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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The White People, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The White People
+
+Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett
+
+Release Date: March 14, 2006 [EBook #459]
+Last Updated: September 17, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WHITE PEOPLE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Keller and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WHITE PEOPLE
+
+By Frances Hodgson Burnett
+
+
+
+
+
+TO LIONEL
+
+     “The stars come nightly to the sky;
+     The tidal wave unto the sea;
+     Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high
+     Can keep my own away from me.”
+
+
+
+
+THE WHITE PEOPLE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Perhaps the things which happened could only have happened to me. I do
+not know. I never heard of things like them happening to any one else.
+But I am not sorry they did happen. I am in secret deeply and strangely
+glad. I have heard other people say things--and they were not always
+sad people, either--which made me feel that if they knew what I know it
+would seem to them as though some awesome, heavy load they had always
+dragged about with them had fallen from their shoulders. To most people
+everything is so uncertain that if they could only see or hear and know
+something clear they would drop upon their knees and give thanks. That
+was what I felt myself before I found out so strangely, and I was only a
+girl. That is why I intend to write this down as well as I can. It will
+not be very well done, because I never was clever at all, and always
+found it difficult to talk.
+
+I say that perhaps these things could only have happened to me, because,
+as I look back over my life, I realize that it has always been a rather
+curious one. Even when those who took care of me did not know I was
+thinking at all, I had begun to wonder if I were not different from
+other children. That was, of course, largely because Muircarrie
+Castle was in such a wild and remote part of Scotland that when my few
+relations felt they must pay me a visit as a mere matter of duty, their
+journey from London, or their pleasant places in the south of England,
+seemed to them like a pilgrimage to a sort of savage land; and when a
+conscientious one brought a child to play with me, the little civilized
+creature was as frightened of me as I was of it. My shyness and fear of
+its strangeness made us both dumb. No doubt I seemed like a new breed of
+inoffensive little barbarian, knowing no tongue but its own.
+
+A certain clannish etiquette made it seem necessary that a relation
+should pay me a visit sometimes, because I was in a way important. The
+huge, frowning feudal castle standing upon its battlemented rock was
+mine; I was a great heiress, and I was, so to speak, the chieftainess
+of the clan. But I was a plain, undersized little child, and had no
+attraction for any one but Jean Braidfute, a distant cousin, who took
+care of me, and Angus Macayre, who took care of the library, and who was
+a distant relative also. They were both like me in the fact that they
+were not given to speech; but sometimes we talked to one another, and I
+knew they were fond of me, as I was fond of them. They were really all I
+had.
+
+When I was a little girl I did not, of course, understand that I was
+an important person, and I could not have realized the significance of
+being an heiress. I had always lived in the castle, and was used to its
+hugeness, of which I only knew corners. Until I was seven years old,
+I think, I imagined all but very poor people lived in castles and were
+saluted by every one they passed. It seemed probable that all little
+girls had a piper who strode up and down the terrace and played on the
+bagpipes when guests were served in the dining-hall.
+
+My piper’s name was Feargus, and in time I found out that the guests
+from London could not endure the noise he made when he marched to and
+fro, proudly swinging his kilts and treading like a stag on a hillside.
+It was an insult to tell him to stop playing, because it was his
+religion to believe that The Muircarrie must be piped proudly to;
+and his ancestors had been pipers to the head of the clan for five
+generations. It was his duty to march round the dining-hall and play
+while the guests feasted, but I was obliged in the end to make him
+believe that he could be heard better from the terrace--because when he
+was outside his music was not spoiled by the sound of talking. It was
+very difficult, at first. But because I was his chieftainess, and had
+learned how to give orders in a rather proud, stern little voice, he
+knew he must obey.
+
+Even this kind of thing may show that my life was a peculiar one; but
+the strangest part of it was that, while I was at the head of so many
+people, I did not really belong to any one, and I did not know that this
+was unusual. One of my early memories is that I heard an under-nursemaid
+say to another this curious thing: “Both her father and mother were dead
+when she was born.” I did not even know that was a remarkable thing to
+say until I was several years older and Jean Braidfute told me what had
+been meant.
+
+My father and mother had both been very young and beautiful and
+wonderful. It was said that my father was the handsomest chieftain in
+Scotland, and that his wife was as beautiful as he was. They came to
+Muircarrie as soon as they were married and lived a splendid year there
+together. Sometimes they were quite alone, and spent their days fishing
+or riding or wandering on the moor together, or reading by the fire in
+the library the ancient books Angus Macayre found for them. The library
+was a marvelous place, and Macayre knew every volume in it. They used
+to sit and read like children among fairy stories, and then they would
+persuade Macayre to tell them the ancient tales he knew--of the days
+when Agricola forced his way in among the Men of the Woods, who would
+die any savage death rather than be conquered. Macayre was a sort of
+heirloom himself, and he knew and believed them all.
+
+I don’t know how it was that I myself seemed to see my young father and
+mother so clearly and to know how radiant and wildly in love they
+were. Surely Jean Braidfute had not words to tell me. But I knew. So I
+understood, in a way of my own, what happened to my mother one brilliant
+late October afternoon when my father was brought home dead--followed by
+the guests who had gone out shooting with him. His foot had caught in a
+tuft of heather, and his gun in going off had killed him. One moment
+he had been the handsomest young chieftain in Scotland, and when he was
+brought home they could not have let my mother see his face.
+
+But she never asked to see it. She was on the terrace which juts over
+the rock the castle is built on, and which looks out over the purple
+world of climbing moor. She saw from there the returning party of
+shooters and gillies winding its way slowly through the heather,
+following a burden carried on a stretcher of fir boughs. Some of her
+women guests were with her, and one of them said afterward that when she
+first caught sight of the moving figures she got up slowly and crept
+to the stone balustrade with a crouching movement almost like a young
+leopardess preparing to spring. But she only watched, making neither
+sound nor movement until the cortege was near enough for her to see that
+every man’s head was bowed upon his breast, and not one was covered.
+
+Then she said, quite slowly, “They--have--taken off--their bonnets,” and
+fell upon the terrace like a dropped stone.
+
+It was because of this that the girl said that she was dead when I was
+born. It must have seemed almost as if she were not a living thing.
+She did not open her eyes or make a sound; she lay white and cold.
+The celebrated physicians who came from London talked of catalepsy
+and afterward wrote scientific articles which tried to explain her
+condition. She did not know when I was born. She died a few minutes
+after I uttered my first cry.
+
+I know only one thing more, and that Jean Braidfute told me after I grew
+up. Jean had been my father’s nursery governess when he wore his first
+kilts, and she loved my mother fondly.
+
+“I knelt by her bed and held her hand and watched her face for three
+hours after they first laid her down,” she said. “And my eyes were so
+near her every moment that I saw a thing the others did not know her
+well enough, or love her well enough, to see.
