The Last of the Kintyres

by Catherine Airlie

“Oh, Tony!” she protested, “Do be more sensible. Hew would never demand anything of anyone that he wasn’t prepared to tackle himself. He’s only trying to help us.”

  “Us?” he queried. “Where do you come in, Liz? I haven’t really thought about it before,” he confessed apologetically, “but you are free to go, aren’t you?” She nodded dumbly, not able to tell him that to be bound to Ardlamond and Hew, as he was bound, would be the greatest happiness she could know. Unlike Tony, she would never want to go away.

  “You will try to make something of this offer of Hew’s?” she pleaded as they neared the house. “You will give it a trial?”

  He hesitated for only a second.

  “I’ll give it a trial,” he promised, smiling suddenly and unexpectedly into her eyes. “It’s going to be odd, having to learn about sheep!”

  Over a rather belated lunch Hew gave him a rough idea what would be expected of him.

  “You’ll go out with the shepherd and learn how to handle the dogs. Wraith’s easy. She knows the ropes better than Dan himself, but while you’re on the hill with him you’ll take your orders from Dan. We’ll be dipping next week, so we’ll be glad of your help over at the pens. You’ll be right in the thick of it,” he added with a smile which Elizabeth considered rather grim. “Three or four days dipping sheep should give you a pretty good idea about whether you’re going to stay the course or not.”

  Tony flushed.

  “You really do think I’m pretty soft, don’t you?” he challenged.

  Hew rose from his chair, pushing it back out of the way to stand beside this reluctant boy who was now, willy-nilly, his ward.

  “Whatever comes of it, Tony,” he said quite kindly, “I’m sure you’ll do your best, if it’s only for Elizabeth’s sake.” He gave Elizabeth a brief, sideways look which surprised the hot flush rising in her cheeks. “She’s horribly embarrassed about having to accept my hospitality, you see, and this, I take it, would make a difference.”

  His tone had been so dry, his eyes so mocking, that she felt she hated him again, yet how could she hate him when every moment of his company had become precious to her?

  He stood waiting for Tony at the door.

  “Care to come and have a word with old Dan?” he suggested. “You’ll find him quite a character.”

  He was making no difference about Caroline, treating the incident on the shore road as if it had never been.

  Elizabeth could not forget about Caroline. She could not forget the way Caroline had looked at Hew, the demand in her eyes and the light laughter on her lips as she had challenged him to walk back with her into the past. La belle Dame sans Merci? What had that to do with Caroline and Hew?

  Minutes later she found herself at the door of the library, her hand uncertainly on the crystal knob. Hew had invited her to make free with his father’s books.

  In under ten minutes she had found what she wanted. The thin, leather-bound volume of Keats was in her hand, yet it seemed that she had not the power to open it. It seemed that she dared not.

  Carrying it to the window-seat, she knelt in the pale afternoon sunlight, slowly turning the pages until she came to the poem she had read so long ago.

  ‘O what can ail thee, knight-at arms,

  Alone and palely loitering?

  The sedge has wither’d from the lake,

  And no birds sing.’

  Something cold seemed to take possession of her heart, but she forced herself to read on.

  ‘I met a lady in the meads,

  Full beautiful—a faery’s child,

  Her hair was long, her foot was light,

  And her eyes were wild.’

  Caroline!

  ‘She looked at me as she did love . .

  Was that it? Had Caroline tricked Hew? Had he found her incapable of real and lasting love? Of course he had. She had married someone else, someone with more money, more to give her—more of the material things of life.

  ‘I set her on my pacing steed

  And nothing else saw all day long…’

  Yes, Hew would love like that. Elizabeth’s heart quailed before the knowledge, but she forced her eyes back to the printed page, knowing that she had come in search of something. But what? What?

  ‘She took me to her elfin grot,

  And there she wept, and sigh’d full sore,

  And there I shut her wild wild eyes

  With kisses four.’

  Why was she forcing herself to read this, bringing herself face to face with Hew’s passionate first love? Her eyes travelled swiftly down title page to meet the words she had been looking for.

