Castor and Pollux watered their milk-white steeds? On the Palatine,” she went on in a gentle, convincing way, “there is the Cave of the Wolf which suckled Romulus and Remus.” Suddenly she thrust all seriousness from her, laughing till her eyes danced. “I could not teach you to appreciate all these things in a day, Mr. Meldrum, but I could show them to you, and I could make you love Rome, even though you do not want to look farther than Scotland for your happiness!”
The amazing contrast in her make-up, the suggestion of something half-child, half-woman, which he had encountered even in the first moment of their meeting, baffled Andrew so that he looked sharply away from the teasing expression in her eyes, concentrating frowningly on the way ahead.
She had led him back on to the Corso by a series of side passages and narrow streets. The teeming life of the wide, sophisticated boulevard seemed to belong to another world, but in some ways Tessa belonged to it, too. She did not seem to have any inhibitions, he mused, looking down at her dark head as she moved beside him, her shoulders straight, her eyes alive and bright as she threaded her way through the busy throng.
“Rome can be very beautiful in this light,” she observed. “My father and I used to walk all the way to the Capitol just to see the play of it on the white travertine which is almost as beautiful as marble and in some ways not so cold.” She looked at him with an elfin grin. “Perhaps you will not understand that, but my father was an artist.”
Andrew felt impatient, even vaguely angry, yet there was no reason why he should care what she thought about him or whether he was lacking in understanding of the arts.
“Here is your hotel,” she said in an entirely different voice. “There will be plenty of room at this time of year. While you go in and register I shall wait out here in the sunshine. After it has rained in Rome we appreciate the sunshine so very much more.”
He wanted to tell her not to wait but found that he could not look directly into her clear eyes and administer such a rebuff, and within a short time he was back with her on the pavement, prepared to climb to the Palatine and up the flight of steps to the Capitol to see the sunshine playing on the white Brescian marble like light on water.
Not until he had left her, with a nodding acquaintance with half of Rome’s famous monuments behind him, did he finally realize that he had been seeing the Eternal City through her eyes.
She had that way with her, the precious quality of a child-like enthusiasm for all things, but possibly she had inherited it from Veronique.
Her mother’s name stood out before him in the moonlit quiet of his bedroom far above the Corso, and he thought again of his father, whom he had never really known but whose memory had been cherished in his heart for as long as he could remember. Veronique had betrayed his father. The lovely, frail creature who had captured Fergus Meldrum’s heart after his first wife’s death had thrown that love back in his face and gone her way, sending him to his own death in circumstances which had always been suspect.
And this was Veronique’s daughter.
He stood with his hands clenched, looking out into the night till the echo of laughter far beneath him made him bar the window against the vision of a pair of violet eyes.
To-morrow, he thought, I shall go to Amalfi alone.
He was not up early enough to escape Tessa, however.
Before he had finished his breakfast a waiter brought him a message to say that Miss Halliday was waiting in the foyer.
“It’s such a wonderful day,” she said, “I’ve brought a picnic! And Luigi has sent us a bottle of wine! He has also let me use his car,” she added tentatively.
The gamine quality was more in evidence than ever today, though her hair was neatly brushed and she had put on a white cotton skirt and multi-coloured top, which did not appear to have a great deal of back to it. Andrew thought that she would be cold driving out into the country until he saw that she carried a little woollen coat tucked in to the gay raffia bag swinging on her arm, and then he wondered what sort of excuse he could offer for not going at all.
“We’ll go to Amalfi,” she suggested, preceding him out through the open door. “To-day will be wonderful on the Campagna, and you know that everyone should see Naples before they die!”
“I had not thought to go to Naples,” he said, and then stood staring in speechless bewilderment at the strange contraption at the kerb which he feared must be Luigi’s car.
Tessa laughed back into his startled face.
“Are you afraid?” she asked. “You must not be! I used to drive my father when he was tired after a busy day. We would go out a little way into the Campagna where, in the spring, the grass is blue with irises, and we would paint them together till the sun went down.” Suddenly she looked up at him as she got in behind the wheel. “You will not mind if I bring my canvases to Scotland with me?” she asked. “I feel that I shall be able to paint there, too.”
He told her that he did not mind, automatically, thinking that her reception at Glenkeith would hardly be made the more secure when she presented herself there, sketch-block in hand, but after that he let her drive him along the wide motor road out of the city without thinking too much about Glenkeith and the future.
The car was an open tourer and a wind fanned their cheeks as they went along, while all the sun in the world seemed concentrated on the blue sea ahead of them. The whole Campagna was alive with bright Sicilian marigolds and long afterwards Andrew was to associate them with this day when the memory of Vesuvius standing out sharply against the southern skyline and the magic of Ischia and Capri had paled.
Before they reached Amalfi Tessa drew the car up on the roadside and they ate their picnic meal in the shadow of a lone pine with the sea at their feet and the vista of blue Salerno backed by the distant Apennines.
She produced the simple repast with a certain amount of pride. There was ham and pasta and an excellent cheese which Andrew found himself enjoying with the appetite of a hungry schoolboy.
