ia GREEN FIRE TRomance BY FIONA MACLEOD 1 While still 1 may, I -write for you The love I lived, the dream I knew ' NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 1896 Copyright, 1896, by HARPER & BROTHERS. All righti reserved. TO ESCLARMOUNDO ' Nee sine te nee tecum vivere possum," OVID 2060B37 "There are those of us -who -would rather be -with Catltal of the Woods, and be drunken tuith green fire, than gain t/ie paradise of the holy Molios -who banned him, if in that gain ivere to be heard no more the earth-sioeet ancient song of the blood that is in the reins of youth. . . . "O green fire of life, ptt/.te of the world ! O Love, O Youth, O Dream of Dreams I "THE ANNIR CHOILLE." CONTENTS BOOK FIRST THE BIRDS OF ANGUS OGUE CHAP. PAGE j. EUCHARIS 3 II. THE HOUSE OF KERIVAL 22 III. STORM 37 IV. THE DREAM AND THE DREAMERS .... 53 V. THE WALKER IN THE NIGHT 69 VI. VIA OSCURA 99 VII. " DEIREADH GACH COGAIDH, SITH " (THE END OF ALL WARFARE, PEACE) . . . 114 VIII. THE UNFOLDING OF THE SCROLL .... 12$ BOOK SECOND THE HERDSMAN IX. RETROSPECTIVE : FROM THE HEBRID ISLES . 149 X. AT THE EDGE OF THE SHADOW 175 XI. MYSTERY 195 XII. IN THE GREEN ARCADES 2O8 XIII. THE MESSAGE 224 XIV. THE LAUGHTER OF THE KING 239 BOOK THIRD XV. THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD 259 GREEN FIRE BOOK FIRST THE BIRDS OF ANGUS OGUE Hither and thither, And to and fro, They thrid the Maze Of Weal and Woe : O winds that blow For golden weather Blow me the birds, All white as snow On the hillside heather Blow me the birds That Angus know : Blow me the birds, Be it Weal or Woe ! CHAPTER I EUCHARIS Then, in the violet forest, all a-bourgeon, Eucharis said to me: "It is Spring." ARTHUR RIMBAUD. AFTER the dim purple bloom of a suspended spring, a green rhythm ran from larch to thorn, from lime to sycamore; spread from meadow to meadow, from copse to copse, from hedgerow to hedgerow. The black- thorn had already snowed upon the nettle- garths. In the obvious nests among the bare boughs of ash and beech the eggs of the blackbird were blue-green as the sky that March had bequeathed to April. For days past, when the breath of the equinox had surged out of the west, the missel-thrushes had bugled from the wind-swayed topmost branches of the tallest elms. Everywhere the green rhythm ran. 4 Green Fire In every leaf that had uncurled there was a delicate bloom, that which is upon all things in the first hours of life. The spires of the grass were washed in a green, dewy light. Out of the brown earth a myriad living things thrust tiny green shafts, arrow-heads, bulbs, spheres, clusters. Along the pregnant soil keener ears than ours would have heard the stir of new life, the innumerous whisper of the bursting seed; and, in the wind itself, shepherding the shadow-chased sunbeams, the voice of that vernal gladness which has been man's clarion since Time began. Day by day the wind-wings lifted a more multitudinous whisper from the woodlands. The deep hyperborean note, from the invisi- ble ocean of air, was still audible: within the concourse of bare boughs which lifted against it, that surging voice could not but have an echo of its wintry roar. In the sun-havens, however, along the southerly copses, in daisied garths of orchard-trees, amid the flowering currant and guelder and lilac bushes in quiet places where the hives were all a-murmur, the wind already sang its lilt of Eucharis 5 spring. From dawn till noon, from an hour before sundown till the breaking foam along the wild cherry flushed fugitively because of the crimson glow out of the west, there was a ceaseless chittering of birds. The star- lings and the sparrows enjoyed the commune of the homestead; the larks and fieldfares and green and yellow linnets congregated in the meadows, where, too, the wild bee al- ready roved. Among the brown ridgy fal- lows there was a constant flutter of black, white-gleaming, and silver-gray wings, where the stalking rooks, the jerking pewets, and the wary, uncertain gulls from the neighboring sea, feasted tirelessly from the teeming earth. Often, too, the wind-hover, that harbinger of the season of the young broods, quivered his curved wings in his arrested flight, while his lance-like gaze penetrated the whins, beneath which a new-born rabbit crawled, or discerned in the tangle of a grassy tuft the brown, watchful eyes of a nesting quail. In the remoter woodlands the three forest- ers of April could be heard: the woodpecker tapping on the gnarled boles of the oaks; 6 Green Fire the wild-dove calling in low, crooning mono- tones to his silent mate; the cuckoo tolling his infrequent peals from skyey belfries built of sun