At the end of the landing on which their big top room opened was a short iron ladder. She decided to explore and, climbing up the iron ladder, pushed up the trapdoor. A cry of delight escaped her as she thrust her head through the opening. It was a great, flat roof, separated from the next ones by low copings of stone work, flat topped and about two feet high. The town, as she climbed out and stood on the roof, lay beneath her like a plan. People looked like flies in the streets, the tramcars like accelerated caterpillars. The water of the harbour was still and smooth and as incredibly blue as the water she had seen Mrs. King using in her laundry work that morning. Wharves or trees ran right down into the blueness. The big ships lying at anchor made her heart beat fast with their clean beauty and romance; the bare, clean roofs running along for perhaps fifty houses gave her a breath of freedom that brought back Lashnagar and Ben Grief. She thought, with a pang of pity, about Louis, the product of suburban London, chained to streets and houses almost all his boyhood, knowing nothing of the scourge of the winds, the courage of wide, high places. She tumbled down the ladder, her eyes bright.
"Louis—Oh Louis, come up on the roof! It's perfectly beautiful! I've been so worried about you shut up here like this, and I've felt so choked myself with this one room. But up there I'll make you shut your eyes, and I'll tell you all about Ben Grief, and you'll think you're there. I'll make you hear the curlews and the gulls and see Jock and Tammas come in with the boats."
"But on the roof!" he protested. "Whatever next?"
"Oh, come and see. You'll love it," she urged and, though he said it was "a beastly fag," she got him at last into his dressing-gown and slippers and sitting beside her on the coping.
She was happier than she had been for months; she felt that there was enough breath up here for her, and not even his laughing at her for being "such a kid" could damp her enjoyment. Presently a new idea occurred to her.
"Let's sleep up here!" she cried, and once again over-ruled his objections, and dragged up the mattress and blankets.
The shadows of the chimneys were long across the roofs as she laid the mattress down by the coping. The day had been hot with the clear, bright heat of early summer. They sat on the mattress, smoking—an accomplishment Marcella had learnt from him and practised rather tentatively. She talked to him of Lashnagar, pouring into his ears legend after legend of her people, until she came to the tale of the spaewife and the coming of the ruin upon Lashnagar.
"Do you mean to have the cheek to say this is an ancestor of yours?" he asked as, with glowing eyes and quickened breaths, she told him of the twins born on Flodden Field and wrapt in their foemen's trappings. Had he been less self-centred he could not have tried to hurt her by making fun of her legends.
"Yes. She is my great, great, goodness knows how great grandmother. I'm rather proud of her, but she takes some living up to. I often feel I disappoint her. But if ever I feel flabby or lazy or tired of hard things I switch my mind on to her. Fancy her, sick and weak, tramping after her man to the battle, and then leaving him dead as she took his heirs and his shattered pennant back to the ruins of his home. I feel ashamed of myself for ever daring to think I'm ill-used when I think of my spaewife grandmother! We're not brave and hard like that now—But I'd rather like to get her here to settle you and people who talk about 'limiting' women. She wasn't much of a passenger."
"Oh, that witch story comes in lots of mythologies, and old family histories!" he said, teasingly. "I don't suppose she ever existed at all, really, or if she did it was because she'd been tarred and feathered and took refuge at that out of the world show because she was afraid of being burnt."