GREEN FIRE
A Romance
BY
FIONA MACLEOD
"_While still I may, I write for you
The love I lived, the dream I knew_"
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1896
Copyright, 1896, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
TO
ESCLARMOUNDO
"_Nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum._"--OVID
"_There are those of us who would rather be with Cathal of the Woods,
and be drunken with green fire, than gain the paradise of the holy
Molios who banned him, if in that gain were to be heard no more the
earth-sweet ancient song of the blood that is in the veins of youth...._
"_O green fire of life, pulse of the world! O Love, O Youth, O Dream of
Dreams!_
"THE ANNIR CHOILLE."
CONTENTS
BOOK FIRST
THE BIRDS OF ANGUS OGUE
CHAP. PAGE
I. EUCHARIS 3
II. THE HOUSE OF KERIVAL 22
III. STORM 37
IV. THE DREAM AND THE DREAMERS 53
V. THE WALKER IN THE NIGHT 69
VI. VIA OSCURA 99
VII. "DEIREADH GACH COGAIDH, SITH" (THE
END OF ALL WARFARE, PEACE) 114
VIII. THE UNFOLDING OF THE SCROLL 125
BOOK SECOND
THE HERDSMAN
IX. RETROSPECTIVE: FROM THE HEBRID ISLES 149
X. AT THE EDGE OF THE SHADOW 175
XI. MYSTERY 195
XII. IN THE GREEN ARCADES 208
XIII. THE MESSAGE 224
XIV. THE LAUGHTER OF THE KING 239
BOOK THIRD
XV. THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD 259
GREEN FIRE
BOOK FIRST
_THE BIRDS OF ANGUS OGUE_
Hither and thither,
And to and fro,
They thrid the Maze
Of Weal and Woe:
O winds that blow
For golden weather
Blow me the birds,
All white as snow
On the hillside heather--
Blow me the birds
That Angus know:
Blow me the birds,
Be it Weal or Woe!
CHAPTER I
EUCHARIS
_Then, in the violet forest, all a-bourgeon, Eucharis said to me: "It
is Spring."_--ARTHUR RIMBAUD.
After the dim purple bloom of a suspended spring, a green rhythm ran
from larch to thorn, from lime to sycamore; spread from meadow to
meadow, from copse to copse, from hedgerow to hedgerow. The blackthorn
had already snowed upon the nettle-garths. In the obvious nests among
the bare boughs of ash and beech the eggs of the blackbird were
blue-green as the sky that March had bequeathed to April. For days
past, when the breath of the equinox had surged out of the west, the
missel-thrushes had bugled from the wind-swayed topmost branches of the
tallest elms. Everywhere the green rhythm ran.
In every leaf that had uncurled there was a delicate bloom, that which
is upon all things in the first hours of life. The spires of the grass
were washed in a green, dewy light. Out of the brown earth a myriad
living things thrust tiny green shafts, arrow-heads, bulbs, spheres,
clusters. Along the pregnant soil keener ears than ours would have
heard the stir of new life, the innumerous whisper of the bursting
seed; and, in the wind itself, shepherding the shadow-chased sunbeams,
the voice of that vernal gladness which has been man's clarion since
Time began.
Day by day the wind-wings lifted a more multitudinous whisper from
the woodlands. The deep hyperborean note, from the invisible ocean
of air, was still audible: within the concourse of bare boughs which
lifted against it, that surging voice could not but have an echo of its
wintry roar. In the sun-havens, however, along the southerly copses,
in daisied garths of orchard-trees, amid the flowering currant and
guelder and lilac bushes in quiet places where the hives were all
a-murmur, the wind already sang its lilt of spring. From dawn till
noon, from an hour before sundown till the breaking foam along the
wild cherry flushed fugitively because of the crimson glow out of the
west, there was a ceaseless chittering of birds. The starlings and the
sparrows enjoyed the commune of the homestead; the larks and fieldfares
and green and yellow linnets congregated in the meadows, where, too,
the wild bee already roved. Among the brown ridgy fallows there was
a constant flutter of black, white-gleaming, and silver-gray wings,
where the stalking rooks, the jerking pewets, and the wary, uncertain
gulls from the neighboring sea, feasted tirelessly from the teeming
earth. Often, too, the wind-hover, that harbinger of the season of the
young broods, quivered his curved wings in his arrested flight, while
his lance-like gaze penetrated the whins, beneath which a new-born
rabbit crawled, or discerned in the tangle of a grassy tuft the brown,
watchful eyes of a nesting quail.
In the remoter woodlands the three foresters of April could be heard:
the woodpecker tapping on the gnarled boles of the oaks; the wild-dove
calling in low, crooning monotones to his silent mate; the cuckoo
tolling his infrequent peals from skyey belfries built of sun and mist.
