After he had got back into bed and she stooped over him, trying to chafe warmth into his cold feet, he looked at her more kindly than he had ever looked before.

"All my life I have cursed you because you were a girl. I cursed your mother because she gave me no son. And now I thank G.o.d that you are not a man, to carry on the old name."

"Why, father?" she asked, her eyes frightened and puzzled.

"The Lord deals righteously. I shall sleep now," was all he said.

It was Wullie who told her what her father had meant. They were up on Ben Grief watching the swollen streams overflowing with melted snow and storm-water. Marcella looked wan and tired; her eyes were ringed with black shadows. As usual she was hungry, but Wullie had left potatoes buried under the green-wood fire, and they would feast when they got back.

"Why is it father is glad I'm not a boy?" she asked him.

It was a long time before he told her.

"The Lashcairns are a wild lot, la.s.sie--especially the men folk. They kill and they rule others and they drink. It's drink that's ruined them, because drink is the only thing they canna rule. That's the men folk I'm talking of. Your great-grandfather lost all his lands that lie about Carlossie. The old grey house and the fields all about Ben Grief and Lashnagar were lost by your father. All he's got now is Lashnagar and the farm-house. And Lashnagar canna be sold because it hasna any value.

Else he'd have sold it, to put it in his bar'l."

She said nothing. Her tired eyes looked out over the farm and the desolate hill, her hair, streaming in the wind, suddenly wrapped her face, blinding her. As she struggled with it, light came, and she turned to Wullie.

"It was the barrel, then, that made father ill?"

"It was so."

"And grandfather, and his father--did they get ill, too, through the barrel?"

He shook his head, and she s.n.a.t.c.hed at his arm roughly.

"Wullie, ye're to tell me. I'm telling ye ye're to tell me, Wullie. I never heard of them. How did they die? I shall ask father if you don't tell me."

"Your great-grandfather killed his son in a quarrel, when your father was a bit laddie of four. The next day he was found dead beside his bar'l in the cellar."

The storm-water went swirling down by their feet, brown and frothing. It went down and down as though Ben Grief were crying hopelessly for this wild people he had cradled.

"I see, now, why he's glad I'm not a boy. Wullie--do all the Lashcairns die--like that?" and she pictured again her father waiting, as he put it, to be drowned in his bed while a procession of killed and killing ancestors seemed to glide before her eyes over the rushing water.

"The men folk, yes. They canna rule themselves."

"And the women?" she said sharply, realizing that she and Aunt Janet were all that were left.

"They keep away from the bar'l."

"Yes, I couldn't imagine Aunt Janet doing that," she said, smiling faintly. "Or me."

"Some of the women rule themselves," he said tentatively. "There was the witch-woman first--and later there was the Puritan woman. They seem to mother your women between them. There's never any telling which it'll be."

"Aunt Janet--" began Marcella.

"She's ruled herself. Some of the Lashcairn women wouldna think of ruling themselves. Then they go after the man they need, like the witch-woman. And--take him."

Marcella frowned.

"It sends them on strange roads sometimes," said Wullie, and would say no more.

It was Marcella's rest night, and tired as she was, she lay thinking long in the silence. It was a strangely windless night, but her thoughts went whirling as though on wings of wind. Thoughts of fate, thoughts of scepticism jostled each other: pictures came; she saw the apple tree breaking through Lashnagar; she saw a landslide many years ago on Ben Grief that had torn bare strange coloured rocks in the escarpment. Just as she fell asleep, worn out, she thought that perhaps something beautiful might outcrop from her family, something different, something transforming. And then she was too tired to think any more and went to sleep.

CHAPTER III

The "last lap" was not a very long one; it grew in distress as the days went on. The worn-out heart that the Edinburgh doctor had graphically described as a frail gla.s.s bubble, in his attempt to make Andrew Lashcairn nurse his weakness, played cruel tricks with its owner. It choked him so that he could not lie down; it weakened him so that he could not stand up. He would gasp and struggle out of bed, leaning on Marcella so heavily that she felt she could not bear his weight for more than another instant. But the weight would go on, and somehow from somewhere she would summon strength to bear it. But after a while his frail strength would be exhausted, and he would have to fall back on the bed, fighting for breath and with every struggle increasing the sense of suffocation. But all the time, when his breath would let him, he would pray for courage--as time went on he prayed more for courage to bear his burden than for alleviation of it, though sometimes a Gethsemane prayer would be wrung from him.

"O Lord," he would whisper, his trembling hand gripping the girl's arm until it bruised the flesh, "I am the work of Thy hands. Break me if Thou wilt. But give me courage not to cry out at the breaking."

One night when it became impossible, because of the stiffness and heaviness of his swollen legs, for him to walk about, he prayed for death, and Marcella, forced to her knees by his pa.s.sionately pleading eyes, sobbed at his words.

"Lord, I am trying hard to be patient with Thee," he gasped. "But I am man and Thou art G.o.d. I cannot match Thy patience with mine. I am trying so hard not to cry out beneath Thy hand. But give me more courage--more courage, O Lord, or I must play the coward. Take Thy cup from me until to-morrow, when I shall have more strength to lift it to my lips--or let me die, Lord, rather than crack like this."

