The Gated Road

by Jean S. MacLeod

  THE GATED ROAD

  Jean S. Macleod

  Jane Thornton’s life was in ruins.

  An accident had destroyed her dancing career, and her fiancé and her own sister had fallen suddenly in love. Jane had the weight of more than one grief in her heart the day she went to High Tor to break a piece of bad news to Adam Drummond, her sister's fiancé. When she arrived, she found that her task was even harder than she imagined. The road to Adam’s farm was punctuated by gates, blocking the way to intruders, and they seemed like symbols of the barriers that he put round his own heart to keep out love. But Adam didn't need her sympathy. He needed a fiancé—and he insisted that Jane take her sister’s place. Yet more than one woman, it appeared, wanted to find a way through his defences. Which of them would succeed?

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jane Thornton sat in the quiet room, aware of her solitude and filled with a deepening sense of gratitude to the woman who had made it possible. After the accident she had spent a month in a busy London hospital being “pieced together again,” as her twin had put it, and the ceaseless comings and goings in the wards had done nothing to improve her shattered nerves.

  “Go up to the Lakes,” her friend had said. “You’ll get peace and quiet there. I don’t let the cottage till Easter, and even then you can stay on if you want to.”

  Jane had come to Thorpe Newell because it had seemed, at the time, the only thing to do. Her job had gone. She could no longer hope to continue with a career in ballet that had barely begun to be successful. All the ambition, all the hard work, all the endless striving after perfection that had surrounded her and Penny for the past six years had come to nothing; for her, at least. For Penny it would be different.

  She smiled as she thought of her sister, gay, lovable, irresponsible Penny, who hoped that she might combine her career with what she expressed as “the love of a lifetime!”

  Jane wondered what had induced her twin to turn her eyes from the glitter and sophistication of the London she loved so well to the bleak North of England farmhouse where Adam Drummond lived his isolated life among the Border fells.

  Perhaps it was one of those things which just couldn’t be explained, Jane mused as she got up from her chair and crossed to the cottage window, waiting for the postman to come up the path with her letters in his hand.

  The letter she wanted most should have arrived the day before. Stephen had returned to London from America a week ago. He had sent her a cable to say when he was leaving New York, and she had given him three days in London to attend to business before she had let her heart rise at the sound of the postman’s step.

  Thinking about him, the color rose slowly into her cheeks, her eyes reflecting an inner radiance of happiness and content that gave her face an added warmth and beauty. She was not engaged to Stephen, but their understanding was complete.

  Jane had cherished these thoughts, painfully aware of her utter dependence on Stephen’s continuing love and affection now that Fate had snatched away her career. Although she had known moments of desperate indecision when she had thought herself more severely crippled than she was, she was sure of his love.

  Stephen hadn’t seen her on her feet since the accident. He had been in America when she had left the hospital to come north, and there had been only Penny to see her safely onto the train—Penny who had cried when she had seen her hobble across the room for the first time; Penny who had said that she would “break the news to Stephen as best she could.”

  “I don’t want you to break anything to Stephen!” Jane had cried sharply. “He knows about my foot, and I’m not crippled. It won’t make any difference.”

  No, she told herself determinedly as the postman fumbled with the gate, it won’t make any difference!

  There were two letters that morning. The letter she wanted most held Stephen’s rather bold, distinguished looking handwriting singling it out from the other from her twin. Both bore the London postmark. Both, she noticed, had been posted in the same southwestern district at the same time.

  The color deepened in her cheeks as she opened Stephen Moreland’s and her heartbeats quickened. It was not a long letter and it was chillingly to the point.

  “Janey, darling,” he addressed her as he always did, “I’ve got to see you right away. There’s something we have to talk about and I can’t bring you all the way to London to say it. I’m coming north to see you. I shall be leaving here as soon as I post this and hope to reach your isolated little hide-out some time tomorrow morning. Penny tells me it is quite remote, but I dare say I shall find it before lunch. I must be back here, in London, the following day—Friday—for a conference.

  “Yours,

  Stephen”

  Jane’s heart recoiled as she put the letter down. There was something so stiff, so unlike Stephen in the brief, calculated words. It amounted almost to a note of warning he could not be coming all that way to impart good news.

  Her twin’s letter was slightly incoherent at first. Penny was generally vague when she was excited about something, and Jane began to read with a small frown pencilled between her brows and a half-amused smile curving her lips. Although they were twins and so exactly alike to all outward appearances, there were times when she felt many years her sister’s senior.

  It had been especially so since her recent accident, Jane realized as she scanned the first, hurriedly written page.

  “This is all going to be a most devastating shock to you, Janey,” the hurried scrawl announced, “but it’s something you’ve got to know. It’s something neither of us could really help. Love is like that, I suppose, taking one unawares, making a havoc of one’s life sometimes. I don’t know how it happened. Please believe me when I say that! It has all been so quick and unexpected. Maybe Stephen and I should have known when we first met each other how it would be in the end. I didn’t like him much, if you remember. I thought he was too arrogant and sure of himself. But now it’s different. You’re not going to be able to forgive us easily for what we are doing to you, Janey, because I know you were in love with Stephen right from the beginning...”