+
+“The first hour she was like a dead thing--aye, like a dead thing that
+had never lived. But when the hand of the clock passed the last second,
+and the new hour began, I bent closer to her because I saw a change
+stealing over her. It was not color--it was not even a shadow of a
+motion. It was something else. If I had spoken what I felt, they would
+have said I was light-headed with grief and have sent me away. I have
+never told man or woman. It was my secret and hers. I can tell you,
+Ysobel. The change I saw was as if she was beginning to listen to
+something--to listen.
+
+“It was as if to a sound--far, far away at first. But cold and white as
+stone she lay content, and listened. In the next hour the far-off
+sound had drawn nearer, and it had become something else--something she
+saw--something which saw her. First her young marble face had peace in
+it; then it had joy. She waited in her young stone body until you were
+born and she could break forth. She waited no longer then.
+
+“Ysobel, my bairn, what I knew was that he had not gone far from the
+body that had held him when he fell. Perhaps he had felt lost for a bit
+when he found himself out of it. But soon he had begun to call to her
+that was like his own heart to him. And she had heard. And then, being
+half away from earth herself, she had seen him and known he was waiting,
+and that he would not leave for any far place without her. She was so
+still that the big doctors thought more than once she had passed. But I
+knew better.”
+
+It was long before I was old enough to be told anything like this that I
+began to feel that the moor was in secret my companion and friend, that
+it was not only the moor to me, but something else. It was like a thing
+alive--a huge giant lying spread out in the sun warming itself, or
+covering itself with thick, white mist which sometimes writhed and
+twisted itself into wraiths. First I noticed and liked it some day,
+perhaps, when it was purple and yellow with gorse and heather and broom,
+and the honey scents drew bees and butterflies and birds. But soon I saw
+and was drawn by another thing.
+
+How young was I that afternoon when I sat in the deep window and watched
+the low, soft whiteness creeping out and hovering over the heather as
+if the moor had breathed it? I do not remember. It was such a low little
+mist at first; and it crept and crept until its creeping grew into
+something heavier and whiter, and it began to hide the heather and
+the gorse and broom, and then the low young fir-trees. It mounted and
+mounted, and sometimes a breath of wind twisted it into weird shapes,
+almost like human creatures. It opened and closed again, and then it
+dragged and crept and grew thicker. And as I pressed my face against the
+window-pane, it mounted still higher and got hold of the moor and hid
+it, hanging heavy and white and waiting. That was what came into my
+child mind: that it had done what the moor had told it to do; had hidden
+things which wanted to be hidden, and then it waited.
+
+Strangers say that Muircarrie moor is the most beautiful and the most
+desolate place in the world, but it never seemed desolate to me. From my
+first memory of it I had a vague, half-comforted feeling that there
+was some strange life on it one could not exactly see, but was always
+conscious of. I know now why I felt this, but I did not know then.
+
+If I had been older when I first began to see what I did see there, I
+should no doubt have read things in books which would have given rise
+in my mind to doubts and wonders; but I was only a little child who had
+lived a life quite apart from the rest of the world. I was too silent by
+nature to talk and ask questions, even if I had had others to talk to. I
+had only Jean and Angus, and, as I found out years later, they knew what
+I did not, and would have put me off with adroit explanations if I had
+been curious. But I was not curious. I accepted everything as it came
+and went.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+I only six when Wee Brown Elspeth was brought to me. Jean and Angus were
+as fond of each other in their silent way as they were of me, and they
+often went together with me when I was taken out for my walks. I was
+kept in the open air a great deal, and Angus would walk by the side of
+my small, shaggy Shetland pony and lead him over rough or steep places.
+Sheltie, the pony, was meant for use when we wished to fare farther than
+a child could walk; but I was trained to sturdy marching and climbing
+even from my babyhood. Because I so loved the moor, we nearly always
+rambled there. Often we set out early in the morning, and some simple
+food was carried, so that we need not return to the castle until we
+chose. I would ride Sheltie and walk by turns until we found a place
+I liked; then Jean and Angus would sit down among the heather, Sheltie
+would be secured, and I would wander about and play in my own way. I do
+not think it was in a strange way. I think I must have played as almost
+any lonely little girl might have played. I used to find a corner among
+the bushes and pretend it was my house and that I had little friends who
+came to play with me. I only remember one thing which was not like the
+ordinary playing of children. It was a habit I had of sitting quite
+still a long time and listening. That was what I called it--“listening.”
+ I was listening to hear if the life on the moor made any sound I could
+understand. I felt as if it might, if I were very still and listened
+long enough.
+
+Angus and Jean and I were not afraid of rain and mist and change of
+weather. If we had been we could have had little outdoor life. We always
+carried plaids enough to keep us warm and dry. So on this day I speak
+of we did not turn back when we found ourselves in the midst of a sudden
+mist. We sat down in a sheltered place and waited, knowing it would lift
+in time. The sun had been shining when we set out.
+
+Angus and Jean were content to sit and guard me while I amused myself.
+They knew I would keep near them and run into no danger. I was not an
+adventurous child. I was, in fact, in a more than usually quiet mood
+that morning. The quiet had come upon me when the mist had begun to
+creep about and inclose us. I liked it. I liked the sense of being shut
+in by the soft whiteness I had so often watched from my nursery window
+in the castle.
+
+“People might be walking about,” I said to Angus when he lifted me from
+Sheltie’s back.
+
+“We couldn’t see them. They might be walking.”
+
+“Nothing that would hurt ye, bairnie,” he answered.
+
+“No, they wouldn’t hurt me,” I said. I had never been afraid that
+anything on the moor would hurt me.
+
+I played very little that day. The quiet and the mist held me still.
+Soon I sat down and began to “listen.” After a while I knew that Jean
+and Angus were watching me, but it did not disturb me. They often
+watched me when they thought I did not know they were doing it.
+
+I had sat listening for nearly half an hour when I heard the first
+muffled, slow trampling of horses’ hoofs. I knew what it was even before
+it drew near enough for me to be conscious of the other sounds--the
+jingling of arms and chains and the creaking of leather one notices as
+troopers pass by. Armed and mounted men were coming toward me. That was
+what the sounds meant; but they seemed faint and distant, though I knew
+they were really quite near. Jean and Angus did not appear to hear them.
+I knew that I only heard them because I had been listening.
+
+Out of the mist they rode a company of wild-looking men wearing garments
+such as I had never seen before. Most of them were savage and uncouth,
+and their clothes were disordered and stained as if with hard travel and
+fight. I did not know--or even ask myself--why they did not frighten me,
+but they did not. Suddenly I seemed to know that they were brave men
+and had been doing some brave, hard thing. Here and there among them I
+caught sight of a broken and stained sword, or a dirk with only a
+hilt left. They were all pale, but their wild faces were joyous and
+triumphant. I saw it as they drew near.
+
+The man who seemed their chieftain was a lean giant who was darker but,
+under his darkness, paler than the rest. On his forehead was a queer,
+star-shaped scar. He rode a black horse, and before him he held close
+with his left arm a pretty little girl dressed in strange, rich clothes.