  ‘La belle Dame sans Merci

  Hath thee in thrall!’

  She closed her eyes, feeling the coldness of death and utter despair in her heart, opening them again only to read:

  ‘And I awoke and found me here

  On the cold hill’s side.’

  Someone—Hew?—had underlined these final, harshly-revealing lines.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE first of the Dromore Sheep-dog Trials had already been run before Hew turned the Daimler off the main road on to a little-used track already thick with parked vehicles of every age and sort. He guided it in between the stout posts of a field gate which gave directly on to the hill, where a marquee had been set up and a separate tent for the judges.

  It was raining, the fine, mist-like rain of the Western Highlands which falls like a caress, and Elizabeth lifted her face to it to feel its cooling touch on her cheek.

  She did not want to meet Caroline, although she knew that such a meeting was inevitable. She did not want to see that look in Caroline’s eyes which proclaimed how firmly Hew was hers.

  ‘La belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!’

  Was that it? Was Hew captured for all time, in spite of himself? Could he not throw the spell of Caroline and that old loving to the four winds? Once he had loved was it to be for always?

  “Hew,” Caroline said, coming up behind them, “You’re wanted in the judges’ tent.” She barely glanced in Elizabeth’s direction. “The weather might have stayed fine for me,” she remarked. “I’ve arranged a barbecue for tonight at the Castle. You’ll come, won’t you?” she added, turning to Elizabeth and Tony only because convention demanded that she should include them. “We always end up the Trials with a small party of some sort, somewhere or other.”

  Tony clutched at the invitation for them both. “We’ll love it, Carol! Is there anything I can do to help?” he offered far too eagerly.

  Caroline considered for a moment.

  “Not really,” she said almost insolently. “Hew will do anything there is to do. He knows his way about.”

  “Hullo, Elizabeth!” a quiet voice said. “I spotted you when you first came in. What do you think of our show?”

  Elizabeth smiled up into Stephen Friend’s clear blue eyes.

  “I haven’t had time to see anything yet,” she told him, looking swiftly at the slight, flaxen-haired girl standing hesitantly by his side.

  “This is Imogen,” he introduced them. “It’s her first day back home.”

  Imogen Friend was still a schoolgirl. She had that slight awkwardness of manner due to an intense shyness, but she was lovely for all that. Lovely and natural, a bud opening slowly to the warmth of the sun. Her hair was straight and golden and shining, curving inwards a little on her shoulders, and her eyes were a deep, clear blue. She looked at Elizabeth and smiled, willing to like her immediately because Stephen did.

  “This is Tony,” Stephen said. “He’s Elizabeth’s brother and Hew’s ward.”

  Imogen took Tony’s outstretched hand and a peculiar sensation of relief flooded into Elizabeth’s heart.

  “Are you going to stay with Hew?” Imogen asked. “At Ardlamond?”

  Tony nodded, aware of her in a negative sort of way. She was his own age and pretty enough—pink and white and golden-haired, although not exactly like a doll—but she came nowhere beside Caroline,
who had turned up at the Trials in a rather flamboyant raincoat of black and red proofed silk over a red silk dress. It made her stand out startlingly in that rather conservatively-garbed throng of shepherds and ghillies and villagers, each in their sober tweeds, and he thought that she was well aware of it, admiring her the more for her courage to be “different.”

  “I expect I shall be staying for a while,” he granted, looking down at Imogen, who blushed a little as their eyes met. “You live in Oban, don’t you?”

  “Near Oban,” she corrected him with a small, backwards glance in Caroline’s direction. “Quite near Mrs. Hayler, in fact.”

  Tony disliked the use of Caroline’s married name, and a quick frown drew his brows together. It aged Caroline, he considered, putting her just a bit farther out of reach.

  “Come and have a look at the collies,” Stephen suggested, and Elizabeth, following him across the field, was painfully aware of Caroline’s bright raincoat near the judges’ tent, where Hew was now in conference.

  “I must look out for Mrs. Lorimer,” she told Stephen as they reached the spectators’ barrier where everyone had gathered for the next trial. “She was supposed to be bringing Tony over with John and Duncan, but he came back on Thursday with Caroline.”

