THE MOUNTAIN LOVERS

TO * * * * * *

I

The wind sighed through the aisles of the hill-forest. Among the lower-set pines there was an accompanying sound as of multitudinous baffled wings. This travelling voice was upon the mountain in a myriad utterance. Round the forehead of Ben Iolair it moved as an eagle moves, sweeping in vast circles: the rhythm of its flight reiterated variously against walls of granite, gigantic boulders, and rain-scooped, tempest-worn crags and pinnacles. Lower were corries, furrows that seemed to have been raked into the breast of the hill in some olden time when the solitudes were not barren. Therein the wind slid with a hollow, flute-like call. This deepened into an organ-note of melancholy, when glens, filled with birchen undergrowth and running water, were aloud with the rumour of its passages. Upon the heights, upon the flanks, upon all the sunswept mass of Iolair, the rushing noise of its pinions was as the prolonged suspiration of the sea. Beyond the forest of pines it swooped adown the strath, and raced up the narrow neck of the Pass of the Eagles, and leaped onward again athwart and over the slopes of Tornideon that, gigantic in swarthy gloom, stood over against Ben Iolair.

In the heart of the pinewoods it was meshed as in a net. The sighing of it through the green-gloom avenues, warm with the diffused ruddiness of the pine-bark, was as the sound of distant water falling from infrequent ledge to ledge in a mountain gorge. Intent by the fringe of the forest, or even upon the underslopes still flooded with afternoon sunlight, one might have heard its rising and falling sough as it bore downward beneath the weight of the branches, or slipped from bole to bole and round ancient girths.

Here and there a hollow was still as deep water. Not a sigh breathed upon the mossy ground, thickly covered in parts with cones and the myriad-shed needles of the pines. Not a murmur came from the spell-bound trees. The vast boughs hung motionless in the silent air. Sometimes the upper branches stirred, but while the shadow-haunted plumes ruffled as with a passing breath, it was with a slow, solemn, soundless rhythm.

In one of those sanctuaries of peace, where the forest was thinner and everywhere luminous with the flowing gold of the setting sun, a child danced blithely to and fro, often clapping her hands, but without word or sound, and with her wild-fawn eyes ceaselessly alert yet unquestioning and unsmiling.

In that solitary place she was doubly alone. No eyes were there to espy her, save those of the cushats and a thrush whose heart beat wildly against her callow brood. She was like the spirit of woodland loneliness: a lovely thing of fantasy that might recreate its beauty the next moment in a medley of sun-rays, or as a floating golden light about the green boles, or as a windflower swaying among the tree-roots with its own exquisite vibration of life. So elemental was she, then and there, that if she herself had passed into the rhythm of her rapt dance and so merged into the cadence of the wind among leaves and branches, or into the remoter murmuring of the mountain burns and of the white cataracts even then leaping into the sun-dazzle and seeming never to fall though for ever falling—if this change had been wrought, as the swift change from shadow-gloom to sun-gloom, nothing of it would have seemed unnatural. She was as absolutely one with nature as though she were a dancing sunbeam, or the brief embodiment of the joy of the wind.

As the child danced, a human mote in that vast area of sun-splashed woodland, the light flooded in upon her scanty and ragged dress of brown homespun, from which her arms and legs emerged as the white chestnut-buds from their sheaths of amber. Her skin was of the hue and smoothness of crudded cream, where not sunburnt to the brown of the wallflower. Dark as were her heavily lashed eyes, her hair, a mass of short curls creeping and twisting and leaping throughout a wild and tangled waviness, was of a wonderful white-like yellow, as of the sheen of wheat on a windy August noon or the strange amber-gold of the harvest-moon when rising through a sigh of mist. She was beautiful, but rather with the promise of beauty than beauty itself—as the bud of the moss-rose is lovely but has a fairer loveliness in fee. Though her face was pale, its honeysuckle-pallor was so wrought by the sun and wind that her cheeks had the glow of sunlit hill-water. In every line, in every contour of her body, in every movement, every pose, a beautiful untutored grace displayed itself. A glimpse of the secret of all this winsomeness opened at times in the eyes. These were full of a changing light. The "breath" was upon her: on her rhythmic limbs, on her flowing hair, on her parted lips.

To and fro, flickeringly as a leaf shadow, the small body tripped and leapt. Sometimes she raised her arms when with tossed-back head she sprang to one side or forward: sometimes she clapped her hands, and a smile for a moment dreamed rather than lay upon her face. But none seeing her could have thought she danced out of mere glee. No birdeen of laughter slipped from the little lips: the eyes had a steadfast intensity amid all their waywardness. Either the child was going through this fantastic byplay for some ulterior reason, or she was wrought by an ecstasy that could be expressed only in this way. Perhaps no one who had met a glance of those wildwood eyes could have doubted that she was rapt by an unconscious fantasy of rhythm.

A stillness had grown about the heart even of the patient mavis in the rowan beside the winding shadow-haunted pool, a few yards away from the spot where the child soundlessly danced. A clear call came from its mate ever and again: neither feared any longer this dancer in the sunset-shine. The cushats crooned unheedingly. In a glade above, a roe stood, gazing wonder-stricken: but after a restless pawing of the ground she lidded her unquiet eyes, and browsed contentedly under the fern.

Suddenly the dancer stopped. She stood in that exquisite poise of arrested motion which for a moment the wave has when it lifts its breast against the wind. Intently she listened: with eyes dilated and nostrils swiftly expanding and contracting, like any wild thing of the woodlands.

A voice, strangely harsh in its high, thin falsetto, resounded from the upper glades.

"Oona!"

The child smiled, relaxed from her intent attitude, and listlessly moved a step or two forward.

"Oona! Oona!! Oona!"

"It is Nial," she muttered. "I don't want him. I am tired of helping him to look for his soul."

The words came from her lips in smileless earnestness. To her, evidently, so fantastical a quest had nothing in it of surprise or strangeness.

The startled roe had already fled. The merest rustle of the bracken hinted the whither-away of its flight. Instinctively, Oona noticed the sound, and her eyes looked beyond a distant clump of pines in time to see a gleam of something brown leap out of and into the tall fern, as a seabird among green running billows.

Almost simultaneously she caught a glimpse of an uncouth dwarfish figure moving slowly through the pine-glades.

Swift as a bird to its covert she slipped into the dusk of the neighbouring savannah of bracken.

"Oona!"

The voice was nearer, but from its greater lift in the air the child knew that Nial had stopped, and was doubtless looking about him. She made no response. If the searcher were but ten yards away he would not have discovered her. No fox among the root crannies, no hare crouching low in her form, could have more easily evaded detection.

"Oona!"

The voice was now further away. Clearly Nial had turned westward, and was moving through the glade beyond the pool. Once more she heard the harsh, thin voice; but now it was crooning a song wherewith she was familiar, the words of which simulated the plaining of the wild-dove:

Then the silence closed in about her again. A relative silence, for she heard the hum of the brown bee drowsily fumbling to its nest under a bramble, the whir of the stag-moth, the innumerable indeterminate rustle and hum of the woodlands in summer. The cushats crooned ever and again, hushfully nestling amid the green dusk of the boughs. A fern-owl swooped through the glades, whence already the sunset light had vanished, and after every short flight it would poise on a pine-branch and emit its resonant whir. In the hollow where Oona lay there was still no breath of air; but overhead the wind stirred the plumes of every tree-crest, and its voice, vibrant, full of rising and falling flute-like calls, loudly surgent, haunting-sweet, was audible on all sides and beyond upon the uplands of Iolair.

The gloaming, creeping from under the bracken and down from amid the branches of the pines, had begun to fill the forest with veils of shadow. It was for this Oona had waited. Gently disparting the bracken, and, herself almost as insubstantial and soundless as a shadow, with one swift glance around her, she vanished into the darkness that involved the columnar pine-glades.

In the dim, fragrant May-bloom there seemed nothing astir save white moths, which flickered from bush to bush. The deer, if any were there, were resting; the roosting black-cock were as silent as the doves. The remoter dusk was full of the voices of the wind, but those distant aerial sounds were as the wings that fan the courts of Silence.

Shadow after shadow moved out of the twilight: soft velvety things, though intangible, that lay drowsily upon the boughs of the pines, or slipped after each other through the intricacies of the fern.

Round the pool were many of those lovely silent children of the dusk. Dim scores were massed under the branches, or crept among the willows. Some hung from the sprays of the birches, peering into the ominous blackness of the water underneath. Others, straight and intent, or all tremulous and wavering, stood among the reeds, the most sensitive of which had still a vague breath of sound. Many of these merged into the pool, but their ranks never thinned. By every reed stood a shadow, intent, inclined before a wind that blew not. Of all that passed into the water not one reached the star that gleamed and moved, and seemed to lift and fall in the heart of the pool. Not one crossed the faintly luminous semi-circle that lay upon the surface. Each sank down, down, till the star in the depths shone far above. But by the upper margins of the pool, where the pines ran steeply toward it, one shadow sat that did not waver, did not move, that grew darker and more dark, blackly distinct, though all around was blurred or fugitive.

