Pharais; and, The Mountain Lovers

The heart of the birdeen lightened as she walked swiftly through the dewy fern. She began to call back to the cushats and other birds as they uttered their matin cries. Then she laughed, and broke into snatches of song.

The light was streaming down the Strath as she emerged into the open glade above the Linn. Here, among the trees on the slope and in the many cavernous rocks and bosky hollows, deep shadows still lingered. It would be nigh upon an hour before the morning twilight waned hence.

A glance showed her that there was no one at the Linn. She ran down close to it, and peered eagerly here and there, on either side. There was no one visible. With a sigh of relief she was about to step forward to take a sunrise peep into the Pool below the Linn, for the great salmon she had never yet been able to descry, when she stopped, because of the croaking of a raven.

It was not lucky to go athwart the croaking of a fee-ach' at sunrise. The great black bird swung on an outspread bough of a hazel, close to the Kelpie's Pool, and croaked with harsh, monotonous reiteration. Oona stooped, lifted a stone, and threw it at the raven, who watched her closely.

"Fitheach! fitheach! The way of the sun to you! Be off, be off!"

Croak! croak!

"Black fēē-ach, black fēē-ach, go where the dead are, and do not cross my way, or I will put a rosad upon thee!"

Croak! croak! croak!

Half angry, half glad, the child threw another stone; then turned, leaped from stone to stone till she gained the grass again, and then went singing low toward the cave called the Uav-an-teine.

The arch of it was still in shadow, and the bracken on the brow of the arch: though the rowan that leaned forward into the air bathed its upper branches in sunlight. On the smooth thyme-set sward beyond, the yellow shine lay; so warm, that the butterflies hovered in and out of the golden area.

With cautious steps Oona advanced. If Nial were there she wished to surprise him while he slept.

She crawled to one side of the sunswept cave, within which was still a warm dusk. Surely that was the sound of breathing? Yes; she could hear the steady rise and fall, faint though it was. With a smile she moved forward.

Suddenly she stood as one changed into stone. What was this: what did it mean? No sign of Nial was there. But, among dried bracken and dead leaves, blown or drifted there in autumnal days, and forming a place of rest fit for the weariest deer that ever leaped before the baying hounds, lay two figures, clasped in one another's arms.

For a moment the idea flashed across Oona's mind that the sleepers were Torcall and Anabal. Then she knew who they were, for who had such a mass of lovely dark-brown hair as Sorcha? what man of the Strath had the curly yellow hair of Alan? So that was where the lovers met! Once or twice, within these last few cloudless days and nights, she knew that Sorcha, when at length the restless lapwings had ceased their querulous crying in the moonlight, had slipped quietly from the house. She knew, too, that once at least Sorcha did not return till sunrise, for she had been awake, and had risen, and had seen her sister moving slow through the dew, with so wonderful a look in her eyes, so beautiful, so strange, that she had not dared to speak, and had fled back to her bed, with a sob in her throat, she knew not why.

She smiled, and pondered how best to startle them. How she wished Nial were here also, so that he might laugh when Alan and Sorcha suddenly awoke, and found themselves observed!

But, as she looked, the change that had already been at work in her of late, swayed her mood otherwise.

She rose to her feet, and leaned against the green mossy boulder at the side of the cave. For a while she stood thus, her eyes intent upon the lovers. How beautiful Sorcha's face was, faint-flushed like that! What a new, strange light upon her face! And Alan: how tall and strong he was, how bonnie the rippling gold hair of his head! His fair face, whiter now than she had ever seen it, seemed cut out of stone, so sharp were the outlines. Thus, she thought, must Angus Óg seem: Angus, the fairest youth of the world, whom none sees now, for he is of the Ancient People, who, though still among us, are invisible to mortal eyes. Often had Sorcha told her of him: sure, now, this was he?

Instinctively, she looked to see if white birds hovered anywhere. For the olden tale said that the kisses of Angus Óg became white birds, and that these flew abroad continually, to nest in lovers' hearts till the moment came when, on meeting lips of love, their invisible wings should become kisses again.

No, there were no birds: none, at least, for her eyes to see.

The hot sunlight moved upon her bare feet. Soon it would reach her waist, she knew, if she stood brooding there: and when it did that, the glow would be upon the face of Alan, and he would awake.

