I went to tea under the big apple-tree. It was very big and old and wonderful. No wonder Mr. MacNairn and his mother loved it. Its great branches spread out farther than I had ever seen the branches of an apple-tree spread before. They were gnarled and knotted and beautiful with age. Their shadows upon the grass were velvet, deep and soft. Such a tree could only have lived its life in such a garden. At least it seemed so to me. The high, dim-colored walls, with their curious, low corner towers and the leafage of the wall fruits spread against their brick, inclosed it embracingly, as if they were there to take care of it and its beauty. But the tree itself seemed to have grown there in all its dignified loveliness of shadow to take care of Mrs. MacNairn, who sat under it. I felt as if it loved and was proud of her.
I have heard clever literary people speak of Mrs. MacNairn as a “survival of type.” Sometimes clever people bewilder me by the terms they use, but I thought I understood what they meant in her case. She was quite unlike the modern elderly woman, and yet she was not in the least old-fashioned or demodee. She was only exquisitely distinct.
When she rose from her chair under the apple-tree boughs and came forward to meet me that afternoon, the first things which struck me were her height and slenderness and her light step. Then I saw that her clear profile seemed cut out of ivory and that her head was a beautiful shape and was beautifully set. Its every turn and movement was exquisite. The mere fact that both her long, ivory hands enfolded mine thrilled me. I wondered if it were possible that she could be unaware of her loveliness. Beautiful people are thrilling to me, and Mrs. MacNairn has always seemed more so than any one else. This is what her son once said of her:
“She is not merely beautiful; she is Beauty—Beauty’s very spirit moving about among us mortals; pure Beauty.”
She drew me to a chair under her tree, and we sat down together. I felt as if she were glad that I had come. The watching look I had seen in her son’s eyes was in hers also. They watched me as we talked, and I found myself telling her about my home as I had found myself telling him. He had evidently talked to her about it himself. I had never met any one who thought of Muircarrie as I did, but it seemed as if they who were strangers were drawn by its wild, beautiful loneliness as I was.
I was happy. In my secret heart I began to ask myself if it could be true that they made me feel a little as if I somehow belonged to some one. I had always seemed so detached from every one. I had not been miserable about it, and I had not complained to myself; I only accepted the detachment as part of my kind of life.
Mr. MacNairn came into the garden later and several other people came in to tea. It was apparently a sort of daily custom—that people who evidently adored Mrs. MacNairn dropped in to see and talk to her every afternoon. She talked wonderfully, and her friends’ joy in her was wonderful, too. It evidently made people happy to be near her. All she said and did was like her light step and the movements of her delicate, fine head—gracious and soft and arrestingly lovely. She did not let me drift away and sit in a corner looking on, as I usually did among strangers. She kept me near her, and in some subtle, gentle way made me a part of all that was happening—the talk, the charming circle under the spreading boughs of the apple-tree, the charm of everything. Sometimes she would put out her exquisite, long-fingered hand and touch me very lightly, and each time she did it I felt as if she had given me new life.
There was an interesting elderly man who came among the rest of the guests. I was interested in him even before she spoke to me of him. He had a handsome, aquiline face which looked very clever. His talk was brilliantly witty. When he spoke people paused as if they could not bear to lose a phrase or even a word. But in the midst of the trills of laughter surrounding him his eyes were unchangingly sad. His face laughed or smiled, but his eyes never.
“He is the greatest artist in England and the most brilliant man,” Mrs. MacNairn said to me, quietly. “But he is the saddest, too. He had a lovely daughter who was killed instantly, in his presence, by a fall. They had been inseparable companions and she was the delight of his life. That strange, fixed look has been in his eyes ever since. I know you have noticed it.”
We were walking about among the flower-beds after tea, and Mr. MacNairn was showing me a cloud of blue larkspurs in a corner when I saw something which made me turn toward him rather quickly.
“There is one!” I said. “Do look at her! Now you see what I mean! The girl standing with her hand on Mr. Le Breton’s arm.”
Mr. Le Breton was the brilliant man with the sad eyes. He was standing looking at a mass of white-and-purple iris at the other side of the garden. There were two or three people with him, but it seemed as if for a moment he had forgotten them—had forgotten where he was. I wondered suddenly if his daughter had been fond of irises. He was looking at them with such a tender, lost expression. The girl, who was a lovely, fair thing, was standing quite close to him with her hand in his arm, and she was smiling, too—such a smile!
“Mr. Le Breton!” Mr. MacNairn said in a rather startled tone. “The girl with her hand in his arm?”
“Yes. You see how fair she is,” I answered.
“And she has that transparent look. It is so lovely. Don’t you think so? SHE is one of the White People.”
He stood very still, looking across the flowers at the group. There was a singular interest and intensity in his expression. He watched the pair silently for a whole minute, I think.
“Ye-es,” he said, slowly, at last, “I do see what you mean—and it IS lovely. I don’t seem to know her well. She must be a new friend of my mother’s. So she is one of the White People?”
