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Title: Tragic Romances - Re-issue of the Shorter Stories of Fiona Macleod; - Rearranged, with Additional Tales
Author: Sharp, William
Language: English
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TRAGIC ROMANCES
[Illustration]
RE-ISSUE OF THE SHORTER
STORIES OF FIONA MACLEOD
REARRANGED, WITH
ADDITIONAL
TALES
COPYRIGHTED IN THE UNITED
STATES: ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
By the Same Author.
PHARAIS: A Romance of the Isles.
(FRANK MURRAY, Derby.)
(STONE & KIMBALL, New York.)
THE MOUNTAIN LOVERS: A Romance.
(JOHN LANE, London.)
(ROBERTS BROS., Boston.)
THE SIN-EATER: and other Tales.
(PATRICK GEDDES & COLLEAGUES, Edinburgh.)
(STONE & KIMBALL, New York.)
THE WASHER OF THE FORD: and other Legendary Moralities.
(PATRICK GEDDES & COLLEAGUES, Edinburgh.)
(STONE & KIMBALL, New York.)
GREEN FIRE: A Romance.
(ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO., London.)
(HARPERS, New York.)
FROM THE HILLS OF DREAM: Mountain Songs and Island Runes.
(PATRICK GEDDES & COLLEAGUES, Edinburgh.)
VOLUME
THREE
TRAGIC
ROMANCES
BY
Fiona Macleod
PATRICK GEDDES & COLLEAGUES
THE OUTLOOK TOWER·CASTLE HILL·EDINBURGH
TRAGIC ROMANCES
“It is Destiny, then, that is the Protagonist in the Celtic Drama … And
it is Destiny, that sombre Demogorgon of the Gael, whose boding breath,
whose menace, whose shadow glooms so much of the remote life I know, and
hence glooms also this book of interpretations: for pages of life must
either be interpretative or merely documentary, and these following pages
have for the most part been written as by one who repeats, with curious
insistence, a haunting, familiar, yet ever wild and remote air, whose
obscure meanings he would fain reiterate, interpret.”
(From the PROLOGUE to _The Sin-Eater_.)
CONTENTS
PAGE
MORAG OF THE GLEN 11
THE DÀN-NAN-RÒN 61
THE SIN-EATER 113
THE NINTH WAVE 167
THE JUDGMENT O’ GOD 185
GREEN BRANCHES 201
THE ARCHER 231
_NOTE_
In this volume all the tales, except the first and last, are re-issued
from _The Sin-Eater_. “Morag of the Glen” is reprinted from the November
issue of _The Savoy_; “The Archer” has not hitherto appeared in print. As
the other tales have not been reset, they are, except in the matter of
pagination and arrangement, necessarily unaltered.
_MORAG OF THE GLEN_
MORAG OF THE GLEN
I
It was a black hour for Archibald Campbell of Gorromalt in Strathglas,
and for his wife and for Morag their second daughter, when the word came
that Muireall had the sorrow of sorrows. What is pain, and is death a
thing to fear? But there is a sorrow that no man can have and yet go
free for evermore of a shadow upon his brow: and there is a sorrow that
no woman can have and keep the moonshine in her eyes. And when a woman
has this sorrow, it saves or mars her: though, for sure, none of us may
discern just what that saving may be, or from whom or what, or what may
be that bitter or sweet ruin. We are shaped as clay in the potter’s hand:
ancient wisdom, that we seldom learn till the hand is mercifully still,
and the vessel, finished for good or evil, is broken.
It is a true saying that memory is like the sea-weed when the tide is
in--but the tide ebbs. Each frond, each thick spray, each fillicaun
or pulpy globe, lives lightly in the wave: the green water is full of
strange rumour, of sea-magic and sea-music: the hither flow and thither
surge give continuity and connection to what is fluid and dissolute.
But when the ebb is far gone, and the wrack and the weed lie sickly in
the light, there is only one confused intertangled mass. For most of
us, memory is this tide-left strand: though for each there are pools,
or shallows which even the ebb does not lick up in its thirsty way
depthward,--narrow overshadowed channels to which we have the intangible
clues. But for me there will never be any ebb-tide of memory, of one
black hour, and one black day.
A wild lone place it was where we lived: among the wet hills, in a
country capped by slate-black mountains. To the stranger the whole
scene must have appeared grimly desolate. We, dwellers there, and those
of our clan, and the hill folk about and beyond, knew that there were
three fertile straths hidden among the wilderness of rock and bracken:
Strathmòr, Strathgorm, and Strathglas. It was in the last we lived. All
Strathglas was farmed by Archibald Campbell, and he had Strathgorm to
where the Gorromalt Water cuts it off from the head of Glen Annet. The
house we lived in was a long two-storeyed whitewashed building with
projecting flanks. There was no garden, but only a tangled potato-acre,
and a large unkempt space where the kail and the bracken flourished
side by side, with the kail perishing day by day under the spreading
strangling roots of the usurper. The rain in Strathglas fell when most
other spots were fair. It was because of the lie of the land, I have
heard. The grey or black cloud would slip over Ben-Bhreac or Melbèinn,
and would become blue-black while one was wondering if the wind would
lift it on to Maol-Dunn, whose gloomy ridge had two thin lines of
pine-trees which, from Strathglas, stood out like bristling eyebrows.
But, more likely than not, it would lean slowly earthward, then lurch
like a water-logged vessel, and spill, spill, through a rising misty
vapour, a dreary downfall. Oh! the rain--the rain--the rain! how weary
I grew of it, there; and of the melancholy _méh’ing_ of the sheep, that
used to fill the hills with a lamentation, terrible, at times, to endure.
And yet, I know, and that well, too, that I am thinking this vision of
Teenabrae, as the house was called, and of its dismal vicinage, in the
light of tragic memory. For there were seasons when the rains suspended,
or came and went like fugitive moist shadows: days when the sunlight and
the wind made the mountains wonderful, and wrought the wild barren hills
to take on a softness and a dear familiar beauty: hours, even, when, in
the hawthorn-time, the cuckoo called joyously across the pine-girt scaurs
and corries on Melbèinn, or, in summer, the swallows filled the straths
as with the thridding of a myriad shuttles.
Sure enough, I was too young to be there: though, indeed, Morag was no
more than a year older, being twenty; but when my mother died, and my
father went upon the seas upon one of his long whaling voyages, I was
glad to leave my lonely home in the Carse o’ Gowrie and go to Teenabrae
in Strathglas, and to be with my aunt, that was wife to Archibald mac
Alasdair Ruadh--Archibald Campbell, as he would be called in the lowland
way--or Gorromalt as he was named by courtesy, that being the name of his
sheep-farm that ran into the two straths where the Gorromalt Water surged
turbulently through a narrow wilderness of wave-scooped, eddy-hollowed
stones and ledges.
I suppose no place could be called lifeless which had always that sound
of Gorromalt Water, that ceaseless lamentation of the sheep crying among
the hills, that hoarse croaking of the corbies who swam black in the air
betwixt us and Maol-Dunn, that mournful plaining of the lapwings as they
wheeled querulously for ever and ever and ever. But, to a young girl, the
whole of this was an unspeakable weariness.
Beside the servant-folk--not one of whom was to me anything, save a girl
called Maisie, who had had a child and believed it had become a “pee-wit”
since its death, and that all the lapwings were the offspring of the
sorrow of joy--there were only Archibald Campbell, his wife, who was
my aunt, Muireall the elder daughter, and Morag. These were my folk:
but Morag I loved. In appearance she and I differed wholly. My cousin
Muireall and I were like each other; both tall, dark-haired, dark-browed,
with dusky dark eyes, though mine with no flame in them; and my face too,
though not uncomely, without that touch of wildness which made Muireall’s
so strangely attractive, and at times so beautiful. Morag, however,
was scarce over medium height. Her thick wavy hair always retained the
captive gold that the sunshine had spilled there; her soft, white,
delicate, wild-rose face was like none other that I have ever seen: her
eyes, of that heart-lifting blue which spring mornings have, held a
living light that was fair to see, and gave pain too, perhaps, because of
their plaintive hillside wildness. Ah, she was a fawn, Morag!… soft and
sweet, swift and dainty and exquisite as a fawn in the green fern.
Gorromalt himself was a gaunt stern man. He was two inches or more over
six feet, but looked less, because of a stoop. It always seemed to me
as if his eyes pulled him forward: brooding, sombre, obscure eyes, of a
murky gloom. His hair was iron-grey and matted; blacker, but matted and
tangled, his thick beard; and his face was furrowed like Ben Scorain of
the Corries. I never saw him in any other garb than a grey shepherd tweed
with a plaid, though no Campbell in Argyll was prouder than he, and he
allowed no plaid or _tunag_ anywhere on his land or in his house that was
not of the tartan of MacCailin Mòr. He was what, there, they called a
black protestant; for the people in that part held to the ancient faith.
True enough, for sure, all the same: for his pity was black, and the
milk of kindness in him must have been like Gorromalt Water in spate.
Poor Aunt Elspeth! my heart often bled for her. I do not think Archibald
Campbell was unkind to his wife, but he was harsh, and his sex was like
a blank wall to her, against which her shallow waters surged or crawled
alike vainly. There was to her something at once terrible and Biblical
in this wall of cruel strength, this steadfast independence of love
or the soft ways or the faltering speech of love. There are women who
hate men with an unknowing hatred, who lie by their husband night after
night, year after year; who fear and serve him; who tend him in life
and minister to him in death; who die, before or after, with a slaying
thirst, a consuming hunger. Of these unhappy housemates, of desolate
hearts and unfrequented lips, my aunt Elspeth was one.
It was on a dull Sunday afternoon that the dark hour came of which I have
spoken. The rain fell among the hills. There was none on the north side
of Strathglas, where Teenabrae stood solitary. The remembrance is on
me keen just now: how I sat there, on the bench in front of the house,
side by side with Morag, in the hot August damp, with the gnats pinging
overhead, and not a sound else save the loud raucous surge of Gorromalt
Water, thirty yards away. In a chair near us sat my aunt Elspeth. Beyond
her, on a milking-stool, with his chin in his hands, and his elbows on
his knees, was her husband.
There was a gloom upon all of us. The day before, as soon as Gorromalt
had returned from Castle Avale, high up in Strathmòr, we had seen the
black east wind in his eyes. But he had said nothing. We guessed that
his visit to the Englishman at Castle Avale, who had bought the Three
Straths from Sir Ewan Campbell of Drumdoon, had proved fruitless, or at
least unsatisfactory. It was at the porridge on the Sabbath morning that
he told us.
“And … and … must we go, Archibald?” asked his wife, her lips white and
the deep withered creases on her neck ashy grey.
He did not answer, but the tumbler cracked in his grip, and the
splintered glass fell into his plate. The spilt milk trickled off the
table on to the end of his plaid, and so to the floor. Luath, the collie,
slipped forward, with her tongue lolling greedily: but her eye caught
the stare of the silent man, and with a whine, and a sudden sweep of her
tail, she slunk back.
It must have been nigh an hour later, that he spoke.
“No, Elspeth,” he said. “There will be no going away from here, for you
and me, till we go feet foremost.”
Before the afternoon we had heard all: how he had gone to see this
English lord who had “usurped” Drumdoon: how he had not gained an
interview, and had seen no other than Mr Laing, the East Lothian factor.
He had had to accept bitter hard terms. Sir Ewan Campbell was in Madras,
with his regiment, a ruined man: he would never be home again, and, if
he were, would be a stranger in the Three Straths, where he and his
had lived, and where his kindred had been born and had died during six
centuries back. There was no hope. This Lord Greycourt wanted more rent,
and he also wanted Strathgorm for a deer-run.
We were sitting, brooding on these things: in our ears the fierce words
that Gorromalt had said, with bitter curses, upon the selling of the
ancient land and the betrayal of the people.
Morag was in one of her strange moods. I saw her, with her shining eyes,
looking at the birch that overhung the small foaming linn beyond us, just
as though she saw the soul of it, and the soul with strange speech to it.
“Where is Muireall?” she said to me suddenly, in a low voice.
