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.
