Master of Glenkeith (18 page)

“Tessy,” he said harshly, “are you all right?”

“Yes.” Her voice was no more than a whisper, but she could feel Andrew’s strong arms about her and see Andrew’s dark, set face above her own. “Yes—I’m all right.”

“The shot must have raked her shoulder.” Andrew pulled back the torn sleeve to look at the wound. “Your friend made a good job of it, didn’t he?” he added dryly.

He rose to his feet with Tessa still in his arms.

“I’ll send for the car,” Nigel said rather desperately. “It won’t take us very long to get back to Gantley.”

“There’s no need.” Andrew sounded brusque but businesslike. “I’ve got the brake with me. It’s parked down there on the edge of the moor. I’ll take her back to Glenkeith.”

Nigel stared at him incredulously.

“Are you mad, Drew?” he cried. “You can’t take her fourteen miles in the back of a brake without doing something about that shoulder. We’ve got a first-aid outfit at Gantley and a doctor within call, if we need one. I’m not letting you take any risks with Tessa, whatever you might say.”

“She’s my responsibility,” Andrew returned doggedly, still holding his burden and standing firm in the attitude he had adopted.

“That’s balderdash!” Nigel informed him. “You must be mad even to think of Glenkeith. Besides,” he added, “I have a right to take care of her, a right to be with her.”

As if he had been struck across the face, Andrew stood staring at him for a full minute before he turned on his heel and strode with Tessa down the narrow path beside the burn to the waiting brake.

He felt chilled and no longer defiant. Nigel had “a right” to be with the girl in his arms. He had just said so.

He laid Tessa in the brake, his firm hands moving gently over the hurt shoulder before he shook his head.

“It means Gantley, Tessa,” he said. “You’ll be all right once we get there.”

His voice had been harsh, almost rough, but there had been an underlying tenderness about it that probed shatteringly into Tessa’s heart. She lay in the brake with her eyes closed and Nigel by her side, remembering Andrew’s voice and the look that had been in his eyes when he had first lifted her up. She could not think it tender: there had been anger in it and contempt, and no doubt he had felt that she had done the wrong thing in a difficult situation. He probably thought that she should never have come to Gantley, but Nigel had been so kind and he had wanted her to come more than anything else. Nigel’s kindness stood out in that moment like some necessary haven which she must reach before the tempest of Andrew’s anger finally overwhelmed her. She put her hand out, feeling small and weak and utterly at a loss till Nigel’s thin fingers closed tightly over hers in a gesture of the utmost assurance.

“Don’t worry, Tessy!” he said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

Margaret and Mrs. Haddow were sitting out on the verandah when they reached the lodge. They had prepared tea in the hope that the shooting party would return early to share it with them, but they were instantly all concern when they saw Nigel helping Tessa down from the brake.

“There’s been a slight accident,” Nigel explained, and Margaret’s eyes flew instantly to Andrew.

“What happened, Drew?” she asked.

“Someone shot out of turn,” Nigel explained hastily. “Tessa had been sketching along the burnside and she came up to look at some deer, I think. We came over the ridge on the windward side of them and—that was that.”

Margaret did not ask who had fired “out of turn.” It was scarcely necessary and, anyway, it did not seem to matter. All she saw was Andrew’s set jaw and a look on Nigel Haddow’s face which had never been there before. Were they both in love with Tessa, she wondered, her heart contracting at the thought.

“This is terribly unfortunate, my dear,” Mrs. Haddow was helping Tessa into the lodge. “We must hope that the shot hasn’t gone too deep. Blood always looks badly at first.” She turned to Andrew who was just behind her.

“I know you’re good at this sort of thing, Drew. Will you have a look at it till we can bring a doctor?”

Andrew followed her into the sitting-room where a log fire flared and crackled on the open hearth.

“I’m so cold!” Tessa sighed thankfully, kneeling down in front of the comforting blaze.

