The Gated Road

by Jean S. MacLeod

  “How long,” he asked abruptly, “did you mean to stay?”

  She looked up, but his back was to her now as he stood staring out of the window at the white-shrouded outbuildings across the yard.

  “Not at all,” she confessed. “I thought I must just come and explain things to you, Adam, and then go away.”

  “But circumstances trapped you?” He laughed harshly. “I suppose you felt sorry for me,” he added aggressively.

  “I had no idea what you were like,” she pointed out.

  He smiled derisively.

  “The country yokel, breaking his heart over the faithlessness of woman! The poor, dim peasant never likely to get over his loss! Was that it?” he demanded.

  The color flew into Jane’s cheeks, but she stood her ground.

  “Yes, I pitied you,” she admitted, “but you must remember that I came here without knowledge of you or High Tor.”

  He faced her abruptly, his eyes flint-like in the revealing northerly light.

  “And now that you do know?” he challenged.

  “I feel that, at least, I may have been able to help your mother.”

  All the anger went out of his face as he swung round to the window.

  “Even I could scarcely deny that,” he said with his back to her. “I am humbly grateful.”

  “You must want me to go,” she said, “as quickly as possible.”

  “On the contrary.” He turned to look at her, at last, his eyes a remote, steely gray as he waited for her reaction. “I want you to stay. I’m asking you to complete the cure.”

  “But perhaps I’ve already done all I can for your mother,” she protested. “And it can only be awkward for you.”

  “I can take care of that,” he assured her. “We can tell my mother the truth when she is strong enough to hear it. It would be nothing short of disastrous to tell her. She’s met you and it has made a tremendous difference to her. Even if she were still to die, she would die happily now.”

  “We’ve not got to let her die,” Jane said huskily. “She loves High Tor. She wants to see you happy, Adam.”

  It was the wrong thing to have said. She knew that instantly and was sorry, but it was too late to recall her impulsive words. She could not even apologize to Adam.

  “Women are always ready to understand—when it doesn’t hurt them too much,” he said. “I dare say you wanted to offer me your understanding, Jane, but I don’t really need it. All I want you to do is to give my mother a reasonable chance of recovery. You were recuperating in the Lake District,” he went on deliberately. “All I’m asking you to do is to continue the process here at High Tor for a week or two until Fenwick is able to tell us that she is entirely out of danger. There’s no need for us to get in each other’s way,” he added dryly. “I shall be out on the hill all day and the house is big enough for both of us. We can live our separate lives so long as my mother doesn’t guess that we have no intention of getting married.”

  “It won’t be easy,” she warned him with peculiar insight. “Even now I feel guilty about deceiving your family as we are doing.”

  “You needn’t worry about Nigel,” he returned curtly. “He won’t be at all concerned and I dare say he will enjoy your company while you’re here.”

  “And—Marion?” The question had been forced from Jane’s reluctant lips. “Can you tell me about Marion, Adam?”

  His face darkened, but he said lightly enough:

  “Marion is our penance for owning what was once all Denholm land. That dale you saw on the way up here widens considerably as it goes eastwards, and the Priory stands on the best stretch of grazing this side of the Roman Wall. The Denholms owned it for generations, but death duties crippled them so much in the end that they were forced to sell. Marion’s only brother—the last of the Denholms in the male line—went to Canada.”

  “Couldn’t Marion have gone with him?” Jane asked in a small, restrained voice.

  “She could have done,” Adam said, “but she was determined to stay.”

  “And so she came here?”

  There was a tense, protracted silence which Jane thought he was never going to break.

  “No,” he said at last. “She continued to stay at the Priory.”

  “Alone?”

  “Not alone.” His tone was brittle. “She had a younger sister—Angela.”

  The tension between them deepened, and somehow Jane knew that Angela Denholm was Adam’s first love.

  But what had happened? What had gone wrong to separate them? And why had Marion Denholm eventually come to High Tor as the Drummonds’ housekeeper?

  “We’re vaguely related in a way,” Adam said, as if in response to her unspoken question. “A Drummond once married a Denholm in the distant past. That sort of thing happens frequently in the dales,” he added briefly.

  “My mother felt that we ought to give Marion a home, at least until she could make up her mind what she wanted to do. She would not come to High Tor as a guest, and we were looking for a reliable housekeeper at the time. She asked for the job, and we decided it would give her the independence she likes.”

  His voice had hardly varied as he had spoken, and there was nothing in it to tell her what he really thought about Marion’s position at High Tor. Jane found herself wondering if Angela Denholm had also come to the farm when her old home had changed hands, but she could not bring herself to ask Adam.

  “It has given Marion a certain amount of authority here,” he said. “And she loves authority.”

  “Has she been here a long time?”

  He shrugged.

  “Four years. Long or short, whichever way you care to look at it,” he reflected.

  “And the Priory?”

  His face darkened as he said briefly:

  “Nobody uses it. Marion still has a great deal of the original furniture there; stuff she doesn’t want to sell, which is understandable.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He came over to the fire and looked down at the lambs. They were stretched out lazily on an old blanket on the stone hearth, and Jane waited eagerly for his verdict.