The night advanced. The shadows moved onward before it, or were enveloped in its folds. Though in the forest no travelling susurrus was audible, the wind had arisen again upon the heights. Restless, forlorn, it lifted its wild wings from steep to steep. Its vibrant rise, its baffled fall, re-echoed faintly or dully. At times there was a thin, shrewd, infinitely remote whistling. This was the myriad air-spray of the wind driven through the spires of the heather.

With the second hour of the night the moon rose over the shoulder of Iolair. For a time a gold dust had glittered along the edges of the granite precipices. Then the summit of the mountain had gleamed like a vast bronze altar lit by hidden lamps. Suddenly, almost in a moment, a gigantic arm swung upward an immense globe of fire.

As the moon rose she emitted a more yellow flame. Downward a flood of orange glory poured upon the highest peaks—barren, scoriated, lifeless, but for the lichens that thrive upon snows and chill dews. The globe—in which, as in the sun, could be seen a whirling of light—rapidly diminished in size. Less portentous, it swung through space in an added loveliness. Serene, equable, its yellow glow spread over mountain and forest, down every broad strath, each grave-dark glen, down every straggling hillside corrie.

The coming of the moonbeams wrought a fantastic new life in the forest. The lightward boughs took on a proud armour. The branches moved against the night, mailed like serpents with moving scales of gold and silver.

When the first comers reached the pool they fell upon it with delight. Forward they leapt, and bathed their lovely golden bodies in the water, which held them to itself with joy. A score died to make a silver ripple, a hundred perished to fill every handsbreath of water as with melted ore. When a water-snake darted from the reeds and shot across the surface, its flight dissipated innumerable vibrations and delicate fugitive cup-like hollows and waverings, aureate or radiant with white fires. A few fish rose from the weeds and crevices, where they had lain like drifting leaves. When their fins shivered above the surface there was a momentary dazzle, as though a little flame of moonfire had fallen and for a moment flared unquenched.

The dusk-shadows had long vanished. Those of the night, sombre, motionless, waited. One only remained: the same sitting shape, darkly distinct, that had stayed when the twilight had waned.

There had been no movement throughout the long withdrawal of the light, the stealthy recapture of the dark. But when the pool, save for the margins, was all one wave of interlapsing gold and silver, the shadow-shape at last raised a shaggy peaked head. For a time Nial the dwarf stared vacantly at the transformed water. Then a smile came into his worn, fantastic face, so wild and rude, and in a sense so savage, and yet with the unharming, guileless, and even gentle look of most wild creatures when not roused by appetite or emotion.

The play of the moonbeams delighted him. When the last of them slid furtively through the shadows, and turned the reeds into spires of gold, he gazed mournfully at the gloom of the forest tarn. Nothing now moved therein except three wandering star-rays, that quivered and expanded and contracted as though the central phantom-flames were alive, and were feeling tremulously through this dim, unknown water-world.

Once Nial rose. His small, high-shouldered, misshapen figure seemed scarcely human; the rough clothes he wore—patches of blurred and broken shadow they appeared now—might have been part of him, as the hide of a deer, or the fell of any wild thing. When he moved, it was with woodland alertness, with the swift grace of all sylvan creatures.

As his feet plashed among the shallows he stooped. For long he peered earnestly into the water. Then, with a sigh, he stepped back, and moved silently again to the mossy stump where he had sat since nightfall.

The late nocturnal sounds that prelude the dawn did not awake him, if asleep he were. The occasional cries of ewes upon the hills were only as remote falling waves in the sea of silence and darkness. The bleating of a restless stag ceased as abruptly as it had begun.

Just before the first trouble of the dawn these sounds multiplied. Ever and again, though at long intervals, there was the splash of a fish, hawking along the under-surface of the tarn for the twilight-ephemeridæ. The hoarse gurgling call of the capercailzie fell through the pine-glades. From invisible pastures came the first muffled, uncertain lowing of the shaggy bulls, standing beyond the still-crouching drowsy kye, whose breaths made a faint grey mist in the darkness.

The wind rose and fell. It had now a different sound, as there is a different note in the ascending and decrescent song of the lark. It was, however, still confined to the heights and the upland moors.

With the first sunflood there is something of the same chemic change in the wind as there is in the sea. An electric tremor goes through it. Its impalpable nerves thrill: its invisible pulse beats.

Long before Nial, in the deep twilight of the forest, saw that morning had come, he was aware of it from the cry of the wind, as it leaped against the sun.

He stirred, listening. The call of that bodiless voice he knew and loved so well had suddenly grown clearer. It was as though the invisible Lute-player who shepherds the clouds with his primeval music had breathed a high, resonant note. To the keen ears of Nial this was enough. He knew that the wind had moved from the south to the north-west: a thing easy to tell at once in the neighbourhood of pines, but to be known of few when heard against remote heights and in the dark.

The dwarf rose and began to pace restlessly to and fro. Once or twice he stood still and shook himself; then, with a searching but unexpectant glance around him, resumed his aimless wandering.

The wind reached the forest before the first lances of the sunlight had thrust themselves through the umbrage at its higher end. Nial heard it lifting the still air of the pine-glooms with its vast wings, and beating it to and fro, sending volleys of fragrant breath from swaying tree-top to tree-top. It wandered nearer and nearer: at first overhead, so that only the summits of the pines swayed southward, but soon it came leaping and blithely laughing through the long aisles of the forest. The indescribable rumour of the sunflood followed. As the old Celtic poets tell us, the noise of the sunfire on the waves at daybreak is audible for those who have ears to hear. So may be heard the sudden rush and sweep of the sunbeams when they first stream upon a wood. The boughs, the branches, the feathery or plume-like summits of the trees do homage at that moment, when the Gates of Wonder open for a few seconds on the unceasing miracle of Creation. The leaves quiver, or curl upward, even though there be no breath of air. It is then that crows, rooks, wood-doves, and, on the heights, the hawks and eagles, lean their breasts against the sunflood and soar far forward and downward on wide-poised motionless wings: a long, unswerving, scythe-sweep, strange in its silent and ordered beauty, to be seen similarly at no other time.

The sound was an exultation throughout the forest. Soon the invisible presence dwelt everywhere. Every branch held a note of music: every leaf was a whisper. There was not a frond of bracken, a blade of grass, that did not bend listeningly. The windflowers in the mossiest hollows were tremulous.

When the sunbeams came dancing and leaping in the track of the wind, the note of exultation, in deepening, became more indiscriminate. The bleating of the stags, the lowing of the distant kye, the plaintive crying of the ewes and lambs, the calls and songs of the birds, the myriad indeterminate voice of morning, blent in a universal rumour of joy.

Nial stood listening intently, now to this sound, now to that. He knew the forest, and the life of the forest, as no other man could do. He, too, was a woodlander, as much as the deer, or the shy cushat, or the very bracken.

The birds that flew by paid no heed to him. He was watching a young fox blinking its yellow eyes from under a hollow mass of roots, when a roe trotted rapidly close by him, her hill-pool eyes alert, her long neck strained, her nostrils distended and quivering. He turned, but she did not swerve nor hasten. Her fawn followed. It stopped almost opposite to Nial, looked at him curiously, lifted its delicate forehead alternately, and sniffed with swift sensitive twitchings. He looked quietly into the great violet eyes, filled with a wonderful living amber when turned against the sun. The fawn slowly advanced till the velvety warmth of its lips nibbled playfully at the arm, gently extended toward it. The dwarf stroked the smooth muzzle and the long twitching ears. Suddenly, with an elfish whisk, the fawn sprang to one side, spun with abrupt sidelong leaps around the funny two-legged creature: then, finding that its new playmate was so perplexingly staid, leaped away in a light bounding flight in pursuit of its dam, who had halted among the bracken, and had been watching curiously, but unalarmedly.

Strangely, it was with a look more of resentment than of pleasure that Nial turned and walked slowly toward the upper glades.

There was no one there to overhear his muttered words. Perhaps the wood-doves that watched him pass, listened unheedingly to his angry exclamations—half sobs, half vague outcries against the bitterness of his fate that he, Nial the Soulless, was shunned by all human beings, or by all save the child Oona, and treated as though he were a wild thing of the woods—and that even the creatures of the hillsides and the forest-glades knew him, while not of their own fellowship, to be no human.

These thoughts always tortured him. His unspeakably lonely and remote life, indeed, was one long martyrdom. Rightly or wrongly, he, and others, had ever believed he was a changeling, a soulless man, perhaps the offspring of demon parentage. Had he been blessed with the mind-dark he might have gone through his span of life as blithely as any wildwood creature. Two things only, besides his human form, differentiated him from the birds and the beasts he loved so well, though from their world, too, an involuntary exile for ever: one, the faculty of speech: the other, the possession of a reasoning, if a restricted and perverted mind.

How innumerably often he had brooded over the fantastic, and to him part-maddening, part-terrifying, and wholly obsessive legend of his birth!

