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But the soil was not deep enough for trees or bushes to take root. In Marcella's lifetime men had been lost on Lashnagar, and sheep and dogs, adventuring too far, had never come back. Legend had it that hundreds of years ago Lashnagar had been a quiet little village nestling round Castle Lashcairn, the home of Marcella's folks.
I am in muddles myself, but I am most sorry for you. And my name is Marcella Lashcairn of Lashnagar." She put it in an envelope, addressed it to him, tapped on his door and pushed it under. She went on deck that afternoon in a state of bubbling excitement. There were not many people about.
"I didn't think boys were drunkards," she said casually. "I'm twenty-seven." "Are you really? All the boys at Lashnagar are grown up when they're twenty-seven. You seem so young. You're so shy and queer. I'm nineteen," she added. "And you know," he burst out in the midst of her words, "they can't blame me!
"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."
The money was almost exhausted; the oat crop failed and one of the cows was lost on Lashnagar, where she had been tempted by hunger to find more food.
Marcella had taken her piece of oatcake and cheese at supper-time out to the door. But it was no use to the beasts. The little black pig gobbled it in a mouthful and squealed for more. In her agony of pity something dawned on her. "I suppose," she said to herself, as she stood shivering, looking over rimed Lashnagar, "that Jesus was as sorry for His disciples as I am for these poor beasts.
In front of the house rose Lashnagar, the home of desolation, a billowing waste of sand rising to about a thousand feet at the crest. Curlews called and sea-gulls screamed over Lashnagar; heather grew upon it, purple and olive-green; fennel and cooch and henbane sprang side by side with dwarfed stink-nettles, stunted by the salt sand in which they were rooted.
His eldest is going on for ten, I think an' how's he to pay for labour to clear his land?" Neither of them knew, but they decided to make for Loose End and see what was going on under the five gums. That day was the strangest experience to them both. Louis had tramped before in the cooler New Zealand summer; Marcella had walked miles on Lashnagar.
They may be quiet like Lashnagar for years, an' then something crops out like yon crumbling last night that killed young Colin. But it's not always evil that crops out, mind ye." Marcella did not go on Lashnagar again for months.
And how they would laugh at a man who could not master himself, a man who cried! "Why, I'm a snob! I was hurt when he thought I'd disgrace him by my bad manners. And now I'm being just as cruel!" Then she jerked herself away from Lashnagar and stood with the last letter in her hand, afraid to open it. It was postmarked Melbourne and had come in that morning.
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