+The big man’s hand was pressed against her breast as he held her; but
+though it was a large hand, it did not quite cover a dark-red stain on
+the embroideries of her dress. Her dress was brown, and she had brown
+hair and soft brown eyes like a little doe’s. The moment I saw her I
+loved her.
+
+The black horse stopped before me. The wild troop drew up and waited
+behind. The great, lean rider looked at me a moment, and then, lifting
+the little girl in his long arms, bent down and set her gently on her
+feet on the mossy earth in the mist beside me. I got up to greet her,
+and we stood smiling at each other. And in that moment as we stood the
+black horse moved forward, the muffled trampling began again, the wild
+company swept on its way, and the white mist closed behind it as if it
+had never passed.
+
+Of course I know how strange this will seem to people who read it, but
+that cannot be helped and does not really matter. It was in that way the
+thing happened, and it did not even seem strange to me. Anything might
+happen on the moor--anything. And there was the fair little girl with
+the eyes like a doe’s.
+
+I knew she had come to play with me, and we went together to my house
+among the bushes of broom and gorse and played happily. But before we
+began I saw her stand and look wonderingly at the dark-red stain on
+the embroideries on her childish breast. It was as if she were asking
+herself how it came there and could not understand. Then she picked
+a fern and a bunch of the thick-growing bluebells and put them in her
+girdle in such a way that they hid its ugliness.
+
+I did not really know how long she stayed. I only knew that we were
+happy, and that, though her way of playing was in some ways different
+from mine, I loved it and her. Presently the mist lifted and the sun
+shone, and we were deep in a wonderful game of being hidden in a room in
+a castle because something strange was going to happen which we were not
+told about. She ran behind a big gorse bush and did not come back. When
+I ran to look for her she was nowhere. I could not find her, and I went
+back to Jean and Angus, feeling puzzled.
+
+“Where did she go?” I asked them, turning my head from side to side.
+
+They were looking at me strangely, and both of them were pale. Jean was
+trembling a little.
+
+“Who was she, Ysobel?” she said.
+
+“The little girl the men brought to play with me,” I answered, still
+looking about me.
+
+“The big one on the black horse put her down--the big one with the star
+here.” I touched my forehead where the queer scar had been.
+
+For a minute Angus forgot himself. Years later he told me.
+
+“Dark Malcolm of the Glen,” he broke out. “Wee Brown Elspeth.”
+
+“But she is white--quite white!” I said.
+
+“Where did she go?”
+
+Jean swept me in her warm, shaking arms and hugged me close to her
+breast.
+
+“She’s one of the fair ones,” she said, kissing and patting me. “She
+will come again. She’ll come often, I dare say. But she’s gone now and
+we must go, too. Get up, Angus, man. We’re for the castle.”
+
+If we three had been different--if we had ever had the habit of talking
+and asking questions--we might surely have asked one another questions
+as I rode on Sheltie’s back, with Angus leading us. But they asked
+me nothing, and I said very little except that I once spoke of the
+wild-looking horsemen and their pale, joyous faces.
+
+“They were glad,” was all I said.
+
+There was also one brief query from Angus.
+
+“Did she talk to you, bairnie?” he said.
+
+I hesitated and stared at him quite a long time. Then I shook my head
+and answered, slowly, “N-no.”
+
+Because I realized then, for the first time, that we had said no words
+at all. But I had known what she wanted me to understand, and she had
+known what I might have said to her if I had spoken--and no words were
+needed. And it was better.
+
+They took me home to the castle, and I was given my supper and put to
+bed. Jean sat by me until I fell asleep; she was obliged to sit rather a
+long time, because I was so happy with my memories of Wee Brown Elspeth
+and the certainty that she would come again. It was not Jean’s words
+which had made me sure. I knew.
+
+She came many times. Through all my childish years I knew that she
+would come and play with me every few days--though I never saw the wild
+troopers again or the big, lean man with the scar. Children who play
+together are not very curious about one another, and I simply accepted
+her with delight. Somehow I knew that she lived happily in a place not
+far away. She could come and go, it seemed, without trouble. Sometimes
+I found her--or she found me upon the moor; and often she appeared in
+my nursery in the castle. When we were together Jean Braidfute seemed to
+prefer that we should be alone, and was inclined to keep the under-nurse
+occupied in other parts of the wing I lived in. I never asked her to do
+this, but I was glad that it was done. Wee Elspeth was glad, too. After
+our first meeting she was dressed in soft blue or white, and the red
+stain was gone; but she was always Wee Brown Elspeth with the doelike
+eyes and the fair, transparent face, the very fair little face. As I had
+noticed the strange, clear pallor of the rough troopers, so I noticed
+that she was curiously fair. And as I occasionally saw other persons
+with the same sort of fairness, I thought it was a purity of complexion
+special to some, but not to all. I was not fair like that, and neither
+was any one else I knew.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+It was when I was ten years old that Wee Elspeth ceased coming to me,
+and though I missed her at first, it was not with a sense of grief or
+final loss. She had only gone somewhere.
+
+It was then that Angus Macayre began to be my tutor. He had been a
+profound student and had lived among books all his life. He had helped
+Jean in her training of me, and I had learned more than is usually
+taught to children in their early years. When a grand governess was
+sent to Muircarrie by my guardian, she was amazed at the things I
+was familiar with, but she abhorred the dark, frowning castle and the
+loneliness of the place and would not stay. In fact, no governess would
+stay, and so Angus became my tutor and taught me old Gaelic and Latin
+and Greek, and we read together and studied the ancient books in the
+library. It was a strange education for a girl, and no doubt made me
+more than ever unlike others. But my life was the life I loved.
+
+When my guardian decided that I must live with him in London and be
+educated as modern girls were, I tried to be obedient and went to him;
+but before two months had passed my wretchedness had made me so ill that
+the doctor said I should go into a decline and die if I were not sent
+back to Muircarrie.
+
+“It’s not only the London air that seems to poison her,” he said when
+Jean talked to him about me; “it is something else. She will not live,
+that’s all. Sir Ian must send her home.”
+
+As I have said before, I had been an unattractive child and I was a
+plain, uninteresting sort of girl. I was shy and could not talk to
+people, so of course I bored them. I knew I did not look well when I
+wore beautiful clothes. I was little and unimportant and like a reed for
+thinness. Because I was rich and a sort of chieftainess I ought to have
+been tall and rather stately, or at least I ought to have had a bearing
+which would have made it impossible for people to quite overlook me.
+But; any one could overlook me--an insignificant, thin girl who slipped
+in and out of places and sat and stared and listened to other people
+instead of saying things herself; I liked to look on and be forgotten.
+It interested me to watch people if they did not notice me.
+
+Of course, my relatives did not really like me. How could they? They
+were busy in their big world and did not know what to do with a girl who
+ought to have been important and was not. I am sure that in secret they
+were relieved when I was sent back to Muircarrie.
+
+After that the life I loved went on quietly. I studied with Angus, and
+made the book-walled library my own room. I walked and rode on the moor,
+and I knew the people who lived in the cottages and farms on the estate.