  The words swam and blurred before Jane’s eyes. She could not believe what she had just read, but her hands were unsteady as she turned back the pages and began again at the beginning.

  Stephen and Penny! The words shattered in her mind, destroying all concentrated thought. Stephen in love with someone else—in love with Penny!

  Was this what Stephen wanted to tell her? Was he saying that he was in love with Penny now? Penny who looked so much like her but had no limp to spoil for him the perfection of her beauty!

  Her heart seemed to swell until it was almost ready to burst; she couldn’t think clearly. Neither could she apportion blame. All she knew was that she wanted to creep away, to hide herself from further hurt, not to meet Stephen or to see him again.

  Then, gradually, she knew that she had to see him. It was a cowardly thing to run away. He was coming to offer her an explanation and she had to stay and hear it, whatever it might do to her afterward.

  Sitting very still, she felt the seconds creep away endlessly, and then, when she could sit no longer, she went out into the pale March sunshine to watch for the first sign of Stephen’s car. It was no longer possible to bear the thought of meeting him in the house because, deep in her heart, she had planned that they might one day return here on a brief honeymoon—brief because Stephen had his foot on the ladder of success at last, and could not afford to be too long away from the heart of things.

  And the heart of things, as far as Stephen was concerned, was London and New York.

  Even before she had picked up the purr of the car’s powerful engine she saw it winding its way along the twisting road beneath her, in and out between
the thick hedges of rhododendrons and the dark patches of trees which fringed the lake. It came steadily up the hill, and, with an unconscious straightening of her slim shoulders, she closed the cottage gate behind her and went to meet it. It was as if she would exclude Stephen from her quiet sanctuary until she was sure of what he had come to say.

  She knew almost before he had got out of the car. When he saw her he jammed on his brakes, bringing the Mercedes to a standstill a yard or two along the road. In that moment she had glimpsed something in his face that turned her heart to ice. It lay, still and cold, in her breast as she walked slowly across the grass toward him.

  “I’ve had a devil of a job finding you!” he managed to say lightly as he got out from behind the wheel. “You certainly prefer solitude, Jane!”

  She smiled, forcing her lips to the gesture, although she could not bring herself to speak. Stephen did not attempt to kiss her, possibly because he could see what she was feeling reflected in her far too candid eyes.

  “You got my letter?” he asked instead.

  “Yes.”

  The monosyllable seemed to have been forced from her, and then, suddenly, she was making it easy for him, not waiting till he could get out the words that would tear her heart to shreds.

  “I know what you want to say, Stephen,” she told him. “I—Penny wrote to me. I got both your letters by the same post.”

  He made a small, impatient gesture with his hands while his eyes remained contritely on hers.

  “I asked her not to write,” he said. “It’s so harsh. I felt that I ought to come and tell you myself...”

  He was looking uncomfortable now, grasping for the right words, and suddenly Jane was sorry for him.

  “It’s all right,” she assured him dully. “You couldn’t help it, you or Penny. It’s the sort of thing that might happen to anyone and—and we weren’t engaged, Stephen—not formally engaged.”

  “No,” he agreed almost with relief, as if that might make things easier all round. “The devil of the thing is that Penny was—is.”

  For the first time Jane remembered Adam Drummond. “I suppose he’ll give her up,” she suggested flatly.

  “I can’t say how sorry I am, Janey...”

  She heard Stephen’s voice as if it came from some great distance, far beyond the hills, and a desperate sort of unreality flooded across her mind. This couldn’t be true, her heart began to plead. It was no more than a dreadful nightmare from which she would awake to find herself in Stephen’s arms with all her world secure again.

  But he did not take her into his arms. He stood uncertainly beside the car, wishing the interview over yet not knowing how to end it, not knowing what would be kindest—to go swiftly or to stay a while in an attempt to reason and comfort.

  Yet what reason could there be? And what comfort? Jane’s heart felt like lead. It was all over. Stephen was in love with someone else.

  Penny! Something painful deep inside her kept repeating her sister’s name, endlessly, bewilderingly. How could Penny have done this?

  “Will you come back to London, Jane?” Stephen was asking unhappily. “I’ll hang around till you pack.”

  Swiftly she recoiled before the suggestion.

  “No! No, I couldn’t.”

  “Perhaps you’re right.” He looked about him, trying to imagine what comfort or compensation she could find here, immured among these Lakeland hills. “It’s not so long since your accident, is it?”

  She realized then that he had avoided looking at her when she walked and her heart gave a quick, violent lurch of protest. Was that part of his reason?

  “I’ve made a remarkable recovery.” Her tone was proud, almost defiant as she faced him. “In time I’ll be able to walk almost as well as anyone else—”

  Abruptly she broke off, suddenly hearing the words she had uttered as a plea, the final, despairing cry of anguished heart.

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course you will! And then you must come back into the swim, Janey. Penny and I will help all we can.”

  She smiled deprecatingly, hardening her thoughts.