A sudden fantasy took her. Almost she had laughed aloud. When she moved into the space opposite the cave it was as though she waded in sunshine. Everywhere in the light the dew shone, filled with unburning fire.

She crossed the sunspace, to where a mass of honeysuckle drooped over a wild brier. With deft fingers she made a crown of this, starred with some pink wild-roses, plucked from a low bush beyond the brier; then of the dusky yellow honeysuckle wove a garland.

Decorated thus, and with sparkling eyes, she turned and faced the cave again. Soundlessly she began to dance.

At first it was the mere joy of her laughing glee. Soon, she hoped Alan or Sorcha would wake. Ah, then, how she would laugh, to see them stare confusedly at her, dancing there in the sunlight!

But as she wavered to and fro in the sunsea, a dreamy pleasure moved her to half-forgetfulness of where she was. A mavis on the rowan over the cave began to sing, the strange late song that sometimes wells forth in silent August; at first, long, sweet, vibrant notes, then a swift gurgling music, and then, as his heart warmed against the sun, more and more wildly sweet, till the hot air swung with the intoxication of his rapture.

More and more, too, was Oona rapt as she wavered to and fro. The swift rhythm of her joyous dance wrought her as with a spell. A dream lay in her eyes, now set far away – far away, where Angus Óg was, and where the sun rose and the moon waxed and waned to the singing of the white merle.

The sunlight seemed to drift her onward, as though she were a dancing wave on the forehead of the tide. Soon she was past the cave, and still, as the sunbeams flickered, she leaped and swayed, rapt in an ecstasy beyond thought or heed.

Suddenly, the thrush ceased. There was a whirr of wings: then a sharp, quickly repeated strident cry.

Another second, and Oona was a laughing child again, crouched low in the bracken. Alan or Sorcha was awake, and had stirred!

Ah, no, she thought, she would not let them see her now. True, they might hear her, where she lay panting like a young bird escaped from a hawk! As soundlessly as she could, for her quick breathing and the rustle of the bracken, she half-crawled, half-ran, back the way she had come. Soon she was safe, for the pines enclosed her, and then the beeches and birks near the water-slope. From behind a vast beech-bole she watched to see if she were pursued, or seen. But no one came. All was as before: only, the thrush did not venture back to the rowan, which now threw its flickering fingerlike shadows on the smooth turf below, in front of the cave.

VIII

Already the breath of the day was windlessly hot.

Flushed with her dancing in the sunlight, and with the languor of August in her blood, Oona listened eagerly to the cool sound of the running of Mairg Water.

The next moment she was free of her scanty raiment, and was by the streamside. As she stood among a cluster of yellow irises, the sunlight lay upon the gold of her hair and the glowing ivory-white of her body, and then seemed to spill in yellow fire among the tall blooms about her feet. A faint green glimmer from the emerald iris-sheaths dusked the small white thighs.

A leap like a fawn, and she was in the water. A hundred miniature rainbows gleamed in the dazzle of spray as she splashed to and fro, after she had come to the surface some yards downstream. What joy it was to feel the cool brown water laving her body: to dive and swim like an otter: to float slowly with the current under overhanging foliage, and see the young sedge-warblers in the reeds or among the water-willows, or to look up at the curving boughs of a birch or rowan, deep green against the deep blue! Then the wonder and beauty to rest with outspread arms, and breast against the flow: to stare down into the mirroring depth, and see the flickering feathers of the quicken and the red rowan-berries marvellously real and near, with lovely shadow-birds flitting to and fro among the shadow-branches, and, strangest of all, another white Oona drifting like a phantom through that greenshine underworld!

When she swung round suddenly, and held herself back against the downflow, as an otter half-alarmed will do, it was not because she was drifting too near the "race" just above the cataract. A strange sound came from the Linn, or beyond it. The noise of the water was in her ears, and she could not hear distinctly: but surely that noise was the cry of one in sorrow, and, at any rate, human.

With a swift movement she slid to the bank, caught at a tuft of flowering sedge, and then stood, dripping and all agleam in the sunlight, while with inclined head she listened intently.

Now she could hear more distinctly: certainly some one was by or near the Linn. The noise of the churned waters rose and fell in a long, wavering, unequal sigh; and in one of the downward hushes her keen ears caught tones and even words she fancied she recognised.