  “You’ve done very well,” he said. “They’ll be on their feet and running around in a couple of days.”

  Jane felt a sudden rush of pride and her face flushed as he continued to look at her.

  “It’s been so much worth doing,” she confessed. “Will they ever be really sturdy specimens, Adam?”

  “There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be,” he told her. “But for the accident before their birth they would have been outside now. They come of good, hardy stock.”

  His pride in breeding was obvious, and perhaps that was what she had partly condemned as arrogance at their first meeting. But now she understood it. He had worked for this flock and for High Tor, toiling night and day when necessary, and he wanted to see it getting stronger.

  “I’m keeping you from your work,” she said impulsively. “You must have plenty to do, Adam.”

  “There’s always lots to do about a farm.” He crossed to the outer door, looking back at her when he had reached it. “Will you give me your decision about staying on before the morning?” he asked.

  “I can give it to you now,” she said. “I won’t let you down, Adam. I’ll stay as long as you need me.”

  After he had gone she wondered why both brothers should have asked her practically the same question within five minutes of one another with quite obviously different reasons, and suddenly she felt convinced that Nigel’s reason was by far the more selfish of the two. Nigel wanted someone at High Tor who might act as a buffer between himself and Marion, and possibly between himself and Adam.

  Adam was thirty, and Nigel would not be twenty-one till later in the year. In a good many ways he seemed older than that, as most men up here did, but in other ways he was amazingly boyish and immature. He was also irresistibly attractive, she was forced to acknowledge with a deepening smile. Nigel would always be able to twist any woma
n round his little finger, with the possible exception of Marion.

  Yet Jane was sure that it was not only Marion’s immunity to his charm which stood between Nigel and the Drummonds’ housekeeper. Something else had gone deeper, a fear of each other which could not be called respect. It was a sort of uneasy truce, Jane concluded, a mutual decision to let sleeping dogs lie.

  The snow lay deeply for over a week, hemming them in and making it impossible for her to go far, even if she had found the time to walk by herself.

  Marion, it appeared, was in full control of the household, and she was feared, if not exactly respected, by all the domestic staff. Oddly enough, she seemed content to leave the nursing of Mrs. Drummond entirely to Jane.

  “I’ve never been much use in a sick-room,” she acknowledged in her brief, offhand way, making the remark sound strangely callous. “Weakness appalls me.”

  Jane felt chilled by the confession, but did not say anything. The hours she herself spent at Helen Drummond’s bedside had become very precious to her.

  “You seem to do it naturally,” Marion went on to observe. “Were you ever trained as a nurse?”

  Jane shook her head.

  “No. I’ve always been a dancer. I’ve been interested in ballet ever since I was a child.”

  She could speak about her dancing now almost without hurt, without that first dreadful sense of emptiness flooding over her like a dark tide, knowing that she had accepted the future and its uncertainties as she would have accepted any other challenge.

  “It’s no use crying over spilt milk,” she said. “My dancing days are over and I must look out for something else to do.”

  It was her first mistake, the first false move she had made, and Marion seized upon it immediately.

  “Surely that won’t be necessary?” she asked, lighting the inevitable cigarette while she watched Jane closely through the first smoke clouds. “You’ll marry Adam and settle down at High Tor quite comfortably and the future needn’t really concern you very much.”

  Jane’s face was crimson. She was no match for Marion, and she found herself wishing that Adam hadn’t thought it necessary to keep the truth from her.

  “I suppose I was thinking about the immediate future,” she amended flatly. “I—we can’t really do anything until Mrs. Drummond is out of danger and well on the road to recovery.”

  That, at least, was true, but Marion was looking at her speculatively now. She did not move away from the hearth, where they had been standing after their midday meal, and Jane had the odd impression of being cornered. In that moment she felt the impact of Marion’s ruthlessness stronger than ever before. She had little knowledge of fox-hunting, but Marion seemed to be perpetually in the saddle, hunting down some defenceless creature, avid for the final kill, the ultimate victory.

  “You never speak about your twin,” she observed casually as she examined the glowing tip of her cigarette. “Are you very much alike?”

  Jane felt her throat go dry.

  “It’s supposed to be difficult to tell us apart,” she confessed.

  The dark eyebrows shot up.

  “And your sister was able to go on with her career?” Marion queried.

  “Yes.”

  “Very fortunate.” Marion strolled to the window. “I’m going out,” she announced. “Will you see to Mrs. Drummond’s tea tray?”

  “Of course.”

  Jane was glad to escape and relieved to find herself in the quiet sanctuary of Helen Drummond’s room. Although she still could not move very much or sit up in bed, Helen was fully conscious now of all that went on about her. The vividly blue eyes followed Jane everywhere and they had adopted a little code of gestures which they both understood. The slightest movement of Helen’s frail, blue-veined hands had its own meaning for Jane, and the blue eyes spoke a language of their own. Doctor Fenwick had paid his usual visit to his patient in the morning, expressing himself as well pleased with her progress, and had gone off, with Adam in attendance, to look at the sheep before he continued with his round.

