She watched him curiously. What did it mean? she wondered. He was crouching, with his back to her, on the extreme of the ledge overlooking the Kelpie's Pool—that deep caldron which received all that was at last disgorged from the maelstrom of the Linn. His head was bent forward, and sometimes he leaned on his hands, and sometimes swayed backward or sideways.
What startled her more were the strange, wild, barbaric words that Nial was chanting, with thin, hoarse, monotonous wail. What was this rune he chanted? Why did he crouch there, chanting and swaying, swaying and chanting?
Sometimes he ceased for a few moments that crooning, mourning, appealing, inexplicable chant, and appeared to be speaking, and to gesticulate as he spoke.
Fantastic thoughts flashed through the child's brain. Perhaps it was the kelpie who was trying to lure Nial to her arms; or mayhap Nial had seen her, and was putting a rosad upon her. She knew that the people of the Strath, and even Murdo the shepherd—in truth, Alan, too, and perhaps Sorcha, though she would not say it—believed that the elf-man was in league with all the mysterious or dreadful creatures of the shadow, from the harmless "guidfolk" of the hill-hollow to the yellow-clad demon-woman who drove her herd of deer and sang her death-song, and to the dark and terrible kelpie who lurked in the deep pool in that wild place beyond the Linn o' Mairg. Or, again, Nial might be uttering some incantation: or be at his old quest, the seeking of his lost soul.
Surely it must be that, she thought, as soundlessly she approached him.
Within the last minute or two a change had come over him. Every now and then he raised his head, often clasping and unclasping his hands, swaying to and fro the while, and speaking or chanting rapidly, with wild, scarce coherent words. He was as one in an ecstasy. Oona, for the first time, feared him. She stood, only a few yards behind him now, and listened.
"Ochan, ochone, arone! and so fair too, and so fair!
O white you are as the canna that floats in the breeze,
Or as the wool of the young lamb that Murdo found dead in the heather,
Or as the breast of Sorcha, or as Oona, little Oona!