The Kelpie's Pearls

by Mollie Hunter

  Ten minutes later, Torquil heard the sound of the Land Rover driving off and then the squelching of the Woman's big boots as she came up the muddy path to the back door. She came in and looked at him in silence and Torquil looked at her.

  'I couldn't kill them,' he said at last. 'You cannot kill anything you love. It would be murder.'

  'You disobeyed me because of them,' the Woman said grimly. 'You went to that old woman's house after I warned you to stay away from her. So to the sin of disobedience you have added the sin of pride, thinking you knew better than me what was good for you.'

  'Punish me then!' cried Torquil, 'but don't touch the animals, please! They've done no harm.'

  'That is for me to decide,' the Woman said angrily. 'And as for you, you will not stir out of this house while the storm is on, do you hear? When the weather has cleared I will go up the hill myself and find out what is behind all this business. And if you disobey me this time, you will be thrashed. Do you understand?'

  Torquil nodded miserably. He understood all right but he also knew that he would have to risk that thrashing after what Alasdair had said about blowing up the kelpie's pool. It would break Morag's heart to have such a thing happen and how could he let it without making some attempt to warn her? As for his animals, he thought, he would have to make some plan to rescue them before the Woman could get her hands on them. Perhaps the Naturalist would let him keep them at Kiltarlity.

  Maybe the Woman suspected what he was thinking. Anyhow, she took no chances but all that day while the storm still raged outside she kept him locked in the house and at night she came to his room two or three times to make sure he was still there. The next day was the same but that night, what with having lost her sleep the night before, she slept heavily. Torquil lay and listened to her snoring until he was sure she would not wake up, then quietly he got up and dressed, put back the bolt on his window, opened it and slid out on to the sill.

  The storm caught him up at once like a giant's hands, but he steadied himself against the wall of the house till he had recovered his breath; then with his head down against the rain and the wind he set off up the hill. Morag's house was in darkness of course when he reached there, but he bent down to the keyhole and whistled through it as loud as he could and a few minutes later she came to the door calling, 'Who's there?'

  'It's me, Torquil!' he called through the keyhole and she opened the door.

  Minutes later, Morag had made up the fire in the kitchen and Torquil was drinking hot milk and telling her what the Woman and Alasdair had threatened to do.

  'The Naturalist will let me keep my animals with him,' he finished. 'But what about Alasdair? You'll have to stop him, Mistress Morag.'

  'I know,' said Morag. 'I know. But what can I do? He is a big strong man, and look at me. I am old and weak. What can I do?'

  'Oh, he is wicked, wicked!' cried Torquil. 'He is telling lies about you too, saying that you told him you raised this storm with a spell!'

  'That's no lie,' Morag said, 'I did raise the storm. Do you not remember I told you I had a plan to drive all these people away from my house?'

  The cup went clattering from Torquil's hand. He rose slowly to his feet staring at Morag. 'Was that your plan?' he whispered. 'Witchcraft!'

  Morag looked at his white face and staring eyes and all at once she realized how wrong she had been not to trust him. Without a word she rose and took the key of her grandmother's little old black cupboard off its hook, unlocked the cupboard and took out the book of magic.

  'Sit down, Torquil,' she said, 'and listen to me. I am going to read you from this book that belonged to Elizabeth MacLeod who was my grandmother and a white witch. It is all in the Gaelic or you could read it for yourself.'

  'How do I know you will read truly then?' Torquil whispered.

  'Give me your cross of rowan,' said Morag.

  Torquil drew the little cross of rowan wood from his pocket and laid it on the table between them. Morag put the tips of her fingers on it and said solemnly,

  'I swear by the sacred wood of the tree that bred the tree from which this cross was made that I will read truly what is written in the book of Elizabeth MacLeod.'

