Bride of Alaine Read online

  “Odd? Why should she? You’re a Macrae and you’ve come here because of the pull of your ancestry. Aunt Grace is not merely an authority on Ure and everything connected with it, but she thoroughly enjoys the opportunity—any opportunity—to air her knowledge. In the first half-hour of getting to know her you’ll probably hear more about your great-greats than you ever anticipated hearing, and I promise she’ll have an answer to all your questions. You won’t leave here without adding vastly to your store of knowledge of Ure.”

  Judy made an effort to brighten, and to appear gratified.

  “Why, that’s wonderful!” she declared. “Absolutely wonderful! I’m so crazy about Ure I want to collect as much information as I can about it.”

  Amanda rose, and made her apologies to her host. “I think I ought to give Jean a hand in the kitchen,” she said, watching the angular serving-woman departing from the room. “I’m afraid our coming here is most unfair on her!”

  Urquhart glanced at her with a flicker of indolence in his eyes.

  “Just as you please,” he said. “She’s a bit difficult at times, but I’m sure you can mollify her.”

  And once again she thought his observation a trifle obscure, particularly as there seemed to be a kind of emphasis on the word ‘you.’

  CHAPTER VI

  IN the kitchen Jean deposited a tray of crockery on the huge, scrubbed table, and then stood with her hands on her hips looking about her as if wondering where she ought to begin to restore order.

  It was a kitchen that was more like a vast, dimly-lit cavern, and there appeared to be none of the conveniences any ordinary young woman marrying a man of modest income would expect in a home of her own. There was certainly no refrigerator, no cooker apart from the vast range, and the sink would have appalled most housewives. It was like a deep trough made of galvanised iron, and instead of a tap there was a pump handle which Jean had to work quite violently before water filled the sink. As for hot water, that had to be fetched from the stove, and was usually kept hissing and bubbling in a great black kettle on the top of the range.

  Amanda seized a tea=cloth—which, at least, was so white it amazed her and reflected credit on Jean—and started to wipe the dishes as Jean washed. Up to her elbows in strong suds, the older woman told her bluntly she didn’t need her assistance.

  “There’s no need for you to be following me out here,” she asserted. “A few extra plates are not going to kill me. Besides, there’s that friend of yours to be tucked up on the settee.”

  The dryness of her tone caused Amanda to glance at her closely.

  “Mr. Urquhart will see to that,” she replied.

  “Aye,” Jean returned almost heavily, “he will that!”

  Amanda polished the lid of a vegetable dish.

  “And you’ve had to do all the cooking,” she said. “It’s too much for you, and I do apologise for putting you to so much trouble. I wish Miss Macrae would decide she could get down to the boat all right, and we could be rowed back to the hotel where we were staying until last night.”

  “She’ll no’ do that,” Jean observed, as if she hadn’t the smallest doubt of it. She moved with her awkward gait over to the stove and fetched some more hot water. “She’s settled in now, and Urquhart’ll bring his aunt here to make things look all nice and respectable.” She sighed, and thrust a wisp of lank hair out of her eyes. “He’s already said as much to me and Duncan.”

  Amanda surveyed her sympathetically, but at the same time she felt a little curious. Judy would leave a handsome tip behind for the domestics if ever the time came when she departed, and people who had to wait on her usually sensed this as a result of coming into contact with her. She was not ungenerous. She was not even unpleasant to domestics, so why did Jean display such an air of gloom, and why was it obvious she was not prepared to go an inch out of her way to discover an attractive side to the beautiful unexpected visitor?

  To Amanda she was quite friendly in a grudging way, so why not to Judy?

  “She’s rich, isn’t she?” she said suddenly, scraping the bottom of a saucepan. “According to Duncan her cases are all of the finest, and the landlady over at The Three Goats was mighty sorry to see the last of her. I wouldn’t ha’ been sorry myself, but then I’m not one that is struck much on riches. I’ve been poor all my life, and I’ll be poor till I die. But there’s folks that behaves queerly when money’s in the wind,” with a dark look at the girl who was helping her. “Aye! They behave queerly. And a woman wi’ a pretty face and a lot o’ gold in the bank is a tool in the hands of the devil! I reminded Duncan of that last night when he talked about Alaine.”

