THE HOUSE OF KERIVAL
It was with a sudden beating of the heart that, midway in Easter, Alan
de Kerival received in Paris two letters: one from the Marquis de
Kerival, and the other from his cousin Ynys, whom he loved.
At all times he was ill at ease in the great city; or at all times save
when he was alone in his little study in the Tour de l'Ile, or in the
great circular room where the master astronomer, Daniel Darc, wrought
unceasingly. On rare occasions, golden afternoons these, he escaped to
the green places near Paris--to Rambouillet or St. Germain, or even
to Fontainebleau. There, under the leafless trees of winter or at the
first purpling of spring, he was wont to walk for hours, dreaming his
dream. For Alan was a poet, and to dream was his birthright.
And for dream, what had he? There was Ynys above all, Ynys whom he
loved with ever deepening joy and wonder. More and more she had become
to him his real life; he lived in her, for her, because of her. More
and more, too, he realized that she was his strength, his inspiration.
But besides this abiding delight, which made his heart leap whenever
he saw a Breton name above a shop or on a volume on the bookstalls,
he was ever occupied by that wonderful past of his race which was to
him a living reality. It was perhaps because he so keenly perceived
the romance of the present--the romance of the general hour, of the
individual moment--that he turned so insatiably to the past with its
deathless charm, its haunting appeal. The great astronomer whom he
loved and served knew the young man well, and was wont to say that his
favorite assistant was born a thousand years too late.
One day a Breton neighbor of the Marquis de Kerival questioned Daniel
Darc as to who the young man's friends were. "Nomenoë, Gradlon-Maur,
Gwenc'hlan, Taliésin, Merlin, and Oisin," was the reply. And it was
true. Alan's mind was as irresistibly drawn to the Celtic world of the
past as the swallow to the sun-way. In a word, he was not only a poet,
but a Celtic poet; and not only a Celtic poet, but a dreamer of the
Celtic dream.
Perhaps this was because of the double strain in his veins. Doubtless,
too, it was continuously enhanced by his intimate knowledge of two of
the Celtic languages, that of the Breton and that of the Gael. It is
language that is the surest stimulus to the remembering nerves. We have
a memory within memory, as layers of skin underlie the epidermis. With
most of us this anterior remembrance remains dormant throughout life;
but to some are given swift ancestral recollections. Alan de Kerival
was of these few.
His aunt, the Marquise, true Gael of the Hebrid Isles as she was, loved
the language of her people, and spoke it as she spoke English, even
better than French. Of Breton, save a few words and phrases, she knew
almost nothing--though Armorican was exclusively used throughout the
whole Kerival region, was the common tongue in the Manor itself, and
was habitually affected even by the Marquis de Kerival--on the few
occasions when Tristran the Silent, as the old nobleman was named,
cared to speak. But with two members of the household she invariably
spoke in Gaelic; with her nephew Alan, the child of her sister Silis
Macdonald, and her old servitor, Ian Macdonald, known among his fellows
as Yann the Dumb, mainly because he seldom spoke to them, having
no language but his own. Latterly, her daughter Ynys had become as
familiar with the one Celtic tongue as the other.
With this double key, Alan unlocked many doors. All the wonderful
romance of old Armorica and of ancient Wales was familiar to him, and
he was deeply versed in the still more wonderful and magical lore of
the Gaelic race. In his brain ran ever that Ossianic tide which has
borne so many marvellous argosies through the troubled waters of the
modern mind. Old ballads of his native isles, with their haunting
Gaelic rhythms and idioms and their frequent reminiscences of the
Norse viking and the Danish summer-sailor, were often in his ears. He
had lived with his hero Cuchullin from the days when the boy showed his
royal blood at Emain-Macha till that sad hour when his madness came
upon him and he died. He had fared forth with many a Lifting of the
Sunbeam, and had followed Oisin step by step on that last melancholy
journey when Malvina led the blind old man along the lonely shores of
Arran. He had watched the _crann-tara_ flare from glen to glen, and at
the bidding of that fiery cross he had seen the whirling of swords, the
dusky flight of arrow-rain, and, from the isles, the leaping forth of
the war _birlinns_ to meet the viking galleys. How often, too, he had
followed Nial of the Nine Hostages, and had seen the Irish Charlemagne
ride victor through Saxon London, or across the Norman plains, or with
onward sword direct his army against the white walls of the Alps!