  “I wonder what Caroline is up to,” Stephen mused. “She always has a reason for what she does.”

  Elizabeth smiled a little wanly.

  “Perhaps she thought I shouldn’t have been alone with Hew at Ardlamond,” she suggested.

  Stephen did not smile. Instead, he looked about him in the crowd, as if in search of someone, and then he saw Caroline standing beside the tent.

  “Perhaps,” he said thoughtfully. “And was Hew at Ardlamond?”

  “Not all the time. He went to Whitefarland. We were coming back from the farm when we met Caroline and Tony.”

  The information surprised him. His eyes were far too candidly blue to hide the fact, Elizabeth thought.

  “You didn’t expect Hew to take me to Whitefarland,” she said. “He didn’t really take me, Stephen. I went by mistake—climbing on the hill the morning after Tony’s accident.”

  “Hew ought not to live as he does up there,” he said, without giving her a direct answer to her question. “It isn’t good for him. Now that he has come into the estate, however, all that might be changed.”

  “Yet Whitefarland could have been made a home,” Elizabeth said without thinking. “It’s lovely up there, high and free among the hills, and not so far off the beaten track when you think how near it is to Ardlamond.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of its inaccessibility,” Stephen answered. “Hew has made a recluse of himself up there these past three years or so, and it isn’t good for any man. The solitary life is all right so long as one is happy,” he added briefly.

  And Hew hadn’t been happy at Whitefarland. But now everything had changed. Caroline was back, a far more sophisticated and lovely Caroline than the girl who had left her native glen four yep ago to share a life of luxury in Canada with a doting husband. Yes, Caroline was back and accessible again, and Hew was now master of Ardlamond. All these things made a difference.

  “Hew really means to sell Whitefarland, I suppose,” Stephen asked, his blue eyes ranging the hills where the latest contestant for the Cup was gathering five bewildered ewes into a tight little group to herd them neatly downwards towards the first obstacle. He’s probably made his definite decision by now.”

  '“He doesn’t want to sell. I think I know that,” Elizabeth said. “However unhappy he’s been up there, Stephen, he’s fond of the place, and proud of it, too. After all, four years of unremitting effort can’t be dismissed with a shrug, can it?”

  “It was even more than that,” Stephen answered slowly. “Hew has been eight years up there in all, licking it into shape. It wasn’t paying when he first took over, but things were beginning to look a little more rosy by the time he thought of marrying Caroline. He could have settled his marriage more quickly, but he’s an independent beggar. He wouldn’t ask a woman to struggle on with him. He’d have to have something concrete to offer her—and Caroline just wouldn’t wait. Not when she saw the chance of hooking a millionaire in the meantime.”

  “I wonder,” Elizabeth said beneath her breath, “if she ever was in love with him—truly in love.”

  “Caroline could never be in love with anyone but herself,” Stephen returned with alacrity. “I know Caroline, and selfishness is a powerful driving force, you know. Getting everything you want out of life for the least possible return.”

  They watched the progress of the working dog for several minutes in silence, although Elizabeth was only seeing the collie’s carefully-calculated movements across the grass. Her thoughts were not on how the dog was going to pen his sheep. They were with Caroline and the strange quirk of fate which had brought her back to Dromore a rich widow, probably when Hew needed her most.

  Stephen began to explain the finer points of the collie’s efforts, but she wasn’t concentrating. All she could think of was Caroline and Hew together, Caroline making it so painfully obvious that they belonged.

  When the trophies were finally presented she stood at the long trestle table beside Hew with a little arrogant smile of conquest on her red lips, and it was Hew who announced that they were all invited to the barbecue at the Castle. He said that Mrs. Hayler wanted them all to feel welcome, and he said it with a smile in Caroline’s direction which turned Elizabeth’s heart to ice. Caroline could do so much for Dromore, and she was determined to do it if it would help to gain her Hew’s affection.

  “I’ve been all over the place looking for you for the past half-hour!” someone said at Elizabeth’s elbow as the last of the cups was being presented.