She hesitated for a moment as to whether to run back for the handful of clothes she had left upstream, but then bethought her that it was only Nial and no stranger who might throw stones at her as a kelpie – as some boys from the Strath, who at Beltane had been burning small fires and cooking wild-birds' eggs, had done many weeks agone at Nial.14

How often, in her wanderings with Nial, she had bathed, to his wonder and awe at her white beauty, her daring, her skill! As for him, though he loved the running water almost with a passion, nothing would induce him to enter it, except when alone and in the dim light. As a boy he had been as much at home in it as any creature of the river. But once, after he had come to know Oona, and to find in her the one person in the world whose soul did not loom too infinitely remote above his drear loneliness of spirit, he had leaped one dead-calm noon into the water; and there and then, for the first time, realised, in the phantom which swam with him or beneath him, the misshapen ugliness of his body, the savagery of his distorted head and features. From that day he had never entered the stream, save at late dusk or on moonless nights.

So with swift steps, which left small pads of damp upon the rock-ledges, Oona ran toward the great boulder which overhung the cataract.

As she passed the place where, a few hours ago, she had left her foster-father and the woman Anabal, she glanced here and there for any trace of either she might not have seen before. The next moment she caught sight of Nial.

She watched him curiously. What did it mean? she wondered. He was crouching, with his back to her, on the extreme of the ledge overlooking the Kelpie's Pool – that deep caldron which received all that was at last disgorged from the maelstrom of the Linn. His head was bent forward, and sometimes he leaned on his hands, and sometimes swayed backward or sideways.

What startled her more were the strange, wild, barbaric words that Nial was chanting, with thin, hoarse, monotonous wail. What was this rune he chanted? Why did he crouch there, chanting and swaying, swaying and chanting?

Sometimes he ceased for a few moments that crooning, mourning, appealing, inexplicable chant, and appeared to be speaking, and to gesticulate as he spoke.

Fantastic thoughts flashed through the child's brain. Perhaps it was the kelpie who was trying to lure Nial to her arms; or mayhap Nial had seen her, and was putting a rosad upon her. She knew that the people of the Strath, and even Murdo the shepherd – in truth, Alan, too, and perhaps Sorcha, though she would not say it – believed that the elf-man was in league with all the mysterious or dreadful creatures of the shadow, from the harmless "guidfolk" of the hill-hollow to the yellow-clad demon-woman who drove her herd of deer and sang her death-song, and to the dark and terrible kelpie who lurked in the deep pool in that wild place beyond the Linn o' Mairg. Or, again, Nial might be uttering some incantation: or be at his old quest, the seeking of his lost soul.

Surely it must be that, she thought, as soundlessly she approached him.

Within the last minute or two a change had come over him. Every now and then he raised his head, often clasping and unclasping his hands, swaying to and fro the while, and speaking or chanting rapidly, with wild, scarce coherent words. He was as one in an ecstasy. Oona, for the first time, feared him. She stood, only a few yards behind him now, and listened.

"Ochan, ochone, arone! and so fair too, and so fair!O white you are as the canna that floats in the breeze,Or as the wool of the young lamb that Murdo found dead in the heather,Or as the breast of Sorcha, or as Oona, little Oona!O, O, arone, arone, Death of me, Woe!Oh, white too and fair, and I black as the wet peats,Black and ugly, so that even the deer know,And Fior and Donn and all the dogsThink me no more than a sheep, than the kye, ochan, ochone!But oh, it's dead you are and drowned, Anam, my Soul!And it's there you lie … grey and still … with … and you laugh at me, maybe …And it may be you are the shadow only that will go if I leap at you!… and hair like mine thick with dew …Or … the kelpie …And true it was, with the fēē-ach, and the feannag, and the corbie,The corbie, the hoodie-craw, and the raven!"

At these words Oona glanced swiftly to right and left. Nowhere had she heard again the croaking of the raven, and now she could descry neither of Nial's three birds of omen. But just as her gaze was wandering back to the dwarf, she caught sight of the fitheach further downstream, perched upon a dead branch near some rocks, and even as she looked she heard its harsh, savage croak! croak!

"Ay, ay, ròc, Fēē-ach, ròc! Dean rocail, dean rocail!" began Nial again, with a wild gesture…

"Nial! Nial!"

