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Captivity by M. Leonora Eyles

M >> M. Leonora Eyles >> Captivity




Things were going a little better at the farm because of Rose
Lashcairn's money: more cows came, and sacks of meal and corn
replenished the empty coffers in the granary. 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. Many a girl would have died; Marcella proved
herself more a child of the Lashcairns than of her little English mother
by living and thriving on it. Her father sent her to work in the fields
with the men, but forbade her to speak to any of the village women who
worked there, telling her to remember that her folks were kings when
theirs were slaves. One night, when the snow drifted in from Lashnagar
on to her bed, she closed her window, and he, with a half return of the
old fury, pushed it out, window-frame and all. Ever after that Marcella
slept in a cave of winds. It never occurred to her to rebel against her
father. She accepted the things done to her body with complete docility.
Over the things that happened to her mind her father could have no
control.

But his Spartan training had a queer effect upon her. Always meagrely
fed, always knowing the very minimum of comfort, she became oblivious to
food or comfort for herself; she became unconscious, independent of her
body save as a means of locomotion, but she cared immensely for other
people's. She shivered to think of Wullie's brother Tammas and his son
Jock out fishing in the night with icy salt water pouring over chafed
hands, soaking through their oilskins; she cried after a savagely silent
meal of herrings and oatcake when she had not noticed what she was
eating, to think of the villagers with nothing but herrings and
oatcakes. She hated to think of things hungry, things in pain. She even
felt a great, inarticulate pity for her father. For all his striding
autocracy and high-handedness there was something naive and childish
about him that clutched at her heart. He was like Ben Grief, alone and
bare when the winds tore.

He was thorough, was Andrew Lashcairn. Finding the young student's
"Riddle of the Universe" in the book-room one day he read it idly. It
started him on a course of philosophy in which he determined to include
Marcella. From Edinburgh came boxes of books--and a queer assortment of
books they were. Locke and Berkeley, James' "Natural Religion," Renan's
"Life of Christ," a very bad translation of Lucretius; Frazer's "Golden
Bough," a good deal of Huxley and Darwin, and many of the modern
writers. They were something amazingly new to him, and Marcella used to
watch him sitting in the fireless book-room with a candle flickering
while the wind soughed round the house and in through every chink in the
worn walls. His fine grey eyes were deep sunken; when he looked up
suddenly there was sometimes a little light of madness in them that made
her recoil instinctively; his thick hair was greyish, whitening over the
temples; his high Keltic cheekbones were gaunter than ever, his forehead
and mouth lined with past rages. He had never held a religion--the
Lashcairn religion had been a jumble of superstition, ancestor-worship
and paganism on which a Puritan woman marrying a Lashcairn in the
middle seventeenth century had grafted her dour faith. It had
flourished--something hard and dictatorial about it found good soil
on the Lashcairn stock.

So modern Rationalism had a stern fight with Andrew, struggling with the
madness of the Kelt, the dourness of the Puritan. It held him for a year
and no more, for a thing unemotional could not grip a thing so
excitable. In that year Marcella was bidden read all the books her
father read, and believe them. When she evaded them she was forced to
read them aloud, with a dictionary at her side, and discuss them
intelligently with him. If she answered at random, with her heart and
her eyes away at the huts with Wullie, he would throw at her head the
nearest thing that came to his hand--a book, a faggot of wood, a cup of
tea--or order her to bed without any food. Marcella had to follow him
on these excursions into philosophic doubt, sacrificing her pet calf
of legend and poetry every day in the temple of Rimmon, handcuffed to
him as she did it. But Andrew Lashcairn did everything with such
thoroughness that he seemed to use up a certain set of cells in his
brain exhaustively, and thus procure revulsion. A man who can drink half
a gallon of whisky a day for years consistently, and stop without a
moment's notice, can do most things. Andrew took Rationalism as he took
whisky; he forced it upon his household.

In all this time her chief joy was to be found in writing long letters
to her dead mother, whom she imagined to be living somewhere between the
sunshine and the rain, an immanent presence. These letters she burnt
usually, though sometimes she made little boats of them and floated them
out to sea, and sometimes she pushed them into the shifting sands
through fissures on Lashnagar. They comforted her strangely; they were
adoration and love crystallized. Her only friendliness came from
Hunchback Wullie, when she could escape from the book-room and run down
to his hut.