In the fields, where the thorns were green as rivulets of melted snow
and the grass had the bloom of emerald, and the leaves of docken,
clover, cinquefoil, sorrel, and a thousand plants and flowers, were
wave-green, the ewes lay, idly watching with their luminous amber
eyes the frisking and leaping of the close-curled, tuft-tailed,
woolly-legged lambs. In corners of the hedgerows, and in hollows in
the rolling meadows, the primrose, the celandine, the buttercup, the
dandelion, and the daffodil spilled little eddies of the sun-flood
which overbrimmed them with light. All day long the rapture of the
larks filled the blue air with vanishing spirals of music, swift and
passionate in the ascent, repetitive and less piercing in the narrowing
downward gyres. From every whin the poignant, monotonous note of the
yellow-hammer reëchoed. Each pastoral hedge was alive with robins,
chaffinches, and the dusky shadows of the wild-mice darting here and
there among the greening boughs.
Whenever this green fire is come upon the earth, the swift contagion
spreads to the human heart. What the seedlings feel in the brown
mould, what the sap feels in the trees, what the blood feels in every
creature from the newt in the pool to the nesting bird--so feels the
strange, remembering ichor that runs its red tides through human hearts
and brains. Spring has its subtler magic for us, because of the dim
mysteries of unremembering remembrance and of the vague radiances of
hope. Something in us sings an ascendant song, and we expect, we know
not what; something in us sings a decrescent song, and we realize
vaguely the stirring of immemorial memories.
There is none who will admit that spring is fairer elsewhere than in
his own land. But there are regions where the season is so hauntingly
beautiful that it would seem as though Angus Ogue knew them for his
chosen resting-places in his green journey.
Angus Og, Angus MacGreine, Angus the Ever Youthful, the Son of
the Sun, a fair god he indeed, golden-haired and wonderful as Apollo
Chrusokomes. Some say that he is Love; some, that he is Spring; some,
even, that in him, Thanatos, the Hellenic Celt that was his far-off
kin, is reincarnate. But why seek riddles in flowing water? It may
well be that Angus Ogue is Love, and Spring, and Death. The elemental
gods are ever triune; and in the human heart, in whose lost Eden an
ancient tree of knowledge grows wherefrom the mind has not yet gathered
more than a few windfalls, it is surely sooth that Death and Love are
oftentimes one and the same, and that they love to come to us in the
apparel of Spring.
Sure, indeed, Angus Ogue is a name above all sweet to lovers, for is
he not the god--the fair youth of the Tuatha-de-Danann, the Ancient
People, with us still, though for ages seen of us no more--from the
meeting of whose lips are born white birds, which fly abroad and nest
in lovers' hearts till the moment come when, on the yearning lips of
love, their invisible wings shall become kisses again?
Then, too, there is the old legend that Angus goes to and fro upon the
world, a weaver of rainbows. He follows the spring, or is its herald.
Often his rainbows are seen in the heavens; often in the rapt gaze of
love. We have all perceived them in the eyes of children, and some of
us have discerned them in the hearts of sorrowful women and in the dim
brains of the old. Ah! for sure, if Angus Og be the lovely Weaver
of Hope he is deathless comrade of the spring, and we may well pray
to him to let his green fire move in our veins, whether he be but the
Eternal Youth of the World, or be also Love, whose soul is youth, or
even though he be likewise Death himself, Death to whom Love was wedded
long, long ago.
* * * * *
But nowhere was spring more lovely, nowhere was the green fire of
life so quick with impulsive ardors, as, one year of the years, in a
seaward region to the north of the ancient forest of Broceliande, in
what of old was Armorica and now is Brittany.
Here spring often comes late, but ever lingers long. Here, too, in the
dim green avenues of the oak-woods of Kerival, the nightingales reach
their uttermost western flight. Never has the shepherd, tending his
scant flock on the upland pastures of Finistère, nor the fisherman
lying a-dream amid the sandy thickets of Ushant, heard that quaint
music--that primeval and ever young song of the passionate heart which
Augustine might well have had in mind when he exclaimed "Sero te amavi,
Pulchritudo, tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi." But, each April,
in the woods of Kerival, the nightingales congregate from afar, and
through May their songs make the forest like a sanctuary filled with
choristers swinging incense of a delicate music.
