Part 9 (2/2)
”Eh?” he asked.
”Oh, that's nothing. Only something I was thinking,” she said quickly.
”But I've got to go; only I hate to think of things being uprooted here.”
”Then dinna think aboot it. I knew ye'd be awa' afore long. It's in ye, juist as it's in the birds. But ye'll come flying back like they do.”
”Oh, Wullie, do you think I shall?” she pleaded, watching him as he stroked his beard and looked out across the sea.
”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.”
Wullie's words comforted her, gave her a sense of security as she sat at his side toasting fish for the last time and eating the cake that somehow did not taste quite so good as usual. As she said good-bye to him before she went the round of the village bidding everyone good-bye, something impelled her to kiss his brown cheek. The last she saw of him was his bent figure silhouetted in the doorway of the hut with a fire glow behind it, and the setting sun s.h.i.+ning on his eyes that were bright with tears.
But that night she was too excited to feel really unhappy as she looked at the boxes ready in the book-room, her little leather case lying open waiting for the last-minute things next morning. When, even, she blundered into the dairy to find rope and caught sight of a horrible red pile of meat that had been Hoodie, she could not cry about it. She was too busy thinking that, out of her adventuring, a day would come when the old place would be warmed and lighted again, and she told this to Aunt Janet, who was sitting, sunk in thought, by the fire in the book-room.
”I wouldn't be dreaming too much, Marcella,” she said gently. ”Even if dreams come true to some extent, they are very disappointing. A dream that you dreamed in a golden glow comes to pa.s.s in a sort of grey twilight, you know. And you'll never bring happiness here. Get the thought out of your head. There are too many ghosts. Could you ever kill the ghost of little Rose lying there with pain inside her, eating her life out? Or your father raging and hungering, like a pine tree in a window-pot?” She shook her head sadly. ”No, Marcella, till you've killed thought you'll never be happy--till you've killed feeling--”
”Look here,” began Marcella quickly, kneeling beside her aunt and suddenly holding her stiff body in her quick young arms. ”Auntie,” she said, using the diminutive shyly, and even more shamefacedly adding, ”dear--I'm not going to listen to you. So there! I'm going away, and I'm going to come back and simply _dose_ you with happiness, like we used to dose the old mare with medicine when she was ill. If you won't take it, I'll drown you in it. Or else what's the use of my going away?”
”You're going away because you feel it in your feet that you've got to go, Marcella,” said Aunt Janet calmly. The wind roared down the chimney and sent fitful puffs of smoke out into the room. ”If I tried to stop you, you'd go on hungering to be away.”
CHAPTER VI
It was the doctor who saw Marcella on to the _Oriana_ at Tilbury. Aunt Janet had not suggested coming with her: it had not occurred to her as the sort of thing that was necessary, nor had Marcella given it a thought. Left to herself, she would have taken train blithely from Carlossie to Edinburgh and thence to London--imagining London not very much more formidable than a larger Carlossie. But the doctor made them see that it was quite necessary for someone to see her off safely, and naturally the job fell to him.
The booking of the pa.s.sage had caused considerable discussion. Aunt Janet had written to the s.h.i.+pping company asking them to reserve a saloon berth by the first mail-boat after a certain date. That it took nearly all the money she had or was likely to have, as far as she could see, for the rest of her days, did not trouble her in the least. She could live on nothing, she told herself--and it was absolutely necessary that Andrew's child should go away, even though she was going to seek the once-refused charity of a relative, with the maximum of dignity and with flags flying. But the doctor had a talk with her about it. He had had three trips as s.h.i.+p's doctor to Australia on P. and O. steamers, and his imagination reeled at the prospect of Marcella in the average saloon on a long-distance liner.
”You see,” he said, trying hard to be tactful, ”if Marcella travels first cla.s.s she'll need many clothes. There are no laundries on most of these s.h.i.+ps, and it's a six weeks' trip. In the tropics you need to be changing all day if you care a bra.s.s farthing for your appearance.” He did not tell her that Marcella's frankness and her lack of conventional training would ostracize her among the first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers, half of whom were Government officials and the like going out to Australia or India, while the rest were self-made Australians going back home after expensive visits to the Old Country. They moved in airtight compartments. The exclusive Government folks would not have accepted a place on a raft that held the self-made colonials even at the risk of losing their lives. The self-made folks, snubbed and a little hurt, were rather inclined to be blatantly loud and a.s.sertive in self-defence.
Between the two Marcella would be a shuttlec.o.c.k. But she clinched the discussion herself by remarking airily that she was going in the cheapest possible way.
”You shall go second cla.s.s,” said her aunt. ”I quite see Dr. Angus's point about the first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers.”
”I'm going third, Aunt. I won't spend money that needn't be spent, and the third-cla.s.s part of the s.h.i.+p gets there just as fast as the first!
I'd be uncomfortable among rich folks. I only know poor people, and Dr.
Angus--I'll get on better with third-cla.s.s people.”
The doctor laughed at the implication, and was forced to give in. He told Aunt Janet that the third cla.s.s was quite comfortable, though he really knew nothing about it. He had never been on an emigrant s.h.i.+p in his life. He arranged for a share in a two-berth cabin quite blithely.
Marcella felt solemn when she finally saw the doctor's machine at the door waiting for her in the grey dawn light; Jean cried, and Tammas and Andrew, who were coming in with the tide, seeing the trap crawling along, ran up a little flag on the masthead to cheer her going. But Aunt Janet did not cry. She kissed the girl unemotionally and went into the house, shutting the heavy door with a hollow, echoing clang.
They had some hours to spend in Edinburgh, and got lunch in Princes Street. It all seemed amazingly big and busy to Marcella, who could not imagine the use of so many hundreds of people.
”I can't see what they're all here for, doctor,” she said as they sat at a very white and sparkling table in a deep window opposite the Scott Monument, and the people went to and fro in the absorbed, uncommunicative Edinburgh way. ”They don't seem to be needed.”
The doctor laughed.
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