+I think they liked me, but I am not sure, because I was too shy to seem
+very friendly. I was more at home with Feargus, the piper, and with
+some of the gardeners than I was with any one else. I think I was lonely
+without knowing; but I was never unhappy. Jean and Angus were my nearest
+and dearest. Jean was of good blood and a stanch gentlewoman, quite
+sufficiently educated to be my companion as she had been my early
+governess.
+
+It was Jean who told Angus that I was giving myself too entirely to the
+study of ancient books and the history of centuries gone by.
+
+“She is living to-day, and she must not pass through this life without
+gathering anything from it.”
+
+“This life,” she put it, as if I had passed through others before, and
+might pass through others again. That was always her way of speaking,
+and she seemed quite unconscious of any unusualness in it.
+
+“You are a wise woman, Jean,” Angus said, looking long at her grave
+face. “A wise woman.”
+
+He wrote to the London book-shops for the best modern books, and I began
+to read them. I felt at first as if they plunged me into a world I did
+not understand, and many of them I could not endure. But I persevered,
+and studied them as I had studied the old ones, and in time I began to
+feel as if perhaps they were true. My chief weariness with them came
+from the way they had of referring to the things I was so intimate with
+as though they were only the unauthenticated history of a life so
+long passed by that it could no longer matter to any one. So often the
+greatest hours of great lives were treated as possible legends. I
+knew why men had died or were killed or had borne black horror. I knew
+because I had read old books and manuscripts and had heard the stories
+which had come down through centuries by word of mouth, passed from
+father to son.
+
+But there was one man who did not write as if he believed the world had
+begun and would end with him. He knew he was only one, and part of
+all the rest. The name I shall give him is Hector MacNairn. He was a
+Scotchman, but he had lived in many a land. The first time I read a book
+he had written I caught my breath with joy, again and again. I knew I
+had found a friend, even though there was no likelihood that I should
+ever see his face. He was a great and famous writer, and all the world
+honored him; while I, hidden away in my castle on a rock on the edge of
+Muircarrie, was so far from being interesting or clever that even in my
+grandest evening dress and tiara of jewels I was as insignificant as a
+mouse. In fact, I always felt rather silly when I was obliged to wear my
+diamonds on state occasions as custom sometimes demanded.
+
+Mr. MacNairn wrote essays and poems, and marvelous stories which were
+always real though they were called fiction. Wheresoever his story was
+placed--howsoever remote and unknown the scene--it was a real place, and
+the people who lived in it were real, as if he had some magic power to
+call up human things to breathe and live and set one’s heart beating.
+I read everything he wrote. I read every word of his again and again. I
+always kept some book of his near enough to be able to touch it with my
+hand; and often I sat by the fire in the library holding one open on
+my lap for an hour or more, only because it meant a warm, close
+companionship. It seemed at those times as if he sat near me in the dim
+glow and we understood each other’s thoughts without using words, as Wee
+Brown Elspeth and I had understood--only this was a deeper thing.
+
+I had felt near him in this way for several years, and every year he had
+grown more famous, when it happened that one June my guardian, Sir Ian,
+required me to go to London to see my lawyers and sign some important
+documents connected with the management of the estate. I was to go
+to his house to spend a week or more, attend a Drawing-Room, and show
+myself at a few great parties in a proper manner, this being considered
+my duty toward my relatives. These, I believe, were secretly afraid that
+if I were never seen their world would condemn my guardian for
+neglect of his charge, or would decide that I was of unsound mind and
+intentionally kept hidden away at Muircarrie. He was an honorable man,
+and his wife was a well-meaning woman. I did not wish to do them an
+injustice, so I paid them yearly visits and tried to behave as they
+wished, much as I disliked to be dressed in fine frocks and to wear
+diamonds on my little head and round my thin neck.
+
+It was an odd thing that this time I found I did not dread the visit
+to London as much as I usually did. For some unknown reason I became
+conscious that I was not really reluctant to go. Usually the thought
+of the days before me made me restless and low-spirited. London always
+seemed so confused and crowded, and made me feel as if I were being
+pushed and jostled by a mob always making a tiresome noise. But this
+time I felt as if I should somehow find a clear place to stand in, where
+I could look on and listen without being bewildered. It was a curious
+feeling; I could not help noticing and wondering about it.
+
+I knew afterward that it came to me because a change was drawing near. I
+wish so much that I could tell about it in a better way. But I have only
+my own way, which I am afraid seems very like a school-girl’s.
+
+Jean Braidfute made the journey with me, as she always did, and it was
+like every other journey. Only one incident made it different, and when
+it occurred there seemed nothing unusual in it. It was only a bit of
+sad, everyday life which touched me. There is nothing new in seeing a
+poor woman in deep mourning.
+
+Jean and I had been alone in our railway carriage for a great part of
+the journey; but an hour or two before we reached London a man got in
+and took a seat in a corner. The train had stopped at a place where
+there is a beautiful and well-known cemetery. People bring their friends
+from long distances to lay them there. When one passes the station, one
+nearly always sees sad faces and people in mourning on the platform.
+
+There was more than one group there that day, and the man who sat in the
+corner looked out at them with gentle eyes. He had fine, deep eyes and a
+handsome mouth. When the poor woman in mourning almost stumbled into
+the carriage, followed by her child, he put out his hand to help her
+and gave her his seat. She had stumbled because her eyes were dim with
+dreadful crying, and she could scarcely see. It made one’s heart stand
+still to see the wild grief of her, and her unconsciousness of the world
+about her. The world did not matter. There was no world. I think there
+was nothing left anywhere but the grave she had just staggered blindly
+away from. I felt as if she had been lying sobbing and writhing and
+beating the new turf on it with her poor hands, and I somehow knew that
+it had been a child’s grave she had been to visit and had felt she left
+to utter loneliness when she turned away.
+
+It was because I thought this that I wished she had not seemed so
+unconscious of and indifferent to the child who was with her and clung
+to her black dress as if it could not bear to let her go. This one was
+alive at least, even if she had lost the other one, and its little face
+was so wistful! It did not seem fair to forget and ignore it, as if
+it were not there. I felt as if she might have left it behind on the
+platform if it had not so clung to her skirt that it was almost dragged
+into the railway carriage with her. When she sank into her seat she did
+not even lift the poor little thing into the place beside her, but left
+it to scramble up as best it could. She buried her swollen face in her
+handkerchief and sobbed in a smothered way as if she neither saw, heard,
+nor felt any living thing near her.
+
+How I wished she would remember the poor child and let it comfort her!
+It really was trying to do it in its innocent way. It pressed close to
+her side, it looked up imploringly, it kissed her arm and her crape
+veil over and over again, and tried to attract her attention. It was
+a little, lily-fair creature not more than five or six years old and
+perhaps too young to express what it wanted to say. It could only cling
+to her and kiss her black dress, and seem to beg her to remember that
+it, at least, was a living thing. But she was too absorbed in her
+anguish to know that it was in the world. She neither looked at nor
+touched it, and at last it sat with its cheek against her sleeve, softly
+stroking her arm, and now and then kissing it longingly. I was obliged
+to turn my face away and look out of the window, because I knew the man
+with the kind face saw the tears well up into my eyes.