It is a wonderful region, that which lies betwixt Ploumaliou on the
east and Kerloek on the west; the oldest, remotest part of an ancient,
remote land. Here the few hamlets and fewer scattered villages are,
even in externals, the same as they were a hundred or three hundred
years ago. In essentials, there is no difference since St. Hervé
or St. Ronan preached the new faith, or indeed since Ahès the Pale
rode through the forest aisles in the moonlight and heard the Nains
chanting, or since King Gradlon raced his horse against the foam when
his daughter let the sea in upon the fair city of Ys. The good _curés_
preach the religion of Christ and of Mary to the peasants; but in the
minds of most of these there lingers much of the bygone faith that
reared the menhirs. Few indeed there are in whose ears is never an echo
of the old haunted world, when every wood and stream, every barren
moor and granite wilderness, every sea-pasture and creek and bay had
its particular presence, its spirit of good or ill, its menace, its
perilous enchantment. The eyes of the peasants by these shores, these
moors, these windy hill-slopes of the south, are not fixed only on the
meal-chest and the fallow-field, or, on fête-days, upon the crucifix
in the little church; but often dwell upon a past time, more sacred now
than ever in this bitter relinquishing age. On the lips of many may be
heard lines from that sad folk-song, "Ann Amzer Dremenet" (In the Long
Ago):
Eur c'havel kaer karn olifant,
War-n-han tachou aour hag arc' hant.
Daelou a ver, daelou c'houero:
Neb a zo enn han zo maro!
Zo maro, zo maro pell-zo,
Hag hi luskel, o kana 'to,
Hag hi luskel, luskel ato,
Kollet ar skiand-vad gant-ho.
Ar skiand-vad ho deuz kollet;
Kollet ho deuz joaiou ar bed.
* * * * *
[But when they had made the cradle
Of ivory and of gold,
Their hearts were heavy still
With the sorrow of old.
And ever as they rocked, the tears
Ran down, sad tears:
Who is it lieth dead therein,
Dead all these weary years?
And still they rock that cradle there
Of ivory and gold;
For in their brains the shadow is
The Shadow of Old.
They weep, and know not what they weep;
They wait a vain rebirth:
Vanity of vanities, alas!
For there is but one birth
On the wide, green earth.]
Old sayings they have, too; who knows how old? The charcoal-burner in
the woods above Kerloek will still shudder at the thought of death
on the bleak, open moor, because of the carrion-crow that awaits his
sightless eyes, the fox that will tear his heart out, and the toad
that will swallow his soul. Long, long ago Gwenc'hlan the Bard sang
thus of his foe and the foes of his people, when every battle field
was a pasture for the birds and beasts of prey, and when the Spirit of
Evil lurked near every corpse in the guise of a toad. And still the
shrimper, in the sands beyond Ploumaliou, will cry out against the
predatory sea fowl _A gas ar Gall--a gas ar Gall!_ (Chase the Franks!)
and not know that, ages ago, this cry went up from the greatest of
Breton kings, when Nomenoë drove the Frankish invaders beyond the Oust
and the Vilaine, and lighted their flight by the flames of Nantes and
Rennes.
Near the northern frontier of the remotest part of this ancient region,
the Manor of Kerival was the light-house of its forest vicinage. It
was and is surrounded by woods, for the most part of oak and chestnut
and beech. Therein are trees of an age so great that they may have
sheltered the flight of Jud Mael, when Ahès chased him on her white
stallion from glade to glade, and one so venerably old that its roots
may have been soaked in the blood of their child Judik, whom she forced
her betrayer to slay with the sword before she thrust a dagger into
his heart. Northward of the manor, however, the forest is wholly of
melancholy spruce, of larch and pine. The pines extend in a desolate
disarray to the interminable dunes, beyond which the Breton sea lifts
its gray wave against a gray horizon. On that shore there are few
rocks, though here and there fang-like reefs rise, ready to tear and
devour any boat hurled upon them at full tide in days of storm. At
Kerival Haven, too, there is a wilderness of granite rock; a mass of
pinnacles, buttresses, and inchoate confusion, ending in long, smooth
ledges of black basalt, these forever washed by the green flow of the
tides.
None of the peasants knew the age of the House of Kerival, or how long
the Kerival family had been there. Old Yann Hénan, the blind brother of
the white-haired _curé_, Père Alain, who was the oldest man in all the
countryside, was wont to say that Kerival woods had been green before
ever there was a house on the banks of the Seine, and that a Kerival
had been lord of the land before ever there was a king of France. All
believed this, except Père Alain, and even he dissented only when
Yann spoke of the seigneur's ancestor as the Marquis of Kerival; for,
as he explained, there were no marquises in those far-off days. But
this went for nothing; for, unfortunately, Père Alain had once in his
youth preached against the popular belief in Korrigans and Nains, and
had said that these supernatural beings did not exist, or at any
rate were never seen of man. How, then, could much credence be placed
on the testimony of a man who could be so prejudiced? Yann had but
to sing a familiar snatch from the old ballad of "Aotru Nann Hag ar
Gorrigan"--the fragment beginning
Ken a gavas eur waz vihan
E-kichen ti eur Gorrigan,
and ending
Met gwell eo d'in mervel breman
'Get dimizi d' eur Gorrigan!--
[The Lord Nann came to the Kelpie's Pool
And stooped to drink the water cool;
But he saw the kelpie sitting by,
Combing her long locks listlessly.