All in the region of Iolair knew his story: how he had been found when a little child, in the woods, and had been taken care of by Adam Morrison, the minister: how when yet a boy, a cripple, and a trial to his foster-father and all who knew him, he had disappeared with vagrant gypsies, and had not been heard of for fifteen years, till one autumn he was seen among the pines in the forest of Iolair. He had been in the neighbourhood for weeks, though none knew of it. During that ensuing winter he was fed and sheltered by Torcall Cameron, or by Murdo the shepherd, or by Alan Gilchrist on Tornideon, the mountain on the north side of Strath Iolair. For the rest, he lived no man knew how, and slept no man knew where. He was an outcast and homeless: but if he lost much, much also he gained. He knew the living world as few could even approximately know it: sight, hearing, smell, each sense was intensified in him. He saw and heard and was aware of much that to others was non-existent or dubiously obscure.

But the real mystery of his life, to himself as well as to his human neighbours, who half-disowned him, was in the reputed fact that he was the child of the Cailliach.

A year before Mr. Adam Morrison had found the puny wailing child close to the tarn in the heart of the forest, a man who lived high on Sliabh-Geal, the mountain that leaned southward from the shoulder of Iolair, had fallen under the spell of the Cailliach, the beansìth or demon-woman. No one knew much about him. He was a shepherd, but none had heard whence he came or of what folk. He asked none to cross his airidh. But the rumour was everywhere held that Black Duncan—all the name he was ever known by—was a changeling. The minister was wont to disavow this, but added that Duncan certainly lived under a curse, though the nature or source of the malediction was beyond the ken of all save the unfortunate man himself, if indeed even he knew of it.

One winter the Cailliach was seen of several women. Her tall figure, clad in a yellow robe, as she drove her herd of deer to the waterside, was unmistakable. She was seen again and again. The following summer, as Torcall Cameron was crossing the Gual, the ridge betwixt Iolair and Sliabh-Geal, he heard a strange voice singing through the gloaming. Looking about him, he discerned a woman sitting among the bracken, and milking a hind, the while she sang a song that brought a mist about his eyes, and made his heart throb. By her exceeding stature, and the yellow plaid about her, as well as by the unknown words that were wedded to that wild song, he knew her to be the Cailliach. He fled, lest she should turn and ban him. A little later he saw the beansìth again. It was a long way off, but he recognised her: and even while he watched, she turned herself into the guise of a grey deer, and went leaping toward the high remote sheiling where Black Duncan lived. That autumn Duncan was more than once heard laughing and talking in shadowy places, and in the forest. On the first day of the equinox his body was found in the tarn. The face had an awful look upon it. The same afternoon Mr. Adam Morrison, going to the spot to verify what he had heard, found the miserable little waif he adopted afterward. No sooner had he taken it in his arms than a large grey deer sprang from a covert of bracken and leaped into the forest gloom. Despite its size and haste, its passage through the undergrowth was absolutely soundless.

The thing was unmistakable. The Cailliach had put her spell upon Black Duncan. When her hour had come upon her, she had strangled her mortal lover and thrown his body into the tarn. Then she had borne her doubly cursed babe.

All who heard of these things averred that the child would be soulless. Mr. Morrison said no: that he would give it Christian baptism, and rear it in godly ways: and that God would have pity upon the innocent. The old people of the strath shook their heads. The minister was wise in the Scriptures and in the book-lore, but was it not well known that he knew little of and cared less for their treasured oral traditions and legends and obscure ancestral runes? Was it likely he could judge, when he barely knew who or what the Cailliach was? Had he not ever preached from his pulpit that there were no "other people" at all?

The good man was wrong. He admitted it, when, three years later, the child Nial—so called by Mr. Morrison in memory of a young brother of his own, and because he had refused to give the foundling the pagan designation of Nicor the Soulless—was lost one summer gloaming. When, after long searching, the truant was discovered, the child was no longer the same. The shepherd who had found him said that, earlier in the evening, he had noticed a tall woman leading a child through the forest, and stopping every now and again by some tree-hole, as though she listened for some one or to some thing. Later, when he was on the quest for the strayed little one, and as he approached the spot where his search was rewarded, his dog had stopped, snarling, and refused to advance. While he wondered at this, a large grey deer sprang out of the bracken and disappeared into the forest. As soon as it vanished the dog recovered from its sudden terror, and ran forward, and was soon barking over the body of the child.

Before this misadventure Nial had been what Mr. Morrison himself called "a waefu' bairn." Weak and ailing from the first, he had grown more and more fretful: and his endless crying and whining had been a sore trial to the good man and to old Jean Macrae.

But after the finding of him in the forest he was no longer the same. He became strangely silent. Even when hungry, or when hurt or frightened, he made no sound. He would sit for hours and stare vaguely before him. It was with difficulty that he could be got to speak at all, and if it had not been for the minister's persistency he would have grown dumb.

The questioning, and yet remote, look in his eyes disconcerted all who looked therein. Old Mary Macbean, the birth-woman, confirmed the general suspicion. The child had no soul, she said: she knew the signs. The Christian baptism and the constant prayers and heed of the minister had preserved or perhaps won a soul to it: but the Cailliach had found her offspring in the woods, and had lured the soul from the body, and had prisoned it in some pine-tree in the depths of the forest. Two or three years passed, and Nial grew more and more deformed, more and more unchildlike. Silent, morose, he was never content save when wandering high on the mountain-slopes, or among the pines, or by Iolair Water as it came swirling down its steep bouldered channels from the Linn o' Mairg. In one thing alone he transcended all the other dwellers in the strath, young or old. He knew every flower and plant and tree, every bird, every creature, and the haunts of all and the life of all, with a surety of knowledge and a profound intimacy that at once astonished the hill-folk and confirmed them in their belief concerning him.

Then there came a summer when he was hardly ever seen at Mr. Morrison's house. He lived like an outcast, and was seldom met save by a mountain shepherd, or by the two highest hill-dwellers, the widow Anabal Gilchrist on Tornideon, and Torcall Cameron of Màm-Gorm on Wester Iolair. Fitting company, it was said; for Anabal and Torcall were not only voluntarily isolated from the folk of the strath, and held themselves strangely aloof, but were at bitter feud the one with the other.

That autumn a band of gypsies came to the strath. Some were brown-skinned and of foreign race; others were of northern blood and birth: a few were Celtic waifs, who had the Gaelic as their familiar speech. When the people of the dust, or the children of the wind, as the Highlanders call these vagrant folk—though commonly by the first designation—moved away again, traceless as is their wont, they took Nial with them. The winter passed, the spring, summer came again, and with the waning of autumn there was still no sign of the changeling. Year after year went by: and the story of Nial, or Nicor the Soulless, as he was often named, became vaguer and vaguer. It was nigh upon fifteen years later that he was seen once more in the strath. No one had heard of his return; no one knew of it except perhaps Torcall Cameron and his daughter Sorcha, or Anabal Gilchrist and her son Alan; when one day Murdo, Màm-Gorm's shepherd, came along the strath with the news that, as he strode through the forest at dawn, he had descried Nial—a ragged, fantastically deformed dwarf, aged in appearance as though he were one of "the other people" who lived in the heart of the hills. He had recognized him in a moment; but had not spoken with him because when he saw the creature it was stealing furtively from pine-bole to pine-bole, and sometimes tapping and listening intently, or muttering.

"And what would that be meaning?" asked every one to whom he told his tale, though there was not one who did not know the answer aforehand.

"It means that he was looking for his soul—for the soul that the Cailliach won out of him and hid for ever in a pine-tree, where neither he nor any one else would be like to find it."

"Until the tree falls, by the hand of man, or by the lightning or the wind," some one would add: but at this Murdo would only shake his head, and say that the beansìth had for sure chosen a tree that neither wind nor flame could easily reach, and that when, after hundreds of years, it would be dying, it would die from within, and so kill the soul that wailed and wept or lay spellbound in misery within.

Thereafter Nial was occasionally seen. Weeks went by: summer passed, and autumn: and it was clear that he had come back to stay, though he never once drew near the house of old Mr. Morrison, nor even sought out his foster-father anywhere, nor held converse with any one save at Màm-Gorm.

He might have been dead or absent, for all the hill-folk knew, had it not been for Sorcha Cameron, who told in the strath, on the rare Sabbaths when she came down from Iolair, how her father gave occasional shelter and frequent food to Nial: and for the confirming of this by Murdo the shepherd, who said that the dwarf for the most part slept in the woods, but as the nights grew colder had begun to take haven either in a cave, or in an old hut on the hillside, or at Torcall Cameron's sheiling.

"And I doubt if he would cross the airidh at all," he added, "were it not for that little wild-fire of a lass, the bit girlie Oona, that Màm-Gorm loves wi' all his heart and soul, an' better than his bonnie Sorcha, for all he leaves her to flit about like a spunkie owre the fèith. For Nial will speak to Oona when he'll not even look at any one else: an' the lassie will be awa' wi' him, an' no man kens the way o't or the whitheraway o' thae twain."

And so that winter went, and then another spring, until the coming of May again: and Nial was once more one of the people of the strath, though hardly ever seen in the valley itself, except by the Linn o' Mairg or by the running water, and then only in the dusk of the morning, or in late gloamings.