  “Don’t worry,” she said stiffly. “It’s not such an insoluble problem. At least I can use my hands and my brain.”

  She wanted him to go now. Desperately she wanted that before she collapsed ignominiously at his feet, begging for the return of his love. Harsh, dry sobs rose into her throat, but she forced them back. This was to be a clean break. Stephen expected it of her.

  He took a step toward her, attempting to take her into his arms, to hold her, to comfort her, perhaps, but she warded him off with a small, bleak cry.

  “No, Stephen! I’d rather you went, straight away. Don’t even say goodbye.”

  He got into the car and sat there for a moment, hesitating. Then, without another word or a backward look, he let in his clutch and drove down the hill toward the lake.

  Jane watched till the shining black car was out of sight, hardly aware of reaction, her mind and body numbed into a blank immobility by the finality of his departure, by the sudden and devastating nature of her loss.

  I shall never love anyone again, she thought. There was only Stephen...

  During those few minutes she realized how much she had given to their love. It had been bound up with so much—her work, her way of living, all her hopes and aspirations for the future. And now all that was changed, shattered by her accident and the cold, searing fact that Stephen had ceased to love her.

  She tried not to believe that the two things were synonymous, that Stephen would have remained faithful if she had been able to take her place by his side in the fullest sense of the word. He had predicted great things for her, saw her as the coming ballerina of her day and age.

  Bitterness flowed in, cold and chilling, to take possession of her heart. She felt the tears of an overwhelming self-pity gathering in her eyes and, fighting them, fled back toward the cottage, thankful to be alone.

  There were moments when solitude was the only thing. The tears came, blinding her, welling up out of her weakness and her utter desolation of spirit. Their love was over now, for ever, and Penny was all Stephen wanted.

  Penny? It was unbelievable. She could not sort it out, and inevitably she came back to the thought of Adam Drummond. Had Penny told him? Was a letter already on its way to the lonely farmhouse on the Cumberland fells, breaking his heart, too?

  Jane had never met him. His brief acquaintance with her twin, which had culminated so unexpectedly in their engagement, had begun while Jane had been touring abroad with her first ballet company. She had been chosen to fill a gap in an emergency, and Penny herself had urged her to take the chance.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she had said as cheerfully as her disappointment would allow. “I’ll work like mad while you’re away and be nearly as good as you are by the time you return!”

  Yes, Penny had worked hard and played a little, had become engaged to her savage young man from the northern fells all before Jane had returned from Zurich, where the tour had ended. Two days before the plane had taken off on its homeward flight she had gone into the mountains with a skiing party and been brought back on a stretcher—the stretcher on which she had eventually returned to England.

  With suddenly trembling hands she smoothed out her sister’s letter, not knowing why she should want to read it for the second time. She already knew that life and gaiety and love were over for her and just beginning for Penny.

  Automatically her eyes followed the scrawled words. Penny’s sorrow, her dismay at what had happened to them were all there. She was truly, genuinely sorry. And then, because she was Penny, she was asking a favor.

  “I don’t know how I am going to tell Adam,” she wrote. “Stephen says I must see him and explain it all fairly. But how can I, Jane? How can you explain anything like this to a person like Adam? He wouldn’t understand. I’d find myself not saying anything in the end. I’d come away still engaged to him and still loving Stephen, and I’d never be a
ble to write what I felt afterwards. Adam is going to be angry—terribly, terribly angry! I feel that, if I saw him, he’d force me to keep my promise. He considers an engagement a sort of sacred bargain. People don’t get involved in engagements where he comes from unless they are sure about their feelings. And I was sure, Jane—so sure until Stephen started to take me about when you were away...”

  Jane put the letter aside. What did Penny want her to do? She wasn’t—she couldn’t be suggesting that she should write to Adam Drummond in her stead?

  “Stephen says that I ought not to write,” Penny’s letter went on, “but I just can’t go off to New York without knowing that I’m free. I’ll be with Stephen and we want to get married. Oh, Jane! this must be awful for you to read, but I know you’ll help out. Please, please go and see Adam for me. You’ll know what to say to him. You can tell him how it is so much better than I ever could, and you are so near. You’re practically on the Drummonds’ doorstep. You could get there and back in a day, if only you would!”

  Penny’s pleading words beat against her mind even when she tried to reject them. There was desperation behind them and a suggestion of panic which bordered on fear.

  “I’m supposed to be going up there next weekend. Adam will have to know before then. I can’t go, Jane. I can’t face the terrible scene there’s sure to be. Adam can be inexorable. He could hold me to my promise, even against my will.”

  Which, Jane decided, was ridiculous. No man, however madly he might be in love, could hold a woman against her will. Perhaps that was what Penny expected her to explain to Adam Drummond.

  If I only knew what to do, she thought. What to do for the best. The day wore on. The longest day in her life, stretching bleakly to its end, and all night long she tossed fitfully, suspended over a dark abyss of heartbreak that was gradually deepened by doubt. Then Penny settled everything for her. She wired frantically: “Drummonds expecting me today. Jane, you must go. Am packing for New York.”