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.