II

The foreheads of the hills were bathed in light. Sheer above all rose the aureoled peaks of Ben Iolair and Tornideon. The lyric rapture of the morning made a sound of rejoicing. The bleating of the sheep was more rapid and less plaintive; and when the harsh screams of the great eagle, that had its eyrie far above where the mountain-shoulders almost touch, came echoing down the slopes, they were so mellowed at last as to fall through the leagues of sunsea in sharp cadences.

Mists veiled all the slopes, and hid the strath. The mountains seemed thus to be raimented in white and crowned with living gold. On the heights these mists moved with furtive undulations, with an upward wave which ever and again lifted a great mass of vapour columnarly toward the summits.

Beneath, they lay like suspended snow, or hung as palls: vast draperies of unrevealed day.

Even though the sunflood broke into these cohorts, and here seemed to suck with thirsty flaming tongues, here to plunge in golden billows among shallows of fading shadow, or here with a giant hand withdrew, rent, swept away, dissipated the ever dissolving, ever reforming battalions of rising mist—yet, as the morning advanced, the highland was still swathed.

Sometimes a boulder, at a vast height, would stand disclosed. The wet upon it, from granite boss and yellow lichen, shimmered as though the fairy-folk who weave the rainbows were there at work. A space below would give way to the sudden leap of the hill-wind; and with a rush the sunlight would stream forward. Pine after pine would rear a green banner, from which mist-veils would float, or rise and sway like flags of a marching army. Then the ranks would close in again. Flying columns would converge from right and left; the pine-banners would vanish, as though in the smoke of battle: a mighty swaying mass would sweep upward, absorb the sunbeams and splinter their gleaming lances, till boulder after boulder would be captured and the bastioned heights themselves be environed in the assault.

From the narrow loch at the end of the ravine, in the Pass of the Eagles, came the clamour of wildfowl. Now here, now there, as though a voice swam disembodied in that white sea, the double note of the cuckoo resounded. In a thick sob, the echo of the Linn o' Mairg came heavily at intervals. The muffled noise of Mairg Water crawled through the caverns of the mist.

Though the two mountain-buttresses at the head of the pass are so close that the legend of a stag having taken the intervening space at a bound is not wholly incredible, it was impossible for one hid in the mist on Maol-Gorm of Iolair to see any one or anything on Maol-dubh of Tornideon. But through the mist, here suffused with a pale golden light, was audible on both spurs the bleating of travelling sheep and the barking of a dog, with, now and again, the lowing of cows.

Suddenly a voice rang out, strong, clear, and blithe:

Upon the spring of the last word came back from Iolair a voice as blithe and more sweet, the voice of a woman, with the lilt of a bird in it and all the joy of the sunshine:

There was something so penetratingly sweet and joyous in the song that it stirred every bird on the hillside. The larks rose through the mist till they swam into the sunflood; the linties and shilfas and yellow-yites sent thrilling notes from gorse-bush to gorse-bush and from rowan to rowan. In the birk-shaws, the cries of the merles sounded like shrill flutes.

To and fro went the sweet voices. Now the man's on Tornideon would ring blithely, now the woman's on Iolair respond.

At last, as the cattle moved up the slopes, with the spreading sheep in advance, the shepherding voices fell further apart. Instinct led the kye to the sunlight, for all living things have their joy through the eyes.

"Sorcha, Sorcha, Sorcha!" came ringing through the mist: "Sorcha-mo-ciatach-nio-nag!"

"Tha, Ailean-a-ghaolach!" came back, with a ripple of laughter, the laughter of joy.3

"Ah mo cailin geal, mo nighean donn, duit ciat mhor!"

"Duit cíat, no runach!"4

"The sheep and the kye don't know love, Sorcha, or they would stay here till the mists go, and then we would see each other."

"Let us cry deasiul, and turn thrice sunways!"

"Ay; and meanwhile the beasts won't stand still! That evil beast of a bull, Donncha-dhu, who ought to be called Domnuill-dhu, is leading the way over the shoulder of Maol-Gorm. I must go, Sorcha-mo-ghraidh, or never a sheep will I find again; and as for the kye, they'll go smelling the four winds. Sorcha! Sorcha! Can you hear?"

Hear came back in a sweet falling echo, the more remote and aerial because of the mist.

"Come down to-night after the milking, and meet me at the Linn.... Sorcha! I'm going to see Mr. Morrison again!"

"'Tis no use, Alan. But I'll meet you at the Linn in the late gloaming."

"Sorcha!"

"Alan!"

Then, fainter and fainter, Sorcha!... Alan! And at last no response came when Alan Gilchrist cried, with a prolonged echoing call, the name of his ghaolaiche, his heart's joy.

Soon thereafter the mists began to disperse.

Alan Gilchrist was at the pool, below the Linn o' Mairg, long before Sorcha Cameron came down from Màm-Gorm, the hill-farm on Iolair, by the circuitous but secluded way through the pine-glades.

For an hour or more he had lain there, dreaming. The first green breath of May was sweet upon the land: already a warmth as of midsummer was in the air. Pleasant it was to lie and dream by the running water.

When he had first reached the Mairg Water, after his fruitless journey to Inverglas, the village of Strath Iolair, he had thrown himself down among the fern, in the shadow of a boulder overlooking the Kelpie's Pool. Angry thoughts were in his mind, because of the minister's refusal to marry Sorcha and himself. It was a bitter thing, he thought, and unjust.

For that noontide, after he had driven the sheep on to the upper pastures upon Tornideon, and had got little Davie Niven, of Clachan-nan-Creag, to herd the sheep for him till moonrise, he had gone down by his home at Ardoch-Beag, itself high on the mountain-side—though he was little there during the summer-pasturing on the hills—to the strath, and so by the road to Inverglas. As he went through the village, there were many who looked at him with glad eyes: for wherever he went Alan found a smile of welcome for him, partly because of the beauty of his tall person and curly yellow hair, which made the strath women call him Alan-aluinn, Alan-fair-to-see, but more perhaps of his own smile that was so sweet out of his blue eyes, and for the grave yet winning way of him. His rival, Duncan Robertson, spoke of him contemptuously as "the man for women and children"; but, as others besides Duncan Robertson knew well, the women's-man and the children's-man could also be the best man's-man in the strath when occasion required.

This early afternoon, however, he had no wish to speak with any, and so hurried on, with a visit only to old Morag Niven, Davie the herd-laddie's grandmother. The small, douce, wizened old woman blessed him for what he brought her, and insisted on telling his fortune again by the lines in his hands. Laughingly he assured her she had told it to him so often that he was beginning not to believe in her predictions at all.

"That may be," she exclaimed, half-pettishly: "but it's this I'm telling you, Alan Mac Fergus, and what's more, it's not only the 'vision' of the love that's coming to you, but I've had the 'sight' on the lover too!"

The young man flushed, but answered carelessly:

"Good for you, Mùimé: but sure 'tis a risky thing to be seeing too much."

The old woman stared keenly at him for a moment, and then smiled.

"Well, and will this, then, be like what you have seen in your dreams, if ever a great oganach like you dreams at all:

"First: She is beautiful as this May day.

"Second: She is tall and graceful as a young pine, and moves like a hind upon the hills, an' no flower sways in the wind more dainty-sweet than she.

"Third: She is fair of face, with all the soft skin of her like new milk. But her hair is dark, like the woods at dusk, and fragrant as they.

"Fourth: She lives at a mountain-farm, and all her heart is in a man's keeping, and all her beauty is his to love, and she is the tallest, and strongest, and sweetest lass in all the strath or in the big world beyond, and as beautiful as Roscrana that was wife to Fingal of old and mother of Ossian the blind bard—ay, good as Morna, which is the name of a woman that is beloved by all, and fair-to-see as Fiona, which is the name given of old to a bonnie maid, and lovely as Alona, than whom not woman could be lovelier.

"Fifth: And the man she loves is a poor misguidit wastrel who lives on a hill opposite to her, and I'm thinkin' his name will be Alan too, Alan this or Alan that.

"Sixth: 'Tis Himself only, praise be to Him, who knows who this Morna-Fiona-Alona may be: but in a dream I had, I'm thinkin' her name is Sorcha.

"And Seventh" (this in a relapse from Gaellic into the Lowland tongue): "I may be a silly auld wife, Alan my man, but I'm na sae blind as ta fail ta see through a split poke, for a' yer havers and blethers!"

With a shamefaced laugh Alan told her she was an old witch, and was sheer doited at that! Then, suddenly stooping and kissing her grey hair, he bade her good-bye, and went on his way.

But it was an ill-faring. Mr. Morrison, the tall, dark-faced minister, gray and lank as an old fox, though a godly man, would have nothing to say to the granting of his request.

"No, no, Alan Gilchrist," he added in parting, and in a not unkindly tone, "'tis no ill-will I am bearing you, my lad. But neither I nor any true minister of God will wed you and Sorcha Cameron, because of the feud between Torcall her father and Anabal your mother, and of the ban laid by him on her, and by her on you."

"So be it, Mr. Morrison; but as for me, I will be putting up with no banning from man or woman—no, not I, nor Sorcha either!"

"That is a wicked thing for you to say. But Sorcha is a good lass if you're not a good lad, and ... and ... the long and short of it is, I can't and won't wed you and her ... no, not though your mother and Sorcha's father were to die, and that I avow here solemnly, to the stones be it said."