“Muireall?” I repeated, “Muireall? I am not for knowing, Morag. Why do
you ask? Do you want her?”
She did not answer, but went on:
“Have you seen him again?”
“Him?… Whom?”
“Jasper Morgan, this English lord’s son.”
“No.”
A long silence followed. Suddenly Aunt Elspeth started. Pointing to a
figure coming from the peat-moss at the hither end of Strathmòr, she
asked who it was, as she could not see without her spectacles. Her
husband rose, staring eagerly. He gave a grunt of disappointment when he
recognised Mr Allan Stewart, the minister of Strathmòr parish.
As the old man drew near we watched him steadfastly. I have the thought
that each one of us knew he was coming to tell us evil news; though none
guessed why or what, unless Morag mayhap.
When he had shaken hands, and blessed the house and those within it,
Mr Stewart sat down on the bench beside Morag and me. I am thinking he
wanted not to see the eyes of Gorromalt, nor to see the white face of
Aunt Elspeth.
I heard him whisper to my dear that he wanted her to go into the house
for a little. But she would not. The birdeen knew that sorrow was upon us
all. He saw “no” in her eyes, and forbore.
“And what is the thing that is on your lips to tell, Mr Stewart?” said
Gorromalt at last, half-mockingly, half-sullenly.
“And how are you for knowing that I have anything to tell, Gorromalt?”
“Sure, man, if a kite can see the shadow of a mouse a mile away, it can
see a black cloud on a hill near by!”
“It’s a black cloud I bring, Archibald Campbell: alas, even so. Ay, sure,
it is a black cloud it is. God melt the pain of it!”
“Speak, man!”
“There is no good in wading in heather. Gorromalt, and you, Mrs Campbell,
and you, my poor Morag, and you too, my dear, must just be brave. It is
God’s will.”
“Speak, man, and don’t be winding the shroud all the time! Let us be
hearing and seeing the thing you have brought to tell us.”
It was at this moment that Aunt Elspeth half rose, and abruptly reseated
herself, raising the while a deprecatory feeble hand.
“Is it about Muireall?” she asked quaveringly. “She went away, to the
church at Kilbrennan, at sunrise: and the water’s in spate all down
Strathgorm. Has she been drowned? Is it death upon Muireall? Is it
Muireall? Is it Muireall?”
“She is not drowned, Mrs Campbell.”
At that she sat back, the staring dread subsiding from her eyes. But at
the minister’s words, Gorromalt slowly moved his face and body so that he
fronted the speaker. Looking at Morag, I saw her face white as the canna.
Her eyes swam in wet shadow.
“It is not death, Mrs Campbell,” the old man repeated, with a strange,
uneasy, furtive look, as he put his right hand to his stiff white necktie
and flutteringly fingered it.
“In the name o’ God, man, speak out!”
“Ay, ay, Campbell: ay, ay, I am speaking … I am for the telling … but …
but, see you, Gorromalt, be pitiful … be …”
Gorromalt rose. I never realised before how tall he was. There was
height to him, like unto that of a son of Anak.
“Well, well, well, it is just for telling you I’ll be. Sit down,
Gorromalt, sit down, Mr Campbell, sit down, man, sit down!… Ah, sure
now, that is better. Well, well, God save us all from the sin that is in
us: but … ah, mothering heart, it is saving you I would be if I could,
but … but …”
“But _what_!” thundered Gorromalt, with a voice that brought Maisie and
Kirsteen out of the byre, where they were milking the kye.
“He has the mercy: He only! And it is this, poor people: it is this.
Muireall has come to sorrow.”
“What sorrow is the sorrow that is on her?”
“The sorrow of woman.”
A terrible oath leapt from Gorromalt’s lips. His wife sat in a stony
silence, her staring eyes filming like those of a stricken bird. Morag
put her left hand to her heart.
Suddenly Archibald Campbell turned to his daughter.
“Morag, what is the name of that man whom Muireall came to know, when
she and you went to that Sodom, that Gomorrha, which men call London?”
“His name was Jasper Morgan.”
“Has she ever seen him since?”
“I think so.”
“You _think_? What will you be _thinking_ for, girl! _Think!_ There will
be time enough to think while the lichen grows grey on a new-fall’n rock!
Out with it! Out with it! Have they met?… Has he been here?… is _he_ the
man?”
There was silence then. A plover wheeled by, plaining aimlessly. Maisie
the milk-lass ran forward, laughing.
“Ah, ’tis my wee Seorsa,” she cried. “Seorsa! Seorsa! Seorsa!”
Gorromalt took a stride forward, his face shadowy with anger, his eyes
ablaze.
“Get back to the kye, you wanton wench!” he shouted savagely. “Get back,
or it is having my gun I’ll be and shooting that pee-wit of yours, that
lennavan-Seorsa!”
Then, shaking still, he turned to Morag.
“Out with it, girl! What do you know?”
“I know nothing.”
“It is a lie, and it is knowing it I am!”
“It is no lie. I _know_ nothing. I _fear_ much.”
“And what do _you_ know, old man?” And, with that, Archibald Campbell
turned like a baited bull upon Mr Stewart.
“She was misled, Gorromalt, she was misled, poor lass! The trouble began
last May, when she went away to the south, to that evil place. And then
he came after her. And it was here he came … and … and…”
“And who will that man be?”
“Morag has said it: Jasper Morgan.”
“And who will Jasper Morgan be?”
“Are you not for knowing _that_, Archibald Campbell, and you _Gorromalt_?”
“Why, what meaning are you at?” cried the man, bewildered.
“Who will Jasper Morgan be but the son of Stanley Morgan!”
“Stanley Morgan!… Stanley Morgan! I am no wiser. Do you wish to send me
mad, man! Speak out!… out with it!”
“Why, Gorromalt, what is Drumdoon’s name?”
“Drumdoon… Why, Sir Ewan… Ah no, for sure ’tis now that English
bread-taker, that southern land-snatcher, who calls himself Lord
Greycourt. And what then?… will it be for…”
“Aren’t you for knowing his name?… No?… Campbell, man, it is _Morgan_ …
_Morgan_.”
All this time Aunt Elspeth had sat silent. She now gave a low cry. Her
husband turned and looked at her. “Go into the house,” he said harshly;
“this will not be the time for whimpering; no, by God! it is not the time
for whimpering, woman.”
She rose, and walked feebly over to Mr Stewart.
“Tell me all,” she said. Ah, grief to see the pain in her old, old
eyes--and no tears there at all, at all.
“When this man Jasper Morgan, that is son to Lord Greycourt, came here,
it was to track a stricken doe. And now all is over. There is this note
only. It is for Morag.”
Gorromalt leaned forward to take it. But I had seen the wild look in
Morag’s eyes, and I snatched it from Mr Stewart, and gave it to my dear,
who slipped it beneath her kerchief.
Sullenly her father drew up, scowled, but said nothing.
“What else?” he asked, turning to the minister.
“She is dying.”
“Dying!”
“Ay, alas, alas--the mist is on the hill--the mist is on the hill--and
she so young, too, and so fair, ay, and so sweet and----”
“That will do, Allan Stewart! That will do!… It is dying she is, you are
for telling us! Well, well, now, and she the plaything o’ Jasper Morgan,
the son of the man there at Drumdoon, the man who wants to drive me away
from here … this _new_ man … this, this lord … he … to drive _me_ away,
who have the years and years to go upon, ay, for more than six hundred
weary long years----”
“Muireall is dying, Archibald Campbell. Will you be coming to see her,
who is your very own?”
“And for why is she dying?”
“She could not wait.”
“Wait! Wait! She could wait to shame me and mine! No, no, no, Allan
Stewart, you go back to Lord Greycourt’s son and his _leannan_, and say
that neither Gorromalt nor any o’ Gorromalt’s kith or kin will have aught
to do with that wastrel-lass. Let her death be on her! But it’s a soon
easy death it is!… she that slept here this very last night, and away
this morning across the moor like a louping doe, before sunburst and an
hour to that!”
“She is at the ‘Argyll Arms’ in Kilbrennan. She met the man there. An
hour after he had gone, they found her, lying on the deerskin on the
hearth, and she with the death-sickness on her, and grave-white, because
of the poison there beside her. And now, Archibald Campbell, it is not
refusing you will be to come to your own daughter, and she with death
upon her, and at the edge o’ the silence!”
But with that Gorromalt uttered wild, savage words, and thrust the old
man before him, and bade him begone, and cursed Muireall, and the child
she bore within her, and the man who had done this thing, and the father
that had brought him into the world, latest adder of an evil brood!
Scarce, however, was the minister gone, and he muttering sore, and
frowning darkly at that, than Gorromalt reeled and fell.
The blood had risen to his brain, and he had had a stroke. Sure, the
sudden hand of God is a terrifying thing. It was all we could do, with
the help of Maisie and Kirsteen, to lift and drag him to his bed.
But an hour after that, when the danger was over, I went to seek Morag. I
could find her nowhere. Maisie had seen her last. I thought that she had
taken one of the horses from the stable, and ridden towards Kilbrennan:
but there was no sign of this. On the long weary moor-road that led
across Strathglas to Strathgorm, she could not have walked without being
seen by some one at Teenabrae. And everyone there was now going to and
fro, with whispers and a dreadful awe.
So I turned and went down by the linn. From there I could see three
places where Morag loved to lie and dream: and at one of these I hoped to
descry her.
And, sure, so it was. A glimpse I caught of her, across the spray of the
linn. She was far up the brown Gorromalt Water, and crouched under a
rowan-tree.
When I reached her she looked up with a start. Ah, the pain of those
tear-wet May-blue eyes--deep tarns of grief to me they seemed.
In her hand she clasped the letter that I had snatched for her.
“Read it, dear,” she said simply.
It was in pencil, and, strangely, was in the Gaelic: strangely, for
though, when with Mr and Mrs Campbell, Morag and I spoke the language
we all loved, and that was our own, Muireall rarely did. The letter ran
somewhat thus:
“MORAG-À-GHRAIDH,
“When you get this I shall not be your living sister any more, but
only a memory. I take the little one with me. You know my trouble.
Forgive me. I have only one thing to ask. The man has not only
betrayed me, he has lied to me about his love. He loves another
woman. And that woman, Morag, is you: and you know it. He loved
you first. And now, Morag, I will tell you one thing only. Do you
remember the story that old Sheen McIan told us--that about the
twin sisters of the mother of our mother--one that was a Morag too?
“I am thinking you do: and here--where I shall soon be lying dead,
with that silence within me, where such a wild clamouring voice
has been, though inaudible to other ears than mine--_here, I am
thinking you will be remembering, and realising, that story_!
“If, Morag, _if_ you do not remember--but ah, no, we are of the old
race of Siol Dhiarmid, _and you will remember_!
“Tell no one of this, except F.--_at the end_.
“Morag, dear sister, till we meet----
“MUIREALL.”
“I do not understand, Morag-my-heart,” I said. Even now, my hand shook
because of these words: “_and that woman, Morag, is you: and you know
it_.”
“Not now,” she answered, wearily. “I will tell you to-night: but not now.”
And so we went back together; she, too tired and stricken for tears, and
I with so many in my heart that there were none for my hot eyes.
As we passed the byre we heard Kirsteen finishing a milking song, but
we stopped when Maisie suddenly broke in, with her strange, wild,
haunting-sweet voice.
I felt Morag’s fingers tighten in their grasp on my arm as we stood
silent, with averted eyes, listening to an old Gaelic ballad of “Morag of
the Glen.”
When Morag of the Glen was fëy
They took her where the Green Folk stray:
And there they left her, night and day,
A day and night they left her, fëy.
And when they brought her home again,
Aye of the Green Folk was she fain:
They brought her _leannan_, Roy McLean,
She looked at him with proud disdain.
“For I have killed a man,” she said,
“A better man than you to wed:
I slew him when he claspt my head,
And now he sleepeth with the dead.
“And did you see that little wren?
My sister dear it was, flew then!
That skull her home, that eye her den,
Her song is, _Morag o’ the Glen_!