Then, after a pause, words were wrung from his lips.

"Justice--not mercy. I would not take mercy even from Thee. The full rigour of Thy law--"

There was no alleviation, and Marcella, kneeling there, wished that she and her father could die together. The horror of helplessness was searing her soul.

Next day came agonizing pain which made every movement a death. But the Edinburgh doctor who came brought relief for the pain, and, talking with Dr. Angus, the Carlossie doctor, mentioned, among other technicalities, the name of a drug--"digitalis." That afternoon Marcella went back in the doctor's trap to get the new medicine, and it gave relief. Whenever, after that, the choking came back, Andrew would cry out for digitalis, which seemed to him the elixir of life. Sometimes he would pray for courage; sometimes, cracking suddenly, he would pray for digitalis and send Marcella often at midnight with a pleading note to the doctor to give him the drug and a little soothing for his heart that was running away with him.

Now that he could not move about he still thought of the souls of the people in the village, and sent a message to them, pleading with them to come and see him. And they, remembering him as the laird, with a sort of feudal obedience, came and stood about his bed, to be stormed at or prayed with according to Andrew's mood. But always after one of these missionary efforts he would suffer agonies of suffocation when he had forgotten, for a while, that his heart was a bubble of gla.s.s.

It was an unreal world, this shadowed world of the old farm. It centred round Andrew Lashcairn's bed--he was its sun, its king, its autocrat still. But things material had slipped from him--or rather, material interests were all centralized in his tortured body. At first during his illness he had worried about the farm, sending messages to Duncan much more than he had done during the days when he was shut behind the green baize door. But now all the farm had slipped from him. He was alone with his body and his soul and G.o.d. Most often his soul cried out. Sometimes his body broke through and showed its pains and the strength of old desires.

As he grew weaker he tried to grasp out at strength. Aunt Janet, who had "ruled herself" to nervelessness, had nothing of the mother, the nurse in her make-up; there was no tenderness in what she did for him. It was not that she had any spirit of getting her own back on Andrew for his tyranny, his impoverishment, his ill-usage of her in the past. She would have given him her last crumb of food if she had thought of it. But a thing atrophied as she was could not think or feel, and so he went without the small tendernesses that would have come to him had Rose, the soft little Englishwoman, lived. She sat up with him night after night patiently. She gave him milk, and she and Marcella went without it that he should have enough. She gave him the inevitable porridge and broth, but he turned away from the things he had eaten all his life in disgust.

"Is there any sort of thing I could have to put a little grip into me, doctor?" he asked, and was ordered beef-tea, various patent foods and eggs, all things very difficult to come by on the stern hillside.

"It seems to me, Janet, if I could have some of these foods and drugs they advertise so much I might get some strength to bear it," he said.

So she got him half a dozen of the different well-advertised things to try. He had them arrayed on a table by his bed, and took immense pleasure in reminding her or Marcella when it was time for them. The doctor, who guessed that money was scarce, suggested that Aunt Janet should sell some of the old oak furniture, and to her surprise a man from London thought it worth while, from her description, to come all the way to Lashnagar to look at it. She loved it because it enshrined the family story; the scratches on the refectory table showed where heavy-clad feet had been planted as Lashcairns of old had pledged each other in fiery bowls. The heavy oak chairs had each a name and a history, but until the man from London came Aunt Janet had not realized their value. So they went away, taken quietly and stealthily out of the house for fear Andrew should know. In the book-room only a few books were left to keep the dusty pennant a melancholy companionship.

But the patent foods and drugs did no good; they reminded Marcella irresistibly of the soil and water she had laid hopefully round the bursting apple tree. As he lay once, with all the wheels of life running at half rate after a sedative, he said to Marcella, who had been reading to him:

"I feel as if I'm not in my body, Marcella. Oh, Marcella, help me to get a grip on my body! I can't make it do what I'm tellin' it to do! Look!"

and he held up one gaunt arm feebly, to let it drop a minute later.

"Look! Marcella--once I could break men with my hands!"

She stared at him, choking. There was nothing she could think to say. In her mother's weakness her lips had overflowed with tendernesses; for her father she could only feel a terrified, inarticulate pity. It was not sympathy. She could not understand enough to sympathize. It was the same sort of hungry, brooding pity she used to feel for the hungry beasts on the farm.

"Marcella, do you think if I were to eat a lot of meat I'd be stronger?"

he asked hopefully. "Oh, make me stronger!--give me something," and suddenly raising himself in bed, he threw his arms about her and, with his grey head on her shoulder, sobbed desolately. She held him, stroking his head, aching to find words, but utterly dumb with terror. And when, later, they got him the food he craved, he could not eat it. Turning from it in disgust, he prayed:

"There is nothing left, but only Thou, O Lord. No longer art Thou my shield and buckler, for no longer can I fight. Thou hast laid me very low, O Lord. Thou hast made me too weak to fight longer; Thou hast bruised me so that I cannot live save in pain; Thou hast laid me very low."