The White People

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"Yes," he said, "it is in your eyes. It was what I saw and found myself
wondering about when I watched you in the train. It was really the moor
and the mist and the things you think are hidden in it."

"Did you watch me?" I asked. "I could not help watching you a little,
when you were so kind to the poor woman. I was afraid you would see me
and think me rude."

"It was the far look in your face I watched," he said. "If you will come
to tea under the big apple-tree I will tell you more about it."

"Indeed I will come," I answered. "Now we must go and sit among the
other people--those who don't care about Muircarrie at all."



CHAPTER V

I went to tea under the big apple-tree. It was very big and old and
wonderful. No wonder Mr. MacNairn and his mother loved it. Its great
branches spread out farther than I had ever seen the branches of an
apple-tree spread before. They were gnarled and knotted and beautiful
with age. Their shadows upon the grass were velvet, deep and soft. Such
a tree could only have lived its life in such a garden. At least it
seemed so to me. The high, dim-colored walls, with their curious, low
corner towers and the leafage of the wall fruits spread against their
brick, inclosed it embracingly, as if they were there to take care of
it and its beauty. But the tree itself seemed to have grown there in all
its dignified loveliness of shadow to take care of Mrs. MacNairn, who
sat under it. I felt as if it loved and was proud of her.

I have heard clever literary people speak of Mrs. MacNairn as a
"survival of type." Sometimes clever people bewilder me by the terms
they use, but I thought I understood what they meant in her case. She
was quite unlike the modern elderly woman, and yet she was not in the
least old-fashioned or demodee. She was only exquisitely distinct.

When she rose from her chair under the apple-tree boughs and came
forward to meet me that afternoon, the first things which struck me were
her height and slenderness and her light step. Then I saw that her clear
profile seemed cut out of ivory and that her head was a beautiful shape
and was beautifully set. Its every turn and movement was exquisite. The
mere fact that both her long, ivory hands enfolded mine thrilled me.
I wondered if it were possible that she could be unaware of her
loveliness. Beautiful people are thrilling to me, and Mrs. MacNairn has
always seemed more so than any one else. This is what her son once said
of her:

"She is not merely beautiful; she is Beauty--Beauty's very spirit moving
about among us mortals; pure Beauty."

She drew me to a chair under her tree, and we sat down together. I felt
as if she were glad that I had come. The watching look I had seen in her
son's eyes was in hers also. They watched me as we talked, and I found
myself telling her about my home as I had found myself telling him. He
had evidently talked to her about it himself. I had never met any one
who thought of Muircarrie as I did, but it seemed as if they who were
strangers were drawn by its wild, beautiful loneliness as I was.

I was happy. In my secret heart I began to ask myself if it could be
true that they made me feel a little as if I somehow belonged to some
one. I had always seemed so detached from every one. I had not been
miserable about it, and I had not complained to myself; I only accepted
the detachment as part of my kind of life.

Mr. MacNairn came into the garden later and several other people came
in to tea. It was apparently a sort of daily custom--that people who
evidently adored Mrs. MacNairn dropped in to see and talk to her every
afternoon. She talked wonderfully, and her friends' joy in her was
wonderful, too. It evidently made people happy to be near her. All she
said and did was like her light step and the movements of her delicate,
fine head--gracious and soft and arrestingly lovely. She did not let
me drift away and sit in a corner looking on, as I usually did among
strangers. She kept me near her, and in some subtle, gentle way made me
a part of all that was happening--the talk, the charming circle under
the spreading boughs of the apple-tree, the charm of everything.
Sometimes she would put out her exquisite, long-fingered hand and touch
me very lightly, and each time she did it I felt as if she had given me
new life.

There was an interesting elderly man who came among the rest of the
guests. I was interested in him even before she spoke to me of him. He
had a handsome, aquiline face which looked very clever. His talk was
brilliantly witty. When he spoke people paused as if they could not
bear to lose a phrase or even a word. But in the midst of the trills
of laughter surrounding him his eyes were unchangingly sad. His face
laughed or smiled, but his eyes never.

"He is the greatest artist in England and the most brilliant man," Mrs.
MacNairn said to me, quietly. "But he is the saddest, too. He had a
lovely daughter who was killed instantly, in his presence, by a fall.
They had been inseparable companions and she was the delight of his
life. That strange, fixed look has been in his eyes ever since. I know
you have noticed it."