“She looks like a white iris herself, doesn’t she?” I said. “Now you know.”
“Yes; now I know,” he answered.
I asked Mrs. MacNairn later who the girl was, but she didn’t seem to recognize my description of her. Mr. Le Breton had gone away by that time, and so had the girl herself.
“The tall, very fair one in the misty, pale-gray dress,” I said. “She was near Mr. Le Breton when he was looking at the iris-bed. You were cutting some roses only a few yards away from her. That VERY fair girl?”
Mrs. MacNairn paused a moment and looked puzzled.
“Mildred Keith is fair,” she reflected, “but she was not there then. I don’t recall seeing a girl. I was cutting some buds for Mrs. Anstruther. I—” She paused again and turned toward her son, who was standing watching us. I saw their eyes meet in a rather arrested way.
“It was not Mildred Keith,” he said. “Miss Muircarrie is inquiring because this girl was one of those she calls the White People. She was not any one I had seen here before.”
There was a second’s silence before Mrs. MacNairn smilingly gave me one of her light, thrilling touches on my arm.
“Ah! I remember,” she said. “Hector told me about the White People. He rather fancied I might be one.”
I am afraid I rather stared at her as I slowly shook my head. You see she was almost one, but not quite.
“I was so busy with my roses that I did not notice who was standing near Mr. Le Breton,” she said. “Perhaps it was Anabel Mere. She is a more transparent sort of girl than Mildred, and she is more blond. And you don’t know her, Hector? I dare say it was she.”
I remained in London several weeks. I stayed because the MacNairns were so good to me. I could not have told any one how I loved Mrs. MacNairn, and how different everything seemed when I was with her. I was never shy when we were together. There seemed to be no such thing as shyness in the world. I was not shy with Mr. MacNairn, either. After I had sat under the big apple-tree boughs in the walled garden a few times I realized that I had begun to belong to somebody. Those two marvelous people cared for me in that way—in a way that made me feel as if I were a real girl, not merely a queer little awkward ghost in a far-away castle which nobody wanted to visit because it was so dull and desolate and far from London. They were so clever, and knew all the interesting things in the world, but their cleverness and experience never bewildered or overwhelmed me.
“You were born a wonderful little creature, and Angus Macayre has filled your mind with strange, rich furnishings and marvelous color and form,” Mrs. MacNairn actually said to me one day when we were sitting together and she was holding my hand and softly, slowly patting it. She had a way of doing that, and she had also a way of keeping me very near her whenever she could. She said once that she liked to touch me now and then to make sure that I was quite real and would not melt away. I did not know then why she said it, but I understood afterward.
Sometimes we sat under the apple-tree until the long twilight deepened into shadow, which closed round us, and a nightingale that lived in the garden began to sing. We all three loved the nightingale, and felt as though it knew that we were listening to it. It is a wonderful thing to sit quite still listening to a bird singing in the dark, and to dare to feel that while it sings it knows how your soul adores it. It is like a kind of worship.
We had been sitting listening for quite a long time, and the nightingale had just ceased and left the darkness an exquisite silence which fell suddenly but softly as the last note dropped, when Mrs. MacNairn began to talk for the first time of what she called The Fear.
I don’t remember just how she began, and for a few minutes I did not quite understand what she meant. But as she went on, and Mr. MacNairn joined in the talk, their meaning became a clear thing to me, and I knew that they were only talking quite simply of something they had often talked of before. They were not as afraid of The Fear as most people are, because they had thought of and reasoned about it so much, and always calmly and with clear and open minds.
By The Fear they meant that mysterious horror most people feel at the thought of passing out of the world they know into the one they don’t know at all.
How quiet, how still it was inside the walls of the old garden, as we three sat under the boughs and talked about it! And what sweet night scents of leaves and sleeping flowers were in every breath we drew! And how one’s heart moved and lifted when the nightingale broke out again!
“If one had seen or heard one little thing, if one’s mortal being could catch one glimpse of light in the dark,” Mrs. MacNairn’s low voice said out of the shadow near me, “The Fear would be gone forever.”
“Perhaps the whole mystery is as simple as this,” said her son’s voice “as simple as this: that as there are tones of music too fine to be registered by the human ear, so there may be vibrations of light not to be seen by the human eye; form and color as well as sounds; just beyond earthly perception, and yet as real as ourselves, as formed as ourselves, only existing in that other dimension.”
There was an intenseness which was almost a note of anguish in Mrs. MacNairn’s answer, even though her voice was very low. I involuntarily turned my head to look at her, though of course it was too dark to see her face. I felt somehow as if her hands were wrung together in her lap.
“Oh!” she said, “if one only had some shadow of a proof that the mystery is only that WE cannot see, that WE cannot hear, though they are really quite near us, with us—the ones who seem to have gone away and whom we feel we cannot live without. If once we could be sure! There would be no Fear—there would be none!”
