“Justice—­not mercy.  I would not take mercy even from Thee.  The full rigour of Thy law—­”

There was no alleviation, and Marcella, kneeling there, wished that she and her father could die together.  The horror of helplessness was searing her soul.

Next day came agonizing pain which made every movement a death.  But the Edinburgh doctor who came brought relief for the pain, and, talking with Dr. Angus, the Carlossie doctor, mentioned, among other technicalities, the name of a drug—­“digitalis.”  That afternoon Marcella went back in the doctor’s trap to get the new medicine, and it gave relief.  Whenever, after that, the choking came back, Andrew would cry out for digitalis, which seemed to him the elixir of life.  Sometimes he would pray for courage; sometimes, cracking suddenly, he would pray for digitalis and send Marcella often at midnight with a pleading note to the doctor to give him the drug and a little soothing for his heart that was running away with him.

Now that he could not move about he still thought of the souls of the people in the village, and sent a message to them, pleading with them to come and see him.  And they, remembering him as the laird, with a sort of feudal obedience, came and stood about his bed, to be stormed at or prayed with according to Andrew’s mood.  But always after one of these missionary efforts he would suffer agonies of suffocation when he had forgotten, for a while, that his heart was a bubble of glass.

It was an unreal world, this shadowed world of the old farm.  It centred round Andrew Lashcairn’s bed—­he was its sun, its king, its autocrat still.  But things material had slipped from him—­or rather, material interests were all centralized in his tortured body.  At first during his illness he had worried about the farm, sending messages to Duncan much more than he had done during the days when he was shut behind the green baize door.  But now all the farm had slipped from him.  He was alone with his body and his soul and God.  Most often his soul cried out.  Sometimes his body broke through and showed its pains and the strength of old desires.

As he grew weaker he tried to grasp out at strength.  Aunt Janet, who had “ruled herself” to nervelessness, had nothing of the mother, the nurse in her make-up; there was no tenderness in what she did for him.  It was not that she had any spirit of getting her own back on Andrew for his tyranny, his impoverishment, his ill-usage of her in the past.  She would have given him her last crumb of food if she had thought of it.  But a thing atrophied as she was could not think or feel, and so he went without the small tendernesses that would have come to him had Rose, the soft little Englishwoman, lived.  She sat up with him night after night patiently.  She gave him milk, and she and Marcella went without it that he should have enough.  She gave him the inevitable porridge and broth, but he turned away from the things he had eaten all his life in disgust.