The Last of the Kintyres Read Online Free PDF Page B

suitcase in each hand, turned back to where Mrs. Hayler stood on the doorstep.
    “I hope we will see you again,” he said far too eagerly. “And—thanks for the lift!”
    Caroline’s finely-pencilled eyebrows shot up and she glanced at Hew, amused by the impulsive little speech, it would seem.
    “If you’ll come this way,” Mrs. Malcolm said at Elizabeth’s side, “I’ll show you upstairs.”
    Elizabeth followed the stout little figure towards the staircase, painfully aware of the fact that Tony was deliberately lagging behind, as if he could not bear to let Caroline Hayler go.
    On the top landing the housekeeper paused, waiting, and he was forced to come up behind them.
    “Sorry!” he apologized. “I must have been daydreaming.”
    “I’ve put the young gentleman in here,” Mrs. Malcolm said, opening one of the many doors along a wide gallery which looked down into the hall.
    Caroline Hayler was still down there with Hew. Elizabeth could hear her slightly high-pitched voice coming up from the shadows and Hew’s monosyllabic rejoinders. She could not make out what they said, but already she had been made aware of a sympathy between them. Caroline had suggested that, pointedly, more than once.
    “Sir Ronald wanted you to be on the other side of the house, Miss Stanton.” Jessie Malcolm’s voice brought her thoughts back to the present. “I think your brother will be comfortable enough here,” she added. “It used to be Mr. Hew’s room.”
    Elizabeth had the impression of getting to know Hew Kintyre much better in the few minutes it took her to glance round this room than she would have done in months of casual meetings. Everything in it reflected an active boyhood, with guns and fishing - tackle lying haphazardly on cupboard tops and group photographs of school and college activities adorning the walls. The essentials of furniture were strong and good. There was nothing ornate that could get in a boy’s way, and the wide window that ran the full length of one wall remained uncurtained. In it was framed a breathtaking view of hill and loch, where a sailing din ghy might have lain moored in days gone by, to be seen immediately on rising and last thing before going to sleep.
    There was no dinghy down on the loch now. The boy who had gone to sleep and wakened in that bright little room had grown up. He didn’t even live here any more. Something—life itself, perhaps—had changed him into a morose and sombre man.
    Sharply she turned from the view of the hills, leaving Tony to settle down in a room which obviously delighted him.
    “You’re not really far away from your brother,” Mrs. Malcolm informed her as they continued along the corridor, tu rning sharply at the end of it into what appeared to be another wing of the old house. “You’ll get all the sun here, right through the day. The mistress liked the rooms that faced the sun.”
    “She was an invalid, wasn’t she?” Elizabeth asked.
    “Yes, but a happy one,” Mrs. Malcolm said. “Everything that could be done was done for her and she took her trials and troubles philosophically. She had a great heart, and she was only too th ankf ul that she was granted the sight of the sea here at Ardlamond. Sir Ronald was such an active man that there was always something new for her to hear about.”
    She opened a door into a large bedroom with windows on two of its walls through w hich flooded all the pearly-grey light of evening. T h e sky to the west had still a warmth of colour and the mountains of Mull looked purple against it, far and mysterious, with all the magic of distance in their hidden glens.
    “I wish I had known Sir Ronald,” Elizabeth said impulsively. “I feel that I’ve missed something that—should have belonged to me.”
    “He was a fine old gentleman,” Jessie Malcolm said with tears in her voice. “And I’m glad he died the way he did, without having to suffer too much. You would have loved him,” she added