“Dearest”—he often called her “Dearest,” and his voice had a wonderful sound in the darkness; it was caress and strength, and it seemed to speak to her of things they knew which I did not—“we have vowed to each other that we WILL believe there is no reason for The Fear. It was a vow between us.”
“Yes! Yes!” she cried, breathlessly, “but sometimes, Hector—sometimes—”
“Miss Muircarrie does not feel it—”
“Please say ‘Ysobel’!” I broke in. “Please do.”
He went on as quietly as if he had not even paused:
“Ysobel told me the first night we met that it seemed as if she could not believe in it.”
“It never seems real to me at all,” I said. “Perhaps that is because I can never forget what Jean told me about my mother lying still upon her bed, and listening to some one calling her.” (I had told them Jean’s story a few days before.) “I knew it was my father; Jean knew, too.”
“How did you know?” Mrs. MacNairn’s voice was almost a whisper.
“I could not tell you that. I never asked myself HOW it was. But I KNEW. We both KNEW. Perhaps”—I hesitated—“it was because in the Highlands people often believe things like that. One hears so many stories all one’s life that in the end they don’t seem strange. I have always heard them. Those things you know about people who have the second sight. And about the seals who change themselves into men and come on shore and fall in love with girls and marry them. They say they go away now and then, and no one really knows where but it is believed that they go back to their own people and change into seals again, because they must plunge and riot about in the sea. Sometimes they come home, but sometimes they do not.
“A beautiful young stranger, with soft, dark eyes, appeared once not far from Muircarrie, and he married a boatman’s daughter. He was very restless one night, and got up and left her, and she never saw him again; but a few days later a splendid dead seal covered with wounds was washed up near his cottage. The fishers say that his people had wanted to keep him from his land wife, and they had fought with him and killed him. His wife had a son with strange, velvet eyes like his father’s, and she couldn’t keep him away from the water. When he was old enough to swim he swam out one day, because he thought he saw some seals and wanted to get near them. He swam out too far, perhaps. He never came back, and the fishermen said his father’s people had taken him. When one has heard stories like that all one’s life nothing seems very strange.”
“Nothing really IS strange,” said Hector MacNairn. “Again and again through all the ages we have been told the secrets of the gods and the wonders of the Law, and we have revered and echoed but never believed. When we believe and know all is simple we shall not be afraid. You are not afraid, Ysobel. Tell my mother you are not.”
I turned my face toward her again in the darkness. I felt as if something was going on between them which he somehow knew I could help them in. It was as though he were calling on something in my nature which I did not myself comprehend, but which his profound mind saw and knew was stronger than I was.
Suddenly I felt as if I might trust to him and to It, and that, without being troubled or anxious, I would just say the first thing which came into my mind, because it would be put there for me by some power which could dictate to me. I never felt younger or less clever than I did at that moment; I was only Ysobel Muircarrie, who knew almost nothing. But that did not seem to matter. It was such a simple, almost childish thing I told her. It was only about The Dream.
“The feeling you call The Fear has never come to me,” I said to her. “And if it had I think it would have melted away because of a dream I once had. I don’t really believe it was a dream, but I call it one. I think I really went somewhere and came back. I often wonder why I came back. It was only a short dream, so simple that there is scarcely anything to tell, and perhaps it will not convey anything to you. But it has been part of my life—that time when I was Out on the Hillside. That is what I call The Dream to myself, ‘Out on the Hillside,’ as if it were a kind of unearthly poem. But it wasn’t. It was more real than anything I have ever felt. It was real—real! I wish that I could tell it so that you would know how real it was.”
I felt almost piteous in my longing to make her know. I knew she was afraid of something, and if I could make her know how REAL that one brief dream had been she would not be afraid any more. And I loved her, I loved her so much!
“I was asleep one night at Muircarrie,” I went on, “and suddenly, without any preparatory dreaming, I was standing out on a hillside in moonlight softer and more exquisite than I had ever seen or known before. Perhaps I was still in my nightgown—I don’t know. My feet were bare on the grass, and I wore something light and white which did not seem to touch me. If it touched me I did not feel it. My bare feet did not feel the grass; they only knew it was beneath them.
“It was a low hill I stood on, and I was only on the side of it. And in spite of the thrilling beauty of the moon, all but the part I stood on melted into soft, beautiful shadow, all below me and above me. But I did not turn to look at or ask myself about anything. You see the difficulty is that there are no earthly words to tell it! All my being was ecstasy—pure, light ecstasy! Oh, what poor words— But I know no others. If I said that I was happy—HAPPY!—it would be nothing. I WAS happiness itself, I WAS pure rapture! I did not look at the beauty of the night, the sky, the marvelous melting shadow. I was PART of it all, one with it. Nothing held me nothing! The beauty of the night, the light, the air WERE what I was, and I was only thrilling ecstasy and wonder at the rapture of it.”
I stopped and covered my face with my hands, and tears wet my fingers.
