The sweet Gaelic words fell from her lips like soft rain in a wood. The room was filled with a low chime of music. Old strange chants or fugitive songs, one after the other, came fragmentarily to her lips; and the plaintive air of them was sometimes her own, sometimes what she had heard others sing, and once or twice old-world melodies, more ancient than the oldest pine-trees, older even than the "fallen stones" in the place on the south slope of Iolair called Teampull-nan-Anait, where a thousand years ago none passed who could tell who Anait was, or where her altar had been or who were her worshippers.
Once the door opened. Sorcha glanced through the flame-lit dusk: a smile on her face, sweet as the dream in her beautiful eyes. The father asleep; Oona crooning before the peats; Nial, quiet hound of Oona, with dark eyes staring up at her from where he lay on the floor: she need not fear to leave, and go out to the roofed hay-room, where Alan's arms yearned for her, where his heart beat for her, where his lips were warm in the dark, where the dear whisper of his voice was the echo of the white song that clapped its hands rejoicing in the sunbower in the hollow of her heart.
IV
But, from that day, the gloom lay more heavily on Torcall Cameron even than of yore. Oona herself could hardly win speech from him. During the week of fine weather that followed the thunderstorm she was rarely at Màm-Gorm. The forest held her with its spell, though often she was on the heights with Murdo when he led the kye to the hill-pastures at sunrise, or with Sorcha at the milking of the cows at sundown.
During the noons, she sought—alone or with Nial—that white merle of which Sorcha had told her once, which had haunted her waking and sleeping dreams ever since. Whoever heard its song would be in fairyland for a thousand years, though the joy of that would be no more than a year and a day of mortal time. Whoever saw it might follow its flight, and for the seer of the white merle there would open wonder after wonder. The green spirits of the trees would come forth, chanting low their murmurous rhyme: the souls of the flowers would steal hand-in-hand, from leaf-covert to leaf-covert, or dance in the golden light of the sunbeams; the singing of the birds, the crooning of the cushats, the hum of the wild-bee and the wood-wasp, the voices of all living things from the low bleat of the fawn to the singing stir of the gnats by the pool or in the hollows—all would become clear as human speech, and would be sweet to hear.
Long, long ago, that white merle had flown out of Eden. Its song has been in the world ever since, though few there are who hear it, knowing it for what it is, and none who has seen the flash of its white wings through the green-gloom of the living wood—the sun-splashed, rain-drenched, mist-girt, storm-beat wood of human life.
But Oona watched for the white shimmer, for the magic song. She looked everywhere save where the white merle nested—in the fair soul of her; listened everywhere save where its secret song was—in the music of her young life in heart and brain. Ah, the sweet song of it!
As for Nial, he crouched for hours at a time, lest by noon or dusk he might hear or see the magic bird. If only he could catch but a glimpse of the white merle, sure he would see his lost soul somewhere among the green spirits who, Oona said, would be seen coming out of the trees which were their bodies. Neither did he know that there was one place where it rested often on a spray in its singing flight, a fugitive Hope; or that notes of its unreachable song pierced the gloom of his bitter pain.
Sorcha alone, only Sorcha, started at times as though she heard it: and in her dreams, and in the dreams of Alan, it sang, a white wonder on a golden bough, in the moonlight.
But for Torcall Cameron in his sorrow there was no white merle. Oona asked him once what its first notes were like.