She felt exhausted now and the heat soothed her, making the pain in her shoulder numb so that she hardly felt it. Her jarred senses were returning to normal and she accepted the hot tea Margaret brought with a smile.

“I’m being a terrible nuisance,” she said.

“Don’t be silly!” Margaret put the cup down on a low stool where she could reach it while Andrew worked.

“You couldn’t possibly have known that someone would pop up with a gun and shoot at the wrong moment.”

Andrew bent over Tessa.

“This may hurt,” he said, “but it has to be done. I’ll be as gentle as I can.”

Again there was that tenderness in his voice which made her want to cry, and when she looked up at him his eyes were no longer remote but warm and sensitive to her pain.

Nigel had brought in the first-aid box and some extra bandages from the gun-room and his mother was hovering with a basin of hot water into which she had poured a few drops of strong disinfectant.

I can’t bear it, Tessa thought. I can’t bear Andrew being kind just because he is sorry for me while all the time he really despises me for being so silly!

While he probed gently for the shot she turned her head away and Nigel took her hand again.

“Soon over!” he whispered. “Drew is the best man among us for a job like this.”

The probing of the tweezers was as nothing to the pain against her heart. I can’t go on loving Andrew like this, she thought, knowing that he doesn’t care. He was angry up there on the moor, angry and impatient when he found me.

“That’s all,” he said, straightening. “Her shoulder can be bandaged now.”

He sounded as if he had lost interest, as if he had done the job expected of him and was relieved to find it over, and it was Nigel who strapped the bandages in place.

When the doctor came, driving up in a battered old Ford which had almost shaken itself to pieces on the moor roads, he said that he could not hope to improve on what had already been done.

“It might have been worse!” he beamed encouragingly. “You’d better rest for an hour or two and after that you should be all right. How long are you here for, Miss Halliday?”

Tessa looked at Andrew, but he refused to make the decision for her.

“I think I would like to go back to Glenkeith in the morning,” she said.

“We’ll all go back,” Nigel decided. “I’m not taking any more risks with you, Tessy! You ought to stay in bed for a day or two.”

“Oh, no, please!” Tessa protested, thinking of Hester for the first time. “I don’t want to spoil your party.”

“We can have other parties, my dear,” Mrs. Haddow said, putting an affectionate hand on her sound shoulder. “Let Nigel have his way, Tessa. He feels responsible for what has happened.”

So many people felt responsible, Tessa thought wanly, remembering that Andrew had chosen to accept her as his responsibility out there on the moor, but she did not want Andrew to accept responsibility where she was concerned. She did not want him to feel it weighing him down every time he thought about Glenkeith. She wanted him to be free.

Sitting round the fire when the darkness had gathered and sent them all indoors, they spoke mostly of Gantley and the wild country beyond it, and Tessa found herself listening to the tales Nigel told with nonchalant ease and forgetting the pain in her shoulder and the throbbing, answering pain in her heart.

Andrew said little, leaning back in a long hide chair in the shadows while the others talked, and smoking his pipe with the air of a man whose thoughts are deeper and more disturbing than the things going on about him.'

At ten o’clock Mrs. Haddow rose.

“All cocoa drinkers are on kitchen duty to-night!” she informed the circle with a smile. “Except Tessa, of course.”

Tessa was feeling really tired now. She seemed to have come a very long way from the events of the afternoon, painfully and with a slower tread. The childish enthusiasm with which she had set out on this new adventure had sobered to a wider conception of all these invitations which Nigel Haddow had pressed upon her so compellingly and her own acceptance of them as a matter of course. Perhaps it had been the look in his mother’s eyes when they had come back to the lodge, the suggestion of permanency in her affection, which had first started this difficult train of thought, or it might just have been the moment in time when she herself had grown up.

She felt trapped and unhappy and aware of a decision which would have to be faced in the very near future.

She had never been lacking in courage, but she slept uneasily that night, tossing about on the narrow bed in her small, rustic-walled cubicle under the thatched eaves till the first grey shafts of dawn pierced the eastern sky.