  “And I’ve been watching out for you all afternoon!” Elizabeth swung round to smile into Shona Lorimer’s friendly eyes. “Where have you been hiding yourself?”

  “Oh, I never can get to these things before about half-way through the afternoon,” Shona answered resignedly. “The Colonel brought us over. The boys are with Tony,” she added just a trifle dryly.

  “I’m so sorry, Shona,” Elizabeth apologized. “I didn’t expect Tony to dash off from Ravenscraig as he did.”

  “Och, now, forget all about it,” Shona smiled her forgiveness. “It was Caroline’s doing. She would wile a bird off a tree, would that one, and never turn a hair doing it! The boys were disappointed of course, but there’s a plot afoot to stay to the barbecue, I gather, so they can make up for lost time!”

  “You’ll stay, won’t you?” Stephen asked.

  “Och, what would I be doing at a barbecue?” Shona smiled. “They’re for young folk.”

  “You’re young at any age these days, Shona,” Stephen told her. “It all depends on one’s outlook on life.”

  “Which is a terrible cliché!” commented Caroline, coming up to join them. “Of course you must come to the Castle, Mrs. Lorimer,” she added graciously. “Hew will expect you to sing for us.”

  “Och, now,” Shona protested, “you’ll not be wanting the old Gaelic songs at a barbecue!”

  “Why not?” Caroline said, as if she had been away from the glen for twenty years. “It strikes me Gaelic songs are still the thing up here. Besides, Hew would like you to come, and, after all”—she looked directly at Elizabeth—“this is a sort of mutual effort. Hew thought it would be nice if I had it at the Castle and the next one could be at Ardlamond.”

  Stephen said “Come on, Elizabeth, and I’ll find you some tea,” and Caroline gave them quite a sweet little smile as they walked away.

  “How I dislike that girl!” Shona said. “And I shouldn’t!”

  “You’ve never come up against her—really hard,” Stephen explained. “You’ve never trodden too heavily on Caroline’s toes.”

  “Where’s Hew?” Shona asked, as if the two thoughts were synonymous.

  Stephen shrugged.

  “He’ll be with the judges for
another hour. We haven’t quite accepted him in his new role of laird, Shona!”

  “Hew won’t be any different,” Shona declared stoutly. “But I suppose he has all sorts of extra commitments to shoulder now,” she reflected. “Like being part of Caroline’s circus at the Castle.”

  Elizabeth looked round for Tony and Imogen, to find only Imogen following in their wake with a look of gentle acceptance in her frank blue eyes. Tony was already trailing Caroline towards the judges’ tent.

  In spite of the warmth of friendship all about her as she walked between Stephen and Shona towards the refreshment marquee, Elizabeth felt numb and cold inside. Caroline had taken what was perhaps her rightful place by Hew’s side. They belonged because of the past and the love they had shared, while she was no more than an interloper, an encumbrance thrust upon Hew out of the blue because of an older love that had never come to fruition. Her mother and Ronald Kintyre had fallen in love all those years ago and parted and never came together again, and it had been madness for her to think, even for the least division of an hour, that she and Hew might be destined to live that love over again.

  Listening to the general conversation with only half an ear, she was conscious of an inward tension every time someone approached the entrance to the marquee, waiting for Hew to come, yet not wanting him to come with Caroline.

  “What are we going to do between now and the barbecue?” Stephen asked as Shona handed him a plate of scones lavishly spread with farm butter. “These things don’t start till a fire can be lit and you can grope about in semi-darkness grilling chicken breasts and sausages, I understand.”

  Shona glanced towards the far end of the marquee.

  “Hew said something about going back to Ardlamond,” she mentioned. “I’d love that. It’s such a long time since I’ve been there. I never seem to have a minute to spare these days, even to visit old friends. But here comes Hew himself”—with a quick little frown which told Elizabeth that he had brought Caroline with him.

  Tony was also there, scowling darkly because Caroline had linked her arm familiarly in Hew’s and he had been forced to fall back beside John and Donald Lorimer.