“Oh, I cannot make it real! I was only there such a short, short time. Even if you had been with me I could not have found words for it, even then. It was such a short time. I only stood and lifted my face and felt the joy of it, the pure marvel of joy. I only heard myself murmuring over and over again: ‘Oh, how beautiful! how beautiful! Oh, how BEAUTIFUL!’
“And then a marvel of new joy swept through me. I said, very softly and very slowly, as if my voice were trailing away into silence: ‘Oh—h! I—can—lie—down—here—on—the grass—and—sleep . . . all—through—the night—under—this—moonlight. . . . I can sleep—sleep—’
“I began to sink softly down, with the heavenliest feeling of relaxation and repose, as if there existed only the soul of beautiful rest. I sank so softly—and just as my cheek almost touched the grass the dream was over!”
“Oh!” cried Mrs. MacNairn. “Did you awaken?”
“No. I came back. In my sleep I suddenly found myself creeping into my bed again as if I had been away somewhere. I was wondering why I was there, how I had left the hillside, when I had left it. That part WAS a dream—but the other was not. I was allowed to go somewhere—outside—and come back.”
I caught at her hand in the dark.
“The words are all wrong,” I said. “It is because we have no words to describe that. But have I made you feel it at all? Oh! Mrs. MacNairn, have I been able to make you know that it was not a dream?”
She lifted my hand and pressed it passionately against her cheek, and her cheek, too, was wet—wet.
“No, it was not a dream,” she said. “You came back. Thank God you came back, just to tell us that those who do not come back stand awakened in that ecstasy—in that ecstasy. And The Fear is nothing. It is only The Dream. The awakening is out on the hillside, out on the hillside! Listen!” She started as she said it. “Listen! The nightingale is beginning again.”
He sent forth in the dark a fountain—a rising, aspiring fountain—of golden notes which seemed to reach heaven itself. The night was made radiant by them. He flung them upward like a shower of stars into the sky. We sat and listened, almost holding our breath. Oh! the nightingale! the nightingale!
“He knows,” Hector MacNairn’s low voice said, “that it was not a dream.”
When there was silence again I heard him leave his chair very quietly.
“Good night! good night!” he said, and went away. I felt somehow that he had left us together for a purpose, but, oh, I did not even remotely dream what the purpose was! But soon she told me, almost in a whisper.
“We love you very much, Ysobel,” she said. “You know that?”
“I love you both, with all my heart,” I answered. “Indeed I love you.”
“We two have been more to each other than mere mother and son. We have been sufficient for each other. But he began to love you that first day when he watched you in the railway carriage. He says it was the far look in your eyes which drew him.”
“I began to love him, too,” I said. And I was not at all ashamed or shy in saying it.
“We three might have spent our lives together,” she went on. “It would have been a perfect thing. But—but—” She stood up as if she could not remain seated. Involuntarily I stood up with her. She was trembling, and she caught and held me in her arms. “He cannot stay, Ysobel,” she ended.
I could scarcely hear my own voice when I echoed the words.
“He cannot—stay?”
“Oh! the time will come,” she said, “when people who love each other will not be separated, when on this very earth there will be no pain, no grief, no age, no death—when all the world has learned the Law at last. But we have not learned it yet. And here we stand! The greatest specialists have told us. There is some fatal flaw in his heart. At any moment, when he is talking to us, when he is at his work, when he is asleep, he may—cease. It will just be ceasing. At any moment. He cannot stay.”
My own heart stood still for a second. Then there rose before me slowly, but clearly, a vision—the vision which was not a dream.
“Out on the hillside,” I murmured. “Out on the hillside.”
I clung to her with both arms and held her tight. I understood now why they had talked about The Fear. These two who were almost one soul were trying to believe that they were not really to be torn apart—not really. They were trying to heap up for themselves proof that they might still be near each other. And, above all, his effort was to save her from the worst, worst woe. And I understood, too, why something wiser and stronger than myself had led me to tell the dream which was not a dream at all.
But it was as she said; the world had not learned the Secret yet. And there we stood. We did not cry or talk, but we clung to each other—we CLUNG. That is all human creatures can do until the Secret is known. And as we clung the nightingale broke out again.
“O nightingale! O nightingale!” she said in her low wonder of a voice. “WHAT are you trying to tell us!”
What I feel sure I know by this time is that all the things we think happen by chance and accident are only part of the weaving of the scheme of life. When you begin to suspect this and to watch closely you also begin to see how trifles connect themselves with one another, and seem in the end to have led to a reason and a meaning, though we may not be clever enough to see it clearly. Nothing is an accident. We make everything happen ourselves: the wrong things because we do not know or care whether we are wrong or right, the right ones because we unconsciously or consciously choose the right even in the midst of our ignorance.
I dare say it sounds audacious for an ordinary girl to say such things in an ordinary way; but perhaps I have said them in spite of myself, because it is not a bad thing that they should be said by an every-day sort of person in simple words which other every-day people can understand. I am only expressing what has gradually grown into belief in my mind through reading with Angus ancient books and modern ones—books about faiths and religions, books about philosophies and magics, books about what the world calls marvels, but which are not marvels at all, but only workings of the Law most people have not yet reasoned about or even accepted.