It was a hard winter, this winter of philosophic doubt for souls and
bodies both. The wild gales kept the fishing-boats at home; the wild
weather had played havoc with the harvests, and often Marcella knew that
Wullie was hungry, though he never told her so. Whenever she went to the
hut she would manage to be absent from a meal beforehand, and going to
Jean, would ask for her ration of whatever was going. Down in the hut
she and Wullie would sit round the fire of driftwood, reaching down
dried herrings from the roof and toasting them on spits of wood for
their feast. And they would talk while the sea crept up and down outside
whispering, or dashed almost at the door shrieking.

One night as they sat toasting their fish and watching the salt
driftwood splutter and crackle with blue flames, Marcella asked
Wullie what he thought of philosophic doubt.

"I've been reading a book to father to-day, Wullie, that says we are all
unreal--that we are not here really, but only a dream."

Wullie sat back a little, turned the fish on his spit without speaking,
and then said:

"Well, maybe we are. Maybe all life's a dream. But all the same it is a
dream dreamed by God."

"I think that's what the book says, but they use such hard words."

"I wouldna fash, lassie. There's not much we do understand, any of us.
That's where I think books fall short--they explain things just as far
as the writer understands. And whiles he doesna understand very far, but
he's got a trick of putting things nicely. Most things you know without
understanding: you do them blindly and someday you see they've been
right. That's what I mean about God making us a pathway. I feel that He
has been walking along my life; I couldna prove it to ye, Marcella. But
one day He'll suddenly turn round when He gets to the end of me and
smile and thank me for carrying Him along a bit."

"I like to know things beforehand," she objected.

"Ye winna. Right at the end ye'll be able to look down yer life and see
the shining marks of His feet all over ye. An' the more ye struggle and
fuss the less He can take hold of ye, and get a grup on ye with His
feet--"

"I'd like to feel sure they were God's, and not any other sort of feet,"
she said slowly, leaving her fish to go cold, though she was very
hungry.

"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. It had borne fruit two years now.

"It knew nothing: it was just still and quiet when something told it to
push on. And then life came along it--like a path. If it had known, it
couldna help the life any--"

She nodded again. She felt she understood now.

At the end of the year things began to go badly again at the farm. 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. One of the serving women, falling ill, went to Edinburgh to be
cured and never came back; paint, blistered and scarred from the doors
and window frames by the weather, was not replaced; the holes gnawed and
torn by the hungry rats in wainscot and floor were never patched and
food was more scarce than ever. Aunt Janet sat, a dourly silent ghost,
while Marcella read to Andrew, listening sickly to the beasts clamouring
for their scanty meals. And one night, when he had been out alone along
Ben Grief and seen his lands and his old grey house, Lashcairn the
Landless, as they called him, went back to his barrel.

For three days he lived behind the green baize door. On the fourth he
came out with his red-rimmed eyes ablaze, his gaunt face pinched, his
hair bedraggled. And that night a little old man, Rose's cousin from
Winchester, came to see them. He had never seen the mad family into
which his cousin had married; he had not seen her since she was a gentle
little thing in pinafores, with a great family of wax dolls. He did not
know that she was dead. Aunt Janet made no explanations; his small black
eyes took in all the decay and famine of the place; his neat black
Sabbatical coat looked queerly out of place in the book-room with its
scarred oak refectory table, its hard oak chairs and its dusty banner
hung from the ceiling above where Andrew Lashcairn sat. When his host
came into the room he pulled himself to his full five feet five and his
thin white face went even whiter. Andrew, in his frenzy, cursed him and
God and the world, and, in the old Berserk rage, dashed over the heavy
table on which Aunt Janet had set a poor meal for the stranger.

It was a wild, bizarre picture; the fire, fanned by the fierce winds
that swept down the open chimney, kept sending out puffs of smoke that
went like grey wraiths about the room; the top of the table rutted by
hundreds of years' fierce feeding; the shattered crockery and
forlorn-looking mess of food on the floor. Aunt Janet and Marcella
shrunk away--her father never got one of his rages but the girl felt
old agony in her broken arm--but the little white-faced cousin stood in
front of Andrew's gaunt frame, which seemed twice his size.

