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.