Part 8 (1/2)
So Fiona filled her pocket with bread and cheese, and started; and the Student, after a useless attempt to settle down to his inscriptions, set up a little three-inch telescope with which he sometimes entertained Fiona on fine nights, gazing at Jupiter's moons or Saturn's rings, and followed her across the moor as far as he could.
It was the only way he could go with her.
There are many worse things in the world than setting out to climb Heleval on a beautiful morning on the first of October, when the gra.s.s in unsunned corners is still pearly with the frost of the night, and the whole earth is touched with the wonderful caress of the cool autumn suns.h.i.+ne. Fiona's way lay along the sh.o.r.e road, past the bank of heather and fern which in August had been gay with flowers, napperd and potentilla, blue milkwort and starry eye-bright, and alive with b.u.t.terflies, blues and small heaths and pearl-bordered fritillaries; but the flowers were faded now, and in their place, in the little burn where the hazelnuts grew, was a tapestry of purple burrs and scarlet hips. The sh.o.r.e road ended at a little burn; here an old stone bridge, grown over with gra.s.s, crossed the pool which in times of spate would hold a fat, white sea-trout, and here Fiona and the Urchin had used to come in summer to gather globe flowers. From this point a sheep track led up the valley beside the burn, through great s.p.a.ces of yellowing bracken, by little swampy springs where late forget-me-nots still lingered and an early snipe might rise with a skeep, and across low-lying wastes of bog-myrtle, perfuming all the air with its dying leaves; then the ground began to rise, and fern and bog-myrtle gave place to short, hard gra.s.s tufted with bulrushes, and beds of matted unburnt heather, seamed with rabbit tracks.
After a time Fiona left the valley and began to climb the hillside, rising steeply through heather and red gra.s.s and heather again, most of it dying by now, but with patches still in full flower, worked by the wild bees and making the moorland smell like a honey-pot. Then more gra.s.s, and limestone ridges, and she stood on the crest of the moor, which billowed away on her right, wave after wave, till it ran down to the low ground and the sea, and rose up on her left till it ended in the great ma.s.s of Heleval, standing up into the cloudless sky. The ground before her was scarred with deep peat-hags, their gray banks touched with the tiny scarlet blossoms of the trumpet-moss, while from their crumbling sides projected bits of the whitened trunks of trees long since dead, last vestiges of the forests that had clothed the island ere ever the Gael first fought his way in. Walking became impossible, and she jumped from gray bank to gray bank, occasionally floundering across a little lake of soft peat, where the wild cotton gra.s.s still bloomed, and the mountain hares had left telltale tracks. Now and again a hare itself would scurry away before her up one of the peat ditches, rising to the moor level as soon as he thought he was out of gunshot and sitting up on his haunches to watch; now and again an old grouse, his head and hackles red as a berry in the sunlight, would rise, crow, and swing away over the brow of the moor. And presently from behind Heleval came drifting a gray bird with a long bill who on hovering wings wheeled three times in the air above her and gave his full spring call, the most wonderful sound that the hills ever hear; then he stooped close over her head and with wings spread sickle-wise shot away for the sea. One may see a curlew on the moor in October, but he will not give his spring call; and Fiona felt of good courage, for she knew that the bird had called for her, to tell her she was in the right way.
So she came to the foot of Heleval itself, and started to climb the steep slope of short gra.s.s, slippery as polished board, which led up to the rock pinnacle above; the hillside twinkled with the white scuts of rabbits racing up before her to their holes, as round the side of the mountain came their enemy, perhaps the last kite in the island, glittering in the sun as only a glede can, till the beautiful cowardly creature caught sight of Fiona and swept away across the valley. She pa.s.sed the great cairn where the hill foxes live, and began the last climb to the pinnacle of rock that fronts the flat crest of the mountain. And now something white on the rock, which she had noticed from below without taking account of, began to become insistent. It could not possibly be a patch of snow yet, she thought. Perhaps the shepherd had hung a sheepskin there. But no sheepskin was ever so white.
Then she came up near the pinnacle, and saw. Standing upright against it was a girl, not much older than herself. Her long dark hair blew back over the rock; her white body was half hidden in a trembling veil of white light, which s.h.i.+mmered and played all about her, waving with every breath of the wind. Her face was beautiful and cold, like a frosty moonrise; her eyes shone like the drip of phosph.o.r.escent water under the stars.
”You have come at last,” said the girl. ”Every day for many days I have watched for you.”
”Who are you, you beautiful girl?” asked Fiona.
”I am an Oread,” said the girl. ”I am the spirit of Heleval.”
”I have heard,” said Fiona, ”that long ago people used to believe that everything had a spirit of its own, mountains and rivers and trees. Is it true then?”
”It _was_ true,” said the girl. ”The world was full of my sisters, once. There were the Naiads in the streams, and the Hamadryads in the woods, and we, the Oreads, in the mountains. Men were wiser and simpler in those days. But now my sisters are nearly all gone. When a tree has become so many cubic feet of timber, how can it shelter a Dryad? When a stream is merely so many units of waterpower, how can a Naiad dwell there? Only the barren mountains, if they contain neither gold nor iron, have been left unappraised and unexploited; and a few Oreads still linger here and there. Once in a while a man fancies that he sees one of us; then he must climb and climb till the day he dies, hoping to see her indeed; down in your world people call him mountain mad.”
”How is it then that I have seen you?” asked Fiona.
The Oread touched her bracelet.
”Partly because of this,” she said. ”But chiefly because you are a child, and can still see. What is it you have come to ask me?”
”How to find the Urchin,” said Fiona.
”You know of course where he is?” the girl asked; and Fiona said, ”Yes, he is in Fairyland; but I do not know the way to go.”
”That is easily told,” said the Oread. ”The King of the Woodc.o.c.k will let you in, and any of his people can tell you where to find him. But do you know the danger? If you do arrive, which is very doubtful, the fairies will make you wish a wish; and if your wish be one that does not find favor with them, they will keep you there forever, till you lose your memory and yourself and become even as one of them.”
”I will take the risk,” said Fiona, ”for I must go and try to bring him back.”
”Why do you want to bring him back?” asked the Oread. ”He is much better where he is. Will he thank you for bringing him back? Not a bit. You will have the labor and the danger, and he will take it all for granted. And then he will become a man, and what use is that? He may be a financier, and cheat somebody; or a politician, and slander somebody; or a learned man, and hinder wisdom. He is much better in Fairyland. Why are you going?”
”I can't help it,” said Fiona. ”You can't leave people in the lurch, you know.”
”Of course you can,” said the Oread. ”Be sensible and go home; eat, drink, and be merry.”
”O, don't you understand?” said Fiona. ”Don't you see that there are some things you _can't_ do, whatever anybody says? It's not the reason of the thing; it's only just because I am I, and he is lost. You are so beautiful; haven't you any heart?”
”Neither heart nor soul,” said the Oread. ”So I ought to be perfectly happy. You have a heart and a soul, and you are not. Which of us is the better off?”
”I wouldn't change, anyhow,” said Fiona.
The Oread laughed.