+
+The poor woman did not travel far with us. She left the train after a
+few stations were passed. Our fellow-traveler got out before her to help
+her on to the platform. He stood with bared head while he assisted her,
+but she scarcely saw him. And even then she seemed to forget the child.
+The poor thing was dragged out by her dress as it had been dragged in. I
+put out my hand involuntarily as it went through the door, because I was
+afraid it might fall. But it did not. It turned its fair little face
+and smiled at me. When the kind traveler returned to his place in the
+carriage again, and the train left the station, the black-draped woman
+was walking slowly down the platform and the child was still clinging to
+her skirt.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+My guardian was a man whose custom it was to give large and dignified
+parties. Among his grand and fashionable guests there was nearly always
+a sprinkling of the more important members of the literary world. The
+night after I arrived there was to be a particularly notable dinner. I
+had come prepared to appear at it. Jean had brought fine array for
+me and a case of jewels. I knew I must be “dressed up” and look as
+important as I could. When I went up-stairs after tea, Jean was in my
+room laying things out on the bed.
+
+“The man you like so much is to dine here to-night, Ysobel,” she said.
+“Mr. Hector MacNairn.”
+
+I believe I even put my hand suddenly to my heart as I stood and looked
+at her, I was so startled and so glad.
+
+“You must tell him how much you love his books,” she said. She had a
+quiet, motherly way.
+
+“There will be so many other people who will want to talk to him,” I
+answered, and I felt a little breathless with excitement as I said it.
+
+“And I should be too shy to know how to say such things properly.”
+
+“Don’t be afraid of him,” was her advice. “The man will be like his
+books, and they’re the joy of your life.”
+
+She made me look as nice as she could in the new dress she had brought;
+she made me wear the Muircarrie diamonds and sent me downstairs. It does
+not matter who the guests were; I scarcely remember. I was taken in to
+dinner by a stately elderly man who tried to make me talk, and at last
+was absorbed by the clever woman on his other side.
+
+I found myself looking between the flowers for a man’s face I could
+imagine was Hector MacNairn’s. I looked up and down and saw none I could
+believe belonged to him. There were handsome faces and individual ones,
+but at first I saw no Hector MacNairn. Then, on bending forward a little
+to glance behind an epergne, I found a face which it surprised and
+pleased me to see. It was the face of the traveler who had helped the
+woman in mourning out of the railway carriage, baring his head before
+her grief. I could not help turning and speaking to my stately elderly
+partner.
+
+“Do you know who that is--the man at the other side of the table?” I
+asked.
+
+Old Lord Armour looked across and answered with an amiable smile. “It is
+the author the world is talking of most in these days, and the talking
+is no new thing. It’s Mr. Hector MacNairn.”
+
+No one but myself could tell how glad I was. It seemed so right that
+he should be the man who had understood the deeps of a poor, passing
+stranger woman’s woe. I had so loved that quiet baring of his head! All
+at once I knew I should not be afraid of him. He would understand that I
+could not help being shy, that it was only my nature, and that if I said
+things awkwardly my meanings were better than my words. Perhaps I
+should be able to tell him something of what his books had been to me.
+I glanced through the flowers again--and he was looking at me! I could
+scarcely believe it for a second. But he was. His eyes--his wonderful
+eyes--met mine. I could not explain why they were wonderful. I think
+it was the clearness and understanding in them, and a sort of great
+interestedness. People sometimes look at me from curiosity, but they do
+not look because they are really interested.
+
+I could scarcely look away, though I knew I must not be guilty of
+staring. A footman was presenting a dish at my side. I took something
+from it without knowing what it was. Lord Armour began to talk kindly.
+He was saying beautiful, admiring things of Mr. MacNairn and his work.
+I listened gratefully, and said a few words myself now and then. I was
+only too glad to be told of the great people and the small ones who were
+moved and uplifted by his thoughts.
+
+“You admire him very much, I can see,” the amiable elderly voice said.
+
+I could not help turning and looking up. “It is as if a great, great
+genius were one’s friend--as if he talked and one listened,” I said. “He
+is like a splendid dream which has come true.”
+
+Old Lord Armour looked at me quite thoughtfully, as if he saw something
+new in me.
+
+“That is a good way of putting it, Miss Muircarrie,” he answered.
+“MacNairn would like that. You must tell him about it yourself.”
+
+I did not mean to glance through the flowers again, but I did it
+involuntarily. And I met the other eyes--the wonderful, interested
+ones just as I had met them before. It almost seemed as if he had been
+watching me. It might be, I thought, because he only vaguely remembered
+seeing me before and was trying to recall where we had met.
+
+When my guardian brought his men guests to the drawing-room after
+dinner, I was looking over some old prints at a quiet, small table.
+There were a few minutes of smiling talk, and then Sir Ian crossed the
+room toward me, bringing some one with him. It was Hector MacNairn he
+brought.
+
+“Mr. MacNairn tells me you traveled together this afternoon without
+knowing each other,” he said. “He has heard something of Muircarrie and
+would like to hear more, Ysobel. She lives like a little ghost all
+alone in her feudal castle, Mr. MacNairn. We can’t persuade her to like
+London.”
+
+I think he left us alone together because he realized that we should get
+on better without a companion.
+
+Mr. MacNairn sat down near me and began to talk about Muircarrie. There
+were very few places like it, and he knew about each one of them. He
+knew the kind of things Angus Macayre knew--the things most people had
+either never heard of or had only thought of as legends. He talked as he
+wrote, and I scarcely knew when he led me into talking also. Afterward
+I realized that he had asked me questions I could not help answering
+because his eyes were drawing me on with that quiet, deep interest. It
+seemed as if he saw something in my face which made him curious.
+
+I think I saw this expression first when we began to speak of our
+meeting in the railway carriage, and I mentioned the poor little fair
+child my heart had ached so for.
+
+“It was such a little thing and it did so want to comfort her! Its white
+little clinging hands were so pathetic when they stroked and patted
+her,” I said. “And she did not even look at it.”
+
+He did not start, but he hesitated in a way which almost produced the
+effect of a start. Long afterward I remembered it.
+
+“The child!” he said. “Yes. But I was sitting on the other side. And I
+was so absorbed in the poor mother that I am afraid I scarcely saw it.
+Tell me about it.”
+
+“It was not six years old, poor mite,” I answered. “It was one of those
+very fair children one sees now and then. It was not like its mother.
+She was not one of the White People.”
+
+“The White People?” he repeated quite slowly after me. “You don’t mean
+that she was not a Caucasian? Perhaps I don’t understand.”
+
+That made me feel a trifle shy again. Of course he could not know what I
+meant. How silly of me to take it for granted that he would!