And so it was that the young man went away wrathful and indignant. Yet, with every mile of his homeward journey he cared less and less. After all, what did it matter to him or Sorcha? Living remote upon the solitary hills, and rarely seeing the people of the strath, what did it avail whether or no he and she were "blessed" by Mr. Morrison? Well, he had done what he could.

He knew, of course, of the heavy weight of a parental ban; how, with some, it was a command as sacred and inviolable as those of God. But he did not know all that Mr. Morrison knew or surmised: wherein, indeed, was the deeper reason of the refusal.

"The child Oona, the child Oona," muttered the minister as he returned to his house; "why was she sent by Anabal, as soon as might be after birth, to Torcall Cameron? And why was he stricken blind, he there alone on Màm-Gorm, with Marsail, his wife, long dead, and only his daughter, Sorcha, sweet lass, beside him: stricken of God, blind and desolate for all his days thereafter? Alas, too, what of the doom of Fergus, her husband!"

But, lying by the running water of Mairg, Alan, at last oblivious of what had angered him and left in his mind a vague distress, pondered other and dearer things than these.

His heart was full of Sorcha. Already, as indeed for more than a month past, there was upon him that trance of love of which the old Celtic poets speak. Even now he went daily in a dream. Malveen, the widow-mother of Davie the herd-laddie, saw him often as he passed to and fro upon the hillside, as one in a vision, rapt, with shining eyes. At times, too, unknown of either, she caught a glimpse of Alan and Sorcha as they kept tryst in the gloamings. She mothered them with the longing woman's joy in love that had never been hers; they were her dear ones, though rare it was that she had word of either. The youth of youths, the maid of maids: to her at last something more than real and familiar, remote as they were in the glamour that was about them as the Mountain Lovers.

It was in the late gloaming, as she had promised, that Sorcha stole soundlessly from the forest, and was in Alan's arms almost before he knew that the tryst was kept.

III

Volumes of grey-black cloud swept up the flanks of Iolair. The breath of the southwest wind fell moist upon the land. All the wonderful colour of the highland seemed absorbed, as though a sponge had been passed over it. The after-gloom was enhanced by the silence which prevailed, for the thunderous weight in the air hushed the birds. Even the corbies sat sullenly on stone dyke or solitary quicken.

Up at the farm of Màm-Gorm the cloud-skirts went trailing by, sometimes enveloping the whole airidh in a clinging obscurity, and ever and again lifting high above it as though with a spasmodic leap.

A few yards from the door of the low whitewashed house Torcall Cameron stood, his gaunt figure, with its mass of tangled iron-grey hair, thrown into strong relief. Though he grasped a heavy oaken staff, his head was uncovered. From this, Nial inferred that "Màm-Gorm" was not going far: of which he was glad, for there was no one in the house, wild weather was nigh, and it was not a time for a blind man to wander among the hills, with the sheep-paths damp and slippery and often obliterated in the moist peat.

For, though Màm-Gorm thought he was alone, Nial had been his silent companion for an hour past. Sorcha, he knew, was up at the high sheiling on Iolair, with the cows: Oona, he imagined, was either wandering after the sheep with Murdo the shepherd, or was in the forest with Nial, or might be flitting here and there on the slopes like the wild fawn she was. As for Nial, Torcall Cameron rarely gave him a thought. The dwarf was like a faithful collie: to be fed, and given a kindly clap now and then, while his gratitude and devotion were taken for granted.

This rough, stern, blind, and stricken giant was a divine being to the poor child of the woods. In a vague way Nial thought of Màm-Gorm as God: like Màm-Gorm, God could provide, could at rare times be tender and pitiful, could be stern, morose, forbidding, terrible in wrath, of a swift avenging spirit, could strike, bruise, drive forth, kill.

When Sorcha had left at sunrise she knew that her father had the gloom upon him. In vain she looked here and there for Oona. The child had vanished. The platter in which she had her porridge was found under a bench near the rowan at the side of the house—where, indeed, Sorcha had looked for it, as she knew Oona's frequent way of carrying her food out-of-door, and eating it in a hollow below a rock, or under a tree, or even beneath the bench, like a little wild thing.

She had turned, after she had called Fionn and Donn, the dogs, and gone back to the house, and kissed her father. His blind eyes were upon her, though it was not through them that he knew she was troubled. He felt the sweet breath of her upon his brow. It was like the first day of spring when she kissed him, but he did not smile. Before she went away with the cows she found Nial, and bade him keep watch and ward, though without letting himself be seen.

But all morning and noon Torcall Cameron had sat brooding by the peats. At the turn of the day he rose, ate some of the bread and cold porridge which, with a jug of milk, Sorcha had set on the table beside him; then resumed his listless attitude by the fire, into the heart of which he stared with his blank, unwavering eyes.

Nial had grown tired, as a collie will tire if the kye drowse, chewing the cud.

He had wandered far from the airidh, and passed idly through the pines. No more of him might have been seen that day had he not heard Oona singing in the woods. It was in vain that he tried to come upon her. Either she had caught sight of him, and wilfully evaded his quest of her; or she was like a birdeen lured by the dancing sunrays. At the last, he thought of a song she was wont to sing. Across the midst of the high glade where he was, lay the bole of a half-fallen pine. Along this he clambered, till he reached the end boughs, and so out upon a feathery branch which swayed up and down with his weight, as a fir-spray when a cushat alights on it:

It was a harsh and wild music, that song of Oona on the lips of Nial. Brokenly, too, it came, between gasps of breath, for, as the branch swayed, so the dwarf's excitement grew, and he seized the pine-needles as though they were the mane of a horse, and he were riding from death for life:

Suddenly he ceased his fierce ride of the branches. Surely that clear call was from the throat of Oona? Yes, near she was, though invisible. Her song bubbled from her as sunlit water down a brae:

Even the hawk-keen eye of Nial failed to discover Oona. Her voice came from a covert of bracken, amid which rose craggy mossed boulders. Doubtless, the girl sheltered behind one of these.

"Oona!"

He lay still now, save for the quivering of his eagerness. The branch was bent by his weight, but did not sway.

"Oona!"

The rapid skiff-skiff of a hind leaping through the fern, through the green-glooms to his right, caught his attention; otherwise he must have seen the bending of the bracken in the hollow beyond him, and have heard the faint rustle as a little cat-like figure swung herself up into a low-branched rowan.

"Oona! Oona!"

Again he sang in his strange, half-screaming, falsetto voice, first one, then another of the snatches of Gaelic song which he had learned from Oona, but without response. One of his sudden fits of anger seized him, and he bit savagely at the supporting branch. Then, with a peal of mirthless laughter, he began to sway wildly to and fro again, so that it was a wonder the bough did not break. He was swung this way and that, as an apple on an outspread branch. With short, incoherent cries he rode onward through the air, for the moment persuaded by his fantasy that he was one of those wind-demons of whom he had heard Murdo the shepherd speak—pale elves of the air who race across forest and moor on flying leaves and broken branches, or are swept screaming in the wake of the wind as, with outblown mane and fierce snorting and neighing, "the gray stallion" speeds with mile-long leaps.

A frenzy of insensate wrath shook him, so that he nearly lost his grip. Screaming, he hurled toward Oona the curses that seemed to him most dreadful and mysterious, dark anathemas of old-time learned here and there during his far-wanderings.

"Droch cheann ort, Oona! Droch bhàs ort! Och, ochan, bas dunach ort! Gu ma h-olc dhuit!—Gu ma h-olc dhuit!"5

A faint shuddering cry came from somewhere close at hand. In a moment his madness went from him. The dumb animal soul felt the finger of God touch it. All wrath ceased, and a great pity came, and longing, and sorrow. The tears sprang to his eyes, and he lay on the branch sobbing convulsively, so that he was like to fall.

He raised his head at last, and looked eagerly about him. "Oona!"

Still there was no response. His gaze lanced hither and thither like a swallow. If a bee crawled from a foxglove bell, he noted it: if a spider swung on a glistening thread, he saw her as, spinning, she sank. If a woodlark stirred, he saw the shadow of its wing flit from frond to frond. But of Oona, no trace.

"Oona, my fairy! Oona, my fawn! I didn't mean it! I didn't mean it! The words were in my throat. I couldn't help it. Not a word was true. Oh, my grief, my grief! Oona mùirnean, Oona mo mùirnean—Ochone, ochone, thràisg mo chridhe—darling, darling, oh, 'tis my heart that is parched!"

But the child was obdurate. She made no sign. Nial lay moaning on the branch. The silence was unbroken, save by the sea-like whisper of the wind among the leaves.

Suddenly a cushat crooned. Then the low croodling sound palpitated upon the warm sunlit air that flooded in among the pine-boughs.

The dwarf listened. The gloom in his eyes lifted. He knew how Oona loved his one utterance that was his own, which he had made in imitation of the crooning of a dove. Raising his head, he half mumbled, half sang:

Surely she would respond: ah, yes, that shrill mocking laugh, elfin sweet in his ears! His gaze leaped along the track of the sound, and then at last he espied her, crouching low in the fork of a rowan, with her bare legs hidden by the bole and only the sparkle of her eyes glinting from behind the screen of leaves.