“For when she went I did not go,
But washed my hands in blood-red woe:
O wren, trill out your sweet song’s flow,
_Morag is white as the driven snow_!”
II
That night the wind had a dreadful soughing in its voice--a lamentable
voice that came along the rain-wet face of the hills, with a prolonged
moaning and sobbing.
Down in the big room, that was kitchen and sitting-room in one, where
Gorromalt sat--for he had risen from his bed, for all that he was so weak
and giddy--there was darkness. His wife had pleaded for the oil-lamp,
because the shadows within and the wild wind without--though, I am
thinking, most the shadows within her brain--filled her with dread; but
he would not have it, no, not a candle even. The peats glowed, red-hot;
above them the small narrow pine-logs crackled in a scarlet and yellow
blaze.
Hour after hour went by in silence. There were but the three of us.
Morag? Ah, did Gorromalt think she would stay at Teenabrae, and Muireall
near by, and in the clutch of the death-frost, and she, her sister dear,
not go to her? He had put the ban upon us, soon as the blood was out of
his brain, and he could half rise from his pillow. No one was to go to
see her, no one was to send word to her, no one was to speak of her.
At that, Aunt Elspeth had fallen on her knees beside the bed, and prayed
to him to show pity. The tears rained upon the relentless heavy hand she
held and kissed. “At the least,” she moaned, “at the least, let some one
go to her, Archibald; at least a word, only one word!”
“Not a word, woman, not a word. She has sinned, but that’s the way o’
women o’ that kind. Let her be. The wind’ll blow her soul against God’s
heavy hand, this very night o’ the nights. It’s not for you nor for me.
But I’m saying this, I am: curse her, ay, curse her again and again, for
that she let the son of the stranger, the son of our enemy, who would
drive us out of the home we have, the home of our fathers, ay, back to
the time when no English foot ever trod the heather of Argyll, that she
would let him do her this shame and disgrace, her and me, an’ you too,
ay, and all of our blood, and the Strath too, for that--ay, by God, and
the clan, the whole clan!”
But though Gorromalt’s word was law there, there was one who had the tide
coming in at one ear and going out at the other. As soon as the rainy
gloom deepened into dark, she slipped from the house; I wanted to go with
her, but she whispered to me to stay. It was well I did. I was able to
keep back from him, all night, the story of Morag’s going. He thought
she was in her bed. So bitter on the man was his wrath, that, ill as he
was, he would have risen, and ridden or driven over to Kilbrennan, had he
known Morag was gone there.
Angus Macallum, Gorromalt’s chief man, was with the horses in the stable.
He tried to prevent Morag taking out Gealcas, the mare, she that went
faster and surer than any there. He even put hand upon the lass, and said
a rough word. But she laughed, I am told; and I am thinking that whoever
heard Morag laugh, when she was “strange,” for all that she was so white
and soft, she with her hair o’ sunlight, and the blue, blue eyes o’
her!--whoever heard _that_ would not be for standing in her way.
So Angus had stood back, sullenly giving no help, but no longer daring to
interfere. She mounted Gealcas, and rode away into the dark rainy night
where the wind went louping to and fro among the crags on the braes as
though it were mad with fear or pain, and complaining wild, wild--the
lamentable cry of the hills.
Hour after hour we sat there. We could hear the roaring sound of
Gorromalt Water as it whirled itself over the linn. The stream was in
spate, and would be boiling black, with livid clots of foam flung here
and there on the dripping heather overhanging the torrent. The wind’s
endless sough came into the house, and wailed in the keyholes and the
chinks. Rory, the blind collie, lay on a mat near the door, and the
long hair of his felt was blown upward, and this way and that, by the
ground-draught.
Once or twice Aunt Elspeth rose, and stirred the porridge that seethed
and bubbled in the pot. Her husband took no notice. He was in a daze,
and sat in his flanked leathern arm-chair, with his arms laid along the
sides, and his down-clasping hands catching the red gleam of the peats,
and his face, white and set, like that of a dead man looking out of a
grated prison.
Once or twice, an hour or so before, when she had begun to croon some
hymn, he had harshly checked her. But now when she hummed, and at last
openly sang the Gaelic version of “The Lord’s my Shepherd,” he paid no
heed. He was not hearing that, or anything she did. I could make nothing
of the cold bitterness that was on his face. He brooded, I doubt not,
upon doom for the man, and the son of the man, who had wrought him this
evil.
His wife saw this, and so had her will at last. She took down the great
Gaelic Bible, and read Christ’s words about little children. The rain
slashed against the window-panes. Beyond, the wind moaned, and soughed,
and moaned. From the kennel behind the byre a mournful howling rose and
fell; but Gorromalt did not stir.
Aunt Elspeth looked at me despairingly. Poor old woman; ah, the misery
and pain of it, the weariness and long pain of starved hearts and barren
hopes. Suddenly an idea came to her. She rose again, and went over to the
fire. Twice she passed in front of her husband. He made no sign.
“He hates those things,” she muttered to me, her eyes wet with pain,
and with something of shame, too, for admitting that she believed in
incantations. And why not, poor old woman? Sure there are stranger things
than _sian_ or _rosad_, charm or spell; and who can say that the secret
old wisdom is mere foam o’ thought. “He hates those things, but I am for
saving my poor lass if I can. I will be saying that old ancient _eolas_,
that is called the _Eolas an t-Snaithnean_.”
“What is that, Aunt Elspeth? What are the three threads?”
“That _eolas_ killed the mother of my mother, dearie; she that was a
woman out of the isle of Benbecula.”
“Killed her!” I repeated, awe-struck.
“Ay; ’tis a charm for the doing away of bewitchment, and sure it is my
poor Muireall who has been bewitched. But my mother’s mother used the
_eolas_ for the taking away of a curse upon a cow that would not give
milk. She was saying the incantation for the third time, and winding the
triple thread round the beast’s tail, when in a moment all the ill that
was in the cow came forth and settled upon her, so that she went back
to her house quaking and sick with the blight, and died of it next day,
because there was no one to take it from her in turn by that or any other
_eolas_.”
I listened in silence. The thing seemed terrible to me then; no, no, not
then only, but now, too, whenever I think of it.
“Say it then, Aunt Elspeth,” I whispered; “say it, in the name of the
Holy Three.”
With that she went on her knees, and leaned against her chair, though
with her face towards her husband, because of the fear that was ever in
her. Then in a low voice, choked with sobs, she said this old _eolas_,
after she had first uttered the holy words of the “Pater Noster”:
_“Chi suil thu,_
_Labhraidh bial thu;_
_Smuainichidh cridhe thu._
_Tha Fear an righthighe_
_Gad’ choisreagadh,_
_An t-Athair, am Mac, ’s an Spiorad Naomh._
_“Ceathrar a rinn do chron--_
_Fear agus bean,_
_Gille agus nighean._
_Co tha gu sin a thilleadh?_
_Tri Pearsannan na Trianaid ro-naomh,_
_An t-Athair, am Mac, ’s an Spioraid Naomh._
_“Tha mi ’cur fianuis gu Moire, agus gu Brighde,_
_Ma ’s e duine rinn do chron,_
_Le droch run,_
_No le droch shuil,_
_No le droch chridhe,_
_Gu’m bi thusa, Muireall gu math,_
_Ri linn so a chur mu’n cuairt ort._
_An ainm an Athar, a’ Mhic, ’s an Spioraid Naomh!”_
(“An eye will see you,
Tongue will speak of you,
Heart will think of you,
The Man of Heaven
Blesses you--
The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
“Four caused your hurt--
Man and Wife,
Young man, and maiden.
Who is to frustrate that?
The three Persons of the most Holy Trinity,
The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
“I call the Virgin Mary and St Bridget to witness
That if your hurt was caused by man,
Through ill-will,
Or the evil eye,
Or a wicked heart,
That you, Muireall, my daughter, may be whole--
And this in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!”)
Just as she finished, and as she was lingering on the line, “_Gu’m bi
thusa, Muireall gu math_” Rory, the blind collie, rose, whimpered, and
stood with snarling jaws.
Strangely enough, Gorromalt heard this, though his ears had been deaf to
all else, or so it seemed, at least.
“Down, Rory! down, beast!” he exclaimed, in a voice strangely shrill and
weak.
But the dog would not be still. His sullen fear grew worse. Suddenly he
sidled and lay on his belly, now snarling, now howling, his blind eyes
distended, his nostrils quivering, his flanks quaking. My uncle rose and
stared at the dog.
“What ails the beast?” he asked angrily, looking now at Rory, now at us.
“Has any one come in? Has any one been at the door?”
“No one, Archibald.”
“What have you been doing, Elspeth?”
“Nothing.”
“Woman, I heard your voice droning at your prayers. Ah, I see--you have
been at some of your _sians_ and _eolais_ again. Sure, now, one would be
thinking you would have less foolishness, and you with the greyness upon
your years. What _eolas_ did she say, lass?”
I told him. “Aw, silly woman that she is, the _eolas an t-Snaithnean_!
madness and folly!… Where is Morag?”
“In bed.” I said this with truth in my eyes. God’s forgiveness for that
good lie!
“And it’s time you were there also, and you too, Elspeth. Come now, no
more of this foolishness. We have nothing to wait for. Why are we waiting
here?”
At that moment Rory became worse than ever. I thought the poor blind
beast would take some dreadful fit. Foam was on his jaws; his hair
bristled. He had sidled forward, and crouched low. We saw him look again
and again towards the blank space to his right, as if, blind though he
was, he saw some one there, some one that gave him fear, but no longer a
fierce terror. Nay, more than once we saw him swish his tail, and sniff
as though recognisingly. But when he turned his head towards the door
his sullen fury grew, and terror shook upon every limb. It was now that
Gorromalt was speaking.
Suddenly the dog made a leap forward--a terrible bristling wolf he seemed
to me, though no wolf had I ever seen, or imagined any more fearsome,
than Rory, now.
He dashed himself against the door, snarling and mouthing, with his snout
nosing the narrow slip at the bottom.
Aunt Elspeth and I shook with fear. My uncle was death-white, but stood
strangely brooding. He had his right elbow upon his breast, and supported
it with his left arm, while with his right hand he plucked at his beard.
“For sure,” he said at last, with an effort to seem at ease; “for sure
the dog is fëy with his age and his blindness.” Then, more slowly still,
“And if that were not so, it might look as though he had the fear on him,
because of some one who strove to come in.”
“It is Muireall,” I whispered, scarce above my breath.
“No,” said Aunt Elspeth, and the voice of her now was as though it
had come out of the granite all about us, cold and hard as that. “No!
Muireall is already in the room.”
We both turned and looked at her. She sat quite still, on the chair
betwixt the fire and the table. Her face was rigid, ghastly, but her eyes
were large and wild.
A look first of fear, then almost of tenderness, came into her husband’s
face.
“Hush, Elspeth,” he said, “that is foolishness.”
“It is not foolishness, Archibald,” she resumed in the same hard,
unemotional voice, but with a terrible intensity. “Man, man, because ye
are blind, is there no sight for those who can see?”
“There is no one here but ourselves.”
But now Aunt Elspeth half rose, with supplicating arms:
“Muireall! Muireall! Muireall! O muirnean, muirnean!”
I saw Archibald Campbell shaking as though he were a child and no strong
man. “Will you be telling us this, Elspeth,” he began in a hoarse
voice--“will you be telling me this: if Muireall is in the room, beyond
Rory there, who will be at the door? Who is trying to come in at the
door?”
“It’s a man. I do not know the man. It is a man. It is Death, maybe. I do
not know the man. O muirnean, mo muirnean!”
But now the great gaunt black dog--terrible in his seeing blindness he
was to me--began again his savage snarling, his bristling insensate fury.
He had ceased a moment while our voices filled the room, and had sidled
a little way towards the place where Aunt Elspeth saw Muireall, whining
low as he did so, and swishing his tail furtively along the whitewashed
flagstones.
I know not what awful thing would have happened. It seemed to me that
Death was coming to all of us.