“It’s called ricotta,” she told him, spreading it lavishly on the home-made bread which he had found slightly coarse. “It’s made with ewe’s milk and was my father’s favourite.”
When she spoke about her father her eyes were soft and glowing. She was not speaking of a failure but of a man she had admired almost to the point of worship, and Andrew thought about his own father and understood.
“When we return to Rome,” she promised gaily, “I shall cook you something really worth while, so that you will know that I shall be of use at Glenkeith.” She lay back on the grass, her slim hands clasped behind her head, her eyes on the distant peak of the volcano, her lips pursed in consideration. “What shall it be? Fritt misto or stracotto? Or red mullet cooked with oil and tomatoes?”
When he did not answer she rolled over on her side and laughed at him.
“It doesn’t mean a thing to you, does it, when you are thinking of roast mutton and green peas!” she challenged.
He got to his feet, feeling her laughter barbed and resenting it.
“We ought to go,” he said almost roughly. “It is getting late.”
As if she would dispute the fact, she got up and turned towards the sea with all the laughter suddenly gone out of her eyes, so that he was sharply aware of intrusion. This was her good-bye to something she had loved all her life, and he felt that he had no part in it. Her eyes were bluer now, as blue as the sea, with a wistfulness about them like the mist over it, and when they drove back towards Rome she was strangely silent.
Signora Zanetti, whom she called Maria with the easy familiarity of long acquaintance, had forestalled her in the preparation of their evening meal and Luigi produced a cherished bottle of Marsala in which to drink Tessa’s health and wish her happiness in her new life.
Andrew felt the wine bitter in his throat as he drank. He could not fail to recognize the quality of their affection as this simple Italian couple said good-bye to the girl they had loved as a member of their own family and he wondered if he
should have left them to enjoy this final meal alone.
There were tears and deep embraces in the morning, too, with the children standing in a small, bewildered group watching Tessa with great dark eyes from which the tears threatened to spill afresh with every word.
Andrew had come for her early, expecting that she would have a great deal of luggage to get to the airport, and had been surprised at the meagreness of her belongings. They were, apparently, all contained in the large carpet-bag affair which bulged at her feet, and he did not think the thin coat she wore adequate for the journey. She had no hat.
“I’m ready,” she said, struggling with her own tears and clutching a bulky sketching-block in her arms. “I’m ready to go now.”
From the beginning she had accepted her transition to Glenkeith as something that was quite natural, as if it had been expected, and he wondered how much her mother had told her about her former home in the Scottish Highlands. Her familiarity with roasted mutton and green peas suggested that Veronique had at least discussed the culinary arts of her adopted country with the daughter of her second marriage, but he had no intention of thinking kindly of Veronique on that account. Nothing that she had ever done at Glenkeith could have mattered to this woman who had abandoned her life there so easily.
When he thought about Glenkeith he became conscious of change and frustration and an insinuating sense of conflict, but once again he was able to assure himself that it was no affair of his. Tessa would be his grandfather’s responsibility.
Like a sharp blow over the heart the thought of his
grandfather’s great age came to him, and the modest pride he had always taken in the fact that, one day, all that was Glenkeith would belong to him.
CHAPTER III
TESSA was almost docile on the journey to Scotland, but Andrew noticed a mounting excitement as they came nearer Aberdeen. She had asked him many questions on the way, but in the main they had been trivial. The essentials she seemed to know.
To his intense surprise, the district round Loch-na-gar was familiar to her, its song and legend kindling a response in her which she was eager to let him see, and when the plane circled above Dyce she was pressing her nose against the glass like an eager child.
“Will anyone come to meet us?” she asked.
Andrew hesitated. He had not asked Margaret to come, but he thought that she would be there. He had cabled the time of their arrival from Rome and he was quite sure what Margaret’s reaction would be. She would be waiting down there on the tarmac to welcome the new arrival in Scotland. Expecting that she would be a child!
He smiled grimly at the thought, although Meg might like having someone near her own age at Glenkeith.
“Andrew,” Tessa said at his elbow, using his Christian name as simply as she had accepted the fact that she would be welcome at Glenkeith, “can we see the farm from here? Can you show me where exactly it is?”
“It’s farther inland, to the west,” he explained. “We have to motor a good way along the Dee to reach it.”
“Of course,” she said. “I had forgotten. How stupid of me!”
She sat with her hands folded till they felt the cushioned bump which told them that they had landed, and then she unfastened her safety belt and stood up beside him, looking small and thin and inadequate in her light coat as they waited to file out behind the other passengers.
Andrew saw Margaret standing in the crowd at the barrier and waved to her, but for the first time in his life
there was no thrill about coming home. He felt tired and unable to cope with the situation, asking himself angrily in the next breath why he thought that he should cope.
Margaret looked paler than usual as she greeted him and frank eyes slid easily away from his to rest on the girl by his side. He was conscious of surprise in her then, even of shock, but in a minute Margaret’s ingrained kindliness was uppermost.
