Captivity Part 65

"Your aunt's getting a wee bit frail, Mrs. Marcella! So I brought the old machine along."

They climbed into the machine--his old, high dog-cart, and drove along through tearing winds which were like the greeting embraces of friends to Marcella. The doctor told her all the news; all about the new babies, and the few deaths and illnesses while she had been away. The dashing of the water on the beach came to them. He told her that Jock had been washed from his little boat one rough night, and his body had never been found. The reek of the green wood fires came to them on the salt breeze.

"What's that remind you of, Louis?" she asked him.

"Gorse!" he said with a grimace.

"I love it!" she said simply.

The door of Wullie's hut stood open. He was silhouetted dark against the light within. The doctor drew up.

"Must stop and speak to Wullie," he said rather apologetically, to Louis. The old man came out and stood looking at Marcella. He did not seem a day older.

"So ye're back again, Marcella?" he said. "I knew ye'd be back! I knew ye'd soon wear the wings off yer feet! But ye're not well?"

"How could I be, away from home?" she said gently. "I'll be well again here."

Tammas came up then, with his wife and the six big children Marcella knew, and two littler ones she had never seen. Jock's Bessie came out and put a small bundle on the floor of the machine.

"Juist a cookie for the bit laddie," she explained.

They all stared at Louis and then spoke to him: he got the idea that they were sizing him up, calling him to account for how he had dealt with Marcella, who belonged to them. They claimed young Andrew whom they coolly called "Andrew Lashcairn." As they drove on through the village they took on something of the nature of a triumphal progress, for everyone came out, and talked. And everyone seemed to be Marcella's owners.

Aunt Janet was on the step when they reached the farm: her eagle face was thinner, quite fleshless; in her black silk frock, shivered at the seams, and the great cairngorm brooch, she looked quite terrifying.

"So you're back, Marcella? I knew you would be coming back," she said.

Louis wondered if this were the stock greeting at Lashnagar.

"I wonder what you've got for going across the world?" she said. "You're not well."

"I've got my two men," laughed Marcella, as she kissed the old lady.

"Humphm!" said Aunt Janet. "He'd have found you out if you'd stayed here all the time."

"Do you know, Marcella," said Louis, as they went along the windy pa.s.sages to her father's room in which Aunt Janet had elected to put them. "I've an extraordinary feeling that I've nothing to do with you any more. All these people--they seem to own you! You're an elusive young beggar, you know. First Kraill--I had to ask his permission to keep you. Now a whole village full!"

She shook her head and put her hand in his.

"Who's got me most, do you think?"

He answered as he thought.

There was a great spurting wood fire on the hearth in the book-room. As she looked round Marcella saw that most of the furniture left in the farm had been brought in. Jean came in, carrying a dish of scones.

Andrew ran straight to her, just as Marcella used to. She explained that she had come back because the mistress was lonely without her, and she could not get used to any ways but those of the farm.

The doctor stayed to the meal. There was no bread on the table. Louis seemed surprised to see the oatcakes and the cheese and the herrings. To Marcella they were a feast of heaven. They put young Andrew in old Andrew's chair beneath the dusty pennant. He sat with his fat brown legs swinging, exceedingly conscious of their manly appearance which he compared with his father's and the doctor's, delighted to see that the doctor's old tweed knickerbockers were very much the same shape as his.

"There's bramble jelly for the boy," said Aunt Janet, who scarcely took her eyes from him for a moment. "Mrs. Mactavish sends me some every year--one pot. There's been four pots since you went away. And I've never been minded to open one. Maybe it's mouldered now."

They talked quietly; out on Lashnagar the winds began to howl; in the pa.s.sages they shrieked and whined, and whistled and groaned in the chimney sending out little puffs of smoke. Up above their heads something scuttled swiftly. The little boy forgot his dignity and drew nearer to his mother.

"That's the rats, Andrew," said Aunt Janet, watching him. His mother explained that rats were a pest, to be hunted out like rabbits in Australia.

He drew away from her then and stood with his back to the fire, his hands behind.

"Andwew kill wats," he announced. "Wiv a big stick."