Rapidly the light spread until a whole wide track of it was set above the hills and the stars paled into the morning blue.

Nigel insisted on driving her back to Glenkeith in the Daimler.

“It’s more comfortable than the brake,” he pointed out reasonably enough. “I’d like to bet that shoulder of yours gave you hell during the night.”

“It wasn’t very bad,” Tessa said, wondering why Andrew did not protest and say that she could quite easily cope with such a short journey in the front of the brake. “I hope nobody will alarm Mr. Meldrum or—anyone else at Glenkeith.”

She was thinking of Hester, but surely Hester could not exactly hold her responsible for this accident!

“I’ll go on ahead with Meg,” Andrew offered when they were ready to start. “Maybe you should see Dr. Coutts once you get there.”

“We can’t call him on Sunday just for a little thing like this,” Tessa said. “Please don’t worry about me, Andrew.”

“I was thinking about my grandfather,” he said. “It would put his mind at rest if Dr. Coutts had a look at your arm.”

Nigel helped her into the Daimler, tucking the fur rug securely about her knees.

“Are you sure you’re warm enough?”

“Quite sure, thank you, Nigel.”

The brake sped away ahead of them. She could see it winding along the moor road almost all the way until it was finally lost in the trees surrounding Glenkeith.

“I can’t find any sort of words to apologize for all this, Tessa,” Nigel said at her elbow. “You know how I feel, don’t you? Desperately responsible and all that, and ready to smother Ortry at the first possible opportunity!”

“He couldn’t help it,” Tessa said. “It was an accident.”

“Any fool knows not to shoot at random like that,” he said contemptuously. “Andrew had every right to be furious.”

“Perhaps he was really most furious with me.”

He turned to look at her, knowing that they were as isolated in the back of the big, roomy limousine with Dawson driving placidly beyond the dividing screen as they would have been out on the open moor.

“What makes you say that?” he asked. “Are you not— completely happy at Glenkeith, Tessy?”

“It would be horribly ungrateful of me if I were not.”

“That isn’t exactly an answer, is it?” He let his arm go lightly about her, avoiding the injured shoulder but drawing her gently towards him. “Tessa,” he said, “you know what I’ve been trying to tell you for weeks. I’ve thought about it, I suppose, ever since that day I met you on the moor when you looked more like a lost sprite materializing out of the mist than anything else. Even then you seemed no ordinary sort of person to me.” His arm tightened a fraction of an inch.

“You know what I’m trying to say, Tessa, don’t you?” She felt breathless, even trapped for a moment.

“Don’t say it, Nigel,” she whispered. “Not now!”

“Why not?” He would not let her push him away, even gently. “It’s got to be said, sooner or later, between you and me. You know that.”

“I’m trying not to know it!”

“Because you can’t give me an answer or because you are afraid?”

“Yes.” She felt as if she had been given some sort of respite. “Yes, that must be it.”

He looked surprised, because he had not exactly expected such a firm rebuff, if that was what he had just received. It was difficult to tell with Tessa. She was no ordinary girl, as he had remarked.

“I’m not rushing you,” he said. “You must have seen this coming for quite a bit. Surely you can give me some sort of answer, Tessa?”

“I can’t. I can’t! I ought to tell you that it’s no use, that you ought to go away and forget all about me—”

“But you can’t do that, either?” He smiled patiently. “You’re very young, Tessy—and very sweet!”

“How you must despise me!” she cried turbulently. “Oh, Nigel, don’t wait for me. Don’t ask me again!” He turned her face up to kiss her full on the mouth. “You might as well ask me to jump over a cliff!” he laughed. “I think you’re worth waiting for, you see,” he added as the car turned in between the Glenkeith gates.

Andrew got out of the brake just ahead of them and went into the house and a few minutes later Hester came out. She was in her usual Sunday black and had just returned from the morning service at the village church, but when she saw the Ardnashee car some of the habitual severity left her expression.