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:
"_Oona, Oona, mo ghraidh:
Oona, Oona, mo ghraidh:
Mùirnean, Mùirnean, Mùirnean,
Oona, Oona, mo ghraidh!_"
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 fernowl 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.