How often he had been with the great king Nomonoë, when he with his
Armoricans chased the Frankish wolves away from Breton soil, or had
raced with Gradlon-Maur from the drowning seas which overwhelmed Ys,
where the king's daughter had at the same moment put her hands on the
Gates of Love and Death! How often he had heard Merlin and Taliésin
speak of the secret things of the ancient wisdom, or Gwenc'hlan chant
upon his wild harp, or the fugitive song of Vivien in the green woods
of Broceliande, where the enchanted seer sleeps his long sleep and
dreams his dream of eternal youth.
It was all this marvellous life of old which wrought upon Alan de
Kerival's life as by a spell. Often he recalled the words of a Gaelic
_sian_ he had heard Yann croon in his soft, monotonous voice--words
which made a light shoreward eddy of the present and were solemn with
the deep-sea sound of the past, that is with us even as we speak.
He was himself, too, a poet, and loved to tell anew, in Breton, to the
peasants of Kerival, some of the wild north tales, or to relate in
Gaelic to his aunt and to Ynys the beautiful folk-ballads of Brittany,
which Annaik knew by heart and chanted with the strange, wailing music
of the forest-wind.
In that old Manor, moreover, another shadow put a gloom into his
mind--this was another shadow than that which made the house so silent
and chill, the inviolate isolation of the paralyzed but still beautiful
Marquise Lois from her invalid husband, limb-useless from his thighs
because of a hurt done in the war into which he had gone brown-haired
and strong, and whence he had come broken in hope, shattered in health,
and gray with premature age. And this other shadow was the mystery of
his birth.
It was in vain he had tried to learn the name of his father. Only three
people knew it: the Marquis Tristran, the Marquise Lois, and Yann the
Dumb. From none of these could he elicit more than what he had long
known. All was to be made clear on his twenty-fifth birthday; till then
he had to be content with the knowledge that he was Alan de Kerival by
courtesy only; that he was the son of Silis Macdonald, of an ancient
family whose ancestral home was in one of the isles of the Southern
Hebrides, of Silis, the dead sister of Lois de Kerival; and that he
was the adopted child of the Marquis and Marquise who bore that old
Armoric name.
That there was tragedy inwrought with his story he knew well. From
fugitive words, too, he had gained the idea that his father, in common
with the Marquis Tristran, had been a soldier in the French army;
though as to whether this unknown parent was Scottish or Breton or
French, or as to whether he was alive or dead, there was no homing clew.
To all his enquiries of the Marquise he received no answer, or was
told simply that he must wait. The Marquis he rarely saw, and never
spoke with. If ever he encountered the stern, white-haired man as he
was wheeled through the garden ways or down one of the green alleys,
or along the corridors of the vast, rambling château, they passed in
silence. Sometimes the invalid would look at him with the fierce,
unwavering eyes of a hawk; but for the most part the icy, steel-blue
eyes ignored the young man altogether.
Yann, too, could not, or would not confide any thing more than Alan had
already learned from the Marquise. The gaunt old Hebridean--whose sole
recreation, when not sitting pipe in mouth before the flaming logs, was
to wander along the melancholy dunes by the melancholy gray sea, and
mutter continuously to himself in his soft island-Gaelic--would talk
slowly by the hour on old legends, and ballad-lore, and on seanachas of
every kind. When, however, Alan asked him about the sisters Lois and
Silis Macdonald, or how Lois came to marry a Breton, and as to the man
Silis loved, and what the name was of the isle whereon they lived,--or
even as to whether Ian himself had kith or kin living,--Yann would
justify his name. He took no trouble in evasion: he simply became dumb.
Sometimes Alan asked the old man if he cared to see the Isles again. At
that, a look ever came into Ian Macdonald's eyes which made his young
clansman love him.
"It will never, never be forgetting my own place I will be," he replied
once, "no, never. I would rather be hearing the sea on the shores there
than all the hymns of heaven, and I would rather be having the canna
and the heather over my head than be under the altar of the great
church at Kerloek. No, no, it is the pain I have for my own place, and
the isle where my blood has been for hundreds of years, and where for
sure my heart is, Alan Mac----"
With eager ears Alan had hoped for the name whereat the old man had
stopped short. It would have told him much. "Alan, son of----!" Even
that baptismal name would probably have told him if his father were a
Gael or a Breton, an Englishman or a Frenchman. But Yann said no more,
then or later.
Alan had hoped, too, that when he came back, after his first long
absence from Kerival, his aunt would be more explicit with him. A vain
hope, for when once more he was at the château he found the Marquise
even less communicative than was her wont. Her husband was more than
ever taciturn, and a gloom seemed to have descended upon the house.