"Ah," he cried joyously, "I see you, Oona, my dove! Ah, my little white dove, your little black dove sees you!"

Oona drew herself up, leaped to a lower branch, and sprang to the ground.

"Cha'n ann de mo chuideachd thù, cha'n ann de mo chuideachd thù, ars an colman," she cried mockingly: "You are not of my flock, not of my flock, said the dove!"6

And with that she spread out her yellow hair with her hands, and went dancing and leaping through the bracken. Onward she flickered like a sunbeam, till she came to a rocky declivity, where she stopped abruptly, and stared intently into the hollow beyond her.

Turning, she looked to see if Nial were watching her, and when she saw that he was still on the swaying pine-branch, she cried eagerly:

"Look, Nial! Look!"

"What is it?" he cried, nearly toppling from the bough in his eagerness. "What is it, Oona? What is it?"

"It must be your soul, Nial! It's black and wriggling about, in case you catch it! Bi ealamh! Bi ealamh! Be quick, be quick!"

Then, with a spring, she leaped out of sight. Nial stared after her for a moment, caught his breath spasmodically, crawled swiftly back to the tree, half clambered, half fell to the ground, and then ran like a leaping goat toward the place where Oona had disappeared.

When he reached the ridge of rock which overhung the hollow he stopped, trembling like a reed in a wind-eddy. At last! At last! Was he to find his soul at last? Black or white, fair to see or uncouth as himself, what did it matter, if only his long quest were now to be rewarded?

Shaking as in an ague, he crawled forward on his belly, till his shaggy head projected over the ledge. At first he could not see, for the passion in his heart had filmed his eyes.

Then at last he stared down into the greenness. He could see nothing. Not a wild bee fumbled among the moss, not an ant crawled along a spray of grass.

What did it mean?

Was it possible that Oona could see what he could not? Here, perhaps, was his tragic sorrow: that his soul might often be nigh, but was invisible to him.

With a hoarse exclamation, half scream, half call, he cried to Oona to come to him. He had a name for her which he had adopted from Murdo the shepherd, and by this he called her now. "Bonnie-wee-lass, bonnie-wee-lass, come to me! Oona, mùirnean, Oona-mo-ghràidh, come to your poor Nial! Oh, my soul, my soul, it will be lost! Oona, it will be lost! Quick, quick, bonnie-wee-lass!"

But no answer came. There was no sign of the girl. She might be hiding near, or be already far away, perhaps croodlin' back to the doves in the middle of the forest, or chasing dragonflies by the tarn, or out upon the hillside flitting from rock to rock like a butterfly, or singing and springing from gale-tuft to heather-tussock, as a green lintie in the sunlight. "O lassie, lassie, where is my soul, where is my soul?" he cried, despairingly.

Suddenly his own curses came back to him, terrible on Oona's unwitting lips.

"Gu ma h-olc dhuit, Nial! Gu ma h-olc dhuit! A bad end to you too, Nial-without-a-soul, and I'll be telling my father, I will, that you laid your curse on me: ay, and I will also be telling Sorcha too, and Murdo, and Alan, and the dogs; and I'll whisper it to the wind, so that it'll tell the Green Lady of the Hills; and if I meet your soul I'll tell it, so that it may be ashamed of you, and go and drown itself in a peat-hole."

Nial listened, quivering. His eyes strained as a crouching hound's.

At last he spoke.

"I was mad, Oona. Forgive me. I see your voice coming from behind that rock. Will you not return and show me my soul?"

"Look in the hollow of the stone beneath you, silly Nial!" came the child's voice mockingly.

Nial stared; then, descrying nothing, leaped into the hollow. The next moment he recoiled with a look of horror.

An adder lay in a little ferny crevice at the base of the rock. Its writhing black body was trying to get out of sight, but could not. An adder was the one thing in nature that the outcast could not bear to look at. It gave him a horror, that at times moved him to frenzy, at times made him flee as a man accursed.

Now he stood as one fascinated. If the nàthair had wriggled toward him he would have stood motionless.

With a heavy swaying motion of his head he muttered:

"Anam nathrach, Anam nathrach!"7

But when the adder saw a crevice elsewhere, that promised better, and swiftly wriggled to it, Nial saw that it was only a crawling beast, this and nothing more.

With a dart like a hawk he seized it by the tail, swung it round his head while he shouted, "Droch spadadh ort! Droch spadadh ort! Bad death to you! Bad death to you!" and flung it against the face of the rock, so that when it fell across a bracken it lay as though stunned or dead.

A shout of elfish laughter came from Oona, who had sprung from her covert, and watched Nial's discomfiture with malicious glee. He turned slowly. His corrugated brows were knitted grotesquely, as with dull bewildered eyes he stared in the direction of the laughter. With a furtive motion he kept shifting his weight now to one foot, now to another, occasionally dragging one backward as though pawing the ground. His tormentor knew well these signs of perplexity, and her light tantalizing glee rippled afresh across the glade. She stood knee-deep in bracken, with her right hand clasping the black-and-silver bough of a birk: a golden-green hue upon her from beneath from the sunlit fern; upon her from above a flood of yellow sunshine, so that she stood out like a human flower, a new daffodil of the woods.

The wild, rude, misshapen creature who fronted her seemed less human now than his wont, with that bovine stare, that uncouth guise, his over-large and heavy head slowly swaying, his restless stamping and scraping. Suddenly it dawned upon him that Oona had not been in earnest: that she had played with, and now mocked him. His eyes grew red, as those of wild swine do of a sudden, or as those of an angry badger. A spray of froth blew from his hanging lip. His long horny fingers opened and closed like sheathing and unsheathing claws.

The next moment there stirred in his brain the thought that perhaps, after all, Oona was mocking him because he had lost, perhaps even because he, he himself, had destroyed his long-sought and moment-agone found soul.

With a cry he threw himself on the ground, sobbing convulsively. He lay there like a stricken beast, a quivering ungainly heap. It was no unknowing beast, though, that moaned, over and over, "My soul—my soul—my soul!" Great tears, like a stag's, ran down his furrowed cheeks. Oona stood amazed. Here was no frenzy of blind rage such as she had seen at times in her companion; but passionate grief: sobs, tears.

The child shivered. God surely has the tendrils of a child's heart close-clinging to his own. Perhaps the wind murmured to her, My grief! my grief! Perhaps the leaves whispered, Sorrow, O sorrow! Perhaps the blind earth breathed, My gloom!, my gloom! Perhaps the laughing sunlight sighed, or the wild bees crooned, or the doves moaned, Peace! peace! peace! Oona's eyes grew dim. A trembling was upon her, like that of a bird in the hollow of the hand. Like a bird, too, was her heart: sure, the flutter of it was an eddy of joy in heaven.

She came toward Nial with swift, noiseless step. He did not hear her approach; or if his wildwood ear caught a rustle, he did not look up. The first he knew of her was the stealing of a small arm round his neck: then the pressure of a warm body against his side: then a wisp of fragrant yellow hair tangled with his coarse, shaggy fell, a soft cheek laid against his, a hand like a little white hovering bird caressed his face. Sweetest of all, the whisper that stole into his dark brain as moonlight: "Nial, darling Nial!"

His sobs ceased. Only his breath came quick and hard. His whole body panted, quivered still.

"Forgive me, Nial! dear, good Nial! I did not mean to hurt you so. I was angry because of your words. But I—I—didn't really mean that that was your soul. Nial, Nial, I didn't see your soul at all!"

Slowly he lifted his wet inflamed face: his eyes agleam through the tangled locks that fell over his brows.

"Have you ever seen it, Oona?"

He could just hear the whispered No. A deep sigh passed her ears, and she pressed closer to his sorrow.

"Oona, my fawn, do you think you'll ever see it? Do you think I'll find it some day?"

"Oh, yes, Nial! Yes—yes—yes!"

"And you will help your poor ugly Nial to—to—find it?"

"Sure, it is helping you I will be, with all my heart, Nial-a-ghràidh."

He stooped his head over hers, lightly shoved her back, and kissed her sunshine-hair. She raised an arm and pulled his face to hers, and kissed him gently.

A faint smile, a glimmer of sunlight on a wet, dishevelled road, came over his face.

Oona sat back, relieved, but with questioning eyes.

"Are you sure you have no soul, Nial? Not even a small dark one that will grow some day, and be beautiful, just as you will, when—when—you die?"

"I am sure, birdeen. Ask Màm-Gorm, ask Sorcha, or Alan, or Murdo, or any of the people down yonder. They know. And I know, when I look in the tarn, or in the pool below the Linn o' Mairg, or in smooth water anywhere: ay, and when the deer come to me, or the sheep do not stir out of my way, or the kye come close and breathe on me kindly. No bee will sting me, and the dragonflies, that even you can't catch, rest sometimes, as the moths do, on my head or arm."