Angus had read and studied them all his life before he began to read them with me, and we talked them over together sitting by the fire in the library, fascinated and staring at each other, I in one high-backed chair and he in another on the opposite side of the hearth. Angus is wonderful—wonderful! He KNOWS there is no such thing as chance. He KNOWS that we ourselves are the working of the Law—and that we ourselves could work what now are stupidly called “miracles” if we could only remember always what the Law is.
What I intended to say at first was merely that it was not by chance that I climbed to the shelf in the library that afternoon and pushed aside the books hiding the old manuscript which told the real story of Dark Malcolm of the Glen and Wee Brown Elspeth. It seemed like chance when it happened, but it was really the first step toward my finding out the strange, beautiful thing I knew soon afterward.
From the beginning of my friendship with the MacNairns I had hoped they would come and stay with me at Muircarrie. When they both seemed to feel such interest in all I told them of it, and not to mind its wild remoteness, I took courage and asked them if they would come to me. Most people are bored by the prospect of life in a feudal castle, howsoever picturesquely it is set in a place where there are no neighbors to count on. Its ancient stateliness is too dull. But the MacNairns were more allured by what Muircarrie offered than they were by other and more brilliant invitations. So when I went back to the castle I was only to be alone a week before they followed me.
Jean and Angus were quite happy in their quiet way when I told them who I was expecting. They knew how glad I was myself. Jean was full of silent pleasure as she arranged the rooms I had chosen for my guests, rooms which had the most sweeping view of the moor. Angus knew that Mr. MacNairn would love the library, and he hovered about consulting his catalogues and looking over his shelves, taking down volumes here and there, holding them tenderly in his long, bony old hand as he dipped into them. He made notes of the manuscripts and books he thought Mr. MacNairn would feel the deepest interest in. He loved his library with all his being, and I knew he looked forward to talking to a man who would care for it in the same way.
He had been going over one of the highest shelves one day and had left his step-ladder leaning against it when he went elsewhere. It was when I mounted the steps, as I often did when he left them, that I came upon the manuscript which related the old story of Dark Malcolm and his child. It had been pushed behind some volumes, and I took it out because it looked so old and yellow. And I opened at once at the page where the tale began.
At first I stood reading, and then I sat down on the broad top of the ladder and forgot everything. It was a savage history of ferocious hate and barbarous reprisals. It had been a feud waged between two clans for three generations. The story of Dark Malcolm and Ian Red Hand was only part of it, but it was a gruesome thing. Pages told of the bloody deeds they wrought on each other’s houses. The one human passion of Dark Malcolm’s life was his love for his little daughter. She had brown eyes and brown hair, and those who most loved her called her Wee Brown Elspeth. Ian Red Hand was richer and more powerful than Malcolm of the Glen, and therefore could more easily work his cruel will. He knew well of Malcolm’s worship of his child, and laid his plans to torture him through her. Dark Malcolm, coming back to his rude, small castle one night after a raid in which he had lost followers and weapons and strength, found that Wee Brown Elspeth had been carried away, and unspeakable taunts and threats left behind by Ian and his men. With unbound wounds, broken dirks and hacked swords, Dark Malcolm and the remnant of his troop of fighting clansmen rushed forth into the night.
“Neither men nor weapons have we to win her back,” screamed Dark Malcolm, raving mad, “but we may die fighting to get near enough to her to drive dirk into her little breast and save her from worse.”
They were a band of madmen in their black despair. How they tore through the black night; what unguarded weak spot they found in Ian’s castle walls; how they fought their way through it, leaving their dead bodies in the path, none really ever knew. By what strange chance Dark Malcolm came upon Wee Brown Elspeth, craftily set to playing hide-and-seek with a child of Ian’s so that she might not cry out and betray her presence; how, already wounded to his death, he caught at and drove his dirk into her child heart, the story only offers guesses at. But kill and save her he did, falling dead with her body held against his breast, her brown hair streaming over it. Not one living man went back to the small, rude castle on the Glen—not one.
I sat and read and read until the room grew dark. When I stopped I found that Angus Macayre was standing in the dimness at the foot of the ladder. He looked up at me and I down at him. For a few moments we were both quite still.
“It is the tale of Ian Red Hand and Dark Malcolm you are reading?” he said, at last.
“And Wee Brown Elspeth, who was fought for and killed,” I added, slowly.
Angus nodded his head with a sad face. “It was the only way for a father,” he said. “A hound of hell was Ian. Such men were savage beasts in those days, not human.”
I touched the manuscript with my hand questioningly. “Did this fall at the back there by accident,” I asked, “or did you hide it?”
“I did,” he answered. “It was no tale for a young thing to read. I have hidden many from you. You were always poking about in corners, Ysobel.”
