Part 8 (2/2)
”What is it, Marcella?”
”I--I don't know. Oh, Aunt Janet, I do wish there was something I could do for you.”
”Marcella!” cried her aunt, almost shocked.
”Oh dear, you make me cry, Aunt Janet, to see you sitting here so lonely and so still. You seem like father--there's a wall all round you that I can't get inside. Oh and I do love you! I'm simply _miserable_ because I want to do something nice for you.”
She stared at her aunt with swimming eyes, and Aunt Janet, quite at a loss to understand the outbreak, could not get outside her wall.
”You will find it's much better to rule love out, Marcella,” said Aunt Janet gently, holding the girl's hand in hers, which was cold. ”It is better not to pity anyone or love anyone. Oh yes, I know you pity me, child. But love and pity have exactly doubled the pain of the world, because, in addition to the tragedy of the person you love is your own tragic desire to do something for them. You take my advice, Marcella--don't love. Rule love out--”
”Oh my goodness--acid drops,” whispered Marcella to herself as she sat down to think out this astonis.h.i.+ng heresy.
From that day she had been filled with a choked pity for Aunt Janet--and now, suddenly, as she sat with the jam spoon full, poised over her plate she saw herself getting like that--slyly eating acid drops because she was ashamed to admit so small, so amiable a weakness, having conquered all the big ones.
She dropped the spoon with a clatter and pushed the pot away from her.
”Acid drops,” she whispered to herself.
”You may as well eat it up, Marcella. It only means you won't have any to-morrow. Neither Jean nor I want it--and the pot can be washed and put away then.”
”No--no. I don't want it,” cried the girl pa.s.sionately. ”Aunt Janet, I want to go away.”
Her eyes were sparkling, her breath coming fast and short.
”Go away?”
”Yes. I can't stay here. What's to happen to me if I do? Oh what's to happen to me?”
”You'll be happier staying here till you drop out of life,” said the woman, looking at her intently.
”Oh no--no! I'd rather be smashed up and killed--like grandfather was,”
cried Marcella pa.s.sionately.
”Yes, I suppose one would--at eighteen,” Aunt Janet mused reminiscently.
”But where can you go?”
”Oh anywhere--I don't care. I'll go anywhere--now--to-night. Aunt, I'm not cruel and unkind, am I, to want to go away? I'll come back to you.
I'll be kinder when I come back,” she cried anxiously. ”I can't stop here and be petrified.”
For two days Aunt Janet thought and pondered while Marcella raged about Ben Grief with the wings of all the swifts and swallows on earth in her feet. She faced many things these two days--she planned many things. She was like a generalissimo arranging details of the taking of the enemy's entrenchments before ever the recruiting for his army had begun. She was full of thoughts and intentions as ungraspable and s.p.a.cious as the Milky Way. She was not quite sure, up there with the winds las.h.i.+ng her face with her hair, whether she was going to save the world from whisky, materialism or dreams; she was not quite sure whether she was going to save women from having smaller brains and weaker bodies than men, or whether she was going to train herself out of being a woman. At any rate, she was going out on the battle-path, glittering in armour. As long as her eyes were on the stars and her hair streaming in the wind it did not seem to matter much where her feet were. They would, she felt sure, follow her eyes.
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. Now Aunt Janet sat down, and, quite characteristically bridging six years of silence and rather rude neglect, stated that Andrew was dead, the farm was not prospering, and she was sending Marcella out to him, as he had expressed a wish for her before. She did not ask if this would be convenient. It did not occur to her that Uncle Philip might be dead, or have left Wooratonga; with Lashcairn high-handedness--to quote Wullie--she expected all the world to do her bidding.
She did not mention the letter to Marcella until it was written; she lived so much inside her wall that the interest the letter must necessarily have for the girl did not occur to her until she called her downstairs and put it into her hand.
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