Oona kneeled, and bade the dwarf do likewise. Then she told him that his evil might be because of a rosad upon him, the spell of the Cailliach: and that she knew a sian might ease him. With closed eyes and clasped hands she repeated slowly:

Long and earnestly she watched to see if the incantation would effect the miracle. Nial trembled, with downcast eyes.

"Perhaps there is no evil in you, Nial," she whispered; "so now I will pray to Himself for you, and you repeat what I say, and shut your eyes and clasp your hands just as I do."

The soulless man and the child knelt side by side among the fern. The light lay all about them as a benediction. The rising wind, with a wet sough in it, came along the pines like an intoning anthem. Around them the bee hummed unwitting; in a tree beyond them a cushat crooned and crooned.

Oona's voice came low and sweet as the hidden dove's:

Silence. Then a hoarse, sobbing voice:

Then Oona again: and, again, Nial:

Oona opened her eyes, looked earnestly at Nial, leant forward and kissed him.

"Now, Nial, rise, and turn sunways, and cry Deasìul."

The dwarf did as she bade; then, with a happy laugh, she slipped her hand in his.

"Let us go back now. The rain is coming."

And so, as the glooms of storm came rapidly over the mountain, the two moved, silent and happy, through the sighing glades of the forest.

Lowering skies, with the floating odour of coming rain, already dulled the hill-land. A raven, flying athwart Iolair, looked larger than its wont. Its occasional croak fell heavily as though from ledge to ledge of weighty air. The wood-doves which flew back toward the forest winged their way at a lower level than usual, the clamour of their pinions beating the atmosphere as with oars: on the moorland the lapwings rose and fell incessantly with wailing cries. The scattered kye lowed uneasily, or stood below solitary rowans or wild-guins, easing their fly-tormented flanks with their swishing tails. On the farther slopes, the querulous lambs bleated: everywhere the incessant calling of the ewes made a mournful rumour. The wind moved with a heavy lift, here rising, here falling, anon whirling upon itself, so that all the fern and undergrowth in the corries bent one way, or, for a league, the spires of the heather whitened.

High and low, the innumerous hum of insects vibrated on the air. Thus may the hum of the wheeling world be heard of Keithoir, who dreams in the hollow of a green hill unknown of man: or of the ancient goddess Orchil, who, blind and dumb, works in silence at the heart of Earth at her loom Change, with the thridding shuttles Life and Death: or of Manannan, who sleeps under the green wave, hearing only the sigh of the past, the moan of the passing, the rune of what is to come.

Before Oona and Nial drew close to the hill farm, a shrill sustained cry, not unlike that of the bird called the oyster catcher, came along the slopes. Oona knew at once it was Sorcha's summons for her to help with the cows. With a whispered word to her comrade she sped away by a sheep-path that wound over against Maol-Gorm. Nial slowly advanced to the green hillock of Cnoc-na-shee. He had just flung himself wearily on the grassy slope, when he saw Torcall Cameron stoop and issue from his low doorway.

Màm-Gorm faced the way of the wind, sniffed the air with sensitive nostrils, and let his blind eyes feel the balm of the damp. Then he turned, and returned to his seat by the fire. Nial watched for an hour. The wind had a steady sough in it, and the clouds were lower, darker, more voluminously vast and swift when Cameron came forth again.

It was this time that he had his staff in his hand, though no cap covered his tangled iron-grey hair.

Nial hoped he was right in believing that Màm-Gorm had come out merely to breathe the caller air: for the dwarf feared the reproach of Sorcha if he let the blind man wander along the perilous moorland, with wind and rain moving like ravenous hounds adown the heights.

When, however, he realised that Torcall Cameron was bent upon making his way to some distant spot, he had not the courage to check him, or even to make known his presence. There was a thundercloud on the man's face, one that to Nial was far more sombre and terrifying than any overhead. When, with slow, hesitating steps, the blind man passed close to Cnoc-na-shee, he stopped for a few moments. Doubtless he was listening to the wind going through the pines, with a noise as of the flowing tide against shingly beaches: or, perhaps, to the scattered lowing and bleating of his sheep and cows. But Nial feared that, in some strange way, he had perceived him. He trembled, for he knew that "the father" was in one of his dark moods. Deep down in his heart he dreaded the gaze of those sightless eyes more than anything else in the world: in his heart of hearts he was convinced that they saw, more awfully and searchingly because through a veil.

In his anxiety not to betray his presence, he ground his foot firmer into a heathy hollow, for he had slightly slipped when Cameron stopped. A pebble was dislodged, and made a slight noise.

The blind man lifted his head, startled.

"Is any one there?"

No answer. The wind sighed along the grass.

"Oona, are you there? Nial, is that you?"

Silence, but for a faint wind-rustle in the bracken.

"Sst! Down, Luath, Fior!"

But no collie barked or whined in response.

"Well, peace to your soul, and go hence."

But at last Torcall was convinced he was alone, for he heard the note of a yellow-hammer, as it fed its mate, close by. With a sigh he moved on. As he passed within a few yards of Nial, the dwarf heard him muttering disconnected phrases: "Ochan-achone, tha m' anam brùite am chom!" ... "ma tha sin an dàn!" ... "ma shìneas Dia mo làithean!"9

He waited till Cameron was some way ahead. Then with light step, stealthy movement, and furtive sidelong glances, he followed.

The first thin rain slanted along the wind. The blind man paid no heed. Indeed, he now walked swiftly and firmly along a sheep-path, as though he were familiar with the way, or had altogether forgotten his infirmity.

Out upon a bleak stretch of moor on one of the higher slopes of Maol-Donn stood a cairn. It was here, so rumour went, though none knew for sure, that Torcall's wife, Marsail, lay buried. It was known that she had perished in a snowstorm, and that he had insisted on her burial where she was found: but when the minister and the people came for her body they were told that she was already in the mools, and that even now the stones of her cairn were upon her.

Beside it was a tall flat slab of rock. It may have been part of a Pictish or Druidic temple, or its resemblance to a sacred stone may have been accidental. It stood erect, one-third imbedded in the hillside.

To these Torcall Cameron now made his way. At the cairn he did not stop, neither did he drop a stone or even a pebble upon it. When he reached the great rock, he leaned against it, and with folded arms stared sightlessly across the strath to Tornideon, whose vast bulk rose sombre in the deepening gloom.

The wail of the wind momently increased. The rocks sweated, even where there was no rain falling.

Suddenly, over the high crest to the west, the Druim-nan-Damh or Ridge of the Stags, there came a heavy rolling sound as though a mass of boulders had fallen down the far side of Iolair.

This first muttering of the thunder aroused the dreamer. He started, checked some exclamation, and then, having stooped and groped till he found what he wanted, threw a small stone on Marsail's cairn.

Nial drew closer. A flash of lightning had frightened him. Thunder and lightning were to him as direct agents of a vengeful and irate Power as they were to the priests and prophets of old.

The first loud crash filled the air. Then ensued a splitting and rending as of a granite mountain, from whose depths vomited a prolonged howling and roaring as of monstrous beasts. The outcast crawled alongside the tall slab against which the man leaned, and gripped a corner with his hand.

When, his white face glimmering in the mirk, he looked up at Màm-Gorm, he shivered with a new dread.

The blind man stood erect, with arms upraised and hands outspread. His face was lit as though a fire burned in his brain. Nial imagined that the dead eyes gleamed, as he had seen toadstools gleam in a dark cave: a dull phosphorescent light, horrible to look upon.

Again a wuthering roar, followed by a scythelike whirlwind, with the sound of rain-torrents flooding the high corries and washing the windward precipices of Ben Iolair. Nial was about to speak, when he crouched back at the volley of words shouted savagely over his head:

"Oh, my Lord God, strike! Oh, let Death be upon me! Sorrow Thou hast given me, and I have not rebelled: grief Thou hast made my daily portion, and I have not rebuked Thee: but now that Thou hast made my day into a charnel-house and my bed into a grave, now that Thou hast brought before my blind eyes what no eyes may see and live, now that Thou hast set the Dead as a watch upon the living—I cry to Thee, Enough!"

Nial shivered with awe and terror. He saw that a frenzy was upon the man whom he both loved and feared.

There was silence for many seconds. A greenish streak of flame shot across the mountain, intolerably vivid. A sound as of mirthless laughter was drowned in an avalanche-roar overhead. Out of the tumult, later, came wild fragments of human shouting:

"Let there be a duel between us then ... ay, Marsail, you may weep; ay, Fergus, you may leap out of your shroud to be soul to soul with me ... what do I care for the hounds of the night?... Call off thy hounds, O Hunter!... Be the day between us, and the night, O God; and the two noons, and the darkness of the coming and the darkness of the going; and the blood of the living, and the corruption of the dead; and the earth and the sea; and the stars beneath the world, and the stars above the world; and the friend of man that is Time, and Thy friend that is Eternity ... for I will not, I will not, I will not ... no, though I perish for ever and for ever" ... (and at last, with a scream) ... "Go Thy ways, O God.... Leave me, if Thou wilt not slay! ... I will not! I will not! I will not!"

When the next flash and thunderblast had hurtled and gone, Nial thought that Death had indeed come. Then he heard a low whisper:

"What is it that I hear? Do the dead stir? Marsail ... Marsail ... or ... or ... is it you, Fergus, son of Fergus, son of Ian?"

