The White People

F >> Frances Hodgson Burnett >> The White People


"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.