But at that moment we all heard the sound of a galloping horse. There
was a lull in the wind, and the rain lashed no more like a streaming
whistling whip. Even Rory crouched silent, his nostrils quivering, his
curled snout showing his fangs.
Gorromalt stood, listening intently.
“By the living God,” he exclaimed suddenly, his eyes like a goaded
bull’s--“I know that horse. Only one horse runs like that at the
gallop. ’Tis the grey stallion I sold three months ago to the man at
Drumdoon--ay, ay, for the son of the man at Drumdoon! A horse to ride
for the shooting--a good horse for the hills--that was what he wanted!
Ay, ay, by God, a horse for the son of the man at Drumdoon! It’s the
grey stallion: no other horse in the Straths runs like that--d’ye
hear? d’ye hear? Elspeth, woman, is there hearing upon you for _that_?
Hey, _tlot-a-tlot, tlot-a-tlot, tlot-tlot-tlot-tlot, tlot-a-tlot,
tlot-tlot-tlot_! I tell you, woman, it’s the grey stallion I sold to
Drumdoon: it’s that and no other! Ay, by the Sorrow, it’s Drumdoon’s son
that will be riding here!”
By this time the horse was close by. We heard his hoofs clang above the
flagstones round the well at the side of the house. Then there was a
noise as of scattered stones, and a long scraping sound: then silence.
Gorromalt turned and put his hand to the door. There was murder in his
eyes, for all the smile, a grim terrible smile, that had come to his lips.
Aunt Elspeth rose and ran to him, holding him back. The door shook. Rory
the hound tore at the splinters at the base of the door, his fell again
bristling, his snarling savagery horrible to hear. The pine-logs had
fallen into a smouldering ash. The room was full of gloom, though the red
sullen eye of the peat-glow stared through the obscurity.
“Don’t be opening the door! Don’t be opening the door!” she cried, in a
thin screaming voice.
“What for no, woman? Let me go! Hell upon this dog--out o’ the way,
Rory--get back! Down wi’ ye!”
“No, no, Archibald! Wait! Wait!”
Then a strange thing happened.
Rory ceased, sullenly listened, and then retreated, but no longer
snarling and bristling.
Gorromalt suddenly staggered.
“Who touched me just now?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.
No one answered.
“Who touched me just now? Who passed? Who slid past me?” His voice rose
almost to a scream.
Then, shaking off his wife, he swung the door open.
There was no one there. Outside could be heard a strange sniffling and
whinnying. It was the grey stallion.
Gorromalt strode across the threshold. Scarcely had I time to prevent
Aunt Elspeth from falling against the lintel in a corner, yet in a
moment’s interval I saw that the stallion was riderless.
“Archibald!” wailed his wife faintly out of her weakness. “Archibald,
come back! Come back!”
But there was no need to call. Archibald Campbell was not the man to fly
in the face of God. He knew that no mortal rider rode that horse to its
death that night. Even before he closed the door we heard the rapid,
sliding, catching gallop. The horse had gone: rider or riderless I know
not.
He was ashy-grey. Suddenly he had grown quite still. He lifted his wife,
and helped her to her own big leathern arm-chair at the other side of the
ingle.
“Light the lamp, lass,” he said to me, in a hushed strange voice. Then
he stooped and threw some small pine-logs on the peats, and stirred the
blaze till it caught the dry splintered edges.
Rory, poor blind beast, came wearily and with a low whine to his side,
and then lay down before the warm blaze.
“Bring the Book,” he said to me.
I brought the great leather-bound Gaelic Bible, and laid it on his knees.
He placed his hand in it, and opened at random.
“With Himself be the word,” he said.
“Is it Peace?” asked Aunt Elspeth in a tremulous whisper.
“It is Peace,” he answered, his voice gentle, his face stern as a graven
rock. And what he read was this, where his eye chanced upon as he opened
at the place where is the Book of the Vision of Nahum the Elkoshite:
“_What do ye imagine against the Lord? He will make a full end._”
After that there was a silence. Then he rose, and told me to go and lie
down and sleep; for, on the morrow, after dawn, I was to go with him to
where Muireall was.
I saw Aunt Elspeth rise and put her arms about him. They had peace. I
went to my room, but after a brief while returned, and sat, in the
quietness there, by the glowing peats, till dawn.
* * * * *
The greyness came at last; with it, the rain ceased. The wind still
soughed and wailed among the corries and upon the rocky braes; with low
moans sighing along the flanks of the near hills, and above the stony
watercourse where the Gorromalt surged with swirling foam and loud and
louder tumult.
My eyes had closed in my weariness, when I heard Rory give a low growl,
followed by a contented whimper. Almost at the same moment the door
opened. I looked up, startled.
It was Morag.
She was so white, it is scarce to be wondered at that I took her at first
for a wraith. Then I saw how drenched she was, chilled to the bone too.
She did not speak as I led her in, and made her stand before the fire,
while I took off her soaked dress and shoes. In silence she made all the
necessary changes, and in silence drank the tea I brewed for her.
“Come to my room with me,” she whispered, as with quiet feet we crossed
the stone flags and went up the wooden stair that led to her room.
When she was in bed she bade me put out the light and lie down beside
her. Still silent, we lay there in the darkness, for at that side of the
house the hill-gloom prevailed, and moreover the blind was down-drawn. I
thought the weary moaning of the wind would make my very heart sob.
Then, suddenly, Morag put her arms about me, and the tears streamed warm
about my neck.
“Hush, Morag-aghray, hush, mo-rùn,” I whispered in her ear. “Tell me what
it is, dear! Tell me what it is!”
“Oh, and I loved him so! I loved him!”
“I know it, dear; I knew it all along.”
I thought her sobs would never cease till her heart was broken, so I
questioned her again.
“Yes,” she said, gaspingly, “yes, I loved him when Muireall and I were in
the South together. I met him a month or more before ever she saw him. He
loved me, and I promised to marry him: but I would not go away with him
as he wished: for he said his father would never agree. And then he was
angry, and we quarrelled. And I--Oh! I was glad too, for I did not wish
to marry an Englishman--or to live in a dreary city; but … but … and then
he and Muireall met, and he gave all his thought to her; and she her love
to him.”
“And now?”
“Now?… _Now_ Muireall is dead.”
“Dead? O Morag, _dead_? Oh, poor Muireall that we loved so! But did you
see her? was she alive when you reached her?”
“No; but she was alone. And now, listen. Here is a thing I have to tell
you. When Ealasaid Cameron, that was my mother’s mother, was a girl,
she had a cruel sorrow. She had two sisters whom she loved with all her
heart. They were twins, Silis and Morag. One day an English officer at
Fort William took Silis away with him as his wife; but when her child
was heavy within her she discovered that she was no wife, for the man
was already wedded to a woman in the South. She left him that night.
It was bitter weather, and midwinter. She reached home through a wild
snowdrift. It killed her; but before she died she said to Morag, ‘He has
killed me and the child.’ And Morag understood. So it was that before any
wind of spring blew upon that snow, the man was dead.”
When Morag stopped here, and said no more, I did not at first realise
what she meant to tell me. Then it flashed upon me.
“O Morag, Morag!” I exclaimed, terrified. “But, Morag, you do not … you
will not …”
“_Will_ not?” she repeated, with a catch in her voice.
“Listen,” she resumed suddenly after a long, strained silence. “While I
lay beside my darling Muireall, weeping and moaning over her, and she so
fair, with such silence where the laughter had always been, I heard the
door open. I looked up: it was Jasper Morgan.
“‘You are too late,’ I said. I stared at the man who had brought her, and
me, this sorrow. There was no light about him at all, as I had always
thought. He was only a man as other men are, but with a cold selfish
heart and loveless eyes.
“‘She sent for me to come back to her,’ he answered, though I saw his
face grow ashy-grey as he looked at Muireall and saw that she was dead.
“‘She is dead, Jasper Morgan.’
“‘_Dead … Dead?_’
“‘Ay, dead. It is upon you, her death. Her you have slain, as though with
your sword that you carry: her, and the child she bore within her, and
that was yours.’
“At that he bit his lip till the blood came.
“‘It is a lie,’ he cried. ‘It is a lie, Morag. If she said that thing,
she lied.’
“I laughed.
“‘Why do you laugh, Morag?’ he asked, in a swift anger.
“Once more I laughed.
“‘Why do you laugh like that, girl?’
“But I did not answer. ‘Come,’ I said, ‘come with me. I have something to
say to you. You can do no good here now. She has taken poison, because of
the shame and the sorrow.’
“‘Poison!’ he cried, in horror; and also, I could see in the poor
cowardly mind of him, in a sudden sick fear.
“But when I rose to leave the room he made ready to follow me. I kissed
Muireall for the last time. The man approached, as though to do likewise.
I lifted my riding-whip. He bowed his head, with a deep flush on his
face, and came out behind me.
“I told the inn-folk that my father would be over in the morning. Then I
rode slowly away. Jasper Morgan followed on his horse, a grey stallion
that Muireall and I had often ridden, for he was from Teenabrae farm.
“When we left the village it was into a deep darkness. The rain and the
wind made the way almost impassable at times. But at last we came to the
ford. The water was in spate, and the rushing sound terrified my horse. I
dismounted, and fastened Gealcas to a tree. The man did the same.
“‘What is it, Morag?’ he asked in a quiet steady voice--‘Death?’
“‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Death.’
“Then he suddenly fell forward, and snatched my hand, and begged me to
forgive him, swearing that he had loved me and me only, and imploring me
to believe him, to love him, to … Ah, the _hound_!
“But all I said was this:
“‘Jasper Morgan, soon or late I would kill you, because of this cruel
wrong you did to her. But there is one way: best for _her_ … best for
_me_ … best for _you_.’
“‘What is that?’ he said hoarsely, though I think he knew now. The roar
of the Gorromalt Water filled the night.
“‘There is one way. It is the only way … Go!’
“He gave a deep quavering sigh. Then without word he turned, and walked
straight into the darkness.”
Morag paused here. Then, in answer to my frightened whisper, she added
simply:
“They will find his body in the shallows, down by Drumdoon. The spate
will carry it there.”
* * * * *
After that we lay in silence. The rain had begun to fall again, and
slid with a soft stealthy sound athwart the window. A dull light grew
indiscernibly into the room. Then we heard someone move downstairs. In
the yard, Angus, the stableman, began to pump water. A cow lowed, and
the cluttering of hens was audible.
I moved gently from Morag’s side. As I rose, Maisie passed beneath the
window on her way to the byre. As her wont was, poor wild wildered lass,
she was singing fitfully. It was the same ballad again. But we heard a
single verse only.
“For I have killed a man,” she said,
“A better man than you to wed:
I slew him when he clasped my head,
And now he sleepeth with the dead.”
Then the voice was lost in the byre, and in the sweet familiar lowing of
the kine. The new day was come.
_THE DAN-NAN-RON_
_NOTE_
This story is founded upon a superstition familiar throughout the
Hebrides. The legend exists in Ireland, too; for Mr Yeats tells me that
last summer he met an old Connaught fisherman, who claimed to be of the
Sliochd-nan-Ron--an ancestry, indeed, indicated in the man’s name: Rooney.
As to my use of the forename ‘Gloom’ (in this story, in its sequel
“Green Branches,” and in “The Anointed Man”), I should explain that the
designation is, of course, not a real name. At the same time, I have
actual warrant for its use; for I knew a Uist man who, in the bitterness
of his sorrow, after his wife’s death in childbirth, named his son
_Mulad_ (_i.e._ the gloom of sorrow: grief).
THE DAN-NAN-RON
When Anne Gillespie, that was my friend in Eilanmore, left the island
after the death of her uncle, the old man Robert Achanna, it was to go
far west.
Among the men of the outer isles who for three summers past had been at
the fishing off Eilanmore, there was one named Mànus MacCodrum. He was
a fine lad to see, but though most of the fisher-folk of the Lewis and
North Uist are fair, either with reddish hair and grey eyes or blue-eyed
and yellow-haired, he was of a brown skin with dark hair and dusky brown
eyes. He was, however, as unlike to the dark Celts of Arran and the
Inner Hebrides as to the Northmen. He came of his people, sure enough.