Then I sat and thought over past memories for a while and the shadows in the room deepened.
“Why,” I said, laggingly, after the silence—“why did I call the child who used to play with me ‘Wee Brown Elspeth’?”
“It was your own fancy,” was his reply. “I used to wonder myself; but I made up my mind that you had heard some of the maids talking and the name had caught your ear. That would be a child’s way.”
I put my forehead in my hands and thought again. So many years had passed! I had been little more than a baby; the whole thing seemed like a half-forgotten dream when I tried to recall it—but I seemed to dimly remember strange things.
“Who were the wild men who brought her to me first—that day on the moor?” I said. “I do remember they had pale, savage, exultant faces. And torn, stained clothes. And broken dirks and swords. But they were glad of something. Who were they?”
“I did not see them. The mist was too thick,” he answered. “They were some wild hunters, perhaps.”
“It gives me such a strange feeling to try to remember, Angus,” I said, lifting my forehead from my hands.
“Don’t try,” he said. “Give me the manuscript and get down from the step-ladder. Come and look at the list of books I have made for Mr. MacNairn.”
I did as he told me, but I felt as if I were walking in a dream. My mind seemed to have left my body and gone back to the day when I sat a little child on the moor and heard the dull sound of horses’ feet and the jingling metal and the creak of leather coming nearer in the thick mist.
I felt as if Angus were in a queer, half-awake mood, too—as if two sets of thoughts were working at the same time in his mind: one his thoughts about Hector MacNairn and the books, the other some queer thoughts which went on in spite of him.
When I was going to leave the library and go up-stairs to dress for dinner he said a strange thing to me, and he said it slowly and in a heavy voice.
“There is a thing Jean and I have often talked of telling you,” he said. “We have not known what it was best to do. Times we have been troubled because we could not make up our minds. This Mr. Hector MacNairn is no common man. He is one who is great and wise enough to decide things plain people could not be sure of. Jean and I are glad indeed that he and his mother are coming. Jean can talk to her and I can talk to him, being a man body. They will tell us whether we have been right or wrong and what we must do.”
“They are wise enough to tell you anything,” I answered. “It sounds as if you and Jean had known some big secret all my life. But I am not frightened. You two would go to your graves hiding it if it would hurt me.”
“Eh, bairn!” he said, suddenly, in a queer, moved way. “Eh, bairn!” And he took hold of both my hands and kissed them, pressing them quite long and emotionally to his lips. But he said nothing else, and when he dropped them I went out of the room.
It was wonderful when Mr. MacNairn and his mother came. It was even more beautiful than I had thought it would be. They arrived late in the afternoon, and when I took them out upon the terrace the sun was reddening the moor, and even the rough, gray towers of the castle were stained rose-color. There was that lovely evening sound of birds twittering before they went to sleep in the ivy. The glimpses of gardens below seemed like glimpses of rich tapestries set with jewels. And there was such stillness! When we drew our three chairs in a little group together and looked out on it all, I felt as if we were almost in heaven.
“Yes! yes!” Hector said, looking slowly—round; “it is all here.”
“Yes,” his mother added, in her lovely, lovely voice. “It is what made you Ysobel.”
It was so angelic of them to feel it all in that deep, quiet way, and to think that it was part of me and I a part of it. The climbing moon was trembling with beauty. Tender evening airs quivered in the heather and fern, and the late birds called like spirits.
Ever since the night when Mrs. MacNairn had held me in her arms under the apple-tree while the nightingale sang I had felt toward her son as if he were an archangel walking on the earth. Perhaps my thoughts were exaggerated, but it seemed so marvelous that he should be moving among us, doing his work, seeing and talking to his friends, and yet that he should know that at any moment the great change might come and he might awaken somewhere else, in quite another place. If he had been like other men and I had been like other girls, I suppose that after that night when I heard the truth I should have been plunged into the darkest woe and have almost sobbed myself to death. Why did I not? I do not know except—except that I felt that no darkness could come between us because no darkness could touch him. He could never be anything but alive alive. If I could not see him it would only be because my eyes were not clear and strong enough. I seemed to be waiting for something. I wanted to keep near him.
I was full of this feeling as we sat together on the terrace and watched the moon. I could scarcely look away from him. He was rather pale that evening, but there seemed to be a light behind his pallor, and his eyes seemed to see so much more than the purple and yellow of the heather and gorse as they rested on them.
After I had watched him silently for a little while I leaned forward and pointed to a part of the moor where there was an unbroken blaze of gorse in full bloom like a big patch of gold.
“That is where I was sitting when Wee Brown Elspeth was first brought to me,” I said.
He sat upright and looked. “Is it?” he answered. “Will you take me there to-morrow? I have always wanted to see the place.”
“Would you like to go early in the morning? The mist is more likely to be there then, as it was that day. It is so mysterious and beautiful. Would you like to do that?” I asked him.
“Better than anything else!” he said. “Yes, let us go in the morning.”