+
+“I beg pardon. I forgot,” I even stammered a little. “It is only my way
+of thinking of those fair people one sees, those very fair ones, you
+know--the ones whose fairness looks almost transparent. There are not
+many of them, of course; but one can’t help noticing them when they pass
+in the street or come into a room. You must have noticed them, too.
+I always call them, to myself, the White People, because they are
+different from the rest of us. The poor mother wasn’t one, but the child
+was. Perhaps that was why I looked at it, at first. It was such a lovely
+little thing; and the whiteness made it look delicate, and I could not
+help thinking--” I hesitated, because it seemed almost unkind to finish.
+
+“You thought that if she had just lost one child she ought to take more
+care of the other,” he ended for me. There was a deep thoughtfulness in
+his look, as if he were watching me. I wondered why.
+
+“I wish I had paid more attention to the little creature,” he said, very
+gently. “Did it cry?”
+
+“No,” I answered. “It only clung to her and patted her black sleeve and
+kissed it, as if it wanted to comfort her. I kept expecting it to cry,
+but it didn’t. It made me cry because it seemed so sure that it could
+comfort her if she would only remember that it was alive and loved her.
+I wish, I wish death did not make people feel as if it filled all the
+world--as if, when it happens, there is no life left anywhere. The child
+who was alive by her side did not seem a living thing to her. It didn’t
+matter.”
+
+I had never said as much to any one before, but his watching eyes made
+me forget my shy worldlessness.
+
+“What do you feel about it--death?” he asked.
+
+The low gentleness of his voice seemed something I had known always.
+
+“I never saw it,” I answered. “I have never even seen any one
+dangerously ill. I--It is as if I can’t believe it.”
+
+“You can’t believe it? That is a wonderful thing,” he said, even more
+quietly than before.
+
+“If none of us believed, how wonderful that would be! Beautiful, too.”
+
+“How that poor mother believed it!” I said, remembering her swollen,
+distorted, sobbing face. “She believed nothing else; everything else was
+gone.”
+
+“I wonder what would have happened if you had spoken to her about the
+child?” he said, slowly, as if he were trying to imagine it.
+
+“I’m a very shy person. I should never have courage to speak to a
+stranger,” I answered.
+
+“I’m afraid I’m a coward, too. She might have thought me interfering.”
+
+“She might not have understood,” he murmured.
+
+“It was clinging to her dress when she walked away down the platform,” I
+went on. “I dare say you noticed it then?”
+
+“Not as you did. I wish I had noticed it more,” was his answer. “Poor
+little White One!”
+
+That led us into our talk about the White People. He said he did not
+think he was exactly an observant person in some respects. Remembering
+his books, which seemed to me the work of a man who saw and understood
+everything in the world, I could not comprehend his thinking that, and
+I told him so. But he replied that what I had said about my White People
+made him feel that he must be abstracted sometimes and miss things. He
+did not remember having noticed the rare fairness I had seen. He smiled
+as he said it, because, of course, it was only a little thing--that he
+had not seen that some people were so much fairer than others.
+
+“But it has not been a little thing to you, evidently. That is why I
+am even rather curious about it,” he explained. “It is a difference
+definite enough to make you speak almost as if they were of a different
+race from ours.”
+
+I sat silent a few seconds, thinking it over. Suddenly I realized what I
+had never realized before.
+
+“Do you know,” I said, as slowly as he himself had spoken, “I did not
+know that was true until you put it into words. I am so used to thinking
+of them as different, somehow, that I suppose I do feel as if they were
+almost like another race, in a way. Perhaps one would feel like that
+with a native Indian, or a Japanese.”
+
+“I dare say that is a good simile,” he reflected. “Are they different
+when you know them well?”
+
+“I have never known one but Wee Brown Elspeth,” I answered, thinking it
+over.
+
+He did start then, in the strangest way.
+
+“What!” he exclaimed. “What did you say?”
+
+I was quite startled myself. Suddenly he looked pale, and his breath
+caught itself.
+
+“I said Wee Elspeth, Wee Brown Elspeth. She was only a child who played
+with me,” I stammered, “when I was little.”
+
+He pulled himself together almost instantly, though the color did not
+come back to his face at once and his voice was not steady for a few
+seconds. But he laughed outright at himself.
+
+“I beg your pardon,” he apologized. “I have been ill and am rather
+nervous. I thought you said something you could not possibly have
+said. I almost frightened you. And you were only speaking of a little
+playmate. Please go on.”
+
+“I was only going to say that she was fair like that, fairer than any
+one I had ever seen; but when we played together she seemed like any
+other child. She was the first I ever knew.”
+
+I told him about the misty day on the moor, and about the pale troopers
+and the big, lean leader who carried Elspeth before him on his saddle. I
+had never talked to any one about it before, not even to Jean Braidfute.
+But he seemed to be so interested, as if the little story quite
+fascinated him. It was only an episode, but it brought in the weirdness
+of the moor and my childish fancies about the things hiding in the white
+mist, and the castle frowning on its rock, and my baby face pressed
+against the nursery window in the tower, and Angus and the library, and
+Jean and her goodness and wise ways. It was dreadful to talk so much
+about oneself. But he listened so. His eyes never left my face--they
+watched and held me as if he were enthralled. Sometimes he asked a
+question.
+
+“I wonder who they were--the horsemen?” he pondered. “Did you ever ask
+Wee Elspeth?”
+
+“We were both too little to care. We only played,” I answered him. “And
+they came and went so quickly that they were only a sort of dream.”
+
+“They seem to have been a strange lot. Wasn’t Angus curious about them?”
+ he suggested.
+
+“Angus never was curious about anything,” I said. “Perhaps he knew
+something about them and would not tell me. When I was a little thing
+I always knew he and Jean had secrets I was too young to hear. They hid
+sad and ugly things from me, or things that might frighten a child. They
+were very good.”
+
+“Yes, they were good,” he said, thoughtfully.
+
+I think any one would have been pleased to find herself talking quietly
+to a great genius--as quietly as if he were quite an ordinary person;
+but to me the experience was wonderful. I had thought about him so much
+and with such adoring reverence. And he looked at me as if he truly
+liked me, even as if I were something new--a sort of discovery which
+interested him. I dare say that he had never before seen a girl who had
+lived so much alone and in such a remote and wild place.
+
+I believe Sir Ian and his wife were pleased, too, to see that I
+was talking. They were glad that their guests should see that I was
+intelligent enough to hold the attention even of a clever man. If Hector
+MacNairn was interested in me I could not be as silly and dull as I
+looked. But on my part I was only full of wonder and happiness. I was a
+girl, and he had been my only hero; and it seemed even as if he liked me
+and cared about my queer life.
+
+He was not a man who had the air of making confidences or talking about
+himself, but before we parted I seemed to know him and his surroundings
+as if he had described them. A mere phrase of his would make a picture.
