"You'll be kept busy," she said, smiling. "When we've cleared the twenty acres of gorse it's all to be ploughed and planted. And when that's done and there isn't a single other thing to do, we'll start to tunnel a hole through the middle of the earth to Lashnagar, like they did in Jules Verne's book."
"I'm keeping my body occupied," he went on slowly. "The point is, will that satisfy my brain, and all of me?"
She looked down the little slope on the top of which Castle Lashcairn stood. The five gum trees stretched up to the cloudless night sky; a few hundred yards away the lake glimmered, star-reflecting and still. To the left the lamp of the Homestead glowed, and "Oh Dry Those Tears" started to groan out. Marcella waited for the line that almost sounded like a collection of bass "brrrrrs" and then she spoke.
"If you can forget yourself, my dear—get swallowed up," she said gently, and a silence fell between them.
The days drew into weeks. Castle Lashcairn grew more and more beautiful; the books arrived from Sydney and kept sentry on the white shelf. Several of her unnecessary frocks Marcella made into cushions stuffed with dried lucerne which made a most interesting crackling noise when one leaned against them. Louis spent most of his Sundays in making a cot for his son but his fatal lack of thoroughness was a drawback, for it seemed to come to pieces as quickly as he got it together. Marcella looked after the fowls and the cows; she did most of the cooking at the Homestead; she got the children beyond the hanger and pothook stage of writing and filled their minds, hitherto worried by family cares, with legend and fairy-tale. She wrote often to Dr. Angus, and he sent her books and garden seeds. All the time she and Louis never found a moment in which to be idle; about eleven o'clock every day she took his lunch across the clearing to him; she collaborated a good deal with Mrs. Beeton in making various ambitious dishes for him, but as they were almost entirely made of mutton, "standard" flour and eggs, there was not much variety. When the fried sheep had lived too long before being killed, or been kept too long after death, they spent considerable time looking at the pretty pictures in the cookery book: Marcella told of Wullie's feasts in the beach-hut. Louis remembered restaurant celebrations. But they were always too hungry to care much what they ate; the most leathery damper, the most difficult mutton was pleasant eaten out of doors in the faint smoke of the gorse fires.
During the afternoons she helped with the gorse grubbing. Before the great bushes could be approached they had to be fired, and she loved to watch the golden blaze flare swiftly to the sky, leaving a pall of grey smoke through which the carbonized gorse branches shone gold for a moment in a fairy tracery before crumbling to white ash on the ground. Then they had to take pickaxes and mattocks, chisels and spades to chop down the parent stem and uproot the smallest leader from the roots. Gorse is very tenacious of life. A root of only a few inches will spring up to a great tree in an incredibly short time, especially on virgin soil fertilized by many burnings.
They had faces perpetually blackened by smoke. Marcella worked with an oilskin bathing-cap sent by Mrs. King, over her hair; she wore an old blue overall on which the spines of the gorse had worked havoc. And still she would not be ill to fall in with Louis's preconceived notions; living an absolutely normal, rather tough life, hardened by her father's Spartanism, she found that a natural process made very little difference to her. To Louis's real distress she swam in the lake every morning; what he could not understand was that she had scarcely, even yet, awakened to consciousness of her body. Once or twice in her queer ecstasies, once or twice in Sydney the sleep within her had stirred and stretched and opened her eyes; from the force of the stirring and stretching she had gathered an impression of something immensely strong. But it had not yet risen and walked about her life yet.
One day she went across the clearing to Louis, through the smoke wreaths that were being gently swayed to and fro by a soft wind. In a blue shirt open at the neck, shewing a triangle of brown chest, he looked very different from the effeminate Louis of the Oriana. Just as she reached him, looking at him instead of the rough ground, all rutted with uptorn roots, she slipped and almost fell. In an instant his arm, taut and strong, was round her. She laughed and drew away from him.
"I was looking at you coming along here, Marcella," he said. "Do you know what you remind me of?"
"Dinner?" she said, sitting down to unpack the basket of food.