The Complete Works of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Frances Hodgson Burnett

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      I did not mean to glance through the flowers again, but I did it involuntarily. And I met the other eyes—the wonderful, interested ones just as I had met them before. It almost seemed as if he had been watching me. It might be, I thought, because he only vaguely remembered seeing me before and was trying to recall where we had met.

      When my guardian brought his men guests to the drawing-room after dinner, I was looking over some old prints at a quiet, small table. There were a few minutes of smiling talk, and then Sir Ian crossed the room toward me, bringing some one with him. It was Hector MacNairn he brought.

      “Mr. MacNairn tells me you traveled together this afternoon without knowing each other,” he said. “He has heard something of Muircarrie and would like to hear more, Ysobel. She lives like a little ghost all alone in her feudal castle, Mr. MacNairn. We can’t persuade her to like London.”

      I think he left us alone together because he realized that we should get on better without a companion.

      Mr. MacNairn sat down near me and began to talk about Muircarrie. There were very few places like it, and he knew about each one of them. He knew the kind of things Angus Macayre knew—the things most people had either never heard of or had only thought of as legends. He talked as he wrote, and I scarcely knew when he led me into talking also. Afterward I realized that he had asked me questions I could not help answering because his eyes were drawing me on with that quiet, deep interest. It seemed as if he saw something in my face which made him curious.

      I think I saw this expression first when we began to speak of our meeting in the railway carriage, and I mentioned the poor little fair child my heart had ached so for.

      “It was such a little thing and it did so want to comfort her! Its white little clinging hands were so pathetic when they stroked and patted her,” I said. “And she did not even look at it.”

      He did not start, but he hesitated in a way which almost produced the effect of a start. Long afterward I remembered it.

      “The child!” he said. “Yes. But I was sitting on the other side. And I was so absorbed in the poor mother that I am afraid I scarcely saw it. Tell me about it.”

      “It was not six years old, poor mite,” I answered. “It was one of those very fair children one sees now and then. It was not like its mother. She was not one of the White People.”

      “The White People?” he repeated quite slowly after me. “You don’t mean that she was not a Caucasian? Perhaps I don’t understand.”

      That made me feel a trifle shy again. Of course he could not know what I meant. How silly of me to take it for granted that he would!

      “I beg pardon. I forgot,” I even stammered a little. “It is only my way of thinking of those fair people one sees, those very fair ones, you know—the ones whose fairness looks almost transparent. There are not many of them, of course; but one can’t help noticing them when they pass in the street or come into a room. You must have noticed them, too. I always call them, to myself, the White People, because they are different from the rest of us. The poor mother wasn’t one, but the child was. Perhaps that was why I looked at it, at first. It was such a lovely little thing; and the whiteness made it look delicate, and I could not help thinking—” I hesitated, because it seemed almost unkind to finish.

      “You thought that if she had just lost one child she ought to take more care of the other,” he ended for me. There was a deep thoughtfulness in his look, as if he were watching me. I wondered why.

      “I wish I had paid more attention to the little creature,” he said, very gently. “Did it cry?”

      “No,” I answered. “It only clung to her and patted her black sleeve and kissed it, as if it wanted to comfort her. I kept expecting it to cry, but it didn’t. It made me cry because it seemed so sure that it could comfort her if she would only remember that it was alive and loved her. I wish, I wish death did not make people feel as if it filled all the world—as if, when it happens, there is no life left anywhere. The child who was alive by her side did not seem a living thing to her. It didn’t matter.”

      I had never said as much to any one before, but his watching eyes made me forget my shy worldlessness.

      “What do you feel about it—death?” he asked.

      The low gentleness of his voice seemed something I had known always.

      “I never saw it,” I answered. “I have never even seen any one dangerously ill. I—It is as if I can’t believe it.”

      “You can’t believe it? That is a wonderful thing,” he said, even more quietly than before.

      “If none of us believed, how wonderful that would be! Beautiful, too.”

      “How that poor mother believed it!” I said, remembering her swollen, distorted, sobbing face. “She believed nothing else; everything else was gone.”

      “I wonder what would have happened if you had spoken to her about the child?” he said, slowly, as if he were trying to imagine it.

      “I’m a very shy person. I should never have courage to speak to a stranger,” I answered.

      “I’m afraid I’m a coward, too. She might have thought me interfering.”

      “She might not have understood,” he murmured.

      “It was clinging to her dress when she walked away down the platform,” I went on. “I dare say you noticed it then?”

      “Not as you did. I wish I had noticed it more,” was his answer. “Poor little White One!”

      That led us into our talk about the White People. He said he did not think he was exactly an observant person in some respects. Remembering his books, which seemed to me the work of a man who saw and understood everything in the world, I could not comprehend his thinking that, and I told him so. But he replied that what I had said about my White People made him feel that he must be abstracted sometimes and miss things. He did not remember having noticed the rare fairness I had seen. He smiled as he said it, because, of course, it was only a little thing—that he had not seen that some people were so much fairer than others.

      “But it has not been a little thing to you, evidently. That is why I am even rather curious about it,” he explained. “It is a difference definite enough to make you speak almost as if they were of a different race from ours.”

      I sat silent a few seconds, thinking it over. Suddenly I realized what I had never realized before.

      “Do you know,” I said, as slowly as he himself had spoken, “I did not know that was true until you put it into words. I am so used to thinking of them as different, somehow, that I suppose I do feel as if they were almost like another race, in a way. Perhaps one would feel like that with a native Indian, or a Japanese.”

      “I dare say that is a good simile,” he reflected. “Are they different when you know them well?”

      “I have never known one but Wee Brown Elspeth,” I answered, thinking it over.

      He did start then, in the strangest way.

      “What!” he exclaimed. “What did you say?”

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