"What's the matter, Cousin Andrew?" he asked mildly. Then, turning to
the others, he said gently: "Go away for a little while. I'll have a
talk with Andrew about little Rose."

They went away with Andrew's curses following them along the windy
passage. Marcella waited in sympathy with the little man's arms, but
after a while a murmur of normal conversation came from the room and
went on until two o'clock in the morning. At last the little old cousin
came to where Marcella and Aunt Janet shivered in the kitchen, and said
simply:

"Andrew has cast his burden on the Lord, and now he can go on his way
singing."

Marcella began to cry from sheer nervousness. She had not the faintest
idea what the cousin meant, but she was to know it as time went by. For
Andrew got religion as he got everything else--very thoroughly--and,
just as he had superimposed Rationalism on his house and bent it before
his whisky furies, now he tried to religionize it.

After two days the cousin went away and never came again. Almost it
seemed as though he had never been, for he wrote not at all, simply
going his serene, white-faced way through their lives for two days and
two nights and dropping out of them. Marcella, telling Wullie about it,
received his explanation.

"It's what I tauld ye afore, lassie. We're not things or people, really.
We're juist paths."

"Was it God who came along that night?" asked Marcella doubtfully.
Wullie thought it was. But she found her father's religion even more
difficult than any of his other obsessions. It made him eager and
pathetic. He had never tried to make drunkards of people; Marcella he
had impatiently tried to make a rationalist; but now he spent all his
time trying to convert them. His household was veneered with evangelism.
The kindly desire to save brands from the burning sent him to the
village praying and quoting the Word to those who once thought him a
king, later a terror, and now could not understand him. Men coming from
the fields and the boats were asked questions about their peace with
God, and in the little chapel where once the Covenanters had met, Andrew
Lashcairn's voice was raised in prayers and exhortations so long and so
burning that he often emptied the place even of zealots before he had
tired himself and God.

All the time Marcella ached with pity for him now that she feared him no
longer. He seemed so naive, so wistful to her, this strange father whom
she could never understand, but who seemed like a child very keen on a
game of make-believe. Things went from bad to worse, but they sat down
to their meal of oatcake and milk uncomplaining, after a long grace. It
was never the way of the Lashcairns to notice overmuch the demands of
the body. And now they sat by the almost bare refectory table, and none
of them would mention hunger; Andrew did not feel it. His zeal fed him.
Marcella, however, took to going down oftener to the huts and always
Wullie, who sensed these things, toasted fish--three or four at a
time--over the embers, and roasted potatoes in the bed of ashes.

It was in the summer following this last obsession that Andrew was taken
suddenly ill. One evening, praying with blazing ardour for the souls of
the whole world, consciousness of unbearable weight came upon him.
Standing in the little chapel he felt that he was being pressed to his
knees and there, with a terrible voice, he cried:

"Yes, Lord, put all the weight of Thy cross upon me, Thy poor
servant--Thy Simon of Cyrene who so untimely, so unhelpfully hath found
Thee."

Those watching believed that they saw the black shadow of a cross laid
over his bowed shoulders. But then, like Andrew, they were Kelts who
could see with eyes that were not apparent. Andrew was carried home to
his bed, and Dr. Angus, the same doctor he had driven forth in violence
from his wife's sickness, came to him.

Thorough in body as in soul, Andrew seemed called upon to bear all the
woes of the world. Sometimes, watching him lying there with closed eyes
and lips that moved faintly as he prayed for courage, Marcella wished
she could see him once again come tearing into the room in a passion
of destruction. His gentleness, his pathos, and the way he talked so
quietly to God with his beautiful voice, almost tore her in two with
pity.

Many nights his illness made it impossible for him to lie down, and then
he would stand, wrapped in a blanket--for his dressing-gown had long
since been torn to shreds--his hands clutching the post of his ancient
bed, his eyes gazing deeply at the faded sun in splendour on the
tapestry back of the bed while he read slowly the old boastful motto,
"By myself I stand." And the girl, lying on a little couch where she
took turns with Aunt Janet in nursing him through the night, would hear
him talking to God by the hour.

