“With the lights down! Oh, please, please, don’t forget that! All the lights down except one,” said Susie Rushworth.
“Yes, with all the lights down except one,” said Margaret. “Betty, will you come and sit here? We will cluster round in a semi-circle. We shall be in shadow, but there must be sufficient light for us to see your face.”
The lights were arranged to produce this effect. There was now only one light in the room, and that streamed over Betty as she sat cross-legged on the floor, her customary attitude when she was thoroughly at home and excited. There was not a scrap of self-consciousness about Betty at these moments. She had been working herself up all day for the time when she might pour out her heart. At home she used to do so for the benefit of Donald and Jean Macfarlane and of her little sisters. But, up to the present, no one at school had heard of Betty’s wild stories. At last, however, an opportunity had come. She forgot all her pain in the exercise of her strong faculty for narrative.
“I see something,” she began. She had rather a thrilling voice—not high, but very clear, and with a sweet ring in it. “I see,” she continued, looking straight before her as she spoke, “a great, great, a very great plain. And it is night, or nearly so—I mean it is dusk; for there is never actual night in my Scotland in the middle of summer. I see the great plain, and a girl sitting in the middle of it, and the heather is beginning to come out. It has been asleep all the winter; but it is coming out now, and the air is full of music. For, of course, you all understand,” she continued—bending forward so that her eyes shone, growing very large, and at the same moment black and bright—“you all know that the great heather-plants are the last homes left in England for the fairies. The fairies live in the heather-bells; and during the winter, when the heather is dead, the poor fairies are cold, being turned out of their homes.”
“Where do they go, then, I wonder?” asked a muffled voice in the darkened circle of listeners.
“Back to the fairies’ palace, of course, underground,” said Betty. “But they like the world best, they’re such sociable little darlings; and when the heather-bells are coming out they all return, and each fairy takes possession of a bell and lives there. She makes it her home. And the brownies—they live under the leaves of the heather, and attend to the fairies, and dance with them at night just over the vast heather commons. Then, by a magical kind of movement, each little fairy sets her own heather-bell ringing, and you can’t by any possibility imagine what the music is like. It is so sweet—oh, it is so sweet that no music one has ever heard, made by man, can compare to it! You can imagine for yourselves what it is like—millions upon millions of bells of heather, and millions upon millions of fairies, and each little bell ringing its own sweet chime, but all in the most perfect harmony. Well, that is what the fairies do.”
“Have you ever seen them?” asked the much-excited voice of Susie Rushworth.
“I see them now,” said Betty. She shut her eyes as she spoke.
“Oh, do tell us what they are like?” asked a girl in the background.
Betty opened her eyes wide. “I couldn’t,” she answered. “No one can describe a fairy. You’ve got to see it to know what it is like.”