For the first time he noticed a change in the attitude of Annaik. Her
great, scornful, wild-bird eyes looked at him often strangely. She
sought him, and then was silent. If he did not speak, she became
morose; if he spoke, she relapsed into her old scornful quiescence.
Sometimes, when they were alone, she unbent, and was his beautiful
cousin and comrade again; but in the presence of Ynys she bewildered
him by her sudden ennui or bitterness or even shadowy hostility. As for
Ynys, she was unhappy, save in Alan's love--a love that neither her
father nor mother knew, and of which she never spoke to Annaik.
If Alan were a dreamer, Ynys was even more so. Then, too, she had what
Annaik had not, though she lacked what her sister had. For she was
mystical as that young saint of the Bretons who saw Christ walking by
night upon the hills, and believed that he met there a new Endymion,
his Bride of the Church come to him in the moonshine. Ynys believed in
St. Guennik, as she believed in Jeanne d'Arc, and no legend fascinated
her more than that strange one she had heard from Yann, of how Arthur
the Celtic hero would come again out of Flath-innis, and redeem his
lost, receding peoples. But, unlike Annaik, she had little of the
barbaric passion, little of that insatiate nostalgia for the life
of the open moor and the windy sea, though these she loved not less
whole-heartedly than did her sister. The two both loved Nature as
few women love her; but to Annaik the forest and the moorland were
home, while to Ynys they were rather sanctuaries or realms of natural
romance. This change to an unwelcome taciturnity had been noted by Alan
on his home visit at Christmas. Still, he had thought little of it
after his return to Paris, for the Noël-tide had been sweetened by the
word given to him by Ynys.
* * * * *
Then Easter had come, and with it the two letters of such import. That
from the Marquise was short and in the tongue he and she loved best:
but even thus it was written guardedly. The purport was that, now his
twenty-fifth birthday was at hand, he would soon learn what he had so
long wished to know.
That from Ynys puzzled him. Why should dispeace have arisen between
Ynys and Annaik? Why should an already gloomy house have been made
still more sombre?
One day, Ynys wrote, she had come upon Annaik riding Sultan, the black
stallion, and thrashing the horse till the foam flew from the champed
bit. When she had cried to Annaik to be merciful, and asked her why she
punished Sultan so, her sister had cried mockingly, "It is my love!
_Addio, Amore! Addio! Addio! Addio!_"--and at each _addio_ had brought
her whip so fiercely upon the stallion's quivering flanks that he had
reared, and all but thrown her, till she swung him round as on a pivot
and went at a wild gallop down a long beech-alley that led into the
heart of the forest.
Well, these things would be better understood soon. In another week
he would be out of Paris, possibly never to return. And then ...
Brittany--Kerival--Ynys!
Nevertheless his heart was not wholly away from his work. The great
astronomer had known and loved Hersart de Kerival, the younger brother
of Tristran, and it was for his sake that he had taken the young man
into his observatory. Soon he had discovered that the youth loved the
beautiful science, and was apt, eager, and yet patient to learn. In
the five years which Alan spent--with brief Brittany intervals--in
the observatory of the Tour de l'Ile, he had come to delight in the
profession which he had chosen, and of which the Marquise had approved.
He was none the less close and eager a student because that he brought
to this enthralling science that spirit of the poetry of the past,
which was the habitual atmosphere wherein his mind dwelt. Even the
most eloquent dissertations of Daniel Darc failed to move him so much
as some ancient strain wherein the stars of heaven were hailed as
kindred of men; and never had any exposition of the lunar mystery so
exquisitely troubled him as that wonderful cry of Ossian which opens
the poem of "Darthula":
"Daughter of heaven, fair art thou! the silence of thy face is
pleasant. Thou comest forth in loveliness; the stars attend thy
blue steps in the east. The clouds rejoice in thy presence, O moon,
and brighten their dark-brown sides. Who is like thee in heaven,
daughter of the night? The stars are ashamed in thy presence, and turn
aside their green sparkling eyes. Whither dost thou retire from thy
course, when the darkness of thy countenance grows? Hast thou thy hall
like Ossian? Dwellest thou in the shadow of grief? Have thy sisters
fallen from heaven? Are they who rejoiced with thee, at night, no
more?--Yes!--They have fallen, fair light! and thou dost often retire
to mourn. But thou thyself shalt fail, one night; and leave thy blue
path in heaven. The stars will then lift their green heads; they, who
were ashamed in thy presence, will rejoice."