Chapter X

The White People

by Francis Hodgson Burnett

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.