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Updated: July 18, 2025
"It is because we have no words to describe that. But have I made you feel it at all? Oh! Mrs. MacNairn, have I been able to make you know that it was not a dream?" She lifted my hand and pressed it passionately against her cheek, and her cheek, too, was wet wet. "No, it was not a dream," she said. "You came back.
I knew because I had read old books and manuscripts and had heard the stories which had come down through centuries by word of mouth, passed from father to son. But there was one man who did not write as if he believed the world had begun and would end with him. He knew he was only one, and part of all the rest. The name I shall give him is Hector MacNairn.
When I went up-stairs after tea, Jean was in my room laying things out on the bed. "The man you like so much is to dine here to-night, Ysobel," she said. "Mr. Hector MacNairn." I believe I even put my hand suddenly to my heart as I stood and looked at her, I was so startled and so glad. "You must tell him how much you love his books," she said. She had a quiet, motherly way.
I took something from it without knowing what it was. Lord Armour began to talk kindly. He was saying beautiful, admiring things of Mr. MacNairn and his work. I listened gratefully, and said a few words myself now and then. I was only too glad to be told of the great people and the small ones who were moved and uplifted by his thoughts.
There seemed to be no such thing as shyness in the world. I was not shy with Mr. MacNairn, either. After I had sat under the big apple-tree boughs in the walled garden a few times I realized that I had begun to belong to somebody.
But in the midst of the trills of laughter surrounding him his eyes were unchangingly sad. His face laughed or smiled, but his eyes never. "He is the greatest artist in England and the most brilliant man," Mrs. MacNairn said to me, quietly. "But he is the saddest, too. He had a lovely daughter who was killed instantly, in his presence, by a fall.
MacNairn smilingly gave me one of her light, thrilling touches on my arm. "Ah! I remember," she said. "Hector told me about the White People. He rather fancied I might be one." I am afraid I rather stared at her as I slowly shook my head. You see she was almost one, but not quite. "I was so busy with my roses that I did not notice who was standing near Mr. Le Breton," she said.
"It has taken man eons of time," Hector MacNairn said, thinking it out as he spoke "eons of time to reach the point where he is beginning to know that in every stock and stone in his path may lie hidden some power he has not yet dreamed of.
The mere fact that both her long, ivory hands enfolded mine thrilled me. I wondered if it were possible that she could be unaware of her loveliness. Beautiful people are thrilling to me, and Mrs. MacNairn has always seemed more so than any one else. This is what her son once said of her: "She is not merely beautiful; she is Beauty Beauty's very spirit moving about among us mortals; pure Beauty."
The damp, sweet scent of fern and heather was in our nostrils; as we climbed we breathed its freshness. "There is a sort of unearthly loveliness in it all," Hector MacNairn said to me. His voice was rather like his mother's. It always seemed to say so much more than his words. "We might be ghosts," I answered. "We might be some of those the mist hides because they like to be hidden."
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