Before Rose Lashcairn was ill she had taken great pleasure in dressing
her little girl; soft things, woven of silk and wool, came from London
for her, soft shoes and stockings and frocks of fine texture and
beautiful colour that seemed strange and exotic on Lashnagar. But these
were worn out and never replaced--except for her mother's funeral she
never wore shoes, summer or winter. Her feet and legs were brown and
quite invulnerable to stones or brambles. Her father did not realize
that she needed clothes; her aunt was too much sunk in shadows to notice
the child's appearance. And, reading her legends and romances, it was
natural that Marcella should live them and dress them. In a press in her
mother's room were clothes brought from the old grey house, the
accumulation of days when fabrics were made as heirlooms. There were
plaids and brocades and silks: there was lace from Valenciennes and
linen from Cambrai, yellow with age. There were muslins that a Lashcairn
had brought when he adventured to India with Clive. Rose often wept over
them. Several times Marcella's dreams nearly cost her her life, for,
living them so utterly, she became detached from the physical world. One
time, when a stormy golden sun went down behind black clouds, shining on
an ancient pile of grey stones that stood on a little spit of land near
the bar of the river, she was reminded of Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur."
She heard the ripples lapping on the reeds and, with an imaginary Sir
Bedivere at her elbow, hurried back to the farm to dress herself as a
Scottish edition of King Arthur in kilts that had belonged to her
grandfather. She worshipped the shine of the moon on the great jewel at
her breast as she stepped into the little frail boat, very tired after a
long day's wandering on Ben Grief without food. To a Kelt death is a
thing so interpenetrating life that thought of it brought no fear;
there was a sort of adventurous anticipation about it. She cast a
stick--her sword Excalibur--into midstream and waited for the arm "clad
in white samite, mystic, wonderful." That it did not appear meant very