He ceased all movement, all sound, as though smitten into silence. Her fear partially overcome, now that she had gathered from his words that he thought he had found his soul at last, but that it was dead – yet with a dread in her heart because of the thing that lay there in the pool, whether alive, dead, or asleep, or treacherously assuming life – she called again, and more loudly:

"Nial! Nial!"

Slowly he looked round. A bewildered terror in his eyes waned. It was only Oona.

"Nial, Nial-mo-ghràidh, what is it?"

"Hush, mo-mùirnean," he muttered, beckoning to her to creep close to him. The slight breeze that had sprung up for its brief life crept along the stream, and whispered along the grass and in the hot-smelling fern. The murmurous sound of it made the child glance apprehensively behind her. She dreaded the elfin footsteps that folk said could be heard at times near Nial.

"What is it, dear Nial?"

"Ssh! Hush! Come here: look! … look!" he whispered.

Gently she stole beside him, leaned over the ledge, and stared down into the pool. A mere breath of the breeze ruffled the surface, and all she could see was a dark mass with a dusky white splatch, looming shadowily through the amber water, and strangely distorted by the silver shimmer caused by the wind-eddy, which came and went round the circuit of the pool like a baffled bird.

"What is it? Who is it? What is it, Nial?"

"Hush, do not speak so loud! It is my soul."

"Your soul, Nial?"

"Ay, true. Sure it is my soul. All night I was in the woods, and I heard a tap-tapping going ever before me, and at dawn it led me down by the Mairg, and then the spirit flew away before me, and the annir-choille was just like a woodpecker! And when it flew up by the Linn, I…"

"Whisper louder, Nial! I can't hear."

"When it flew up by the Linn, I saw it change into a curlew, and it wheeled over the Linn and called cian-cian-cianalas, and then I was afraid, though the annir-choille that was like a woodpecker had made hope to me of finding my soul."

"Who is the annir-choille, Nial?"

He gloomed at her silently. Then in a constrained voice, and with averted eyes:

"How should I know? I know nothing. I am Nial."

"But what have you been told?"

"They call her the wood-maid – the tree-maid."

"Ah-h! … and Nial…"

"But when I came near, the curlew flew away. Then it was that I looked into the pool. And then, and then it was, Oona-mo-rùn, that I saw my soul lying here – big as a man's soul should be, and with a face as white as yours; ay, a fair, good body like Alan's, an' with clothes on, too – dark, beautiful clothes; an' the hands of him that moved about were white; an' … oh, Oona-birdeen, look you now, and see if it is not as I say!"

The awed child stared into the brown depths, where the surface was still ruffled silvery here and there, with a glinting, glancing shimmer that made all things below shiftily uncertain.

"Do you see it, Oona?" cried an eager whisper at her ear.

"Ay, sure."

"Oona, Oona, is it dead? Oona, birdeen, Oona-mo-gràidh, it may – it may be living! O Oona, the white soul o' me – white as you, my fawn!"

The blue eyes glanced up from the pool, and at the speaker. She looked at him, then downward again.

"Nial!"

"Yes … yes, Oona …"

"The wood-maid has been playing with you."

"No, no, no – that is not a true word on your lips!"

"Sure, a true thing it is. Look, Nial; see how big it is. The white face of it is yonder by the salmon-hole, and one foot is moving against the rock below us!"

"And what of that! Sure, it is a beautiful soul, dead or alive; and big as a man's should be, and fair and white and strong!"

"Nial … Nial … it may be alive, for I see its hands moving … but … but" – and here tears came into the child's eyes, and her voice shook with sorrow for her hapless friend – "but … oh, Nial … so big a soul will never be able to creep into your body … for you are small, dear, small, and – and … an' then it is so big and strong!"

Alas, the pity of it! Never once had Nial thought of this; never had he dreamed that so large a soul could not get into his dwarfish, misshapen frame.

He stared in wild amaze, first at Oona, then at the drowned thing in the water – his soul, or a phantom, or a body, or mayhap the kelpie, he knew not which, now – then at Oona again. A fierce pain was in his eyes. He bit his lip, in the way he did whenever Màm-Gorm struck him – a thing that had not been for months past. A little rivulet of blood trickled into his thin matted beard, tangled and twisted this way and that like a goat's.

"Nial! Nial!" moaned Oona pitifully.

"Ay, it is true … that is a true thing that you will be saying, Oona. Sure, it would need to be a soul as small as your own that would do for poor Nial."

