Captivity Part 9

"You'll need to take this letter to Carlossie, Marcella. Jean is too busy to-day. And ask about the postage to Australia. I believe it's only a penny."

"Who do we know in Australia?" asked Marcella.

"Your mother's brother Philip. I've written to tell him you'll be coming to him. He wrote when your mother died saying he would have you, but your father refused then. I've told him you'll be coming shortly, so we'll need to cable when we've looked up the boats and everything."

Marcella stared at her aunt in dead silence. She did not in the least resent this way of disposing of her. She was used to it--she would have disposed of herself in just the same high-handed fashion if it had occurred to her. But she was stricken silent with inarticulate joy at the prospect of going away--especially of going across the sea just as far as possible without getting over the edge of the world.

"But do you think he'll have me?" she said tremulously when she could speak again.

"He'll need to," said her aunt calmly.

"Anyway, if he doesn't someone else will," said Marcella casually. To her hitherto the world had meant Lashnagar, Pitleathy and Carlossie.

She had never been as far as Edinburgh. She had lived in a world of friends--a world that knew her, barefoot and hungry as she was, for the last of the Lashcairns, a world that had open doors for her everywhere.

And Aunt Janet knew about as much of life outside the wall that held her own smouldering personality as Marcella knew.

It was only years afterwards that Marcella wondered where her aunt got the money to buy her the clothes that came from Edinburgh--not many of them, but things severely plain and severely expensive. She knew that the man from Christy's came again--she knew that two great oak chests, one from the landing and one from her mother's room, went away. Later she missed the old weapons that used to be in the armoury at the old grey house and that had lain in her father's bedroom where he could see them ever since they came to the farm--great-swords and dirks and battle-axes--that had rung out a clear message of defiance on many a battlefield. But she did not a.s.sociate their going with her own until she was out in mid-ocean, and then she felt sickened to think what it must have cost Aunt Janet to part from them.

In the midst of her preparations Jean told her one day that she was going away soon.

"Going away?" she cried. "Then what will Aunt Janet do? Why, Jean, I never thought you'd leave her," she added reproachfully.

"Ye're leavin' her yersel'," said Jean grimly. "But I'm not gaun of ma ain acc.o.o.nt. The mistress hersel' was tellun me she'll not be needin' me ony mair."

"Well! but what's she going to do, then?" said Marcella, arrested in her careful tidying of her father's old books on the shelves. "I'm going straight away to ask her."

But her aunt simply told her that it was no concern of hers, but that she was going to live very quietly now.

"But who'll look after you? Who'll do the work? What will you live on?"

"I am not accustomed to being cross-questioned," said Aunt Janet in a definite way that forbade questions. But Marcella lay awake worrying very late during her last few nights at the farm, picturing her aunt all alone, without Jean, without her, without even the beasts, for a butcher from Carlossie had come and slaughtered the last old tottery cow, Hoodie.

"What is she going to do?" the girl asked herself again and again as she tossed on her hard bed that night. She tried to imagine Aunt Janet bringing in wood for the fire, breaking the ice of the well in winter, cleaning and cooking as Jean did, and her imagination simply would not stretch so far. Then she saw the nights when she would sit in the big book-room with the ghosts walking about the draughty pa.s.sages, up and down through the green baize door, looking for their swords and dirks, the beds and tables and chairs that had been sold while the rats scuttered about the wainscoting. And she got a terrible vision of her aunt looking round furtively as her hand went behind the curtain to a paper bag of cheap sweets.

"Oh, I can't leave her!" she cried. "Poor Aunt Janet!"

But even as her lips told her she could not go, her feet tingled like the swallows' wings in September and knew that, whoever suffered for it, she would have to go.

Ghosts and shadows crowded round her next day when she ran down to the beach to say good-bye to Wullie. On the gate of the farm was fixed a notice saying that Miss Lashcairn desired the villagers to come to the house next day if they wished a free joint of beef, as she had no further use for her cattle. "As the beast in question is old," went on the firm, precise writing, "the meat will be tough. But probably it is quite worth consideration by those with large families."

Marcella was crying as she banged open the door of Wullie's hut.

"I thought ye'd be coming, Marcella," he said, looking at her with mournful brown eyes that recalled Hoodie's. "Jock's wife's made ye a seed cake to eat the day, and anither tae pack in yer grip. She says if ye'll pit it intill a bit tin an' fasten it doon tight it'll maybe keep till ye're at Australia. But I'm thenkin' she doesna rightly ken whaur Australia is on the map."

"Oh, Wullie," cried Marcella, flinging herself down on the ground beside him. "I feel as if I can't bear it all. Hoodie killed, and going to be eaten, Jean going to Perth to live, and Aunt Janet all alone in the old farm, living with the rats."

"Ye're awa' yersel', Marcella, mind," said Wullie gravely.

"Wullie, I wish I could explain. I don't want to go, really, but if I don't I'm so afraid I'll get frozen up and dead. Oh, and acid drops,"

she added frantically.

"Eh?" he asked.

"Oh, that's nothing. Only something I was thinking," she said quickly.

"But I've got to go; only I hate to think of things being uprooted here."

"Then dinna think aboot it. I knew ye'd be awa' afore long. It's in ye, juist as it's in the birds. But ye'll come flying back like they do."

"Oh, Wullie, do you think I shall?" she pleaded, watching him as he stroked his beard and looked out across the sea.