and mist. In the fields, where the thorns were green as rivulets of melted snow and the grass had the bloom of emerald, and the leaves of docken, clover, cinquefoil, sorrel, and a thou- sand plants and flowers, were wave-green, the ewes lay, idly watching with their luminous amber eyes the frisking and leaping of the close-curled, tuft-tailed, woolly-legged lambs. In corners of the hedgerows, and in hollows in the rolling meadows, the primrose, the cel- andine, the buttercup, the dandelion, and the daffodil spilled little eddies of the sun-flood which overbrimmed them with light. All day long the rapture of the larks filled the blue air with vanishing spirals of music, swift and passionate in the ascent, repetitive and less piercing in the narrowing downward gyres. From every whin the poignant, monotonous note of the yellow-hammer reechoed. Each pastoral hedge was alive with robins, chaf- finches, and the dusky shadows of the wild- Euchan's 7 mice darting here and there among the green- ing boughs. Whenever this green fire is come upon the earth, the swift contagion spreads to the human heart. What the seedlings feel in the brown mould, what the sap feels in the trees, what the blood feels in every creature from the newt in tne pool to the nesting bird so feels the strange, remembering ichor that runs its red tides through human hearts and brains. Spring has its subtler magic for us, because of the dim mysteries of unremember- ing remembrance and of the vague radiances of hope. Something in us sings an ascendant song, and we expect, we know not what; something in us sings a decrescent song, and we realize vaguely the stirring of immemorial memories. There is none who will admit that spring is fairer elsewhere than in his own land. But there are regions where the season is so hauntingly beautiful that it would seem as though Angus Ogue knew them for his chosen resting-places in his green journey. 8 Green Fire Angus Og, Angus MacGreine, Angus the Ever Youthful, the Son of the Sun, a fair god he indeed, golden-haired and wonder- ful as Apollo Chrusokomes. Some say that he is Love; some, that he is Spring; some, even, that in him, Thanatos, the Hellenic Celt that was his far-off kin, is reincarnate. But why seek riddles in flowing water? It may well be that Angus Ogue is Love, and Spring, and Death. The elemental gods are ever triune; and in the human heart, in whose lost Eden an ancient tree of knowledge grows wherefrom the mind has not yet gathered more than a few windfalls, it is surely sooth that Death and Love are oftentimes one and the same, and that they love to come to us in the apparel of Spring. Sure, indeed, Angus Ogue is a name above all sweet to lovers, for is he not the god the fair youth of the Tuatha-de-Danann, the Ancient People, with us still, though for ages seen of us no more from the meeting of whose lips are born white birds, which fly abroad and nest in lovers' hearts till the Eucharis 9 moment come when, on the yearning lips of love, their invisible wings shall become kisses again? Then, too, there is the old legend that Angus goes to and fro upon the world, a weaver of rainbows. He follows the spring, or is its herald. Often his rainbows are seen in the heavens; often in the rapt gaze of love. We have all perceived them in the eyes of children, and some of us have discerned them in the hearts of sorrowful women and in the dim brains of the old. Ah! for sure, if Angus Og be the lovely Weaver of Hope he is deathless comrade of the spring, and we may well pray to him to let his green fire move in our veins, whether he be but the Eternal Youth of the World, or be also Love, whose soul is youth, or even though he be likewise Death himself, Death to whom Love was wedded long, long ago. But nowhere was spring more lovely, no- where was the green fire of life so quick with impulsive ardors, as, one year of the years, in io Green Fire a seaward region to the north of the ancient forest of Broceliande, in what of old was Arraorica and now is Brittany. Here spring often comes late, but ever lingers long. Here, too, in the dim green avenues of the oak-woods of Kerival, the nightingales reach their uttermost western flight. Never has the shepherd, tending his scant flock on the upland pastures of Finistere, nor the fisherman lying a-dream amid the sandy thickets of Ushant, heard that quaint music that primeval and ever young song of the passionate heart which Augustine might well have had in mind when he exclaimed "Sero te amavi, Pulchritudo, tarn antiqua et tarn nova, sero te amavi." But, each April, in the woods of Kerival, the nightingales congregate from afar, and through