  Then she opened the book of magic and read the spell for raising a storm. And at the end of reading the spell she read also,

  And I, Elizabeth MacLeod, being a white witch who has harmed no one with her power, do conjure any who read this book not to cast this spell for destruction and malice, but only for the protection of the weak. And if they do as I command, the storm will pass over and above them and they will receive no harm from it. But whoso casts this spell in malice, my curse shall fall on them and they will be destroyed in the storm that shall arise from the spell.

  Morag closed the book. 'All this have I done, Torquil,' she said. 'Now you shall be the judge if I have acted from malice or for the protection of the weak.' She rose to her feet and went to the front door. 'Come,' she said to Torquil. 'Come with me out into the storm. If you believe that the spell raised the storm then you must believe also that the storm will destroy me who raised it, if I did so from malice.'

  Torquil put the rowan cross back in his pocket and rose to his feet. Morag opened the front door and he followed her as she stepped outside. At once he was caught up and whipped and tossed like a cork in the torrents of rain and wind, and with a cry of terror he thrust his hands blindly out for support. His hands were caught and held in Morag's own. He looked up and saw her standing calm and still in the centre of the storm, her hair not so much as ruffled, her face turned up to the sky so peaceful that she might have been looking up to the blue, windless sky of a summer day.

  Torquil saw all this in the light that streamed from the open doorway, and maybe it was only the light of the lamp there but he could have sworn in that moment that the light came from Morag herself, and it seemed to him that it was the reflection of some great goodness that shone out of her and that no storm or night could darken.

  The feeling moved him to step closer to her, and as soon as he did this he felt the wind stop tearing at him and the rain streamed past him without touching him, and it was as if he stood in a warm lit room with the storm outside its walls and himself safe from all harm.

  Morag looked down at him. 'I used a witch's spell,' she said. 'Am I a witch then, Torquil?'

  'No, Mistress Morag, you are a good woman,' Torquil said, yet even as he spoke he understood the trouble that would fall on her because of the storm and that he could do nothing to save her from it. He clenched her hands in his and at the touch of her thin old fingers between his strong young ones a great sorrow for Morag gripped him. 'I am sorry for you, Mistress Morag,' he said, and though it puzzled her to hear him talk like this he would not tell her why he had said it.

  'Let her have one more day of peace,' he thought to himself, and to Morag he said, 'You are not to worry about me or my animals when the storm is finished. We shall be safe with the Naturalist.'

  'Then there is only Alasdair to worry about,' said Morag, greatly relieved. 'I will ask the kelpie what to do about him. It is his pool after all, and surely he will think of something.'

  This was a thought that had not occurred to Torquil, but as soon as Morag mentioned it he saw right away that it was the only thing to do. But he took his leave of her with a heavy heart all the same, and when he had slipped back into bed that night he lay awake for a long time thinking of her and wondering if the Trapper had got the dynamite to blow up the kelpie's pool.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Land of Heart's Desire

  NOW you cannot just go into a shop and buy dynamite like you would buy a bar of soap or a pound of beef! You must have a licence and permission from the police and so on, but this sort of thing did not bother the Trapper who had not much respect for the law at the best of times. One of his friends was a rough sort of fellow that worked at a gravel quarry quite near Inverness, and to him Alasdair went as soon as he had seen a doctor about his arm.

  A b
it of money changed hands, heads were put together, and a deal of whispering took place. By the next morning the explosives store at the quarry was lighter by a number of sticks of dynamite, Alasdair had them stowed safely away in the bothy where he kept his tools, and then he was free to go into Inverness and idle away his time till the end of the storm.

  In the town he bought a newspaper and read all about the havoc the storm (which was now in its second day) was causing. Trees had been blown down, said the paper, rivers were in flood, and there had even been a landslide that had blocked the railway line to the south and held up a train with a lot of great and important London people aboard. Curiously enough, no one had been hurt by all these things, but Alasdair didn't notice that. He was too busy brooding on the fact that it was the storm which had caused his dam to break before he could get the pearls. His arm was still throbbing badly and this, of course, did not improve his temper one little bit. All morning he brooded, and by the afternoon his spite at Morag had got the better of his common sense.