+Such a few words made his mother quite clear to me. They loved each
+other in an exquisite, intimate way. She was a beautiful person. Artists
+had always painted her. He and she were completely happy when they were
+together. They lived in a house in the country, and I could not at all
+tell how I discovered that it was an old house with beautiful chimneys
+and a very big garden with curious high walls with corner towers round
+it. He only spoke of it briefly, but I saw it as a picture; and always
+afterward, when I thought of his mother, I thought of her as sitting
+under a great and ancient apple-tree with the long, late-afternoon
+shadows stretching on the thick, green grass. I suppose I saw that just
+because he said:
+
+“Will you come to tea under the big apple-tree some afternoon when the
+late shadows are like velvet on the grass? That is perhaps the loveliest
+time.”
+
+When we rose to go and join the rest of the party, he stood a moment and
+glanced round the room at our fellow-guests.
+
+“Are there any of your White People here to-night?” he said, smiling. “I
+shall begin to look for them everywhere.”
+
+I glanced over the faces carelessly. “There are none here to-night,”
+ I answered, and then I flushed because he had smiled. “It was only
+a childish name I gave them,” I hesitated. “I forgot you wouldn’t
+understand. I dare say it sounds silly.”
+
+He looked at me so quickly.
+
+“No! no! no!” he exclaimed. “You mustn’t think that! Certainly not
+silly.”
+
+I do not think he knew that he put out his hand and gently touched my
+arm, as one might touch a child to make it feel one wanted it to listen.
+
+“You don’t know,” he said in his low, slow voice, “how glad I am that
+you have talked to me. Sir Ian said you were not fond of talking to
+people, and I wanted to know you.”
+
+“You care about places like Muircarrie. That is why,” I answered,
+feeling at once how much he understood. “I care for Muircarrie more than
+for all the rest of the world. And I suppose you saw it in my face. I
+dare say that the people who love that kind of life cannot help seeing
+it there.”
+
+“Yes,” he said, “it is in your eyes. It was what I saw and found myself
+wondering about when I watched you in the train. It was really the moor
+and the mist and the things you think are hidden in it.”
+
+“Did you watch me?” I asked. “I could not help watching you a little,
+when you were so kind to the poor woman. I was afraid you would see me
+and think me rude.”
+
+“It was the far look in your face I watched,” he said. “If you will come
+to tea under the big apple-tree I will tell you more about it.”
+
+“Indeed I will come,” I answered. “Now we must go and sit among the
+other people--those who don’t care about Muircarrie at all.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+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.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+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.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+“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!”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+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.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+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.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+The mist had floated away, and the moor was drenched with golden
+sunshine when we went back to the castle. As we entered the hall I heard
+the sound of a dog howling, and spoke of it to one of the men-servants
+who had opened the door.
+
+“That sounds like Gelert. Is he shut up somewhere?”
+
+Gelert was a beautiful sheep-dog who belonged to Feargus and was his
+heart’s friend. I allowed him to be kept in the courtyard.
+
+The man hesitated before he answered me, with a curiously grave face.
+
+“It is Gelert, miss. He is howling for his master. We were obliged to
+shut him in the stables.”
+
+“But Feargus ought to have reached here by this time,” I was beginning.
+
+I was stopped because I found Angus Macayre almost at my elbow. He had
+that moment come out of the library. He put his hand on my arm.
+
+“Will ye come with me?” he said, and led me back to the room he had
+just left. He kept his hand on my arm when we all stood together inside,
+Hector and I looking at him in wondering question. He was going to tell
+me something--we both saw that.
+
+“It is a sad thing you have to hear,” he said. “He was a fine man,
+Feargus, and a most faithful servant. He went to see his mother last
+night and came back late across the moor. There was a heavy mist, and he
+must have lost his way. A shepherd found his body in a tarn at daybreak.
+They took him back to his father’s home.”
+
+I looked at Hector MacNairn and again at Angus. “But it couldn’t be
+Feargus,” I cried. “I saw him an hour ago. He passed us playing on his
+pipes. He was playing a new tune I had never heard before a wonderful,
+joyous thing. I both heard and SAW him!”
+
+Angus stood still and watched me. They both stood still and watched me,
+and even in my excitement I saw that each of them looked a little pale.
+
+“You said you did not hear him at first, but you surely saw him when
+he passed so near,” I protested. “I called to him, and he took off his
+bonnet, though he did not stop. He was going so quickly that perhaps he
+did not hear me call his name.”
+
+What strange thing in Hector’s look checked me? Who knows?
+
+“You DID see him, didn’t you?” I asked of him.
+
+Then he and Angus exchanged glances, as if asking each other to decide
+some grave thing. It was Hector MacNairn who decided it.
+
+“No,” he answered, very quietly, “I neither saw nor heard him, even when
+he passed. But you did.”
+
+“I did, quite plainly,” I went on, more and more bewildered by the
+way in which they kept a sort of tender, awed gaze fixed on me. “You
+remember I even noticed that he looked pale. I laughed, you know, when I
+said he looked almost like one of the White People--”
+
+Just then my breath caught itself and I stopped. I began to remember
+things--hundreds of things.
+
+Angus spoke to me again as quietly as Hector had spoken.
+
+“Neither Jean nor I ever saw Wee Brown Elspeth,” he said--“neither Jean
+nor I. But you did. You have always seen what the rest of us did not
+see, my bairn--always.”
+
+I stammered out a few words, half in a whisper. “I have always seen what
+you others could not see? WHAT--HAVE--I--SEEN?”
+
+But I was not frightened. I suppose I could never tell any one what
+strange, wide, bright places seemed suddenly to open and shine before
+me. Not places to shrink back from--oh no! no! One could be sure,
+then--SURE! Feargus had lifted his bonnet with that extraordinary
+triumph in his look--even Feargus, who had been rather dour.
+
+“You called them the White People,” Hector MacNairn said.
+
+
+Angus and Jean had known all my life. A very old shepherd who had looked
+in my face when I was a baby had said I had the eyes which “SAW.” It
+was only the saying of an old Highlander, and might not have been
+remembered. Later the two began to believe I had a sight they had not.
+The night before Wee Brown Elspeth had been brought to me Angus had read
+for the first time the story of Dark Malcolm, and as they sat near me on
+the moor they had been talking about it. That was why he forgot himself
+when I came to ask them where the child had gone, and told him of the
+big, dark man with the scar on his forehead. After that they were sure.
+
+They had always hidden their knowledge from me because they were afraid
+it might frighten me to be told. I had not been a strong child. They
+kept the secret from my relatives because they knew they would dislike
+to hear it and would not believe, and also would dislike me as a queer,
+abnormal creature. Angus had fears of what they might do with doctors
+and severe efforts to obliterate from my mind my “nonsense,” as they
+would have been sure to call it. The two wise souls had shielded me on
+every side.
+
+“It was better that you should go on thinking it only a simple, natural
+thing,” Angus said. “And as to natural, what IS natural and what is not?
+Man has not learned all the laws of nature yet. Nature’s a grand, rich,
+endless thing, always unrolling her scroll with writings that seem new
+on it. They’re not new. They were always written there. But they were
+not unrolled. Never a law broken, never a new law, only laws read with
+stronger eyes.”
