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Angus and Wullie; they would never have seen their rather dreamy, very boy-like, almost unembodied Marcella of Lashnagar in the Marcella of Sydney, with her alternate brooding maternal tenderness that guarded him as a baby, or with the melting softness of suddenly released passion.
But Aunt Janet, like a fate, sat gazing up the misty side of Lashnagar through the uncovered window. Andrew stood still, looking from one to the other. Then he took two steps forward. "Jamie Mactavish and Andrew Gray are not here," he said sternly, as though he were a schoolmaster calling the roll. Explanations of the absence murmured out and he came inside, pushing the door to.
King using in her laundry work that morning. Wharves or trees ran right down into the blueness. The big ships lying at anchor made her heart beat fast with their clean beauty and romance; the bare, clean roofs running along for perhaps fifty houses gave her a breath of freedom that brought back Lashnagar and Ben Grief.
A great barrel like the barrel at Lashnagar had been broken by falling from the top storey out of the clutch of a derrick; there was a pool of blood, dreadful and bright in the roadway and men were lifting the crushed body of a man into an ambulance; quite close to the pool of blood was one of whisky that was running into the gutter.
And it pleased their mother's grim humour to creep about the battlefield in the darkness until she found banners and trappings of the Southrons, whom she hated, to act as birth-clothes for her son and daughter when she carried them back mile after mile to brooding Lashnagar. It was the boy who was Marcella's ancestor. Lashnagar was her nursery. On Lashnagar she had seen queer things.
"Fat, Marcella?" he said in a strange, faint voice. "That's what the doctor's been expecting. It's the last lap!" "What do you mean, father? Isn't it better for you to be getting fat now?" He smiled a little and, bending down, pressed his fingers on the swollen ankle. The indentations stayed there. She thought of the soft depression on Lashnagar where the young shepherd had gone down.
As the Feast of All Souls, the time when ghosts thronged on Lashnagar, drew near he brooded in silence for hours. Through one of his choking attacks he lay passive, scarcely fighting for breath; only once did he turn supplicating eyes on Aunt Janet, mutely demanding the drug that soothed. And when he was able to speak again, he told them what he had been thinking.
"I want to go on here with you and Andrew. And I want to see Dr. Angus and Aunt Janet and all the others at Lashnagar and No, I don't want to see him," she added, and thought again for a while in silence. "I don't need to " He looked at her quickly, and said nothing. "Louis, do you think I've been wrong?
"I keep doing this sort of thing," she explained, "ever since I left Lashnagar. Most things I touch I knock over." "Weak co-ordination," he said. "Whatever's that?" She paused in cutting a slice of cake with an enormous clasp-knife Wullie had given her years ago. He immediately looked consciously learned. "Like a baby, you know it grabs for a thing and can't aim at it.
It's because I've lived in the open air, where there was nothing to knock over except trees and stones; or else I've lived in an enormous house where everything was so big you couldn't knock it over if you tried. I'm not used to being among things and people." "Been in prison?" he said, smiling for the first time. She entered on a vivid description of Lashnagar.
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