All the MacCodrums of North Uist had been brown-skinned and brown-haired
and brown-eyed; and herein may have lain the reason why, in bygone days,
this small clan of Uist was known throughout the Western Isles as the
_Sliochd nan Ròn_, the offspring of the Seals.
Not so tall as most of the North Uist and Long Island men, Mànus
MacCodrum was of a fair height and supple and strong. No man was a better
fisherman than he, and he was well-liked of his fellows, for all the
morose gloom that was upon him at times. He had a voice as sweet as a
woman’s when he sang, and he sang often, and knew all the old runes of
the islands, from the Obb of Harris to the Head of Mingulay. Often, too,
he chanted the beautiful _orain spioradail_ of the Catholic priests and
Christian Brothers of South Uist and Barra, though where he lived in
North Uist he was the sole man who adhered to the ancient faith.
It may have been because Anne was a Catholic too, though, sure, the
Achannas were so also, notwithstanding that their forebears and kindred
in Galloway were Protestant (and this because of old Robert Achanna’s
love for his wife, who was of the old Faith, so it is said)--it may have
been for this reason, though I think her lover’s admiring eyes and soft
speech and sweet singing had more to do with it, that she pledged her
troth to Mànus. It was a south wind for him, as the saying is; for with
her rippling brown hair and soft grey eyes and cream-white skin, there
was no comelier lass in the Isles.
So when Achanna was laid to his long rest, and there was none left
upon Eilanmore save only his three youngest sons, Mànus MacCodrum
sailed north-eastward across the Minch to take home his bride. Of the
four eldest sons, Alison had left Eilanmore some months before his
father died, and sailed westward, though no one knew whither, or for
what end, or for how long, and no word had been brought from him, nor
was he ever seen again in the island, which had come to be called
Eilan-nan-Allmharachain, the Isle of the Strangers. Allan and William
had been drowned in a wild gale in the Minch; and Robert had died of
the white fever, that deadly wasting disease which is the scourge of
the Isles. Marcus was now “Eilanmore,” and lived there with Gloom
and Sheumais, all three unmarried, though it was rumoured among the
neighbouring islanders that each loved Marsail nic Ailpean,[1] in
Eilean-Rona of the Summer Isles, hard by the coast of Sutherland.
[1] Marsail nic Ailpean is the Gaelic of which an English
translation would be Marjory MacAlpine. _Nic_ is a contraction for
_nighean mhic_, “daughter of the line of.”
When Mànus asked Anne to go with him she agreed. The three brothers were
ill-pleased at this, for apart from their not wishing their cousin to go
so far away, they did not want to lose her, as she not only cooked for
them and did all that a woman does, including spinning and weaving, but
was most sweet and fair to see, and in the long winter nights sang by the
hour together, while Gloom played strange wild airs upon his _feadan_, a
kind of oaten-pipe or flute.
She loved him, I know; but there was this reason also for her going, that
she was afraid of Gloom. Often upon the moor or on the hill she turned
and hastened home, because she heard the lilt and fall of that _feadan_.
It was an eerie thing to her, to be going through the twilight when she
thought the three men were in the house smoking after their supper, and
suddenly to hear beyond and coming towards her the shrill song of that
oaten flute playing “The Dance of the Dead,” or “The Flow and Ebb,” or
“The Shadow-Reel.”
That, sometimes at least, he knew she was there was clear to her, because
as she stole rapidly through the tangled fern and gale she would hear a
mocking laugh follow her like a leaping thing.
Mànus was not there on the night when she told Marcus and his brothers
that she was going. He was in the haven on board the _Luath_, with his
two mates, he singing in the moonshine as all three sat mending their
fishing gear.
After the supper was done, the three brothers sat smoking and talking
over an offer that had been made about some Shetland sheep. For a
time Anne watched them in silence. They were not like brothers, she
thought. Marcus, tall, broad-shouldered, with yellow hair and strangely
dark blue-black eyes and black eyebrows; stern, with a weary look on
his sun-brown face. The light from the peats glinted upon the tawny
curve of thick hair that trailed from his upper lip, for he had the
_caisean-feusag_ of the Northmen. Gloom, slighter of build, dark of hue
and hair, but with hairless face; with thin, white, long-fingered hands,
that had ever a nervous motion as though they were tide-wrack. There
was always a frown on the centre of his forehead, even when he smiled
with his thin lips and dusky, unbetraying eyes. He looked what he was,
the brain of the Achannas. Not only did he have the English as though
native to that tongue, but could and did read strange unnecessary books.
Moreover, he was the only son of Robert Achanna to whom the old man had
imparted his store of learning; for Achanna had been a schoolmaster in
his youth in Galloway, and he had intended Gloom for the priesthood.
His voice, too, was low and clear, but cold as pale-green water running
under ice. As for Sheumais, he was more like Marcus than Gloom, though
not so fair. He had the same brown hair and shadowy hazel eyes, the
same pale and smooth face, with something of the same intent look which
characterised the long-time missing and probably dead eldest brother,
Alison. He, too, was tall and gaunt. On Sheumais’ face there was
that indescribable, as to some of course imperceptible, look which is
indicated by the phrase, “the dusk of the shadow,” though few there are
who know what they mean by that, or, knowing, are fain to say.
Suddenly, and without any word or reason for it, Gloom turned and spoke
to her.
“Well, Anne, and what is it?”
“I did not speak, Gloom.”
“True for you, _mo cailinn_. But it’s about to speak you were.”
“Well, and that is true. Marcus, and you Gloom, and you Sheumais, I have
that to tell which you will not be altogether glad for the hearing. ’Tis
about … about … me and … and Mànus.”
There was no reply at first. The three brothers sat looking at her, like
the kye at a stranger on the moorland. There was a deepening of the frown
on Gloom’s brow, but when Anne looked at him his eyes fell and dwelt in
the shadow at his feet. Then Marcus spoke in a low voice.
“Is it Mànus MacCodrum you will be meaning?”
“Ay, sure.”
Again, silence. Gloom did not lift his eyes, and Sheumais was now staring
at the peats. Marcus shifted uneasily.
“And what will Mànus MacCodrum be wanting?”
“Sure, Marcus, you know well what I mean. Why do you make this thing hard
for me? There is but one thing he would come here wanting; and he has
asked me if I will go with him, and I have said yes. And if you are not
willing that he come again with the minister, or that we go across to the
kirk in Berneray of Uist in the Sound of Harris, then I will not stay
under this roof another night, but will go away from Eilanmore at sunrise
in the _Luath_, that is now in the haven. And that is for the hearing and
knowing, Marcus and Gloom and Sheumais!”
Once more, silence followed her speaking. It was broken in a strange way.
Gloom slipped his _feadan_ into his hands, and so to his mouth. The clear
cold notes of the flute filled the flame-lit room. It was as though white
polar birds were drifting before the coming of snow.
The notes slid into a wild remote air: cold moonlight on the dark o’ the
sea, it was. It was the _Dàn-nan-Ròn_.
Anne flushed, trembled, and then abruptly rose. As she leaned on her
clenched right hand upon the table, the light of the peats showed that
her eyes were aflame.
“Why do you play _that_, Gloom Achanna?”
The man finished the bar, then blew into the oaten pipe, before, just
glancing at the girl, he replied:
“And what harm will there be in _that_, Anna-ban?”
“You know it is harm. That is the Dàn-nan-Ròn!”
“Ay; and what then, Anna-ban?”
“What then? Are you thinking I don’t know what you mean by playing the
Song of the Seal?”
With an abrupt gesture Gloom put the _feadan_ aside. As he did so, he
rose.
“See here, Anne,” he began roughly--when Marcus intervened.
“That will do just now, Gloom. Ann-à-ghraidh, do you mean that you are
going to do this thing?”
“Ay, sure.”
“Do you know why Gloom played the Dàn-nan-Ròn?”
“It was a cruel thing.”
“You know what is said in the isles about … about … this or that man,
who is under _gheasan_--who is spell-bound … and … and … about the seals
and …”
“Yes, Marcus, it is knowing it that I am: ‘_Tha iad a’ cantuinn gur h-e
daoine fo gheasan a th’ anns no roin._’”
“‘_They say that seals_,’” he repeated slowly; “‘_they say that seals are
men under magic spells._’ And have you ever pondered that thing, Anne, my
cousin?”
“I am knowing well what you mean.”
“Then you will know that the MacCodrums of North Uist are called the
Sliochd-nan-ròn?”
“I have heard.”
“And would you be for marrying a man that is of the race of the beasts,
and that himself knows what _geas_ means, and may any day go back to his
people?”
“Ah, now, Marcus, sure it is making a mock of me you are. Neither you
nor any here believes that foolish thing. How can a man born of a
woman be a seal, even though his _sinnsear_ were the offspring of the
sea-people,--which is not a saying I am believing either, though it may
be: and not that it matters much, whatever, about the far-back forebears.”
Marcus frowned darkly, and at first made no response. At last he
answered, speaking sullenly.
“You may be believing this or you may be believing that,
Anna-nic-Gilleasbuig, but two things are as well known as that the east
wind brings the blight and the west wind the rain. And one is this: that
long ago a Seal-man wedded a woman of North Uist, and that he or his son
was called Neil MacCodrum; and that the sea-fever of the seal was in the
blood of his line ever after. And this is the other: that twice within
the memory of living folk a MacCodrum has taken upon himself the form of
a seal, and has so met his death--once Neil MacCodrum of Ru’ Tormaid, and
once Anndra MacCodrum of Berneray in the Sound. There’s talk of others,
but these are known of us all. And you will not be forgetting now that
Neil-donn was the grandfather, and that Anndra was the brother of the
father of Mànus MacCodrum?”
“I am not caring what you say, Marcus: it is all foam of the sea.”
“There’s no foam without wind or tide, Anne. An’ it’s a dark tide that
will be bearing you away to Uist; and a black wind that will be blowing
far away behind the East, the wind that will be carrying his death-cry to
your ears.”
The girl shuddered. The brave spirit in her, however, did not quail.
“Well, so be it. To each his fate. But, seal or no seal, I am going to
wed Mànus MacCodrum, who is a man as good as any here, and a true man
at that, and the man I love, and that will be my man, God willing, the
praise be His!”
Again Gloom took up the _feadan_, and sent a few cold white notes
floating through the hot room, breaking suddenly into the wild fantastic
opening air of the Dàn-nan-Ròn.
With a low cry and passionate gesture Anne sprang forward, snatched the
oat-flute from his grasp, and would have thrown it in the fire. Marcus
held her in an iron grip, however.
“Don’t you be minding Gloom, Anne,” he said quietly, as he took the
_feadan_ from her hand, and handed it to his brother; “sure, he’s only
telling you in _his_ way what I am telling you in mine.”
She shook herself free, and moved to the other side of the table. On the
opposite wall hung the dirk which had belonged to old Achanna. This she
unfastened. Holding it in her right hand, she faced the three men.
“On the cross of the dirk I swear I will be the woman of Mànus MacCodrum.”
The brothers made no response. They looked at her fixedly.
“And by the cross of the dirk I swear that if any man come between me and
Mànus, this dirk will be for his remembering in a certain hour of the day
of the days.”
As she spoke, she looked meaningly at Gloom, whom she feared more than
Marcus or Sheumais.
“And by the cross of the dirk I swear that if evil come to Mànus, this
dirk will have another sheath, and that will be my milkless breast: and
by that token I now throw the old sheath in the fire.”
As she finished, she threw the sheath on to the burning peats.
Gloom quietly lifted it, brushed off the sparks of flame as though they
were dust, and put it in his pocket.
“And by the same token, Anne,” he said, “your oaths will come to nought.”
Rising, he made a sign to his brothers to follow. When they were outside
he told Sheumais to return, and to keep Anne within, by peace if
possible--by force if not. Briefly they discussed their plans, and then
separated. While Sheumais went back, Marcus and Gloom made their way to
the haven.
Their black figures were visible in the moonlight, but at first they were
not noticed by the men on board the _Luath_, for Mànus was singing.