"No, no, Nial!" cried the child comfortingly, "bigger than mine, really, really– yes, and … and … fatter!"

A sob shook his heavy frame. Oh, the long seeking, and the near goal, and the bitter futile finding! Still, Oona's sympathy was sweet. Dear birdeen that she was, to say he would have a bigger soul than hers, bigger and fatter too! But, no, he thought – no, better to have one the same as Oona's, for all he was so much older and bigger and stronger than she was.

"Ah, Oona-mùirnean, if I could only find my soul at all – anywhere, anywhere!"

"But you will find it, Nial! You will find it! Sorcha told me that you are sure to find it. Never mind what they say down there in the Strath. What do they know about souls? And … and … Nial!"

"Yes, my birdeen."

"If … if … you can't find your soul anywhere – and all this summer we'll go seeking, seeking, for it, till we have listened at every tree in the forest and on the mountain-side – if you can't find it anywhere, I am going to marry you!"

Nial looked at the child bewildered. He knew little of what marriage was, save that in the Strath two married people lived in one house, and that the woman was called by the name of her man, and that they were sadder, and led duller lives – so at least it seemed to him. Sure, it would be for pleasure that he and Oona should have a cot of their own, though he, and she too for that, preferred the pinewood; and a thing for laughter that she, the bit birdeen Oona, should be called Bean Nial!

"Why would you be marrying poor Nial, Oona my doo?"

"Because you would then have half my soul. Yes, yes, Nial! don't shake your head like that; I know you would. Sorcha told me it was in the Book."

For the moment the outcast forgot what lay in the pool. Of three things he stood ever in awe. First, Torcall Cameron, the man of men. Second, the Book, which was a mystery, and held all the sians and rosads, all the spells and incantations in the world, and, as he had heard, was full of "living words," though never had he, being soulless, seen any coming or going to it, like bees, where it lay on the shelf above Torcall's bed. Third, the inscrutable powers which worked somewhere, somehow, behind Torcall, before which even he, Màm-Gorm, was, almost incredible though it seemed, as mist before the wind.

When, therefore, he heard Oona speak of the Book, his awe held him for a moment spellbound. Never had he so much as dreamed that his name was even mentioned there at all. The wonder, the mystery of it, almost took his breath away. What an ill thing, then, that word of the preaching-man he had met once in the Strath, who had told him, in answer to his asking, that he, Nial, could have no name in the Book of Life, because he was unbaptised, and a godless heathen, and a soulless elf-man at that! And now – now – Sorcha had seen his name in the Book – ay, and not in any poor, small Strath Bible, but in the great Bioball that was Torcall Cameron's own, up at Màm-Gorm, on the hillside of Iolair!

But of that mystery he was to hear no more then and there. A cry had come from Oona, a cry of such terror, with moan upon moan, that his heart within him was as a flame in a windy place.

What had happened to the child? Was there a spell upon her? he wondered; was that down there in truth no other than the treacherous, quiet-seeming, murderous kelpie!

He saw that she was shivering all over; that her body was as pallid as her white face.

Not a word came from her. She kneeled forward, staring stonily into the pool.

"Oona! Oona!" he whispered chokingly, terrified beyond further power of speech. Without averting her gaze, she slowly raised an arm and pointed at what had hitherto been but a blurred figure at the bottom of the water. The arm, the pointing hand, remained thus, as though paralysed.

Nial bent over the ledge. The slight breeze had now passed. Not a breath shook the feather-leaf of a rowan. The sunflood poured out of the east upon the shimmering land. Though but an hour after sunrise, the heat palpitated. For the first time that morning there was no wind-eddy upon the pool. The brown water was as lucid as a mirror.

The thing – corpse, or soul, or kelpie – had begun to move. It was slowly rising to the surface.

He shuddered. This, then, was the cause of Oona's fear. Yet, even as this thought passed through his brain, he knew that there was some other reason for the frozen agony of the child.

The body ascended gradually, face downward, the arms trailing stiffly beneath it. One foot was still caught by the weeds, which had caught it as in a net. With a slow gyration the corpse swung round, face upward. The weed-thrall gave way. The drowned rose with outstretched arms.

Oona shrieked, then sank back, cowering, and covered her eyes with her hands. Nial! Nial neither thought nor felt; he was stunned by a blank, bewildering amaze.