  “You mean the Alaine Urquhart who lost his bride, and thereafter became poor?”

  “Yes.” She looked hard at Amanda. “So you know about that?”

  “A little. The rest I can guess. When a rich bride comes to Ure the family will be secure again. Is that it?”

  “Something like it.”

  “And last night Duncan thought I was the rich bride?”

  “He still does.” Jean went on scouring the saucepan, which was giving her some trouble. “I pointed out that I didn’t think you were the one with the money, miss, and he didn’t seem to think it made any difference. He says that you’ve got the face.”

  “Oh!”

  Jean seized a knife and scraped at the blackened side of the saucepan.

  “There’s a tale about the bride who vanished—some say she was snatched away by the devil himself!—and she was so fair she made her bridegroom look like a gypsy, or a foreigner! All Urquhart men are dark. I can’t remember one who had fair hair and blue eyes.”

  “What really happened to the bride who vanished?”

  Jean lifted her eyes momentarily from her task, and then lowered them again.

  “I wouldn’t know, miss.”

  “But there must be stories. Someone must know.”

  Jean shrugged her square shoulders.

  “ ’Tis said she vanished in the mist ... after the wedding, that is. Others vow she drowned herself in the loch, because the Alaine she married was not the man she wanted. Then there are those who swear she jumped from the top of the Tower, and was buried hurriedly to prevent people getting to know. But, whatever happened to her her husband never forgot her, and though he did marry again some years later they say he waited for her for the rest of his days. She was a golden beauty, and she had golden eyes.”

  “You mean brown eyes?”

  “Not dark brown eyes.”

  Amanda couldn’t resist saying a little impishly:

  “Miss Macrae has the most wonderful dark brown eyes!”

  Jean straightened, and her own eyes flashed with a kind of swift resentment, and then clouded a little as if apprehension and uneasiness lay at the back of them.

  “Miss Macrae has black eyes. She’s black as a witch,” she declared. “And black was never the colour of an Urquhart’s true love! They’ve been fair as angels, and red as devils, but never black, for all the men are so dark.”

  Amanda turned away, determined to resist the temptation to tease her any further, for it was quite obvious both Jean and her husband were disturbed because the ferry had brought them two visitors the night before. And as one of the visitors had an aura of wealth about her, and the other had fairish hair with a tinge of red, with hazel eyes, the chances that life on Ure might be different in the future seemed to them very strong.

  Not one possible bride for Alaine but two had been rescued from the mist, and as they were both intensely superstitious they could not ignore these signs and portents. Apparently Duncan still clung to his belief that it was Amanda who was the reincarnation of the bride who had vanished; but she was fairly certain that Jean had all her money on Judy—or she would have done if she’d been a betting woman, instead of a strict Presbyterian.

  “I think I’ll have a look round, if you don’t mind,” Amanda said. “I’d like to have a really good look over the Tower, and the garden, too, i
f there is one.”

  “Cross the yard and you’ll find the garden,” Jean directed her. “In Urquhart’s mother’s day it was well tended, but Duncan never seems to get around to doing very much in it. The few flowers you’ll find I look after myself.”

  Amanda remembered this when she wandered in the garden and found it reasonably well stocked with flowering shrubs and some hardy annuals. There was a large number of roses, too, and the air was sweet with their perfume. They were the dark, mauvish-red roses that are vanishing fast from ultra-civilised gardens, and the rambler that sprawled across the high wall was the old-fashioned Dorothy Perkins.