When the isleman stopped abruptly, one of his companions asked him
jokingly if his song had brought a seal alongside, and bid him beware
lest it was a woman of the sea-people.
He gloomed morosely, but made no reply. When the others listened, they
heard the wild strain of the Dàn-nan-Ròn stealing through the moonshine.
Staring against the shore, they could discern the two brothers.
“What will be the meaning of that?” asked one of the men uneasily.
“When a man comes instead of a woman,” answered Mànus slowly, “the young
corbies are astir in the nest.”
So, it meant blood. Aulay MacNeill and Donull MacDonull put down their
gear, rose, and stood waiting for what Mànus would do.
“Ho, there!” he cried.
“Ho-ro!”
“What will you be wanting, Eilanmore?”
“We are wanting a word of you, Mànus MacCodrum. Will you come ashore?”
“If you want a word of me, you can come to me.”
“There is no boat here.”
“I’ll send the _bàta-beag_.”
When he had spoken, Mànus asked Donull, the younger of his mates, a lad
of seventeen, to row to the shore.
“And bring back no more than one man,” he added, “whether it be Eilanmore
himself or Gloom-mhic-Achanna.”
The rope of the small boat was unfastened, and Donull rowed it swiftly
through the moonshine. The passing of a cloud dusked the shore, but they
saw him throw a rope for the guiding of the boat alongside the ledge of
the landing-place; then the sudden darkening obscured the vision. Donull
must be talking, they thought; for two or three minutes elapsed without
sign: but at last the boat put off again, and with two figures only.
Doubtless the lad had had to argue against the coming of both Marcus and
Gloom.
This, in truth, was what Donull had done. But while he was speaking,
Marcus was staring fixedly beyond him.
“Who is it that is there?” he asked; “there, in the stern?”
“There is no one there.”
“I thought I saw the shadow of a man.”
“Then it was my shadow, Eilanmore.”
Achanna turned to his brother.
“I see a man’s death there in the boat.”
Gloom quailed for a moment, then laughed low.
“I see no death of a man sitting in the boat, Marcus; but if I did, I am
thinking it would dance to the air of the Dàn-nan-Ròn, which is more than
the wraith of you or me would do.”
“It is not a wraith I was seeing, but the death of a man.”
Gloom whispered, and his brother nodded sullenly. The next moment a
heavy muffler was round Donull’s mouth, and before he could resist, or
even guess what had happened, he was on his face on the shore, bound and
gagged. A minute later the oars were taken by Gloom, and the boat moved
swiftly out of the inner haven.
As it drew near through the gloom Mànus stared at it intently.
“That is not Donull that is rowing, Aulay!”
“No; it will be Gloom Achanna, I’m thinking.”
MacCodrum started. If so, that other figure at the stern was too big for
Donull. The cloud passed just as the boat came alongside. The rope was
made secure, and then Marcus and Gloom sprang on board.
“Where is Donull MacDonull?” demanded Mànus sharply.
Marcus made no reply, so Gloom answered for him.
“He has gone up to the house with a message to Anna-nic-Gilleasbuig.”
“And what will that message be?”
“That Mànus MacCodrum has sailed away from Eilanmore, and will not see
her again.”
MacCodrum laughed. It was a low, ugly laugh.
“Sure, Gloom Achanna, you should be taking that _feadan_ of yours
and playing the Codhail-nan-Pairtean, for I’m thinkin’ the crabs are
gathering about the rocks down below us, an’ laughing wi’ their claws.”
“Well, and that is a true thing,” Gloom replied, slowly and quietly.
“Yes, for sure I might, as you say, be playing the Meeting of the Crabs.
Perhaps,” he added, as by a sudden afterthought, “perhaps, though it is
a calm night, you will be hearing the _comh-thonn_. The ‘slapping of the
waves’ is a better thing to be hearing than the Meeting of the Crabs.”
“If I hear the _comh-thonn_, it is not in the way you will be meaning,
Gloom ’ic Achanna. ’Tis not the ‘up sail and goodbye’ they will be
saying, but ‘Home wi’ the Bride.’”
Here Marcus intervened.
“Let us be having no more words, Mànus MacCodrum. The girl Anne is not
for you. Gloom is to be her man. So get you hence. If you will be going
quiet, it is quiet we will be. If you have your feet on this thing, then
you will be having that too which I saw in the boat.”
“And what was it you saw in the boat, Achanna?”
“The death of a man.”
“So … And now” (this after a prolonged silence, wherein the four men
stood facing each other), “is it a blood-matter, if not of peace?”
“Ay. Go, if you are wise. If not, ’tis your own death you will be making.”
There was a flash as of summer lightning. A bluish flame seemed to leap
through the moonshine. Marcus reeled, with a gasping cry; then, leaning
back till his face blanched in the moonlight, his knees gave way. As he
fell, he turned half round. The long knife which Mànus had hurled at him
had not penetrated his breast more than two inches at most, but as he
fell on the deck it was driven into him up to the hilt.
In the blank silence that followed, the three men could hear a sound like
the ebb-tide in sea-weed. It was the gurgling of the bloody froth in the
lungs of the dead man.
The first to speak was his brother, and then only when thin
reddish-white foam-bubbles began to burst from the blue lips of Marcus.
“It is murder.”
He spoke low, but it was like the surf of breakers in the ears of those
who heard.
“You have said one part of a true word, Gloom Achanna. It is murder …
that you and he came here for.”
“The death of Marcus Achanna is on you, Mànus MacCodrum.”
“So be it, as between yourself and me, or between all of your blood and
me; though Aulay MacNeill as well as you can witness that, though in
self-defence I threw the knife at Achanna, it was his own doing that
drove it into him.”
“You can whisper that to the rope when it is round your neck.”
“And what will _you_ be doing now, Gloom-nic-Achanna?”
For the first time Gloom shifted uneasily. A swift glance revealed to him
the awkward fact that the boat trailed behind the _Luath_, so that he
could not leap into it; while if he turned to haul it close by the rope,
he was at the mercy of the two men.
“I will go in peace,” he said quietly.
“Ay,” was the answer, in an equally quiet tone: “in the white peace.”
Upon this menace of death the two men stood facing each other.
Achanna broke the silence at last.
“You’ll hear the Dàn-nan-Ròn the night before you die, Mànus MacCodrum:
and, lest you doubt it, you’ll hear it again in your death-hour.”
“_Ma tha sìn an Dàn_--if that be ordained.” Mànus spoke gravely. His very
quietude, however, boded ill. There was no hope of clemency. Gloom knew
that.
Suddenly he laughed scornfully. Then, pointing with his right hand as if
to someone behind his two adversaries, he cried out: “Put the death-hand
on them, Marcus! Give them the Grave!”
Both men sprang aside, the heart of each nigh upon bursting. The
death-touch of the newly slain is an awful thing to incur, for it means
that the wraith can transfer all its evil to the person touched.
The next moment there was a heavy splash. In a second Mànus realised that
it was no more than a ruse, and that Gloom had escaped. With feverish
haste he hauled in the small boat, leaped into it, and began at once to
row so as to intercept his enemy.
Achanna rose once, between him and the _Luath_. MacCodrum crossed the
oars in the thole-pins, and seized the boat-hook.
The swimmer kept straight for him. Suddenly he dived. In a flash, Mànus
realised that Gloom was going to rise under the boat, seize the keel, and
upset him, and thus probably be able to grip him from above. There was
time and no more to leap: and, indeed, scarce had he plunged into the sea
ere the boat swung right over, Achanna clambering over it the next moment.
At first Gloom could not see where his foe was. He crouched on the
upturned craft, and peered eagerly into the moonlit water. All at once a
black mass shot out of the shadow between him and the smack. This black
mass laughed: the same low, ugly laugh that had preceded the death of
Marcus.
He who was in turn the swimmer was now close. When a fathom away he
leaned back and began to tread water steadily. In his right hand he
grasped the boat-hook. The man in the boat knew that to stay where he was
meant certain death. He gathered himself together like a crouching cat.
Mànus kept treading the water slowly, but with the hook ready so that the
sharp iron spike at the end of it should transfix his foe if he came at
him with a leap. Now and again he laughed. Then in his low sweet voice,
but brokenly at times, between his deep breathings, he began to sing:
The tide was dark an’ heavy with the burden that it bore,
I heard it talkin’, whisperin’, upon the weedy shore:
Each wave that stirred the sea-weed was like a closing door,
’Tis closing doors they hear at last who hear no more, no more,
My Grief,
No more!
The tide was in the salt sea-weed, and like a knife it tore;
The wild sea-wind went moaning, sooing, moaning o’er and o’er;
The deep sea-heart was brooding deep upon its ancient lore,
I heard the sob, the sooing sob, the dying sob at its core,
My Grief,
Its core!
The white sea-waves were wan and grey, its ashy lips before,
The yeast within its ravening mouth was red with streaming gore--
O red sea-weed, O red sea-waves, O hollow baffled roar,
Since one thou hast, O dark, dim sea, why callest thou for more,
My Grief,
For more!
In the quiet moonlight the chant, with its long slow cadences, sung as
no other man in the Isles could sing it, sounded sweet and remote beyond
words to tell. The glittering shine was upon the water of the haven,
and moved in waving lines of fire along the stone ledges. Sometimes a
fish rose, and spilt a ripple of pale gold; or a sea-nettle swam to the
surface, and turned its blue or greenish globe of living jelly to the
moon dazzle.
The man in the water made a sudden stop in his treading, and listened
intently. Then once more the phosphorescent light gleamed about his
slow-moving shoulders. In a louder chanting voice came once again,
Each wave that stirs the sea-weed is like a closing door,
’Tis closing doors they hear at last who hear no more, no more,
My Grief,
No more!
Yes, his quick ears had caught the inland strain of a voice he knew. Soft
and white as the moonshine came Anne’s singing, as she passed along the
corrie leading to the haven. In vain his travelling gaze sought her: she
was still in the shadow, and, besides, a slow drifting cloud obscured
the moonlight. When he looked back again, a stifled exclamation came
from his lips. There was not a sign of Gloom Achanna. He had slipped
noiselessly from the boat, and was now either behind it, or had dived
beneath it, or was swimming under water this way or that. If only the
cloud would sail by, muttered Mànus, as he held himself in readiness for
an attack from beneath or behind. As the dusk lightened, he swam slowly
towards the boat, and then swiftly round it. There was no one there. He
climbed on to the keel, and stood, leaning forward as a salmon-leisterer
by torchlight, with his spear-pointed boat-hook raised. Neither below nor
beyond could he discern any shape. A whispered call to Aulay MacNeill
showed that he, too, saw nothing. Gloom must have swooned, and sank deep
as he slipped through the water. Perhaps the dogfish were already darting
about him.
Going behind the boat, Mànus guided it back to the smack. It was not long
before, with MacNeill’s help, he righted the punt. One oar had drifted
out of sight, but as there was a sculling hole in the stern, that did not
matter.
“What shall we do with it?” he muttered, as he stood at last by the
corpse of Marcus. “This is a bad night for us, Aulay!”
“Bad it is; but let us be seeing it is not worse. I’m thinking we should
have left the boat.”
“And for why that?”
“We could say that Marcus Achanna and Gloom Achanna left us again, and
that we saw no more of them nor of our boat.”
MacCodrum pondered a while. The sound of voices, borne faintly across
the water, decided him. Probably Anne and the lad Donull were talking.
He slipped into the boat, and with a sail-knife soon ripped it here
and there. It filled, and then, heavy with the weight of a great
ballast-stone which Aulay had first handed to his companion, and surging
with a foot-thrust from the latter, it sank.
“We’ll hide the … the man there … behind the windlass, below the spare
sail, till we’re out at sea, Aulay. Quick, give me a hand!”
It did not take the two men long to lift the corpse and do as Mànus
had suggested. They had scarce accomplished this when Anne’s voice came
hailing silver-sweet across the water.
With death-white face and shaking limbs MacCodrum stood holding the mast,
while with a loud voice so firm and strong that Aulay MacNeill smiled
below his fear, he asked if the Achannas were back yet, and, if so, for
Donull to row out at once, and she with him if she would come.