"O knight," she sang, "thou dost not fear
To draw these perilous waters near!
Wed thou me now, or on a stone
For seven years perish all alone,
Or three days hence moan your death-moan!"
"I will not wed you, nor alone
Perish with torment on a stone,
Nor three days hence draw my death-moan--
For I shall die, O Kelpie fair,
When God lets down the golden stair,
And so my soul thou shalt not share--
But, if my fate is to lie dead,
Here, with thy cold breast for my bed,
Death can be mine, I will not wed!"]
When Yann sang this, or told for the hundredth time the familiar story
of how Paskou-Hir the tailor was treated by the Nains when he sought to
rifle the hidden treasure in the grotto, every one knew that he spoke
what was authentic, what was true. As for Père Alain--well, priests are
told to say many things by the good, wise Holy Father, who rules the
world so well but has never been in Brittany, and so cannot know all
that happens there, and has happened from time immemorial. Then, again,
was there not the evidence of the alien, the strange, quiet man called
Yann the Dumb, because of his silence at most times--him that was the
servitor-in-chief to the Lady Lois, the beautiful paralyzed wife of the
Marquis of Kerival, and that came from the far north, where the kindred
of the Armorican race dwell among the misty isles and rainy hills
of Scotland? Indeed Yann had been heard to say that he would sooner
disbelieve in the Pope himself than in the kelpie, for in his own land
he had himself heard her devilish music luring him across a lonely
moor, and he had known a man who had gone fey because he had seen the
face of a kelpie in a hill-tarn.
In the time of the greening, even the Korrigans are unseen of walkers
in the dusk. They are busy then, some say, winding the white into
the green bulbs of the water-lilies, or tinting the wings within the
chrysalis of the water-fly, or weaving the bright skins for the newts;
but however this may be, the season of the green flood over the brown
earth is not that wherein man may fear them.
No fear of Korrigan or Nain, or any other woodland creature or haunter
of pool or stream, disturbed two who walked in the green-gloom of a
deep avenue in the midst of the forest beyond the Manor of Kerival.
They were young, and there was green fire in their hearts; for they
moved slow, hand claspt in hand, and with their eyes dwelling often
on the face of each other. And whenever Ynys de Kerival looked at
her cousin Alan she thought him the fairest and comeliest of the sons
of men; and whenever Alan turned the longing of his eyes upon Ynys he
wondered if anywhere upon the green earth moved aught so sweet and
winsome, if anywhere in the green world was another woman so beautiful
in body, mind, and spirit, as Ynys--Ynys the Dark, as the peasants
called her, though Ynys of the dusky hair and the hazel-green eyes
would have been truer of her whom Alan de Kerival loved. Of a truth,
she was fair to see. Tall she was, and lithe; in her slim, svelt body
there was something of the swift movement of the hill-deer, something
of the agile abandon of the leopard. She was of that small clan, the
true daughters of the sun. Her tanned face and hands showed that she
loved the open air, though indeed her every movement proved this. The
sun-life was even in that shadowy hair of hers, which had a sheen of
living light wrought into its fragrant dusk; it was in her large, deep,
translucent eyes, of a soft, dewy twilight-gray often filled with
green light, as of the forest-aisles or as the heart of a sea-wave as
it billows over sunlit sand; it was in the heart and in the brain of
this daughter of an ancient race--and the nostalgia of the green world
was hers. For in her veins ran the blood not only of her Armorican
ancestors but of another Celtic strain, that of the Gael of the Isles,
Through her mother, Lois Macdonald, of the remote south isles of the
Outer Hebrides, the daughter of a line as ancient as that of Tristran
de Kerival, she inherited even more than her share of the gloom, the
mystery, the sea-passion, the vivid oneness with nature which have
disclosed to so many of her fellow-Celts secret sources of peace.
Everywhere in that region the peasant poets sang of Ynys the Dark or
of her sister Annaik. They were the two beautiful women of the world,
there. But, walking in the fragrant green-gloom of the beeches, Alan
smiled when he thought of Annaik, for all her milk-white skin and
her wonderful tawny hair, for all her strange, shadowy amber-brown
eyes--eyes often like dark hill-crystals aflame with stormy light. She
was beautiful, and tall too, and with an even wilder grace than Ynys;
yet--there was but one woman in the world, but one Dream, and her name
was Ynys.
It was then that he remembered the line of the unfortunate boy-poet of
the Paris that has not forgotten him; and looking at Ynys, who seemed
to him the very spirit of the green life all around him, muttered:
"Then in the violet forest, all a-bourgeon, Eucharis said to me: 'It is
Spring.'"