"Not by myself, O Lord, but in Thy might. Thou art my Rock and my
Fortress, my Defence on my right hand, my strong shield in whom I
trust--"

Silence--except for the grating of rats in the ceiling as they tried to
gnaw the beams, and the moaning of the wind. Then the musical voice
would say, with infinite tenderness:

"He hath said thy foot shall not be moved. Thy keeper shall never, never
slumber nor sleep. O Lord, I am not asking Thee a very great thing, for
already Thou hast done wondrous things for me. This is a little thing, O
Thou that never sleepest! Give me ten minutes' rest, ten minutes' sleep.
To Thee a thousand years are but as yesterday. To me, O Lord, in this
weariness, a night is as a thousand years."

Helped by Marcella he would clamber into bed again, shutting his eyes,
waiting on the Lord, only to start up as the pumping of his worn-out,
strained heart almost choked him. And then, leaning back on heaped
pillows he would look out through the dark window and say, very humbly:

"Most patient hast Thou been with me, Oh Lord, when Thou wast seeking
me so far. Most patient must I be with Thee--I, who have no claim upon
Thy mercy save Thy own most holy kindliness to me."

And so the night would wear on; sometimes he would talk to God,
sometimes to Marcella, telling her how he had hated her because she was
not a boy and seemed, to his great strength, too much like her frail
English mother to be of any use in the world.

"We're a great folk, we Lashcairns, Marcella," he would say, his sunken
eyes brightening. "A great name, Marcella. 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? O Lord, Thou knowest
that in nothing do I glory save in the Cross of Jesus Christ. O Lord,
Simon of Cyrene, Thy cross-bearer, has naught to boast save only the
burden Thy grace has laid upon him. Be patient with me, O Lord--very
hardly dies the vanity of the flesh."

Andrew was always glad when it was Marcella's turn to stay with him at
night, for he liked her to read to him; she read the epistles of Paul
especially and F.W.H. Myers' "St. Paul" until she knew them almost by
heart. In St. Paul Andrew saw much of himself: especially could he see
himself on the Damascus road when a blinding light came down.

Three of the five cows were sold to buy the medicines and the patent
foods he did not seem to notice. Duncan, the farm man who never got any
wages, went out at night to work with Jock and Tammas in their boat, and
at every month end he handed to Aunt Janet the money he got to buy
things for his master. Though he was on his bed Andrew did not forget
his proselytising and Duncan and Jean were brought into the bedroom
every night while Marcella read the New Testament, and her father
prayed. He prayed for her soul and the souls of Duncan and Jean;
Marcella would kneel between the two of them, with the smell of the
fish from Duncan and the scent of the byres from Jean's shoes and her
clothes stealing round her while her father prayed. She was bewildered
by him: very often, when he prayed long and she was falling asleep after
her wakeful night, she would feel impatient with him, especially when he
prayed loud and long that she might be brought to a conviction of sin.
He puzzled her unendurably; sometimes her old docility to his autocracy
made her feel that she really must be the miserable sinner he pictured
her. Sometimes her common sense told her she could not be. Then, on top
of the impatience and revolt, would come aching pity for his weakness,
his tenderness to God, the apologies he made for God who was so hard, so
just in His dealings with him.

He seemed often to resent his illness bitterly; he had never known
anything but an almost savage strength. Now he lay watching his illness
with a curious mixture of fierce resentment and proprietorial pride. He
spent a good deal of his time trying to think of ways in which he could
circumvent the choking sensation that often came to him. Marcella
brought some comfort by placing the kitchen ironing board across the
bed, resting on the backs of two chairs so that he could lean forward on
it. Sometimes he slept so, his grey head jerking forward and backward in
his weariness.

One night, when he could not sleep, he got out of bed and, leaning
on Marcella's shoulders, began to walk about. The moon was rising
desolately over Lashnagar, and he stood for a long time in the window
looking at the dead waste of it all. Suddenly he shivered.

"Father, ye're cold," said Marcella quickly. "Let me put on your socks.
It's a shame of me to let you stand barefoot so long."

He sat down on the deep window-seat, and the moonlight streamed in upon
his feet as she knelt beside him.

