Pharais; and, The Mountain Lovers

by William Sharp

So it was that all that day Torcall Cameron had been as a man in an ill-dream, weary of the long hours, yet dreading the passing of them into the shadow. So, too, it was that, at the last, he went forth with Oona.

At first they wandered into the forest, but here Torcall was never at ease, and so after a time they strolled hand in hand from glade to glade, till the sound of Mairg Water came soothing-cool through the heat.

The peace and utter quietude lay as balm upon the weary man. He grew drowsy at last, as his trouble seemed to lift from him. More than once he would have stopped, and thrown himself on the ground, content to stir no further, but Oona urged him to come on to where the river ran through shelving ledges with a singing sound, and nothing else was to be heard but the whisper of the silver birches and the thin, green reeds.

The crooning of the cushats was in his ears. Sweet it was to have that soft touch of sound after the lamentable cry of the hills, that morning cry now dulled, so that it was there only as a shadow in a darkened room.

He was glad when the breath of the water came upon his face, and he could sit down among the bracken and fragrant gale, and do no more than listen idly to the passage of the water. The whispering water, the scarce audible susurrus of faintly stirred leaves overhead, the singing of the gnats, the low incessant croon of the cushats, these were all the sounds to hear. Not a breath of wind moved in the pinewood, so that it gave not even that vast, slow suspiration which may be heard in forests once or twice between sunrise and sundown even on stillest days. All the birds were still, though few sang even at daybreak in that season of the young brood. Over the reaches of the water the swallows skimmed, hawking silently.

An hour passed. Thinking that he slept, and weary of sitting still so long, Oona rose and slipped away. At first she went to a great yew that towered near the fringe of the forest, to see if the wood-doves she had heard crooning there had fallen asleep, for now they no longer made their croodling moan. Then, having espied them, sitting close with fluffed plumage and drooping wings as they drowsed in the warm shadow, she peered here and there for the nest of a shrew-mouse, for often she had heard thereabouts the patter of the wild-mice in days of drought.

Her quest led her on and on. A sudden splash made her look at the narrow river. A grilse had leaped half out of the clear amber-brown water, and missed the dragonfly which had been poising its arrow-flight close to a wreath of circling foam. The tumult of the linn, a score of yards beyond her, was pleasant in her ears. She forgot the shrew-mice, and thought only of the great salmon that Nial declared slept or lay waiting night and day under a ledge at the bottom of the linn. Yes; she would steal across the rocks, and creep in among the boulders, and lie along the lowest ledge that sloped to the seething hollow, whose black depths, and the deafening noise of whose tumult, had ever an irresistible fascination for her.

She seemed like a water-sprite herself, as she stood on a high rock at a place where the ledges sloped sheer into a crevice, at the bottom of which a snake of brown water writhed through holes and crannies till it leaped out into a back eddy of the river whence it came. She had plucked a branch of rowan-berries, some still green or ruddy brown, but others already kissed into flame by the sun. This she waved slowly to and fro before her, partly to keep the midges away, partly because the rhythm of the running water was flowing through her brain, and so along all the nerves of her body. The sunflood beat full upon her. Her short, ragged, scanty dress glowed like a chestnut-husk in the sunlight; in the hot yellow sunshine the tanned skin of her legs and feet gleamed ivory white. With parted lips and shining eyes she stood intent, transfigured.

Suddenly she started. A look of curiosity, of astonishment, came into her eyes.

What, she wondered, was that unfamiliar object lying in a ferny hollow of the rocks which formed the bridge of Mairg Water, whence the stream fell in a rushing cataract into the Linn? A human figure, clearly; a woman, too. Who could she be? Was she alive or dead? Was it Sorcha? No. Could it be one of the fairy-women of whom she had heard so often: the Cailliach, of whom she had been told so many tales; or that green-clad, yellow-scarfed, mysterious Bandruidh, the sorceress who won the souls out of grown men, and whose glance was fateful as a kelpie's? A kelpie's! Ah, was this indeed not the kelpie of the Linn o' Mairg, lying there in wait for her! or might it be in truth the kelpie, yet only asleep there in the great heat? If so, now was the time to espy it, and perhaps steal or find a hair of its head—which, wound about the third finger of her left hand, would make her a princess among the secret people, and enable her to know what no one in the whole strath, or the greater strath of the world beyond, would know, to see what no one would see.