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Marcella still divided her time when she could between the book-room, Lashnagar and Wullie's smoking-hut; but every morning Andrew Lashcairn tore her out of bed at five o'clock and went with her through snows and frosts, and, later, through the fresh spring mornings to teach her to swim in the wild breakers of the North Sea.
She had often cooked on Wullie's open fire at Lashnagar, and Louis quickly explained that he would make a bush oven outside. Neither of the rooms leaning against the kitchen had any furniture, but Mrs. Twist seemed to have laid in a whole ship's stores of navy hammocks, which she said they could have until Louis had carpentered bed for them.
No kindly angel whispered to her that she should go in, now, for "swounds and vapours," and thus bolster up the protectiveness that had come to birth within him that night. She knew nothing of "swounds and vapours." The rather hard women on Lashnagar were never ill and weak until they were ready to drop into death. Aunt Janet had never been weak save in the matter of the acid drops.
"I'll be colder yet, soon," he said calmly, and she was forced to go away. She guessed that Andrew's sense of dramatic fitness made him wish to make his last entry on the stage alone. So she went back to her room and stood looking out over Lashnagar, where the autumn mists stalked and mowed at each other and fluttered and jostled and fought.
Tears brimmed over: it was when she saw the eternal child in Louis that she loved him most, and was most afraid for him; not afraid now that he would waste himself again, but afraid that he would never touch the mountain-tops at which he was aiming. "Yes, we'll go home," she said dreamily. "And I'll take you on Lashnagar and we'll see them all again.
If I'm kept busy " "You'll be kept busy," she said, smiling. "When we've cleared the twenty acres of gorse it's all to be ploughed and planted. And when that's done and there isn't a single other thing to do, we'll start to tunnel a hole through the middle of the earth to Lashnagar, like they did in Jules Verne's book." "I'm keeping my body occupied," he went on slowly.
"I've tauld ye afore, Marcella. There's no ending tae things! Sometimes the evil comes cropping oot, like when men get caught an' buried on Lashnagar. Sometimes it's something bonny, like yon flooer. Yon apple was meant to live an' bear fruit; the bonny apple's juist the makeweight. It's the seed that matters all the time the life that slides along the tree's life.
Many a time in the sun-drowned days and windless nights Marcella was reminded of those old tales she had heard on Lashnagar from Wullie's lips, of the hot summer when the witch-woman came and men went mad just before the destruction came on the village. It was as though the Oriana went on ploughing through the waters, with the Dog-Star hitched to her masthead inflaming men's blood.
He broke off and talked to Marcella, words that seemed eerie and terrible to her. "To-morrow, Marcella, is the day when the ruin came on Lashnagar. To-morrow I shall die " "Oh, father!" she cried helplessly. "I was once His enemy, Marcella. I must let them see me at His feet now, kissing His hand His man the King's man " He brooded for an hour, gasping for breath.
But the headaches persisted right on until the springtime, bringing gusts of impatience and strange demands and urgencies that made her begin to get tired of the farm and Lashnagar and set her feet longing to be away on strange roads.