Sick with fear, Nial sprang to his feet, seized one of the fallen hands in his own, and tried to lead Màm-Gorm away.

The blind man shook as a tuft of canna in a wind-eddy; white, too, as the canna, was his face.

His lips moved convulsively. At last, hoarse, choking, sobbing sounds came forth, and from these grew three or four words:

"Is—it—you, Marsail?"

Nial shrank appalled, but could not withdraw his hands.

"Is—it—you, Fergus Gilchrist?"

Struggling to escape, he merely added to the paralysing awe which held his captor.

"Who are you—what are you? Are you the thing of the grave, the black guide I have heard of?"

With a sudden jerk the dwarf freed himself. The next moment he bounded aside, then, without a glance behind him, fled.

Cameron sprang forward, but when he found that he had missed his grip he drew up again, and stood listening intently. If it was a spirit, it made a noise of running like a human: if it was a creature of the grave, it hurried back to no hollow near by: if it was Black Donald himself, Sir Diabhol had fled, affrighted!

Ah, the Cailliach! He had not thought of her! It might well be that the demon-woman had tried to snare him. If so, what, who, had saved him?

Dazed and sick he stood for a moment, because of a crash of a thunderbolt against a near height. The granite splintered like glass. In his mouth his palate shrank: his nerves strained, quivering.

Who, what, hurled that thunderbolt? Was it God? Was He answering his wild prayer?

If it were of God, why had it not stricken him? Hark! A scream far off! Had the leaping Cailliach been slain by the lightning, as a flying man by the spear of his pursuer? Had God given him these things as signs? These voices, that awful touch as of human hands?

He bowed his head. Tears scalded the burning lids of his blind eyes. Suddenly he sank to his knees, and with outstretched arms repeated an ancient rune of his fathers, the Cry to Age, the Rann-an-h' Aoise:

It was there, lying with his face in the wet heather, that Sorcha found her father. She had seen Nial flying as for his life, and, from behind the boulder where she was sheltering a lamb, had sprung forward to stop him. But all the elf-man saw was a woman's figure—perhaps the Cailliach who had already stolen his soul and now wanted his body in this night of storm! With a scream he turned aside and dashed onward in his wild, ungainly flight.

Sorcha's great eyes filled with amazement, then with dread. What did it mean? Her bosom heaved, the swell of the sudden tide at her heart. More beautiful than any Fairy-Woman that ever herded the deer or sang a fatal song, she stood with one hand at her breast, the colour ebbing from her face, her slim firm body poised as an intent stag.

Slowly her gaze travelled back the way Nial had come. In the gloom of storm she could descry nothing, no one. If the Cailliach were there, she was now invisible.

Again an almost intolerably vivid flash of blue-green light, out of a dazzling flame that seemed to burst from the hills. The hollow roar and crash that followed dazed her, but in that moment's illumination she had seen the cairn and the stannin' stane, and, beside them, the figure of her father, apparently stricken and fallen prone.

Without a thought of fear, either of the storm or the evil spirit that might be roaming the hillside, she half ran, half clambered upward till she came upon her father lying low. In a moment she was by his side, and had lifted his head, drying his face with her dress, and kissing him, with a crooning as of a mother over her child.

He was not dead. For that she was thankful. She could feel the throb of his heart, and in his throat there was a sound as of sobbing breath.

"Father, father," she cried; then, whispering in his ear, "Father of me, father of me, oh, dear to my heart, all is well! I am Sorcha! There is no evil thing here. Come home! Come home!"

She felt the shiver that went over him. Then he sought with his hand, and clasped that which went to meet it.

"What is it, Sorcha? Where am I?"

"Ah, father, dear father, you are well now: arise: I will lead you home!"

"Home?"

"Yes; do you not hear the wind and the rain? Ah—h—!"

Again a bursting roar overhead, and the whole of Iolair a beacon of flame whereon every boulder and crag stood out clear as in brilliant moonlight.

"I remember! I remember!" Cameron cried, as he staggered to his feet. "Was it you, Sorcha, who took my hands a little ago, when—when—I was speaking to—to—Marsail?..."

The girl recoiled in horror. Marsail ... her long-dead mother!

"What is this thing that you say, O Torcall MacDiarmid?" she whispered, awestruck.

"It is nothing. I was dreaming. Sorcha, I came here dreaming of past days. Your mother lies below the cairn there. I was talking to her to ease my pain. I thought she might hear. And while I spoke, I felt hands clasp mine, and try to pull me down—below the cairn, it may be! And then I fell into a horror, and the darkness came over my mind. And, suddenly, I knew that God spared me, though I had cursed Him, and I fell on my knees and cried the rune of Age, that is a rune of old, forgotten among our people, and therewith I was heard, and my strength knew the Breath, and I fell as you found me."

"But, father, father, you are not in the dark way—you are not old, for all the grey of your hair—you are not going to die, and leave your Sorcha and Oona?"

"Would you have me live, nic-chridhe?"

Seldom did he speak to her thus, though often he called Oona his heart's dearie and other loving names. The tears came to her eyes.

"Yes, yes, father! I would have you live. I love you."

"My age is come upon me. I am weary."

"Not yet: not yet!"

"Do you not know the wisdom of old—s'mairg a dh'iarradh an aoise, Woe to him that desireth extreme old age!"

"Come with me, dear! Come! The rain is leaping at us. Come! You are cold and wet and shivering!"

And so, at last, silent and weary, Torcall Cameron toiled back against the tempest, and neither he nor Sorcha saw, as they passed the byre, a squat, misshapen figure crouching beside Odhar, the calving cow.

It was a night for the peat-glow. Outside, the darkness was intense. The thunderstorm had rolled heavily away, though the far hills still held an echo. But a great wind had arisen, and blew across the heights with a sound like the trumpets of a mighty host. From the forest came a vast tumultuous sigh, as of the moaning sea.

In the low room, where there was no light save that of the peat-fire, upon which flamed some dry pine-logs, Torcall Cameron sat brooding in the ingle. Opposite to him was Sorcha on a milking-stool, now stirring the porridge in the pot at one side of the fire, now with clasped hands staring into the flames, dreaming of Alan, or of what she had that gloaming heard from her father and from Nial.

At dark she had gone to the byre, and, having found the dwarf, had soothed and entreated him, so that his dark mood passed, and he followed her, in furtive silence, into the room, where, unknowing of his advent, Màm-Gorm sat.

Only once had the blind man spoken since he had seated himself once again before the peats. It was to ask Sorcha if she thought that the person who took his hands by the cairn could have been Nial. An imploring glance from the outcast made her refrain from betrayal of his presence: of which she was glad when, having replied that she was certain it was he, for she had seen him running down the hillside as though terrified by the lightning, her father broke into a muttered savage curse.

At last Màm-Gorm slept. The fireglow calmed the wrought face. The tangled iron-grey hair fell over his forehead. He looked strangely old; could it be, thought Sorcha, that his prayer had been heard, and that already the Shepherd had found this weary sheep? And yet, so strong was he, so tall and strong; strong as an aged pine on a headland! Surely his ill was of the stricken heart only?

When his breathing came soft and even, she rose, lightly kissed his grey hair, with a tear for the pity of the old that is in the loving heart of the young, and then went out to the byre to see if Odhar was warm, and under no spell nor evil, though her calf was not yet due.

As she went out Oona slipped in. She was dry and flushed, for at the coming of the storm she had crept into the hayloft, and had there been lulled to sleep by the rush of the rain and the endless rising and falling sough of the wind. Nial made a sign of silence, so she came forward soundlessly. For a time she stared intently at the sleeper, then, seeing that Nial, who had crawled to her side, would not look at her but sat blinking at the flame, she began to croon a song.

The sweet Gaelic words fell from her lips like soft rain in a wood. The room was filled with a low chime of music. Old strange chants or fugitive songs, one after the other, came fragmentarily to her lips; and the plaintive air of them was sometimes her own, sometimes what she had heard others sing, and once or twice old-world melodies, more ancient than the oldest pine-trees, older even than the "fallen stones" in the place on the south slope of Iolair called Teampull-nan-Anait, where a thousand years ago none passed who could tell who Anait was, or where her altar had been or who were her worshippers.

Once the door opened. Sorcha glanced through the flame-lit dusk: a smile on her face, sweet as the dream in her beautiful eyes. The father asleep; Oona crooning before the peats; Nial, quiet hound of Oona, with dark eyes staring up at her from where he lay on the floor: she need not fear to leave, and go out to the roofed hay-room, where Alan's arms yearned for her, where his heart beat for her, where his lips were warm in the dark, where the dear whisper of his voice was the echo of the white song that clapped its hands rejoicing in the sunbower in the hollow of her heart.

IV

But, from that day, the gloom lay more heavily on Torcall Cameron even than of yore. Oona herself could hardly win speech from him. During the week of fine weather that followed the thunderstorm she was rarely at Màm-Gorm. The forest held her with its spell, though often she was on the heights with Murdo when he led the kye to the hill-pastures at sunrise, or with Sorcha at the milking of the cows at sundown.