Hunchback Wullie had told her that
the old grey house on Ben Grief used to be her home, and that the lands
all about had belonged to her father. But they were his no longer and
she was forbidden to pass the old grey house, or even to speak of it.
Andrew Lashcairn, Aunt Janet, two women servants and a man who never
seemed to have any wages for their work lived with Marcella at the farm.
The man and Aunt Janet planted things in the garden, but on the poor
land, among the winds they never grew very well. Oats grew, thin and
tough, in the fields, and were ground to make the daily porridge;
sometimes one of the skinny fowls that picked and pecked its hungry way
through life round about the cattle pen and the back door was killed for
a meal; sometimes Marcella ran miles away up Ben Grief when one of the
lean pigs screamed its life out in a stream of blood in the yard. She
used to feel sorry for the beasts about the farm; the cows seemed to
have such huge, gaunt bodies and looked at her with such mournful eyes
when she went through the croft in which they were eating the scanty
grass. The two old horses who did the ploughing and the harvesting
had ribs that she could count, that felt sharp when she stroked their
patient sides. The cows lowed a great deal--very plaintively and deep;
the pigs squealed hungrily every time a pail clattered in the kitchen or
steps passed their sty door.
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