It was nearly half-an-hour thereafter that Anne rowed out towards the
_Luath_. She had gone at last along the shore to a creek where one of
Marcus’ boats was moored, and returned with it. Having taken Donull on
board, she made way with all speed, fearful lest Gloom or Marcus should
intercept her.
It did not take long to explain how she had laughed at Sheumais’ vain
efforts to detain her, and had come down to the haven. As she approached,
she heard Mànus singing, and so had herself broken into a song she knew
he loved. Then, by the water-edge, she had come upon Donull lying upon
his back, bound and gagged. After she had released him, they waited to
see what would happen, but as in the moonlight they could not see any
small boat come in--bound to or from the smack--she had hailed to know if
Mànus were there.
On his side, he said briefly that the two Achannas had come to persuade
him to leave without her. On his refusal, they had departed again,
uttering threats against her as well as himself. He heard their
quarrelling voices as they rowed into the gloom, but could not see them
at last because of the obscured moonlight.
“And now, Ann-mochree,” he added, “is it coming with me you are, and just
as you are? Sure, you’ll never repent it, and you’ll have all you want
that I can give. Dear of my heart, say that you will be coming away this
night of the nights! By the Black Stone on Icolmkill I swear it, and by
the Sun, and by the Moon, and by Himself!”
“I am trusting you, Mànus dear. Sure, it is not for me to be going back
to that house after what has been done and said. I go with you, now and
always, God save us.”
“Well, dear lass o’ my heart, it’s farewell to Eilanmore it is, for by
the Blood on the Cross I’ll never land on it again!”
“And that will be no sorrow to me, Mànus my home!”
* * * * *
And this was the way that my friend Anne Gillespie left Eilanmore to go
to the isles of the west.
It was a fair sailing in the white moonshine with a whispering breeze
astern. Anne leaned against Mànus, dreaming her dream. The lad Donull sat
drowsing at the helm. Forward, Aulay MacNeill, with his face set against
the moonshine to the west, brooded dark.
Though no longer was land in sight, and there was peace among the deeps
of the quiet stars and upon the sea, the shadow of fear was upon the face
of Mànus MacCodrum.
This might well have been because of the as yet unburied dead that lay
beneath the spare sail by the windlass. The dead man, however, did not
affright him. What went moaning in his heart, and sighing and calling in
his brain, was a faint falling echo he had heard as the _Luath_ glided
slow out of the haven. Whether from the water or from the shore he could
not tell, but he heard the wild fantastic air of the Dàn-nan-Ròn, as he
had heard it that very night upon the _feadan_ of Gloom Achanna.
It was his hope that his ears had played him false. When he glanced about
him and saw the sombre flame in the eyes of Aulay MacNeill, staring at
him out of the dusk, he knew that which Oisìn, the son of Fionn, cried in
his pain: “his soul swam in mist.”
II
For all the evil omens, the marriage of Anne and Mànus MacCodrum went
well. He was more silent than of yore, and men avoided rather than sought
him; but he was happy with Anne, and content with his two mates, who were
now Callum MacCodrum and Ranald MacRanald. The youth Donull had bettered
himself by joining a Skye skipper, who was a kinsman; and Aulay MacNeill
had surprised everyone except Mànus by going away as a seaman on board
one of the _Loch_ line of ships which sail for Australia from the Clyde.
Anne never knew what had happened, though it is possible she suspected
somewhat. All that was known to her was that Marcus and Gloom Achanna had
disappeared, and were supposed to have been drowned. There was now no
Achanna upon Eilanmore, for Sheumais had taken a horror of the place and
his loneliness. As soon as it was commonly admitted that his two brothers
must have drifted out to sea, and been drowned, or at best picked up by
some ocean-going ship, he disposed of the island-farm, and left Eilanmore
for ever. All this confirmed the thing said among the islanders of the
West--that old Robert Achanna had brought a curse with him. Blight and
disaster had visited Eilanmore over and over in the many years he had
held it, and death, sometimes tragic or mysterious, had overtaken six
of his seven sons, while the youngest bore upon his brows the “dusk of
the shadow.” True, none knew for certain that three out of the six were
dead, but few for a moment believed in the possibility that Alison and
Marcus and Gloom were alive. On the night when Anne had left the island
with Mànus MacCodrum he, Sheumais, had heard nothing to alarm him. Even
when, an hour after she had gone down to the haven, neither she nor his
brothers had returned, and the _Luath_ had put out to sea, he was not in
fear of any ill. Clearly, Marcus and Gloom had gone away in the smack,
perhaps determined to see that the girl was duly married by priest or
minister. He would have perturbed himself little for days to come, but
for a strange thing that happened that night. He had returned to the
house because of a chill that was upon him, and convinced, too, that all
had sailed in the _Luath_. He was sitting brooding by the peat-fire, when
he was startled by a sound at the window at the back of the room. A few
bars of a familiar air struck painfully upon his ear, though played so
low that they were just audible. What could it be but the Dàn-nan-Ròn;
and who would be playing that but Gloom? What did it mean? Perhaps, after
all, it was fantasy only, and there was no _feadan_ out there in the
dark. He was pondering this when, still low, but louder and sharper than
before, there rose and fell the strain which he hated, and Gloom never
played before him, that of the Davsa-na-mairv, the Dance of the Dead.
Swiftly and silently he rose and crossed the room. In the dark shadows
cast by the byre he could see nothing; but the music ceased. He went out,
and searched everywhere, but found no one. So he returned, took down the
Holy Book, and with awed heart read slowly, till peace came upon him,
soft and sweet as the warmth of the peat-glow.
But as for Anne, she had never even this hint that one of the supposed
dead might be alive; or that, being dead, Gloom might yet touch a shadowy
_feadan_ into a wild, remote air of the Grave.
When month after month went by, and no hint of ill came to break upon
their peace, Mànus grew light-hearted again. Once more his songs were
heard as he came back from the fishing or loitered ashore mending his
nets. A new happiness was nigh to them, for Anne was with child. True,
there was fear also, for the girl was not well at the time when her
labour was near, and grew weaker daily. There came a day when Mànus had
to go to Loch Boisdale in South Uist; and it was with pain, and something
of foreboding, that he sailed away from Berneray in the Sound of Harris,
where he lived. It was on the third night that he returned. He was met
by Katreen MacRanald, the wife of his mate, with the news that, on the
morrow after his going, Anne had sent for the priest, who was staying
at Loch Maddy, for she had felt the coming of death. It was that very
evening she died, and took the child with her.
Mànus heard as one in a dream. It seemed to him that the tide was ebbing
in his heart, and a cold sleety rain falling, falling through a mist in
his brain.
Sorrow lay heavily upon him. After the earthing of her whom he loved he
went to and fro solitary; often crossing the Narrows and going to the old
Pictish Tower under the shadow of Ben Breac. He would not go upon the
sea, but let his kinsman Callum do as he liked with the _Luath_.
Now and again Father Allan MacNeill sailed northward to see him. Each
time he departed sadder. “The man is going mad, I fear,” he said to
Callum, the last time he saw Mànus.
The long summer nights brought peace and beauty to the isles. It was a
great herring-year, and the moon-fishing was unusually good. All the Uist
men who lived by the sea-harvest were in their boats whenever they could.
The pollack, the dogfish, the otters, and the seals, with flocks of
sea-fowl beyond number, shared in the common joy. Mànus MacCodrum alone
paid no need to herring or mackerel. He was often seen striding along the
shore, and more than once had been heard laughing. Sometimes, too, he was
come upon at low tide by the great Reef of Berneray, singing wild strange
runes and songs, or crouching upon a rock and brooding dark.
The midsummer moon found no man on Berneray except MacCodrum, the
Reverend Mr Black, the minister of the Free Kirk, and an old man named
Anndra McIan. On the night before the last day of the middle month,
Anndra was reproved by the minister for saying that he had seen a man
rise out of one of the graves in the kirkyard, and steal down by the
stone-dykes towards Balnahunnur-sa-mona,[2] where Mànus MacCodrum lived.
[2] _Baille-’na-aonar’sa mhonadh_, “the solitary farm on the
hill-slope.”
“The dead do not rise and walk, Anndra.”
“That may be, maighstir; but it may have been the Watcher of the Dead.
Sure, it is not three weeks since Padruic McAlistair was laid beneath the
green mound. He’ll be wearying for another to take his place.”
“Hoots, man, that is an old superstition. The dead do not rise and walk,
I tell you.”
“It is right you may be, maighstir; but I heard of this from my father,
that was old before you were young, and from his father before him. When
the last buried is weary with being the Watcher of the Dead he goes
about from place to place till he sees man, woman, or child with the
death-shadow in the eyes, and then he goes back to his grave and lies
down in peace, for his vigil it will be over now.”
The minister laughed at the folly, and went into his house to make ready
for the Sacrament that was to be on the morrow. Old Anndra, however,
was uneasy. After the porridge he went down through the gloaming to
Balnahunnur-sa-mona. He meant to go in and warn Mànus MacCodrum. But when
he got to the west wall, and stood near the open window, he heard Mànus
speaking in a loud voice, though he was alone in the room.
“_B’ionganntach do ghràdh dhomhsa, a’ toirt barrachd air gràdh nam
ban!…_”[3]
[3] “Thy love to me was wonderful, surpassing the love of women.”
This Mànus cried in a voice quivering with pain. Anndra stopped still,
fearful to intrude, fearful also, perhaps, to see someone there beside
MacCodrum whom eyes should not see. Then the voice rose into a cry of
agony.
“_Aoram dhuit, ay an déigh dhomh fàs aosda!_”[4]
[4] “I shall worship thee, ay even after I have become old.”
With that Anndra feared to stay. As he passed the byre he started, for he
thought he saw the shadow of a man. When he looked closer he could see
nought, so went his way trembling and sore troubled.
It was dusk when Mànus came out. He saw that it was to be a cloudy night,
and perhaps it was this that, after a brief while, made him turn in his
aimless walk and go back to the house. He was sitting before the flaming
heart of the peats, brooding in his pain, when, suddenly, he sprang to
his feet.
Loud and clear, and close as though played under the very window of the
room, came the cold white notes of an oaten flute. Ah, too well he knew
that wild fantastic air. Who could it be but Gloom Achanna, playing upon
his _feadan_; and what air of all airs could that be but the Dàn-nan-Ròn?
Was it the dead man, standing there unseen in the shadow of the grave?
Was Marcus beside him--Marcus with the knife still thrust up to the hilt,
and the lung-foam upon his lips? Can the sea give up its dead? Can there
be strain of any _feadan_ that ever was made of man--there in the Silence?
In vain Mànus MacCodrum tortured himself thus. Too well he knew that he
had heard the Dàn-nan-Ròn, and that no other than Gloom Achanna was the
player.
Suddenly an access of fury wrought him to madness. With an abrupt lilt
the tune swung into the Davsa-na-mairv, and thence, after a few seconds,
and in a moment, into that mysterious and horrible _Codhail-nan-Pairtean_
which none but Gloom played.
There could be no mistake now, nor as to what was meant by the muttering,
jerking air of the “Gathering of the Crabs.”
With a savage cry Mànus snatched up a long dirk from its place by the
chimney, and rushed out.
There was not the shadow of a sea-gull even in front: so he sped round by
the byre. Neither was anything unusual discoverable there.
“Sorrow upon me,” he cried; “man or wraith, I will be putting it to the
dirk!”
But there was no one; nothing; not a sound.
Then, at last, with a listless droop of his arms, MacCodrum turned and
went into the house again. He remembered what Gloom Achanna had said:
“_You’ll hear the Dàn-nan-Ròn the night before you die, Mànus MacCodrum,
and lest you doubt it, you’ll hear it in your death-hour._”
He did not stir from the fire for three hours; then he rose, and went
over to his bed and lay down without undressing.
He did not sleep, but lay listening and watching. The peats burned low,
and at last there was scarce a flicker along the floor. Outside he could
hear the wind moaning upon the sea. By a strange rustling sound he
knew that the tide was ebbing across the great reef that runs out from
Berneray. By midnight the clouds had gone. The moon shone clear and full.