+
+Angus and I had always been very fond of the Bible--the strange old
+temple of wonders, full of all the poems and tragedies and histories of
+man, his hates and battles and loves and follies, and of the Wisdom of
+the universe and the promises of the splendors of it, and which even
+those of us who think ourselves the most believing neither wholly
+believe nor will understand. We had pored over and talked of it. We had
+never thought of it as only a pious thing to do. The book was to us one
+of the mystic, awe-inspiring, prophetic marvels of the world.
+
+That was what made me say, half whispering: “I have wondered and
+wondered what it meant--that verse in Isaiah: ‘Behold the former things
+are come to pass and new things do I declare; before they spring forth I
+tell you of them.’ Perhaps it means only the unrolling of the scroll.”
+
+“Aye, aye!” said Angus; “it is full of such deep sayings, and none of us
+will listen to them.”
+
+“It has taken man eons of time,” Hector MacNairn said, thinking it out
+as he spoke--“eons of time to reach the point where he is beginning to
+know that in every stock and stone in his path may lie hidden some
+power he has not yet dreamed of. He has learned that lightning may be
+commanded, distance conquered, motion chained and utilized; but he, the
+one CONSCIOUS force, has never yet begun to suspect that of all others
+he may be the one as yet the least explored. How do we know that there
+does not lie in each of us a wholly natural but, so far, dormant power
+of sight--a power to see what has been called The Unseen through all the
+Ages whose sightlessness has made them Dark? Who knows when the
+Shadow around us may begin to clear? Oh, we are a dull lot--we human
+things--with a queer, obstinate conceit of ourselves.”
+
+“Complete we think we are,” Angus murmured half to himself. “Finished
+creatures! And look at us! How many of us in a million have beauty
+and health and full power? And believing that the law is that we must
+crumple and go to pieces hour by hour! Who’d waste the time making a
+clock that went wrong as often? Nay, nay! We shall learn better than
+this as time goes on. And we’d better be beginning and setting our minds
+to work on it. ‘Tis for us to do--the minds of us. And what’s the mind
+of us but the Mind that made us? Simple and straight enough it is when
+once you begin to think it out. The spirit of you sees clearer than we
+do, that’s all,” he said to me. “When your mother brought you into the
+world she was listening to one outside calling to her, and it opened the
+way for you.”
+
+At night Hector MacNairn and his mother and I sat on the terrace under
+stars which seemed listening things, and we three drew nearer to one
+another, and nearer and nearer.
+
+“When the poor mother stumbled into the train that day,” was one of the
+things Hector told me, “I was thinking of The Fear and of my own mother.
+You looked so slight and small as you sat in your corner that I thought
+at first you were almost a child. Then a far look in your eyes made me
+begin to watch you. You were so sorry for the poor woman that you could
+not look away from her, and something in your face touched and puzzled
+me. You leaned forward suddenly and put out your hand protectingly as
+she stepped down on to the platform.
+
+“That night when you spoke quite naturally of the child, never doubting
+that I had seen it, I suddenly began to suspect. Because of The
+Fear”--he hesitated--“I had been reading and thinking many things new to
+me. I did not know what I believed. But you spoke so simply, and I knew
+you were speaking the truth. Then you spoke just as naturally of Wee
+Brown Elspeth. That startled me because not long before I had been told
+the tale in the Highlands by a fine old story-teller who is the head of
+his clan. I saw you had never heard the story before. And yet you were
+telling me that you had played with the child.”
+
+“He came home and told me about you,” Mrs. MacNairn said. “His fear of
+The Fear was more for me than for himself. He knew that if he brought
+you to me, you who are more complete than we are, clearer-eyed and
+nearer, nearer, I should begin to feel that he was not going--out. I
+should begin to feel a reality and nearness myself. Ah, Ysobel! How we
+have clung to you and loved you! And then that wonderful afternoon! I
+saw no girl with her hand through Mr. Le Breton’s arm; Hector saw none.
+But you saw her. She was THERE!”
+
+“Yes, she was there,” I answered. “She was there, smiling up at him. I
+wish he could have known.”
+
+
+What does it matter if this seems a strange story? To some it will mean
+something; to some it will mean nothing. To those it has a meaning for
+it will open wide windows into the light and lift heavy loads. That
+would be quite enough, even if the rest thought it only the weird fancy
+of a queer girl who had lived alone and given rein to her silliest
+imaginings. I wanted to tell it, howsoever poorly and ineffectively
+it was done. Since I KNEW I have dropped the load of ages--the black
+burden. Out on the hillside my feet did not even feel the grass, and yet
+I was standing, not floating. I had no wings or crown. I was only Ysobel
+out on the hillside, free!
+
+
+This is the way it all ended.
+
+For three weeks that were like heaven we three lived together at
+Muircarrie. We saw every beauty and shared every joy of sun and dew and
+love and tender understanding.
+
+After one lovely day we had spent on the moor in a quiet dream of joy
+almost strange in its perfectness, we came back to the castle; and,
+because the sunset was of such unearthly radiance and changing wonder
+we sat on the terrace until the last soft touch of gold had died out and
+left the pure, still, clear, long summer twilight.
+
+When Mrs. MacNairn and I went in to dress for dinner, Hector lingered a
+little behind us because the silent beauty held him.
+
+I came down before his mother did, and I went out upon the terrace again
+because I saw he was still sitting there. I went to the stone balustrade
+very quietly and leaned against it as I turned to look at him and speak.
+
+Then I stood quite still and looked long--for some reason not startled,
+not anguished, not even feeling that he had gone. He was more beautiful
+than any human creature I had ever seen before. But It had happened as
+they said it would. He had not ceased--but something else had. Something
+had ceased.
+
+
+It was the next evening before I came out on the terrace again. The day
+had been more exquisite and the sunset more wonderful than before. Mrs.
+MacNairn was sitting by her son’s side in the bedroom whose windows
+looked over the moor. I am not going to say one word of what had come
+between the two sunsets. Mrs. MacNairn and I had clung--and clung. We
+had promised never to part from each other. I did not quite know why I
+went out on the terrace; perhaps it was because I had always loved to
+sit or stand there.
+
+This evening I stood and leaned upon the balustrade, looking out far,
+far, far over the moor. I stood and gazed and gazed. I was thinking
+about the Secret and the Hillside. I was very quiet--as quiet as the
+twilight’s self. And there came back to me the memory of what Hector had
+said as we stood on the golden patch of gorse when the mist had for
+a moment or so blown aside, what he had said of man’s awakening, and,
+remembering all the ages of--childish, useless dread, how he would
+stand-- I did not turn suddenly, but slowly. I was not startled in the
+faintest degree. He stood there close to me as he had so often stood.
+
+And he stood--and smiled.
+
+I have seen him many times since. I shall see him many times again. And
+when I see him he always stands--and smiles.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg’s The White People, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
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