We were walking about among the flower-beds after tea, and Mr. MacNairn
was showing me a cloud of blue larkspurs in a corner when I saw
something which made me turn toward him rather quickly.

"There is one!" I said. "Do look at her! Now you see what I mean! The
girl standing with her hand on Mr. Le Breton's arm."

Mr. Le Breton was the brilliant man with the sad eyes. He was standing
looking at a mass of white-and-purple iris at the other side of the
garden. There were two or three people with him, but it seemed as if for
a moment he had forgotten them--had forgotten where he was. I wondered
suddenly if his daughter had been fond of irises. He was looking at them
with such a tender, lost expression. The girl, who was a lovely, fair
thing, was standing quite close to him with her hand in his arm, and she
was smiling, too--such a smile!

"Mr. Le Breton!" Mr. MacNairn said in a rather startled tone. "The girl
with her hand in his arm?"

"Yes. You see how fair she is," I answered.

"And she has that transparent look. It is so lovely. Don't you think so?
SHE is one of the White People."

He stood very still, looking across the flowers at the group. There was
a singular interest and intensity in his expression. He watched the pair
silently for a whole minute, I think.

"Ye-es," he said, slowly, at last, "I do see what you mean--and it IS
lovely. I don't seem to know her well. She must be a new friend of my
mother's. So she is one of the White People?"

"She looks like a white iris herself, doesn't she?" I said. "Now you
know."

"Yes; now I know," he answered.

I asked Mrs. MacNairn later who the girl was, but she didn't seem to
recognize my description of her. Mr. Le Breton had gone away by that
time, and so had the girl herself.

"The tall, very fair one in the misty, pale-gray dress," I said. "She
was near Mr. Le Breton when he was looking at the iris-bed. You were
cutting some roses only a few yards away from her. That VERY fair girl?"

Mrs. MacNairn paused a moment and looked puzzled.

"Mildred Keith is fair," she reflected, "but she was not there then. I
don't recall seeing a girl. I was cutting some buds for Mrs. Anstruther.
I--" She paused again and turned toward her son, who was standing
watching us. I saw their eyes meet in a rather arrested way.

"It was not Mildred Keith," he said. "Miss Muircarrie is inquiring
because this girl was one of those she calls the White People. She was
not any one I had seen here before."

There was a second's silence before Mrs. MacNairn smilingly gave me one
of her light, thrilling touches on my arm.

"Ah! I remember," she said. "Hector told me about the White People. He
rather fancied I might be one."

I am afraid I rather stared at her as I slowly shook my head. You see
she was almost one, but not quite.

"I was so busy with my roses that I did not notice who was standing near
Mr. Le Breton," she said. "Perhaps it was Anabel Mere. She is a more
transparent sort of girl than Mildred, and she is more blond. And you
don't know her, Hector? I dare say it was she."



CHAPTER VI

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.



CHAPTER VII

"The feeling you call The Fear has never come to me," I said to her.
"And if it had I think it would have melted away because of a dream I
once had. I don't really believe it was a dream, but I call it one. I
think I really went somewhere and came back. I often wonder why I
came back. It was only a short dream, so simple that there is scarcely
anything to tell, and perhaps it will not convey anything to you. But it
has been part of my life--that time when I was Out on the Hillside. That
is what I call The Dream to myself, 'Out on the Hillside,' as if it were
a kind of unearthly poem. But it wasn't. It was more real than anything
I have ever felt. It was real--real! I wish that I could tell it so that
you would know how real it was."

I felt almost piteous in my longing to make her know. I knew she was
afraid of something, and if I could make her know how REAL that one
brief dream had been she would not be afraid any more. And I loved her,
I loved her so much!

"I was asleep one night at Muircarrie," I went on, "and suddenly,
without any preparatory dreaming, I was standing out on a hillside
in moonlight softer and more exquisite than I had ever seen or known
before. Perhaps I was still in my nightgown--I don't know. My feet were
bare on the grass, and I wore something light and white which did not
seem to touch me. If it touched me I did not feel it. My bare feet did
not feel the grass; they only knew it was beneath them.