  Amanda sat on a bench in the sunshine for about half an hour, and then curiosity drove her to explore the rest of the grounds. At one time they had comprised a well-stocked vegetable, garden, greenhouses and cucumber frames and tomato sheds, as well as peach houses and a large area of orchard full of well-pruned trees. But now the orchard was overgrown, the greenhouses were in ruins, and apparently nobody bothered about things like cucumbers or peaches. The whole of the Tower garden was enclosed within high walls, and beyond the walls the island growth ran riot, like a Malayan forest. There were some magnificent specimens of trees, and as Amanda walked beneath them she felt as if she was in an enchanted world. There were tiny glades and leafy dells, and always the roar of running water filled the silence around her, making it seem like a curiously voluble silence ... a talking silence that was companionable when one was quite alone, as she was.

  She sat down on a fallen tree-trunk—which she decided was the one on which Judy had waited for her the night before—and she pondered the problem that the immediate future presented.

  It was all very well for Judy to state calmly that she was staying on Ure, but she had some sort of a right to be where she was. She was a Macrae, and she had come home to a spot where Macraes had flourished for centuries. But she, Amanda, had no rights whatsoever, and if she allowed herself to be talked into remaining where she was she would be acting in opposition to her own principles. Either one had a right to do a thing, or one had not Besides, Alaine Urquhart was a bachelor, and the whole thing was absurd!

  What would his aunt think when she arrived?

  She got up and moved to the bank of the stream, and stood looking at her reflection in the water. It was such swift-flowing, sparkling, transparent water that it was almost like reviewing one’s appearance in a mirror.

  Some words came back to her ... Jean’s words:

  “She was a golden beauty. She had golden eyes!”

  She put up a hand and touched her hair. In the stream the image that was herself did the same ... but it was most decidedly not golden hair! There were red lights in it, and it was very pretty hair—fairish rather than blonde. But she had light brown eyes ... charming, liquid, golden-brown eyes with some little green lights in them like the weeds writhing and twisting on the bed of the stream.

  She knelt down beside the stream and gazed at herself very earnestly. She was enumerating her good points—heart-shaped face, intelligent brow, golden-tipped eyelashes, warm, human mouth—when someone spoke immediately behind her, and she started as she had never started in her life before. Although she could have ascertained who it was by studying the reflection in the stream she had neither the inclination nor, indeed, the wit to do so, before he spoke again and she was confronting him on her feet.

  “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?” Alaine quoted, with a faintly mocking twist to the corners of his handsome mouth. “Don’t you know, Amanda? Don’t you know that comparisons are odious, and nothing can alter the truth? You are what you are. More or less than that you will never be!”

  Amanda blushed crimson. The hot colour even crept upwards to her scalp.

  “I was studying the bed of the stream,” she defended herself.

  “Of course,” he returned indolently. “It would never have occurred to me that you were doing anything else. As I said before, why should you be so interested in your own appearance?”

  She answered with a certain amount of spirit:

  “It startled Duncan last night!”

  Alaine laughed. Then his hand alighted on her shoulder, and he gripped it gently.

  “So it did,” he agreed. “The next thing we shall discover is that you’re not real at all, and Duncan was right. I must say,” glancing at her flushed cheeks and defensive eyes, “you look very real to me. You look delightfully real!”

  Amanda looked away.

  “What is Judy doing?” she asked.

  “Resting.”

  Words burst from Amanda indignantly:

  “You know that she’s just pretending, don’t you? There’s nothing wrong with her ankle ... nothing that can prevent her getting about, I mean! She twisted it, on a loose stone or something, but she can walk perfectly all right when she wants to. It’s absolutely absurd that you should carry her up and downstairs, and now you say that she’s resting ... when she spent half the morning in bed and doesn’t normally rest at all. She’s intensely active most of the time.”

  Alaine helped himself to a cigarette from his case, but he did not offer her one. Instead he regarded her quizzically as he lighted his cigarette.

  “Loyalty,” he remarked, “is a cardinal virtue.”

  She blushed fiercely again.

  “You think I’m being mean? Because she’s paying my expenses, and being quite generous to me? You think I should back up her play-acting and deceive you as well as involve myself in a mess of lies? But I hate lies and deceit, and I...” She broke off. “I think this whole thing is ridiculous,” she said.

