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.
Angus Og, Angus MacGreine, Angus the Ever Youthful, the Son of the Sun, a fair god he indeed, golden-haired and wonderful 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 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, nowhere was the green fire of life so quick with impulsive ardors, as, one year of the years, in a seaward region to the north of the ancient forest of Broceliande, in what of old was Armorica 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 Finistère, 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, tam antiqua et tam 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 ancient, remote land. Here the few hamlets and fewer scattered villages are, even in externals, the same as they were a hundred or three hundred years ago. In essentials, there is no difference since St. Hervé or St. Ronan preached the new faith, or indeed since Ahès 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 curés 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 fête-days, upon the crucifix 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?
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!) and not know that, ages ago, this cry went up from the greatest of Breton kings, when Nomenoë 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 vicinage. 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 Ahès 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 horizon. On that shore there are few rocks, though here and there fang-like reefs rise, 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 Hénan, the blind brother of the white-haired curé, Père Alain, who was the oldest man in all the countryside, was wont to say that Kerival woods had been green before ever there was a house on the banks of the Seine, and that a Kerival had been lord of the land before ever there was a king of France. All believed this, except Père Alain, and even he dissented