The doctor and Louis smoked and talked together of days forty years ago in Edinburgh, of days seven years ago at St. Crispin's. Marcella and Aunt Janet spoke softly, sitting by the fire.

"I wouldn't be sitting so near the fire, Marcella. You'll have all the colour taken out of your skirt. Not that it matters particularly," said Aunt Janet.

"It's lovely by the fire," murmured Marcella.

Aunt Janet reached over suddenly and spread an old plaid shawl over the girl's knees. She suddenly felt that Louis and Andrew and the last four years were unreal and dreamlike. They had happened to her, but now she was back home again, being told what to do.

Andrew began to rub his eyes.

"Yell be getting away to your bed now, Andrew," said Aunt Janet.

Jean stood up, waiting for him. He hugged his father and mother, shook hands with the doctor and looked searchingly at Aunt Janet before he kissed her. She put her hand behind the curtain, rustled a piece of paper and gave him an acid drop.

"I used tae pit Marcella, yer mither, tae her bed when she was a wee thing," said Jean, taking his small brown hand. He put the sweet into his mouth and trotted off beside her. At the door he stopped to kiss his hand to his mother. The rats scuttled across the floor above; one in the wainscoting scratched and gnawed. Andrew hesitated and came back a few steps. They were all watching him.

"Mummy!" he began in a very thin little voice. Marcella started as if to go to him, and sat back suddenly.

"Andwew will kill wats--wiv a big stick," he said, and marched out of the room before Jean.

Before a week had gone by it seemed to Marcella that she had never been away from Lashnagar. The place wrapped her round, took possession of her. She took Louis down to the huts to see Wullie; she toasted herrings over the fire, and Louis was unexpectedly friendly; the only difference was that Jock was not there any more when the fishing boats came in; and where she had left girls and boys she found young men and women and little babies: they grew up quickly on the hillside. Louis went with her on Ben Grief and saw the old grey house. He wandered on Lashnagar and looked down the terrifying chasms, and heard the screaming of the gulls; and he was unutterably wretched and out of it all.

On Lashnagar he said to her, one day:

"Marcella, it ought to be made compulsory for people, before they think of being married, to find out all about each other's youth."

"Like that poem of poor Lamb's?" she said. "Oh thou dearer than a brother! Why wast thou not born within my father's dwelling? So might we talk of the old familiar faces--Yes, I believe there's a lot in it."

"Since I've been here and seen things, I've understood you better.

Seeing your home, and mine, and thinking how we were the products of those homes! I'm glad young Andrew is here, till it's time for him to go to school. I see where you get your friendliness that used to shock me, and your hardness. I'd like him to get it all."

"I was hoping to protect him from it," she said. "But I know you're right, really," she said slowly.

That was the day before he went south to Edinburgh to join the hospital.

His mother wanted him in London, and his father wrote saying that his old room was ready for him. But Louis told them that Marcella must be at Lashnagar, and Edinburgh was nearer Lashnagar than London was. Dr. Angus felt personally responsible for the resources of Edinburgh when he heard the news and once again he made a pilgrimage, taking Louis to his old rooms in Montague Street, and doing the honours of the city with a proprietorial air. He took to running down to Edinburgh quite frequently; he said he was brushing up his knowledge.

The winter pa.s.sed; Louis spent Christmas at Lashnagar and then took Marcella and the boy to London. Marcella was feeling very ill, but he was too happy and too full of his work to notice it. She was very glad to get back again, to sleep in her father's old four-poster bed looking out on Ben Grief. When he had gone back to Edinburgh she spent many wakeful nights, drawn in upon herself, thinking herself to nothingness like a Buddhist monk until pain brought her to realization again. In those hours she thought much of her father and heard his voice in her ears, saw him standing there before her, clinging to the post as he prayed for strength. Louis wrote her immense letters: sometimes in the night she would light her candle and read them with tears blinding her eyes and an unspeaking grat.i.tude in her heart. She said nothing to Aunt Janet about her illness in Sydney, or about her pain, but one evening the old lady, looking across the firelit hearth, said quietly:

"I shall outlive you, Marcella. Seems foolish! You--young, all tingling for life and joy, and people to care about you. I like a last year's leaf before the wind, dried and dead. The one shall be taken and the other left. It seems foolish."