Читать книгу D. K. Broster Collection - D. K. Broster - Страница 144

Two days later Hector Grant was still at Invernacree, and in those two days, thanks to an intensive system of wooing pursued under favourable circumstances—though Hector was not sure that old Invernacree would prove altogether tractable to handle when it came to the point—had achieved, as far as Jacqueline herself was concerned, the position of accepted suitor. In this he had been greatly assisted by the fine weather, since one cannot sit or walk with a lady in a garden—a locality very favourable to courtship—during persistent rain; in such the lady, at least, is condemned to the house, where lovemaking is more liable to interruption.

Now the sun which shone upon the pair was, naturally, the same which had shone for Ian in his more clandestine commerce with Miss Olivia Campbell among the rocks and the heather of Kilrain. Yet that ill-starred lover, when, returning home on the third day, he left his horse in the stable and crossed the garden on his way to the house, was by no means pleased to perceive the result of this equality of solar benefits; indeed, he stopped dead, astounded, scandalised, and then angry at what, himself unseen, he saw taking place.

Upon the seat encircling the trunk of the cedar tree in the middle of the lawn was sitting his sister Jacqueline; she held an arm outstretched, and upon the wrist thereof perched, like a hawk, one of her doves. A handsome young man, whom Ian instantly recognised, with one knee upon the brown carpet of cedar needles, was laughingly tendering his arm also towards the bird; he appeared to be trying to tempt it away. The hands of these two arms were very near each other, their owners’ heads not far apart.

And somehow Ian felt that he would have been less stirred to anger if he had come upon the intruder wholly upon his knees to Jacqueline, making an impassioned declaration in due form, or if Jacqueline’s dove had not been so inextricably, so sacredly bound up in his mind with his own bright vision of Olivia leaning out of her window here, the day her smile had enslaved him. After that, this scene was sacrilege!

“Curse his impudence!” he said under his breath, and advanced.

The dove saw him first and flew off its mistress’s wrist; the culprits, looking for the reason of its flight, became aware of a third person. Hector sprang to his feet.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Stewart! If it were my place to do so, I would say, ‘Welcome home!’ ” And, not in the least abashed, he came forward, holding out his hand.

Ian bowed rather stiffly as a preliminary to taking it, which he could not in common civility refuse to do. (“No,” he thought, “it is not your place to welcome me, Mr. Grant, and never will be!”) Aloud he said, “Your servant, sir! Good day, Jacqueline; are you teaching Mr. Grant to be a bird fancier?”

She, at least, was rosy in the face which she put up for his kiss.

But it was in no placid frame of mind that Ian went off to see his father, and to give an account of his mission to Glasgow. It was hard to return from renouncing the love of one’s life to find a love affair—minor, of course—going on in one’s own home; it was doubly hard when the suitor was a man whose name had been a source of irritation for the last two years. For that name was connected with the fiasco which had left his cousin Ewen, that December morning, stranded on Ardgour beach in great danger of recapture, a fiasco which his father had never ceased to make a source of reproach to him, though indeed the consequences to Ewen had not been lastingly serious, nor did Ewen himself bear his cousin the slightest grudge for a mishap which the latter could hardly have foreseen. But old Alexander Stewart, who had a great affection for his nephew Ardroy, had more than once muttered, “Ah, your poor brother Alan would have seen in time what was going to happen!” It was all part and parcel of the feeling which Ian knew to exist in his father’s mind, that he was no worthy substitute for his slain elder brother. Yes, it was bitter to come back to that knowledge, when it was partly to his position as Alan’s successor that he had sacrificed his heart’s happiness.

His father, however, greeted him affectionately enough, listened to his account of his interviews with the lawyer, received the papers and looked through them, remarking only that Ian had stayed longer than he expected in Glasgow, and surmising that Mr. Buchanan had been busy.

“Yes,” replied Ian unblushingly, “he was somewhat throng with clients, and I had to wait his leisure, which delayed me.” Here he tempered falsehood with truth by adding, “The mare, too, unexpectedly needed reshoeing, and a drunken blacksmith delayed me still further.”

“Reshoeing! You should have looked to that before setting out. I must speak to them in the stables about it,” said Invernacree, vexed. “And I imagine a drunken smith can hardly have shod her well! Where did you come upon him?”

“Oh, in some clachan on the way,” replied Ian hastily, wishing he had not introduced the subject; and thereupon remarked upon the arrival of Mr. Hector Grant, partly, also, in order to see what his father thought of the attentions paid by the guest to his younger daughter. But the old man did not appear to be aware of them, and on the whole Ian was glad, not wishing, in reality, to discuss the subject of lovemaking.

He went out of the study to the privacy of his own room, and there took out of his pocketbook an object which the utmost care had not preserved from withering. Nothing droops more quickly than the bog-myrtle; yet it retains in death its sweet, half-bitter fragrance. So it was, so it always would be with the memory of those enchanted hours at Kilrain, ending, indeed, in frustration and parting, but yet with a talisman, a sign, magically given.

For how the sprig of gall came to be in his hand, unless Olivia had laid it there when he was asleep, Ian could not conceive. He rejected the idea that someone had done it as a jest—for who would have played such a prank? He could not in his sleep have reached out and clutched it, for there was none growing near; he had searched the spot. But there was a patch some way further down the stream; and it was the Campbell emblem. Never before, he imagined, had a Stewart cherished the gall; never before had one of his name been so besotted as to put a withered fragment of it to his lips as he did now, though he knew not even whether his love had laid it in his hand, nor what had been her meaning if she had. But it was the Campbell emblem, and she was a Campbell . . . O God, if only she were not!