“Wee Brown Elspeth seems very near me this evening,” I said. “I feel as if—” I broke off and began again. “I have a puzzled feeling about her. This afternoon I found some manuscript pushed behind a book on a high shelf in the library. Angus said he had hidden it there because it was a savage story he did not wish me to read. It was the history of the feud between Ian Red Hand and Dark Malcolm of the Glen. Dark Malcolm’s child was called Wee Brown Elspeth hundreds of years ago—five hundred, I think. It makes me feel so bewildered when I remember the one I played with.”
“It was a bloody story,” he said. “I heard it only a few days before we met at Sir Ian’s house in London.”
That made me recall something.
“Was that why you started when I told you about Elspeth?” I asked.
“Yes. Perhaps the one you played with was a little descendant who had inherited her name,” he answered, a trifle hurriedly. “I confess I was startled for a moment.”
I put my hand up to my forehead and rubbed it unconsciously. I could not help seeing a woesome picture.
“Poor little soul, with the blood pouring from her heart and her brown hair spread over her dead father’s breast!” I stopped, because a faint memory came back to me. “Mine,” I stammered—“mine—how strange!—had a great stain on the embroideries of her dress. She looked at it—and looked. She looked as if she didn’t like it—as if she didn’t understand how it came there. She covered it with ferns and bluebells.”
I felt as if I were being drawn away into a dream. I made a sudden effort to come back. I ceased rubbing my forehead and dropped my hand, sitting upright.
“I must ask Angus and Jean to tell me about her,” I said. “Of course, they must have known. I wonder why I never thought of asking questions before.”
It was a strange look I met when I involuntarily turned toward him—such an absorbed, strange, tender look!
I knew he sat quite late in the library that night, talking to Angus after his mother and I went to our rooms. Just as I was falling asleep I remember there floated through my mind a vague recollection of what Angus had said to me of asking his advice about something; and I wondered if he would reach the subject in their talk, or if they would spend all their time in poring over manuscripts and books together.
The moor wore its most mysterious look when I got up in the early morning. It had hidden itself in its softest snows of white, swathing mist. Only here and there dark fir-trees showed themselves above it, and now and then the whiteness thinned or broke and drifted. It was as I had wanted him to see it—just as I had wanted to walk through it with him.
We had met in the hall as we had planned, and, wrapped in our plaids because the early morning air was cold, we tramped away together. No one but myself could ever realize what it was like. I had never known that there could be such a feeling of companionship in the world. It would not have been necessary for us to talk at all if we had felt silent. We should have been saying things to each other without words. But we did talk as we walked—in quiet voices which seemed made quieter by the mist, and of quiet things which such voices seemed to belong to.
We crossed the park to a stile in a hedge where a path led at once on to the moor. Part of the park itself had once been moorland, and was dark with slender firs and thick grown with heather and broom. On the moor the mist grew thicker, and if I had not so well known the path we might have lost ourselves in it. Also I knew by heart certain little streams that rushed and made guiding sounds which were sometimes loud whispers and sometimes singing babbles. The damp, sweet scent of fern and heather was in our nostrils; as we climbed we breathed its freshness.
“There is a sort of unearthly loveliness in it all,” Hector MacNairn said to me. His voice was rather like his mother’s. It always seemed to say so much more than his words.
“We might be ghosts,” I answered. “We might be some of those the mist hides because they like to be hidden.”
“You would not be afraid if you met one of them?” he said.
“No. I think I am sure of that. I should feel that it was only like myself, and, if I could hear, might tell me things I want to know.”
“What do you want to know?” he asked me, very low. “You!”
“Only what everybody wants to know—that it is really AWAKENING free, ready for wonderful new things, finding oneself in the midst of wonders. I don’t mean angels with harps and crowns, but beauty such as we see now; only seeing it without burdens of fears before and behind us. And knowing there is no reason to be afraid. We have all been so afraid. We don’t know how afraid we have been—of everything.”
I stopped among the heather and threw my arms out wide. I drew in a great, joyous morning breath.
“Free like that! It is the freeness, the light, splendid freeness, I think of most.”
“The freeness!” he repeated. “Yes, the freeness!”
“As for beauty,” I almost whispered, in a sort of reverence for visions I remembered, “I have stood on this moor a thousand times and seen loveliness which made me tremble. One’s soul could want no more in any life. But ‘Out on the Hillside’ I KNEW I was part of it, and it was ecstasy. That was the freeness.”
“Yes—it was the freeness,” he answered.
We brushed through the heather and the bracken, and flower-bells shook showers of radiant drops upon us. The mist wavered and sometimes lifted before us, and opened up mystic vistas to veil them again a few minutes later. The sun tried to break through, and sometimes we walked in a golden haze.
We fell into silence. Now and then I glanced sidewise at my companion as we made our soundless way over the thick moss. He looked so strong and beautiful. His tall body was so fine, his shoulders so broad and splendid! How could it be! How could it be! As he tramped beside me he was thinking deeply, and he knew he need not talk to me. That made me glad—that he should know me so well and feel me so near. That was what he felt when he was with his mother, that she understood and that at times neither of them needed words.