  'I'll see the old witch gets what she deserves,' he muttered to himself. He put the newspaper in his pocket and went along to the hotel where there were a lot of newspaper men staying.

  'I'll tell you who you can blame for this storm,' he said to one of the reporters. 'I know who caused it. It was Morag MacLeod, the witch-woman. She raised it with a spell to get rid of all you fellows.'

  Well, naturally the reporter just laughed at this for superstitious nonsense, which sent Alasdair off in a rage fit to choke him. Back he went to the bothy where he had hidden the dynamite and began to pack it into his game-bag all ready to take up the hill as soon as the storm stopped. And there he waited for the next thirty-six hours, clutching his wounded arm and brooding over his wrongs till he had nursed his rage into the grandfather and grandmother of all tempers!

  As it happened, however, the very unreasonableness of his display of rage had made the reporter think there might be something in what the Trapper had told him. He thought about it for a while after Alasdair had banged out of the hotel, and the more he thought the more his curiosity grew until he decided to talk it over with someone.

  'But not a Highlander,' he thought—which was perfectly natural, he being a Lowlander himself. 'They're all far too superstitious!'

  He walked into the hotel lounge and who should he see there but the professor of the scientific expedition sitting in a corner with a gloomy expression on his face. This was the sort of person he was looking for! He went over and sat down beside him, and like everybody else in the town was doing they began to talk about the storm. Very soon the reporter was repeating what Alasdair had said to him, but greatly to his surprise the professor didn't laugh at it. Instead, he looked gloomier than ever and said,

  'They are a strange people, the Highlanders. He might well be telling the truth for all we know.'

  'But do you believe this old woman is a witch, sir?' asked the reporter.

  'I can tell you,' said the professor, 'that when I stepped out of my tent yesterday morning I saw a dam all spattered with blood across the burn where no dam had been the night before. And when I spoke to the old woman she warned me that a storm would come within the hour. I don't know what connection the two things had, if any, for I never found out yet who built the dam. But I did see the storm break. It came out of a clear blue sky and it soaked me, but the rain and the wind did not touch the old woman! Maybe you can find a natural explanation for that, but I cannot.'

  And that was that. The reporter had got his story about Morag, and one moreover that was confirmed by no less a person than the scientific professor, and he lost no time in getting it published in the evening edition of his newspaper. By the morning of the third day of the storm the buzz about Morag had risen to a roar, for there was not a newspaper in the land that did not have headlines about the witch of Abriachan.

  People poured into Inverness from all directions by train, bus and car (air traffic having been grounded because of the storm)—and there was not a room in a hotel or boarding-house to be had for love or money. The shops were sold out of Wellington boots and mackintoshes. The Town Council had an emergency meeting to pass a bye-law forbidding the practice of witchcraft within the county of Inverness, and the children of the town invented a new game called, 'Run, witchy, run!'

  All the campers and picnickers and hikers had been driven off the hill by the end of the second day of the storm, and the excitement in the town grew as they told how they had seen Morag going about her work on the croft as unconcerned as if the storm didn't exist.

  'And no more it did for her,' said some of them, 'for we passed close by her and we could see her clothes were dry as a bone and there was not even a drop of rain shining in her hair.'

  'Three days she said it would last,' they reminded one another, and everyone made up their minds that when the storm came to an end after the third day they would go up the hill and have a good look at the witch of Abriachan.

  Now you may say that Morag was an old fool not to have realized the stir her spell would make once people knew about it, but Morag was far from being a fool. The truth was that she had never learned to think like people who live in cities and she just did not realize (as Torquil had done) how different her way of thinking was to theirs. She did not think the idea of using a spell at all strange and because of this she never gave a thought to what people might be thinking or saying about her and the storm, and it certainly did not cross her mind that the spell would make matters worse rather than better for her, in the end.

