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 moot 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.