"It was a low hill I stood on, and I was only on the side of it. And in
spite of the thrilling beauty of the moon, all but the part I stood on
melted into soft, beautiful shadow, all below me and above me. But I did
not turn to look at or ask myself about anything. You see the difficulty
is that there are no earthly words to tell it! All my being was
ecstasy--pure, light ecstasy! Oh, what poor words-- But I know no
others. If I said that I was happy--HAPPY!--it would be nothing. I WAS
happiness itself, I WAS pure rapture! I did not look at the beauty of
the night, the sky, the marvelous melting shadow. I was PART of it
all, one with it. Nothing held me nothing! The beauty of the night, the
light, the air WERE what I was, and I was only thrilling ecstasy and
wonder at the rapture of it."

I stopped and covered my face with my hands, and tears wet my fingers.

"Oh, I cannot make it real! I was only there such a short, short time.
Even if you had been with me I could not have found words for it, even
then. It was such a short time. I only stood and lifted my face and felt
the joy of it, the pure marvel of joy. I only heard myself murmuring
over and over again: 'Oh, how beautiful! how beautiful! Oh, how
BEAUTIFUL!'

"And then a marvel of new joy swept through me. I said, very softly and
very slowly, as if my voice were trailing away into silence:
'Oh--h! I--can--lie--down--here--on--the grass--and--sleep . . .
all--through--the night--under--this--moonlight. . . . I can
sleep--sleep--'

"I began to sink softly down, with the heavenliest feeling of relaxation
and repose, as if there existed only the soul of beautiful rest. I sank
so softly--and just as my cheek almost touched the grass the dream was
over!"

"Oh!" cried Mrs. MacNairn. "Did you awaken?"

"No. I came back. In my sleep I suddenly found myself creeping into my
bed again as if I had been away somewhere. I was wondering why I was
there, how I had left the hillside, when I had left it. That part
WAS a dream--but the other was not. I was allowed to go
somewhere--outside--and come back."

I caught at her hand in the dark.

"The words are all wrong," I said. "It is because we have no words to
describe that. But have I made you feel it at all? Oh! Mrs. MacNairn,
have I been able to make you know that it was not a dream?"

She lifted my hand and pressed it passionately against her cheek, and
her cheek, too, was wet--wet.

"No, it was not a dream," she said. "You came back. Thank God you came
back, just to tell us that those who do not come back stand awakened in
that ecstasy--in that ecstasy. And The Fear is nothing. It is only
The Dream. The awakening is out on the hillside, out on the hillside!
Listen!" She started as she said it. "Listen! The nightingale is
beginning again."

He sent forth in the dark a fountain--a rising, aspiring fountain--of
golden notes which seemed to reach heaven itself. The night was made
radiant by them. He flung them upward like a shower of stars into
the sky. We sat and listened, almost holding our breath. Oh! the
nightingale! the nightingale!

"He knows," Hector MacNairn's low voice said, "that it was not a dream."

When there was silence again I heard him leave his chair very quietly.

"Good night! good night!" he said, and went away. I felt somehow that
he had left us together for a purpose, but, oh, I did not even remotely
dream what the purpose was! But soon she told me, almost in a whisper.

"We love you very much, Ysobel," she said. "You know that?"

"I love you both, with all my heart," I answered. "Indeed I love you."

"We two have been more to each other than mere mother and son. We have
been sufficient for each other. But he began to love you that first day
when he watched you in the railway carriage. He says it was the far look
in your eyes which drew him."

"I began to love him, too," I said. And I was not at all ashamed or shy
in saying it.

"We three might have spent our lives together," she went on. "It would
have been a perfect thing. But--but--" She stood up as if she could not
remain seated. Involuntarily I stood up with her. She was trembling, and
she caught and held me in her arms. "He cannot stay, Ysobel," she ended.

I could scarcely hear my own voice when I echoed the words.

"He cannot--stay?"

"Oh! the time will come," she said, "when people who love each other
will not be separated, when on this very earth there will be no pain, no
grief, no age, no death--when all the world has learned the Law at
last. But we have not learned it yet. And here we stand! The greatest
specialists have told us. There is some fatal flaw in his heart. At any
moment, when he is talking to us, when he is at his work, when he is
asleep, he may--cease. It will just be ceasing. At any moment. He cannot
stay."

My own heart stood still for a second. Then there rose before me slowly,
but clearly, a vision--the vision which was not a dream.

"Out on the hillside," I murmured. "Out on the hillside."

I clung to her with both arms and held her tight. I understood now why
they had talked about The Fear. These two who were almost one soul
were trying to believe that they were 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.