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The pain had been unbearable all day but she had wrapt herself in a great cape of her father's and taken it out on Lashnagar, where no one could see her, leaving Andrew at the hut with Wullie. For a long time she had lost consciousness, to waken very cold in the winter dusk. "No, Louis said nothing. But I've eyes. You're marked for death. I saw it when you came in at the door that night.
That was in the year before Flodden Field, a hot, dry time that began with Lady Day and lasted till the Feast of All Souls without rain or storm. In that hot summer a witch-woman, very beautiful, had come to Lashnagar to win the soul of Andrew Lashcairn, winning with his soul his bed and his board. A wild wooing it was, and a wilder wedding.
I'd go past the Post Office every day, knowing it was there, and torturing myself with the thought of what I could buy with it, and leaving it there till I'd got five pounds and could drink myself to hell!" She shivered. She could hear him grinding his teeth as he sat close to her. She felt the same inarticulate helplessness that she had felt about all the miseries of Lashnagar.
"Ye'll find, at the end, Marcella, that there's no feet but God's can make shining marks on your life. Other things will walk over ye. They may leave marks of mud, or scars. But the footsteps of God will burn them all off in the end. I canna prove it, Marcella. But ye'll see it some day. D'ye mind yon apple that came flooering up through Lashnagar?" Marcella nodded.
On the Feast of All Souls, the wedding day, a copper sun rose in a sky of blood and lead, and all the folks of Lashnagar drank deeply to drive away impending horror.
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.
Up on Ben Grief all alone in the wind, hungry and blown about she would see herself preaching in the wilderness, eating locusts and wild honey, clad in the roughest sheep-skins. At home, or on Lashnagar, or in the water she saw herself like Britomart in armour always in armour while a knight rode at her side.
I wanted you Janet, for there has always been a Janet Lashcairn since the wild woman came to Lashnagar. But Rose would have you Marcella a foreign name to us," and he sighed heavily. "I hated you, Marcella, because I wanted a boy to win back everything we have lost. Lashcairn the Landless whose lands stretched once from Marcella, what am I saying?
He paused, and moved impatiently. "It's hard to piece thoughts together when you're weak. Can you finish my thought for me, Marcella? It's getting muddled down under sand and stones like Castle Lashcairn under Lashnagar." Marcella hesitated. Then she told him Wullie's idea about the path. "He says other things beside God walk along our lives, but in the end God's footmarks burn out all the rest."
He wandered on Lashnagar and looked down the terrifying chasms, and heard the screaming of the gulls; and he was unutterably wretched and out of it all. On Lashnagar he said to her, one day: "Marcella, it ought to be made compulsory for people, before they think of being married, to find out all about each other's youth." "Like that poem of poor Lamb's?" she said. "Oh thou dearer than a brother!