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She did not expostulate; no one thought of expostulating with Andrew Lashcairn. It was dark when she wakened and dressed hurriedly. Running down to the kitchen to tell Jean the pleasant effects of her plaster she found it was half-past six. "Andrew Lashcairn's doon," said Jean, looking scared. "Who helped him?" asked Marcella, lifting the lid of the teapot that stood on the hearth.
And then Aunt Janet announced, at the end of two days, that she should write to Australia, to a brother of Rose Lashcairn's who lived in Victoria on a big sheep run. He had written at Rose's death, offering to have the child one little girl more or less on his many acres would not count. But Andrew had refused stiffly, insolently, and there the matter had dropped.
For six weeks after her father's funeral she had almost maddening neuralgia. One day, meeting Dr. Angus in the village she stopped to speak to him. Indeed, it was impossible to pass him, for he had bought Rose Lashcairn's little mare who, even after six years, remembered Marcella and stood with eager, soft eyes while the girl stroked her velvet nose and satin sides.
Men coming from the fields and the boats were asked questions about their peace with God, and in the little chapel where once the Covenanters had met, Andrew Lashcairn's voice was raised in prayers and exhortations so long and so burning that he often emptied the place even of zealots before he had tired himself and God.
Divorced from his den and his barrel by his own will-power he had to find something to do. And he undertook Marcella as an interest in life. Things were going a little better at the farm because of Rose Lashcairn's money: more cows came, and sacks of meal and corn replenished the empty coffers in the granary.
Later, when the woman had gone, and the two servant women were crying in the kitchen while they drank scalding tea and spilt it down their aprons from trembling hands, Andrew Lashcairn and Aunt Janet sat in the book-room with all Rose Lashcairn's papers spread out before them. Marcella sat for a while watching. There were letters, smelling of the lavender and rue that lay among them.
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 glass. 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.
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