  The only thing that worried her was Alasdair's threat to blow up the kelpie's pool with dynamite and on the second night of the storm she went down to the pool as soon as Torquil had left her, determined to call the kelpie till he came so that she could warn him of his danger. This was the first time she had used her power over him—the power he had told her was a witch's power—but she excused herself by saying that it was for his own good and he would be grateful to her when he knew.

  She waited by the edge of the pool, calling and calling, and when at last the kelpie came she told him what Alasdair meant to do and how the dynamite would blow the bed of the burn sky-high and destroy his pool.

  'There is only one day left to decide what to do,' she told him. 'Alasdair is certain to be back the day after tomorrow when the storm finishes.'

  The kelpie looked at Morag and noticed that her clothes were quite dry in spite of the rain that was lashing down.

  'This is a strange storm,' he remarked, 'and it is strange you should be so sure it has still a day to run before it comes to an end.'

  'Och, I am getting tired of explaining this,' said Morag. 'I know about the storm because I raised it myself with a spell from my grandmother's book of magic to drive all these people off the hill.'

  'Then you are in greater trouble than I am,' said the kelpie.

  'I am not in any trouble now!' cried Morag. 'The strangers have all left the hill and I am back to my old peaceful ways.'

  'They will come back,' the kelpie told her. 'More and more of them will come back.'

  Morag stared at him, not understanding what he meant, and the kelpie looked back at her with a great sadness in his old face.

  'Mistress Morag,' he said, 'you have had a place in the human world for seventy-three years because you were like them, and so you were one of them. But now you have lost that place in your world because you have done something that will cause you to be called a witch, and they have no place any more for witches in their world. And so you can never again be an ordinary old woman living by her lone and contented in a little house on the hill-side. You will be a sight to see, a joke to laugh at, or a story to tell. And in all the world there will never more be peace or pity for you.'

  And Morag, who was not so stupid that she could not understand the world's way of thinking when it was explained to her, whispered,

  "What am I to do?'

  'Will you trust me?' asked the kelpie.

  'Why should
I not trust you,' she said sadly. 'You are my only friend now.'

  'There is a land,' said the kelpie, 'a land of heart's desire where I could take you and none could follow. It is far away and it has many names, but in the Gaelic it is called Tir-nan-Og and it is the land of eternal youth.'

  'I am not young,' whispered Morag.

  'You will be young there,' the kelpie said. 'All the beautiful women and great heroes of olden times live there, and they are for ever young.'

  Morag wrung her hands in distress. 'I am not brave or beautiful,' she cried.

  'Your heart is good,' said the kelpie. 'A good heart will show a brave and beautiful face in Tir-nan-Og.'

  'But my little house,' Morag wept. 'How could I leave my little house I love so well, where I have lived so long?'

  'Home is in your heart,' said the kelpie. 'Your little house will be there for you in Tir-nan-Og if you carry the memory of it there in your heart.'

  'Give me but one day then to put all in order' Morag pleaded. 'Then I will come with you.'

  'Only one day then,' said the kelpie, 'or it will be too late and nothing I can do will save you from the reckoning.'

  He disappeared into the pool and Morag went slowly back to her house, thinking of all he had said.

  She was up with the dawn the next day and for the last time she milked the cow and collected the eggs from her white hens. For the last time she swept and dusted and polished, cleaned the windows and weeded the garden and fed Torquil's animals. When she had finished that evening she put on her best dress, a clean white cap and apron, and her string of pearls and sat down at the table in the kitchen with pen and ink and a sheet of paper in front of her.

  She dipped the pen in the ink and wrote a letter to Torquil, but she did not address it to him for fear that if it was read by anyone else his name would be linked with hers and bring more unhappiness to him. Instead, she went out to the shed and hid it in the straw of Polar's cage where no one else was likely to look but himself.