  “Why?” He was still regarding her closely, but there was rather more interest than quizzicalness in his expression now. The colour died slowly in her cheeks. She knew she had behaved badly, and that she must sound like a prig—very possibly a jealous prig, because it was Judy who was being made such a fuss of and treated as if she was made of blown glass! And the only explanation she could offer to herself was the doubtful explanation that she was not a good liar, and she knew very well what her friend was up to.

  She shrugged.

  “Jean isn’t deceived.”

  “Why?” he asked again. “Why is it ridiculous that you should come here and stay here? I do occasionally have visitors, you know.”

  “Yes, but—but not...”

  “Highly attractive young women visitors, like your two selves? Oh, but that’s what makes it so diverting. I’m not averse to the charms of your sex, you know. I may live in a monkish solitude, but I’m not a monk.” The cold sparkle of amusement in his black eyes informed her that he was laughing at her, but there was also a degree of seriousness in his speech. Very likely he did enjoy the charms of her sex. “And when anyone as beautiful as Miss Macrae is delivered up to me on my doorstep ... well, naturally, I’m grateful! For once the fates are being kind to me.”

  “You mean they’re not often kind to you?”

  He shrugged.

  “Perhaps not as often as I could wish,” with that note of whimsicalness in his voice.

  She recalled their conversation that morning, and something inside her stiffened its back with a form of resentment she did not quite understand.

  “So what you’re trying to tell me,” she said, “is that even though you’re well aware Judy hasn’t really sprained her ankle—well, not any rate, not badly enough to justify a fuss—you’re perfectly willing to encourage her in the idea in order to keep her here? Because she’s beautiful and diverting and—”

  “Rich,” he said, so softly that she stared at him with widened eyes for a moment.

  “So you are a fortune-hunter?” she said.

  “Did I say I wasn’t?”

  She bit her lower lip hard. Was he still making fun of her, or was he serious?

  “No, but I naturally assumed—”

  “That a gentleman would be more discreet about his intentions, if he did intend to marry one day for money?—to restore the fallen
fortunes of his house, of course!” with a dryness and amusement that, together with the increasing sparkle in his eyes, made her feel little better than a schoolgirl with neither the finesse nor the experience to see beyond the tip of her nose. “However, I’ve got to admit that if Miss Macrae was as plain as a plate I wouldn’t even be thinking about it.”

  “Then you are thinking about it?”

  “But of course.”

  He leaned against the trunk of the tree behind him and smoked his cigarette with enjoyment.

  She turned her back on him and walked to the edge of the stream again. She was trying to think of something crushing to say, but the words that might at least have offended him wouldn’t come. Instead, after a moment, she asked:

  “And your aunt? Will she run up the flag on the battlements because you’ve got a prize in your lap?”

  “Oh, almost certainly!”

  She swung round on him.

  “I don’t believe it! I simply don’t believe it!”

  His white teeth gleamed at her.

  “But that is because you haven’t met my aunt, who is so family-minded that I don’t believe she ever thinks of anything else. Ure is the heart of the universe to her. She’s an Urquhart, you see—a Miss Urquhart still—and nothing but Ure matters to her. If she’d been here last night when you turned up out of the blue she’d have grasped the possibilities so rapidly, after hearing Miss Macrae talk about all those sheep and seen her diamond ear-clips, that she’d have taken me aside at the first opportunity and practically threatened me with her sternest disapproval if I failed to do my duty in the face of such an extraordinary piece of luck.”

  Disbelief trembled in Amanda’s golden-brown eyes like a falling star. She simply couldn’t credit what she had heard.

  “Then your aunt must be a materialist of the first order,” she said.

  “She is. She’s also a realist.”

  “I’ve never come in contact with a realist like that.”

  “But then you’ve never come in contact with a man who owns a crumbling tower and wants to preserve it, have you?” he smiled at her. “Until now!”