Chapter VI

The White People

by Francis Hodgson Burnett

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.