The White People

F >> Frances Hodgson Burnett >> The White People


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?