little strapped basket Jean had made ready for us. He shook the mist drops from our own plaids, and as I was about to sit down I stopped a moment to listen.
“That is a tune I never heard on the pipes before,” I said. “What is a piper doing out on the moor so early?”
He listened also. “It must be far away. I don’t hear it,” he said. “Perhaps it is a bird whistling.”
“It is far away,” I answered, “but it is not a bird. It’s the pipes, and playing such a strange tune. There! It has stopped!”
But it was not silent long; I heard the tune begin again much nearer, and the piper was plainly coming toward us. I turned my head.
The mist was clearing, and floated about like a thin veil through which one could see objects. At a short distance above us on the moor I saw something moving. It was a man who was playing the pipes. It was the piper, and almost at once I knew him, because it was actually my own Feargus, stepping proudly through the heather with his step like a stag on the hills. His head was held high, and his face had a sort of elated delight in it as if he were enjoying himself and the morning and the music in a new way. I was so surprised that I rose to my feet and called to him.
“Feargus!” I cried. “What—”
I knew he heard me, because he turned and looked at me with the most extraordinary smile. He was usually a rather grave-faced man, but this smile had a kind of startling triumph in it. He certainly heard me, for he whipped off his bonnet in a salute which was as triumphant as the smile. But he did not answer, and actually passed in and out of sight in the mist.
When I rose Mr. MacNairn had risen, too. When I turned to speak in my surprise, he had fixed on me his watchful look.
“Imagine its being Feargus at this hour!” I exclaimed. “And why did he pass by in such a hurry without answering? He must have been to a wedding and have been up all night. He looked—” I stopped a second and laughed.
“How did he look?” Mr. MacNairn asked.
“Pale! That won’t do—though he certainly didn’t look ill.” I laughed again. “I’m laughing because he looked almost like one of the White People.”
“Are you sure it was Feargus?” he said.
“Quite sure. No one else is the least like Feargus. Didn’t you see him yourself?”
“I don’t know him as well as you do; and there was the mist,” was his answer. “But he certainly was not one of the White People when I saw him last night.”
I wondered why he looked as he did when he took my hand and drew me down to my place on the plaid again. He did not let it go when he sat down by my side. He held it in his own large, handsome one, looking down on it a moment or so; and then he bent his head and kissed it long and slowly two or three times.
“Dear little Ysobel!” he said. “Beloved, strange little Ysobel.”
“Am I strange!” I said, softly.
“Yes, thank God!” he answered.
I had known that some day when we were at Muircarrie together he would tell me what his mother had told me—about what we three might have been to one another. I trembled with happiness at the thought of hearing him say it himself. I knew he was going to say it now.
He held my hand and stroked it. “My mother told you, Ysobel—what I am waiting for?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Do you know I love you?” he said, very low.
“Yes. I love you, too. My whole life would have been heaven if we could always have been together,” was my answer.
He drew me up into his arms so that my cheek lay against his breast as I went on, holding fast to the rough tweed of his jacket and whispering: “I should have belonged to you two, heart and body and soul. I should never have been lonely again. I should have known nothing, whatsoever happened, but tender joy.”
“Whatsoever happened?” he murmured.
“Whatsoever happens now, Ysobel, know nothing but tender joy. I think you CAN. ‘Out on the Hillside!’ Let us remember.”
“Yes, yes,” I said; “‘Out on the Hillside.’” And our two faces, damp with the sweet mist, were pressed together.
CHAPTER X
The mist had floated away, and the moor was drenched with golden sunshine when we went back to the castle. As we entered the hall I heard the sound of a dog howling, and spoke of it to one of the menservants who had opened the door.
“That sounds like Gelert. Is he shut up somewhere?”
Gelert was a beautiful sheep-dog who belonged to Feargus and was his heart’s friend. I allowed him to be kept in the courtyard.
The man hesitated before he answered me, with a curiously grave face.
“It is Gelert, miss. He is howling for his master. We were obliged to shut him in the stables.”
“But Feargus ought to have reached here by this time,” I was beginning.
I was stopped because I found Angus Macayre almost at my elbow. He had that moment come out of the library. He put his hand on my arm.
“Will ye come with me?” he said, and led me back to the room he had just left. He kept his hand on my arm when we all stood together inside, Hector and I looking at him in wondering question. He was going to tell me something—we both saw that.
“It is a sad thing you have to hear,” he said. “He was a fine man, Feargus, and a most faithful servant. He went to see his mother last night and came back late across the moor. There was a heavy mist, and he must have lost his way. A shepherd found his body in a tarn at daybreak. They took him back to his father’s home.”
I looked at Hector MacNairn and again at Angus. “But it couldn’t be Feargus,” I cried. “I saw him an hour ago. He passed us playing on his pipes. He was playing a new tune I had never heard before a wonderful, joyous thing. I both heard and SAW him!”
Angus stood still and watched me. They both stood still and watched me, and even in my excitement I saw that each of them looked a little pale.
“You said you did not hear him at first, but you surely saw him when he passed so near,” I protested. “I called to him, and he took off his bonnet, though he did not stop. He was going so quickly that perhaps he did not hear me call his name.”
What strange thing in Hector’s look checked me? Who knows?
“You DID see him, didn’t you?” I asked of him.
Then he and Angus exchanged glances, as if asking each other to decide some grave thing. It was Hector MacNairn who decided it.
“No,” he answered, very quietly, “I neither saw nor heard him, even when he passed. But you did.”
“I did, quite plainly,” I went on, more and more bewildered by the way in which they kept a sort of tender, awed gaze fixed on me. “You remember I even noticed that he looked pale. I laughed, you know, when I said he looked almost like one of the White People—”
Just then my breath caught itself and I stopped. I began to remember things—hundreds of things.
Angus spoke to me again as quietly as Hector had spoken.
“Neither Jean nor I ever saw Wee Brown Elspeth,” he said—“neither Jean nor I. But you did. You have always seen what the rest of us did not see, my bairn—always.”
I stammered out a few words, half in a whisper. “I have always seen what you others could not see? WHAT—HAVE—I—SEEN?”
But I was not frightened. I suppose I could never tell any one what strange, wide, bright