May their songs make the forest like a sanctuary filled with choristers swinging incense of a delicate music. It is a wonderful region, that which lies betwixt Ploumaliou on the east and Kerloek on the west; the oldest, remotest part of an Eucharis n ancient, remote land. Here the few hamlets and fewer scattered villages are, even in ex- ternals, the same as they were a hundred or three hundred years ago. In essentials, there is no difference since St. Henre* or St. Ronan preached the new faith, or indeed since Ahes the Pale rode through the forest aisles in the moonlight and heard the Nains chanting, or since King Gradlon raced his horse against the foam when his daughter let the sea in upon the fair city of Ys. The good curts preach the religion of Christ and of Mary to the peasants; but in the minds of most of these there lingers much of the bygone faith that reared the menhirs. Few indeed there are in whose ears is never an echo of the old haunted world, when every wood and stream, every barren moor and granite wilderness, every sea-pasture and creek and bay had its particular presence, its spirit of good or ill, its menace, its perilous enchantment. The eyes of the peasants by these shores, these moors, these windy hill-slopes of the south, are not fixed only on the meal-chest and the fallow-field, or, on fete-days, upon the cruci- iz Green Fire fix in the little church; but often dwell upon a past time, more sacred now than ever in this bitter relinquishing age. On the lips of many may be heard lines from that sad folk-song, "Ann Amzer Dremenet " (In the Long Ago) : Eur c'havel kaer karn olifant, War-n-han tachou aour hag arc" hant. Daelou a ver, daelou c'houero : Neb a zo enn han zo maro ! Zo maro, zo maro pell-zo, Hag hi luskel, o kana 'to, Hag hi luskel, luskel ato, Kollet ar skiand-vad gant-ho. Ar skiand-vad ho deuz kollet ; Kollet ho deuz joaiou ar bed. [But when they had made the cradle Of ivory and of gold, Their hearts were heavy still With the sorrow of old. And ever as they rocked, the tears Ran down, sad tears : Who is it lieth dead therein, Dead all these weary years ? Eucharis 13 And still they rock that cradle there Of ivory and gold ; For in their brains the shadow is The Shadow of Old. They weep, and know not what they weep ; They wait a vain rebirth : Vanity of vanities, alas! For there is but one birth On the wide, green earth.] Old sayings they have, too- who knows how old? The charcoal-burner in the woods above Kerloek will still shudder at the thought of death on the bleak, open moor, because of the carrion-crow that awaits his sightless eyes, the fox that will tear his heart out, and the toad that will swallow his soul. Long, long ago Gwenc'hlan the Bard sang thus of his foe and the foes of his people, when every battle field was a pasture for the birds and beasts of prey, and when the Spirit of Evil lurked near every corpse in the guise of a toad. And still the shrimper, in the sands beyond Ploumaliou, will cry out against the predatory sea fowl A gas ar Gall a gas ar Gall! (Chase the Franks!) 14 Green Fire and not know that, ages ago, this cry went up from the greatest of Breton kings, when Nomenoe drove the Frankish invaders beyond the Oust and the Vilaine, and lighted their flight by the flames of Nantes and Rennes. Near the northern frontier of the remotest part of this ancient region, the Manor of Kerival was the light-house of its forest vici- nage. It was and is surrounded by woods, for the most part of oak and chestnut and beech. Therein are trees of an age so great that they may have sheltered the flight of Jud Mael, when Ahes chased him on her white stallion from glade to glade, and one so venerably old that its roots may have been soaked in the blood of their child Judik, whom she forced her betrayer to slay with the sword before she thrust a dagger into his heart. Northward of the manor, however, the forest is wholly of melancholy spruce, of larch and pine. The pines extend in a desolate disarray to the interminable dunes, beyond which the Breton sea lifts its gray wave against a gray hori- zon. On that shore there are few rocks, though here and there fang-like reefs rise, Eucharis 15 ready to tear and devour any boat hurled upon them at full tide in days of storm. At Kerival Haven, too, there is a wilderness of granite rock; a mass of pinnacles, buttresses, and inchoate confusion, ending in long, smooth ledges of black basalt, these forever washed by the green flow of the tides. None of the peasants knew the age of the House of Kerival, or how long the Kerival family had been there. Old Yann He*nan, the blind brother of the white-haired cur