Until we had reached the patch of gorse where we intended to end our walk we did not speak at all. He was thinking of things which led him far. I knew that, though I did not know what they were. When we reached the golden blaze we had seen the evening before it was a flame of gold again, because—it was only for a few moments—the mist had blown apart and the sun was shining on it.
As we stood in the midst of it together—Oh! how strange and beautiful it was!—Mr. MacNairn came back. That was what it seemed to me—that he came back. He stood quite still a moment and looked about him, and then he stretched out his arms as I had stretched out mine. But he did it slowly, and a light came into his face.
“If, after it was over, a man awakened as you said and found himself—the self he knew, but light, free, splendid—remembering all the ages of dark, unknowing dread, of horror of some black, aimless plunge, and suddenly seeing all the childish uselessness of it—how he would stand and smile! How he would stand and SMILE!”
Never had I understood anything more clearly than I understood then. Yes, yes! That would be it. Remembering all the waste of fear, how he would stand and SMILE!
He was smiling himself, the golden gorse about him already losing its flame in the light returning mist-wraiths closing again over it, when I heard a sound far away and high up the moor. It sounded like the playing of a piper. He did not seem to notice it.
“We shall be shut in again,” he said. “How mysterious it is, this opening and closing! I like it more than anything else. Let us sit down, Ysobel.”
He spread the plaid we had brought to sit on, and laid on it the little strapped basket Jean had made ready for us. He shook the mist drops from our own plaids, and as I was about to sit down I stopped a moment to listen.
“That is a tune I never heard on the pipes before,” I said. “What is a piper doing out on the moor so early?”
He listened also. “It must be far away. I don’t hear it,” he said. “Perhaps it is a bird whistling.”
“It is far away,” I answered, “but it is not a bird. It’s the pipes, and playing such a strange tune. There! It has stopped!”
But it was not silent long; I heard the tune begin again much nearer, and the piper was plainly coming toward us. I turned my head.
The mist was clearing, and floated about like a thin veil through which one could see objects. At a short distance above us on the moor I saw something moving. It was a man who was playing the pipes. It was the piper, and almost at once I knew him, because it was actually my own Feargus, stepping proudly through the heather with his step like a stag on the hills. His head was held high, and his face had a sort of elated delight in it as if he were enjoying himself and the morning and the music in a new way. I was so surprised that I rose to my feet and called to him.
“Feargus!” I cried. “What—”
I knew he heard me, because he turned and looked at me with the most extraordinary smile. He was usually a rather grave-faced man, but this smile had a kind of startling triumph in it. He certainly heard me, for he whipped off his bonnet in a salute which was as triumphant as the smile. But he did not answer, and actually passed in and out of sight in the mist.
When I rose Mr. MacNairn had risen, too. When I turned to speak in my surprise, he had fixed on me his watchful look.
“Imagine its being Feargus at this hour!” I exclaimed. “And why did he pass by in such a hurry without answering? He must have been to a wedding and have been up all night. He looked—” I stopped a second and laughed.
“How did he look?” Mr. MacNairn asked.
“Pale! That won’t do—though he certainly didn’t look ill.” I laughed again. “I’m laughing because he looked almost like one of the White People.”
“Are you sure it was Feargus?” he said.
“Quite sure. No one else is the least like Feargus. Didn’t you see him yourself?”
“I don’t know him as well as you do; and there was the mist,” was his answer. “But he certainly was not one of the White People when I saw him last night.”
I wondered why he looked as he did when he took my hand and drew me down to my place on the plaid again. He did not let it go when he sat down by my side. He held it in his own large, handsome one, looking down on it a moment or so; and then he bent his head and kissed it long and slowly two or three times.
“Dear little Ysobel!” he said. “Beloved, strange little Ysobel.”
“Am I strange!” I said, softly.
“Yes, thank God!” he answered.
I had known that some day when we were at Muircarrie together he would tell me what his mother had told me—about what we three might have been to one another. I trembled with happiness at the thought of hearing him say it himself. I knew he was going to say it now.
He held my hand and stroked it. “My mother told you, Ysobel—what I am waiting for?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Do you know I love you?” he said, very low.
“Yes. I love you, too. My whole life would have been heaven if we could always have been together,” was my answer.
He drew me up into his arms so that my cheek lay against his breast as I went on, holding fast to the rough tweed of his jacket and whispering: “I should have belonged to you two, heart and body and soul. I should never have been lonely again. I should have known nothing, whatsoever happened, but tender joy.”
“Whatsoever happened?” he murmured.
“Whatsoever happens now, Ysobel, know nothing but tender joy. I think you CAN. ‘Out on the Hillside!’ Let us remember.”
“Yes, yes,” I said; “‘Out on the Hillside.’” And our two faces, damp with the sweet mist, were pressed together.