"Why, you are getting fat, father," she said. "I can hardly get your
socks on! And I thought your face looked thinner to-day. What a good
thing--if you get fat."

"Fat, Marcella?" he said in a strange, faint voice. "That's what the
doctor's been expecting. It's the last lap!"

"What do you mean, father? Isn't it better for you to be getting fat
now?"

He smiled a little and, bending down, pressed his fingers on the
swollen ankle. The indentations stayed there. She thought of the soft
depression on Lashnagar where the young shepherd had gone down.

"We'll just walk about a bit, Marcella," he said, his hand pressing
heavily on her shoulder. "I thought my legs felt very tired and heavy.
This is the last lap of the race. When my hands get fat like that my
heart will be drowned, Marcella."

"Father, what _do_ you mean?" she cried frantically, but he told her
nothing. There were no medical books in the house which she could read.
She had to be content, as Wullie had said, to go on to the end knowing
nothing, while things trod along her life.

"It's a damned sort of death, Marcella, for a Lashcairn. Lying in
bed--getting stiffer and heavier--and in the end drowned. We like to go
out fighting, Marcella, killing and being killed. Did I ever tell you of
Tammas Lashcairn and how he tore a wolf to pieces in the old grey house
on Ben Grief?"

He talked quickly and strangely, disjointed talk out of which she wove
wild tales of the deaths of her people in the past.

After he had got back into bed and she stooped over him, trying to chafe
warmth into his cold feet, he looked at her more kindly than he had ever
looked before.

"All my life I have cursed you because you were a girl. I cursed your
mother because she gave me no son. And now I thank God that you are not
a man, to carry on the old name."

"Why, father?" she asked, her eyes frightened and puzzled.

"The Lord deals righteously. I shall sleep now," was all he said.

It was Wullie who told her what her father had meant. They were up on
Ben Grief watching the swollen streams overflowing with melted snow and
storm-water. Marcella looked wan and tired; her eyes were ringed with
black shadows. As usual she was hungry, but Wullie had left potatoes
buried under the green-wood fire, and they would feast when they got
back.

"Why is it father is glad I'm not a boy?" she asked him.

It was a long time before he told her.

"The Lashcairns are a wild lot, lassie--especially the men folk. They
kill and they rule others and they drink. It's drink that's ruined them,
because drink is the only thing they canna rule. That's the men folk I'm
talking of. Your great-grandfather lost all his lands that lie about
Carlossie. The old grey house and the fields all about Ben Grief and
Lashnagar were lost by your father. All he's got now is Lashnagar and
the farm-house. And Lashnagar canna be sold because it hasna any value.
Else he'd have sold it, to put it in his bar'l."

She said nothing. Her tired eyes looked out over the farm and the
desolate hill, her hair, streaming in the wind, suddenly wrapped her
face, blinding her. As she struggled with it, light came, and she turned
to Wullie.

"It was the barrel, then, that made father ill?"

"It was so."

"And grandfather, and his father--did they get ill, too, through the
barrel?"

He shook his head, and she snatched at his arm roughly.

"Wullie, ye're to tell me. I'm telling ye ye're to tell me, Wullie. I
never heard of them. How did they die? I shall ask father if you don't
tell me."

"Your great-grandfather killed his son in a quarrel, when your father
was a bit laddie of four. The next day he was found dead beside his
bar'l in the cellar."

The storm-water went swirling down by their feet, brown and frothing. It
went down and down as though Ben Grief were crying hopelessly for this
wild people he had cradled.

"I see, now, why he's glad I'm not a boy. Wullie--do all the Lashcairns
die--like that?" and she pictured again her father waiting, as he put
it, to be drowned in his bed while a procession of killed and killing
ancestors seemed to glide before her eyes over the rushing water.

"The men folk, yes. They canna rule themselves."

"And the women?" she said sharply, realizing that she and Aunt Janet
were all that were left.

"They keep away from the bar'l."

"Yes, I couldn't imagine Aunt Janet doing that," she said, smiling
faintly. "Or me."

"Some of the women rule themselves," he said tentatively. "There was
the witch-woman first--and later there was the Puritan woman. They seem
to mother your women between them. There's never any telling which it'll
be."

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