  When Adam came back Jane thought that he looked disturbed and angry about something, but he would not permit even the suggestion of conflict to penetrate to his mother’s room. Whatever had ruffled him would be effectively dealt with outside, in his own way.

  “I have to go down the dale,” he announced briefly, because he knew that the invalid was always eager to hear the details of his busy day. “There’s some work to be done there.”

  Helen looked up at him and Jane knew that she was thinking about Nigel.

  “It’s something I must attend to personally,” Adam assured her. Helen glanced in Jane’s direction. They had come to the end of the chapter they were reading and Jane had closed the book. Helen’s eyes said plainly: “Go with him!”

  The blue eyes were curiously insistent, Jane realized uneasily, and Adam seemed to gather immediately what his mother wanted.

  “If I take Jane with me,” he asked, “will you be all right till we get back?”

  Helen’s eyes gleamed.

  “Are you sure, Adam...” Jane began.

  He turned from the bed, and the look he gave her effectively silenced any further protest on her part.

  “Quite sure,” he said. “You’d better wrap up well. It’s fairly cold.”

  “If I’m going to be in the way, Adam,” she suggested, “I’d rather not come.”

  He looked up at her, the steel-gray eyes meeting her distressed look with absolute indifference.

  “There’s plenty of room in the car,” he said. “There’s no earthly reason why you shouldn’t come.”

  He drove in complete silence over the road by which they had come a week ago, closing the gates behind them until they reached Kirkleyhead and the way into the dale.

  Adam stopped the car at the bank.

  “I won’t keep you more than ten minutes,” he excused himself, and was gone before she could reply.

  When he came out to the car again Adam looked grim. He wore the expression of a man who had just settled an unpleasant responsibility in the only way he could, a way that had gone hard against the grain.

  The bank manager had come with him to the door, a little man with shrewd blue eyes.

  “Don’t let it worry you too much Adam,” he advised. “Boys will be boys! They all do it at one time or another. It’s no more than an unfortunate phase.”

  “Nigel should have known better,” Adam said harshly. “All the same, I’m much obliged to you, Mr. Musgrove, for letting me know.”

  What had Nigel done? Probably it was something to do with a check, Jane decided, something dishonorable in Adam’s eyes. She had known him long enough now to realize that he lived according to a strict code and believed that if he were willing to apply it to himself it should also be applied to Nigel. It would be exasperating to him, therefore, to have to admit that his brother had no such fixed ideals, and the difficulty would arise when Adam tried to strike a happy medium in their relationship.

  She could not think what the halfway mark between Adam’s code and Nigel’s might be. Certainly he looked inexorable now as he got in behind the wheel and drove away from Kirkleyhead down into the dale.

  The narrow, deep ravine lay in full sunshine at that time of day, and gradually, as it began to broaden out, its full beauty presented itself. Guarded by high, austere fells on either side, it was sheltered from the ravages of the northeast wind that beat so relentlessly against High Tor. Soon they were down past the tree line and driving under a canopy of great beeches that had shed their leaves. They must have made a green tunnel of the narrow road in the spring and summer. In autumn it would be a bower of gold for the brown river that ran through it, but today it was a magic tracery of black stems against the turquoise sky.

  The car wheels made little sound on the leaf-strewn road, accentuating her companion’s silence, and Jane said awkwardly:

  “Adam, can I help in any way?”

  “I’ve been making allowances
for Nigel’s enthusiasm ever since I can remember,” he enlightened her grimly. “I thought I’d had the lot, but apparently he has plenty of ingenuity.” His mouth tightened into a harder line. “I won’t stand bounced checks and I won’t stand gambling,” he added relentlessly. “It got my father into the sorry mess he died in. It’s not going to happen again, if I can help it.”

  “Oh...”

  There was really nothing Jane could say in the circumstances. Adam was right. She thought of Helen with a little sick fear in her heart, wondering if she knew, and then she realized that it would be the last thing Adam would allow. He would go to any lengths to protect his mother.

  “Don’t worry about it too much,” she advised lamely, echoing the bank manager’s words. “It may just be an isolated incident. Nigel will grow out of it.”

  “Grow out of it? There’s going to be no question of ‘growing,’ Jane. If he gets into a mess like this again I’ll horse-whip him.”

  She knew that he meant it and her heart quailed, but apparently there was to be no further argument.

  “You’ll like the dale,” he said, closing the subject of his brother’s misdeeds. “It’s even more beautiful as you go farther down.”

  The rushing, foam-spattered torrent that had been the river at Kirkleyhead was now a broad and placid stream, winding gently between steep green banks until it emerged at last onto a wide sward of the most luscious grass Jane had ever seen. Even now, in this first spring month, she could see the lush promise of summer grazing and could very well imagine Adam coveting such pasturage. The Priory lands must have meant a great deal to him when he had thought of building up a prize herd of cattle down here.

  The Priory itself stood at the end of a long avenue of giant copper beech, a lovely old gray stone pile sheltered by the burnished trees. It had tall, mullioned windows and high chimneys, which seemed to reach for the sky, and it faced east, looking down the dale. The slanting rays of the sun cast its shadow on a terraced lawn stretching right down to the water’s edge, but the river itself lay between the road and the house.