“You must be tired,” she said, taking Tessa’s proffered hand. “It has been a long journey for you.”
“But every minute of it has been fun!” Tessa declared. “You must be Margaret. Andrew has told me all about you.”
Margaret’s eyes went to Andrew’s tense face and she smiled.
“Has he?” she asked. “I wonder what he said!”
“It was all very complimentary!” Tessa’s eyes were on the people moving out through the barrier by her side and on the wide expanse of green country beyond the airstrip and on the distant hills. “The Braes of Mar!” she mused. “They are near, aren’t they? My mother used to sing a song about them—a Jacobite song. And one about dark Loch-na-gar! Can you wonder that I am impatient to see it all for myself?”
Margaret stole another glance at Andrew and saw his face change, hardening perceptibly at this reference to the faithless Veronique, but she supposed that Tessa would not know why her mother had left Scotland so suddenly all these long years ago. Her own face was curiously tense, the golden freckles showing up clearly against its pallor, and she seemed to avoid any direct reference to Glenkeith as they got into the shooting brake and drove away.
By force of habit she had moved towards the front seat to get in beside Andrew, but she drew back, making way for Tessa to sit beside him.
“You’ll see better in front,” she explained. “Andrew will point out the beauty spots to you.”
But Andrew scarcely needed to tell Tessa where to look for a landmark. The lovely valley of the Dee, with its rolling hills and the grey turrets of ancient castles appearing above their sheltering trees, seemed like the recurrence of a happy dream to her, but he still could not believe that the falsely-sweet Veronique had ever spoken lovingly of her former home.
“It’s all as it should be!” Tessa said, cupping her chin in her hands as she rested her elbows on her knees and leaned forward with increasing delight. “I’ve wanted to see it for so long, and now it is all coming true before my eyes— Balmoral and Crathie, with the hills above them and the mountains beyond and all the brown burns running down to the Dee! When the snow comes I shall paint them, but before that there will be the autumn colours and the rowans on the mountain ash! Andrew,” she said, “everyone should learn to paint!” For a long while she had been studying Andrew, watching him on the plane as it neared his home, seeing him with Margaret, and she was still puzzled by him. He was rugged and uncompromising, and she had not found any kindness in him. There had been no warmth in his eyes when they had first met as there had been when he had looked at Margaret on the airstrip, and now he seemed to have retired into a shell which might prove as hard to pierce as the native granite she had heard so much about.
These giant hills which surrounded his home were made of granite, too, but it had once been her mother’s home and she had wanted to come back to it.
When, on her father’s death, she had learned that there was scarcely any money left for her to live on, she had hardly been dismayed. She had been more than ready to work for a living, and still was, but when Luigi had told her that he had written to “her mother’s people” in Scotland she had been conscious of an inner excitement which had not been dimmed until now.
There had been a sense of belonging, of being part of a family again, and the lost feeling of the past few months had gradually ebbed away. Born and bred in Rome, there was much of the sunshine of the Eternal City in her temperament, yet deep in her innermost heart she had always been aware of a reserve which had made her sensitive to rebuke. It was true that she had not suffered it often. Her father had been an indulgent man, too easygoing to capture the success he so often dreamed about, and he had been doubly kind to her since her mother died. In fact, Tessa mused, Andrew was the first person she had ever met who had not been easy to know and understand.
There had been nothing complicated about Maria and Luigi Zanetti, surrounded by their laughing babies. They had loved and been loved, living from day to day in the fond belief that the Blessed Virgin would not permit them to suffer any greater hardship than they could reasonably
bear, and they had always had affection to spare for the “little only one” in the flat next door, so that Tessa had never really known the meaning of loneliness.
For all that, she had been early aware of a difference in their circumstances, of a reserve which no amount of argument on her own part could ever break down. She was English. In a good many ways she was Scottish, and more than anything else she had longed to see her mother’s Scottish home. She knew that her grandmother had been born on Deeside, and for that reason alone she felt that she must be coming home.
“Where the heart is ...” She had never been to Scotland, but her impulsive heart had rushed ahead of her. All she had ever read of Scotland, of its romantic beauty, its song and legend, was burned deeply into her mind, and now that she was here it did not seem that she was going to be disappointed.
It was only that Andrew Meldrum might have been kinder, but perhaps that, too, had something to do with reserve. He could not possibly be like Luigi, living up here among the stern grandeur of these dark mountains which must surely set their seal on a man and make him different!
When, from time to time, she stole a glance at his set face during that eventful journey, she became aware of a hardening of its contours which reflected some of the harshness of the higher mountain reaches ahead of them, and almost instinctively she turned her eyes to the gentler countryside through which they passed. She had never seen such greenness, such a profusion of grass and tree and moorland clustering thickly at the base of hills stained vividly purple with the flush of heather as the high Apennines were stained in the spring with the blue of gentians, and even the fabled Appian Way could not compare with the excitement of this winding Deeside road with its myriad wild flowers starring the grass on every side.
Because it’s different, she thought. Because I belong here!
Master of Glenkeith Page 3