand beside Rory at the wheel. He was keeping close in to the shore, and when they came to Rhu Dearg he pointed towards the ford.
“There you are!” he exclaimed with pride. “We’re almost across.”
They could see the new causeway along its entire length, and something caught at Christine’s throat as she looked at it. The road came boldly up from the south, from Scoraig and Ardtornish where all this had been begun. It went over the ford on a series of concrete piles, built out from either side once she had given her permission for the material to be landed at Port-na-Keal, and now it was all but complete.
“There’s just the centre span,” Rory told her. “And that’s all ready to be pushed into position. It has been assembled at Scoraig and Finlay hopes to get it into place to-day or to-morrow.”
The following day would be Christmas Eve, Christine realized, but Finlay would go on working to see the job through if the storm held off.
Her heart beat faster as she looked at the narrow neck of land with the water running through between the piles and the road built high and safe above it. Just that one span, she thought, and it would be finished. Finlay’s first dream for Croma would come true!
And Hamish had done his best to wreck it all. A sudden cold shiver ran through her, ominous as a premonition of evil, and she knew that she would not be really happy until Hamish had left the island for good.
Pale, watery sunshine struggled through a break in the clouds to the south as they reached Scoraig, where Jane and a tall man in a long travelling-coat were waiting on the jetty.
“This is Finlay’s brother from Canada,” Jane explained, introducing the stranger, who was so like Finlay that the introduction hardly seemed necessary. He had the same height and the same breadth of shoulder, the same grey-green eyes an
d fiery hair, and when he smiled it was Finlay’s smile, although he was quite obviously younger by several years.
“I’m Joe,” he said. “I’ve heard a great deal about you, so I guess I just had to come down and meet you before the others got a look in!” He grinned and shook hands. “Finlay and you are doing great things on this little island, Miss MacNeill,” he added enthusiastically. “I reckon I had no idea how much till I came across and saw it for myself. You sure seem determined to make it all pay between you!”
He had linked her name so naturally with his brother’s that Christine could not contradict him. They were working together for Croma now—she and Finlay—although they were worlds apart in every other way.
“Finlay has gone up to the ford,” Jane explained. “Every second of daylight is precious if we are to get the final span over before this lot breaks.” She looked up at the lowering sky. “When it comes it will be a tremendous test for the causeway, but Finlay feels sure it will stand up to it. The main point is getting the span across in time. We’re slightly short-handed,” she added with a quick frown, “but I feel that Finlay can do it, and everybody who can wield a spanner has been pressed into service!”
“I’m on convoy duty!” Joe grinned. “When I’ve taken your baggage up to the house I’m going on to the ford.” Christine glanced across at Jane.
“Could we go?” she asked eagerly. “It would be—rather wonderful to see the span going across.”
“Why not?” Jane smiled. “Will you wait for us, Joe?”
“I guess so,” he said, swinging the Ardtornish car away from the jetty. “If you’re not more than half an hour.” He turned to Rory. “You going up?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Rory told him, “for all the tea in China!”
Finlay had six house guests, apart from his brother, and they were all at the ford, Jane explained when they reached the house. She appeared to have been put completely in charge in her old home and no one could have made a more charming hostess than Jane.
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