"Ye'll be back, Marcella. Very glad ye'll be tae come back, an' ye'll find me here, juist the same. Things change little. It takes millions of years to change everything save folk's spirits. I'll never change, till His hand straightens me oot some day for a buryin'. But ye'll be changed, Marcella, like Lashnagar--things will have cropped out in ye, and things will have walked over ye."

Wullie's words comforted her, gave her a sense of security as she sat at his side toasting fish for the last time and eating the cake that somehow did not taste quite so good as usual. As she said good-bye to him before she went the round of the village bidding everyone good-bye, something impelled her to kiss his brown cheek. The last she saw of him was his bent figure silhouetted in the doorway of the hut with a fire glow behind it, and the setting sun shining on his eyes that were bright with tears.

But that night she was too excited to feel really unhappy as she looked at the boxes ready in the book-room, her little leather case lying open waiting for the last-minute things next morning. When, even, she blundered into the dairy to find rope and caught sight of a horrible red pile of meat that had been Hoodie, she could not cry about it. She was too busy thinking that, out of her adventuring, a day would come when the old place would be warmed and lighted again, and she told this to Aunt Janet, who was sitting, sunk in thought, by the fire in the book-room.

"I wouldn't be dreaming too much, Marcella," she said gently. "Even if dreams come true to some extent, they are very disappointing. A dream that you dreamed in a golden glow comes to pa.s.s in a sort of grey twilight, you know. And you'll never bring happiness here. Get the thought out of your head. There are too many ghosts. Could you ever kill the ghost of little Rose lying there with pain inside her, eating her life out? Or your father raging and hungering, like a pine tree in a window-pot?" She shook her head sadly. "No, Marcella, till you've killed thought you'll never be happy--till you've killed feeling--"

"Look here," began Marcella quickly, kneeling beside her aunt and suddenly holding her stiff body in her quick young arms. "Auntie," she said, using the diminutive shyly, and even more shamefacedly adding, "dear--I'm not going to listen to you. So there! I'm going away, and I'm going to come back and simply _dose_ you with happiness, like we used to dose the old mare with medicine when she was ill. If you won't take it, I'll drown you in it. Or else what's the use of my going away?"

"You're going away because you feel it in your feet that you've got to go, Marcella," said Aunt Janet calmly. The wind roared down the chimney and sent fitful puffs of smoke out into the room. "If I tried to stop you, you'd go on hungering to be away."

CHAPTER VI

It was the doctor who saw Marcella on to the _Oriana_ at Tilbury. Aunt Janet had not suggested coming with her: it had not occurred to her as the sort of thing that was necessary, nor had Marcella given it a thought. Left to herself, she would have taken train blithely from Carlossie to Edinburgh and thence to London--imagining London not very much more formidable than a larger Carlossie. But the doctor made them see that it was quite necessary for someone to see her off safely, and naturally the job fell to him.

The booking of the pa.s.sage had caused considerable discussion. Aunt Janet had written to the shipping company asking them to reserve a saloon berth by the first mail-boat after a certain date. That it took nearly all the money she had or was likely to have, as far as she could see, for the rest of her days, did not trouble her in the least. She could live on nothing, she told herself--and it was absolutely necessary that Andrew's child should go away, even though she was going to seek the once-refused charity of a relative, with the maximum of dignity and with flags flying. But the doctor had a talk with her about it. He had had three trips as ship's doctor to Australia on P. and O. steamers, and his imagination reeled at the prospect of Marcella in the average saloon on a long-distance liner.

"You see," he said, trying hard to be tactful, "if Marcella travels first cla.s.s she'll need many clothes. There are no laundries on most of these ships, and it's a six weeks' trip. In the tropics you need to be changing all day if you care a bra.s.s farthing for your appearance." He did not tell her that Marcella's frankness and her lack of conventional training would ostracize her among the first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers, half of whom were Government officials and the like going out to Australia or India, while the rest were self-made Australians going back home after expensive visits to the Old Country. They moved in airtight compartments. The exclusive Government folks would not have accepted a place on a raft that held the self-made colonials even at the risk of losing their lives. The self-made folks, snubbed and a little hurt, were rather inclined to be blatantly loud and a.s.sertive in self-defence.

Between the two Marcella would be a shuttlec.o.c.k. But she clinched the discussion herself by remarking airily that she was going in the cheapest possible way.

"You shall go second cla.s.s," said her aunt. "I quite see Dr. Angus's point about the first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers."

"I'm going third, Aunt. I won't spend money that needn't be spent, and the third-cla.s.s part of the ship gets there just as fast as the first!

I'd be uncomfortable among rich folks. I only know poor people, and Dr.

Angus--I'll get on better with third-cla.s.s people."

The doctor laughed at the implication, and was forced to give in. He told Aunt Janet that the third cla.s.s was quite comfortable, though he really knew nothing about it. He had never been on an emigrant ship in his life. He arranged for a share in a two-berth cabin quite blithely.

Marcella felt solemn when she finally saw the doctor's machine at the door waiting for her in the grey dawn light; Jean cried, and Tammas and Andrew, who were coming in with the tide, seeing the trap crawling along, ran up a little flag on the masthead to cheer her going. But Aunt Janet did not cry. She kissed the girl unemotionally and went into the house, shutting the heavy door with a hollow, echoing clang.

They had some hours to spend in Edinburgh, and got lunch in Princes Street. It all seemed amazingly big and busy to Marcella, who could not imagine the use of so many hundreds of people.

"I can't see what they're all here for, doctor," she said as they sat at a very white and sparkling table in a deep window opposite the Scott Monument, and the people went to and fro in the absorbed, uncommunicative Edinburgh way. "They don't seem to be needed."

The doctor laughed.