When he heard the clock strike in its worm-eaten, rickety case, he sat
up, and listened intently. He could hear nothing. No shadow stirred.
Surely if the wraith of Gloom Achanna were waiting for him it would make
some sign, now, in the dead of night.
An hour passed. Mànus rose, crossed the room on tip-toe, and soundlessly
opened the door. The salt-wind blew fresh against his face. The smell
of the shore, of wet sea-wrack and pungent gale, of foam and moving
water, came sweet to his nostrils. He heard a skua calling from the rocky
promontory. From the slopes behind, the wail of a moon-restless lapwing
rose and fell mournfully.
Crouching, and with slow, stealthy step, he stole round by the seaward
wall. At the dyke he stopped, and scrutinised it on each side. He could
see for several hundred yards, and there was not even a sheltering sheep.
Then, soundlessly as ever, he crept close to the byre. He put his ear to
chink after chink; but not a stir of a shadow even. As a shadow, himself,
he drifted lightly to the front, past the hay-rick: then, with swift
glances to right and left, opened the door and entered. As he did so,
he stood as though frozen. Surely, he thought, that was a sound as of a
step, out there by the hay-rick. A terror was at his heart. In front,
the darkness of the byre, with God knows what dread thing awaiting him:
behind, a mysterious walker in the night, swift to take him unawares.
The trembling that came upon him was nigh overmastering. At last, with
a great effort, he moved towards the ledge, where he kept a candle.
With shaking hand he struck a light. The empty byre looked ghostly and
fearsome in the flickering gloom. But there was no one, nothing. He was
about to turn, when a rat ran along a loose hanging beam, and stared
at him, or at the yellow shine. He saw its black eyes shining like
peat-water in moonlight.
The creature was curious at first, then indifferent. At least, it began
to squeak, and then make a swift scratching with its forepaws. Once or
twice came an answering squeak: a faint rustling was audible here and
there among the straw.
With a sudden spring Mànus seized the beast. Even in the second in
which he raised it to his mouth, and scrunched its back with his strong
teeth, it bit him severely. He let his hands drop, and grope furtively
in the darkness. With stooping head he shook the last breath out of
the rat, holding it with his front teeth, with back-curled lips. The
next moment he dropped the dead thing, trampled upon it, and burst out
laughing. There was a scurrying of pattering feet, a rustling of straw.
Then silence again. A draught from the door had caught the flame and
extinguished it. In the silence and darkness MacCodrum stood, intent
but no longer afraid. He laughed again, because it was so easy to kill
with the teeth. The noise of his laughter seemed to him to leap hither
and thither like a shadowy ape. He could see it: a blackness within the
darkness. Once more he laughed. It amused him to see the _thing_ leaping
about like that.
Suddenly he turned, and walked out into the moonlight. The lapwing was
still circling and wailing. He mocked it, with loud, shrill _pēē-wēēty,
pēē-wēēty, pēē-wēēt_. The bird swung waywardly, alarmed: its abrupt
cry, and dancing flight, aroused its fellows. The air was full of the
lamentable crying of plovers.
A sough of the sea came inland. Mànus inhaled its breath with a sigh
of delight. A passion for the running wave was upon him. He yearned to
feel green water break against his breast. Thirst and hunger, too, he
felt at last, though he had known neither all day. How cool and sweet,
he thought, would be a silver haddock, or even a brown-backed liath,
alive and gleaming wet with the sea-water still bubbling in its gills.
It would writhe, just like the rat; but then how he would throw his head
back, and toss the glittering thing up into the moonlight, catch it on
the downwhirl just as it neared the wave on whose crest he was, and then
devour it with swift voracious gulps!
With quick jerky steps he made his way past the landward side of the
small thatchroofed cottage. He was about to enter, when he noticed that
the door, which he had left ajar, was closed. He stole to the window and
glanced in.
A single thin, wavering moonbeam flickered in the room. But the flame at
the heart of the peats had worked its way through the ash, and there was
now a dull glow, though that was within the “smooring,” and threw scarce
more than a glimmer into the room.
There was enough light, however, for Mànus MacCodrum to see that a man
sat on the three-legged stool before the fire. His head was bent, as
though he were listening. The face was away from the window. It was his
own wraith, of course--of that Mànus felt convinced. What was it doing
there? Perhaps it had eaten the Holy Book, so that it was beyond his
putting a _rosad_ on it! At the thought, he laughed loud. The shadow-man
leaped to his feet.
The next moment MacCodrum swung himself on to the thatched roof, and
clambered from rope to rope, where these held down the big stones which
acted as dead-weight for the thatch against the fury of tempests. Stone
after stone he tore from its fastenings, and hurled to the ground over
and beyond the door. Then, with tearing hands, he began to burrow an
opening in the thatch. All the time he whined like a beast.
He was glad the moon shone full upon him. When he had made a big enough
hole, he would see the evil thing out of the grave that sat in his room,
and would stone it to death.
Suddenly he became still. A cold sweat broke out upon him. The _thing_,
whether his own wraith, or the spirit of his dead foe, or Gloom Achanna
himself, had begun to play, low and slow, a wild air. No piercing cold
music like that of the _feadan_! Too well he knew it, and those cool
white notes that moved here and there in the darkness like snowflakes. As
for the air, though he slept till Judgment Day and heard but a note of it
amidst all the clamour of heaven and hell, sure he would scream because
of the Dàn-nan-Ròn!
The Dàn-nan-Ròn: the _Roin_! the Seals! Ah, what was he doing there, on
the bitter-weary land! Out there was the sea. Safe would he be in the
green waves.
With a leap he was on the ground. Seizing a huge stone he hurled it
through the window. Then, laughing and screaming, he fled towards the
Great Reef, along whose sides the ebb-tide gurgled and sobbed, with
glistering white foam.
He ceased screaming or laughing as he heard the Dàn-nan-Ròn behind him,
faint, but following; sure, following. Bending low, he raced towards the
rock-ledges from which ran the reef.
When at last he reached the extreme ledge, he stopped abruptly. Out on
the reef he saw from ten to twenty seals, some swimming to and fro,
others clinging to the reef, one or two making a curious barking sound,
with round heads lifted against the moon. In one place there was a surge
and lashing of water. Two bulls were fighting to the death.
With swift stealthy movements Mànus unclothed himself. The damp had
clotted the leathern thongs of his boots, and he snarled with curled lip
as he tore at them. He shone white in the moonshine, but was sheltered
from the sea by the ledge behind which he crouched. “What did Gloom
Achanna mean by that,” he muttered savagely, as he heard the nearing air
change into the “Dance of the Dead.” For a moment Mànus was a man again.
He was nigh upon turning to face his foe, corpse or wraith or living
body, to spring at this thing which followed him, and tear it with hands
and teeth. Then, once more, the hated Song of the Seal stole mockingly
through the night.
With a shiver he slipped into the dark water. Then, with quick, powerful
strokes, he was in the moon-flood, and swimming hard against it out by
the leeside of the reef.
So intent were the seals upon the fight of the two great bulls that they
did not see the swimmer, or, if they did, took him for one of their own
people. A savage snarling and barking and half-human crying came from
them. Mànus was almost within reach of the nearest, when one of the
combatants sank dead, with torn throat. The victor clambered on to the
reef, and leaned high, swaying its great head and shoulders to and fro.
In the moonlight its white fangs were like red coral. Its blinded eyes
ran with gore.
There was a rush, a rapid leaping and swirling, as Mànus surged in among
the seals, which were swimming round the place where the slain bull had
sunk.
The laughter of this long white seal terrified them.
When his knee struck against a rock, MacCodrum groped with his arms and
hauled himself out of the water.
From rock to rock and ledge to ledge he went, with a fantastic dancing
motion, his body gleaming foam-white in the moonshine.
As he pranced and trampled along the weedy ledges, he sang snatches of an
old rune--the lost rune of the MacCodrums of Uist. The seals on the rocks
crouched spell-bound: those slow-swimming in the water stared with brown
unwinking eyes, with their small ears strained against the sound:--
It is I, Mànus MacCodrum,
I am telling you that, you, Anndra of my blood,
And you, Neil my grandfather, and you, and you, and you!
Ay, ay, Mànus my name is, Mànus MacMànus!
It is I myself, and no other,
Your brother, O Seals of the Sea!
Give me blood of the red fish,
And a bite of the flying sgadan;
The green wave on my belly,
And the foam in my eyes!
I am your bull-brother, O Bulls of the Sea,
Bull-better than any of you, snarling bulls!
Come to me, mate, seal of the soft furry womb,
White am I still, though red shall I be,
Red with the streaming red blood if any dispute me!
Aoh, aoh, aoh, arò, arò, ho-rò!
A man was I, a seal am I,
My fangs churn the yellow foam from my lips:
Give way to me, give way to me, Seals of the Sea;
Give way, for I am fëy of the sea
And the sea-maiden I see there,
And my name, true, is Mànus MacCodrum,
The bull-seal that was a man, Arà! Arà!
By this time he was close upon the great black seal, which was still
monotonously swaying its gory head, with its sightless eyes rolling this
way and that. The sea-folk seemed fascinated. None moved, even when the
dancer in the moonshine trampled upon them.
When he came within arm-reach he stopped.
“Are you the Ceann-Cinnidh?” he cried. “Are you the head of this clan of
the sea-folk?”
The huge beast ceased its swaying. Its curled lips moved from its fangs.
“Speak, Seal, if there’s no curse upon you! Maybe, now, you’ll be Anndra
himself, the brother of my father! Speak! _H’st--are you hearing that
music on the shore!_ ’Tis the Dàn-nan-Ròn! Death o’ my soul, it’s the
Dàn-nan-Ròn! Aha, ’tis Gloom Achanna out of the Grave. Back, beast, and
let me move on!”
With that, seeing the great bull did not move, he struck it full in the
face with clenched fist. There was a hoarse strangling roar, and the seal
champion was upon him with lacerating fangs.
Mànus swayed this way and that. All he could hear now was the snarling
and growling and choking cries of the maddened seals. As he fell, they
closed in upon him. His screams wheeled through the night like mad
birds. With desperate fury he struggled to free himself. The great bull
pinned him to the rock; a dozen others tore at his white flesh, till his
spouting blood made the rocks scarlet in the white shine of the moon.
For a few seconds he still fought savagely, tearing with teeth and hands.
Once, only, a wild cry burst from his lips: when from the shore end of
the reef came loud and clear the lilt of the rune of his fate.
The next moment he was dragged down and swept from the reef into the
sea. As the torn and mangled body disappeared from sight, it was amid
a seething crowd of leaping and struggling seals, their eyes wild with
affright and fury, their fangs red with human gore.
And Gloom Achanna, turning upon the reef, moved swiftly inland, playing
low on his _feadan_ as he went.
_THE SIN-EATER_
_NOTE_
It should be explained that the sin-relinquishing superstition--a
superstition probably pre-Celtic, perhaps of the remotest
antiquity--hardly exists to-day, or, if at all, in its crudest guise.
The last time I heard of it, even in a modified form, was not in the
west, but in a remote part of the Aberdeenshire highlands. Then, it was
salt, not bread, that was put on the breast of the dead: and the salt
was thrown away, nor was any wayfarer called upon to perform this or any
other function.
THE SIN-EATER
SIN.
_Taste this bread, this substance: tell me_
_Is it bread or flesh?_
[_The Senses approach._]
THE SMELL.
_Its smell_
_Is the smell of bread._
SIN.
_Touch, come. Why tremble?_
_Say what’s this thou touchest?_
THE TOUCH.
_Bread._
SIN.
_Sight, declare what thou discernest_
_In this object._
THE SIGHT.
_Bread alone._
CALDERON,
_Los Encantos de la Culpa._
A wet wind out of the south mazed and mooned through the sea-mist that
hung over the Ross. In all the bays and creeks was a continuous weary
lapping of water. There was no other sound anywhere.
Thus was it at daybreak: it was thus at noon: thus was it now in the
darkening of the day. A confused thrusting and falling of sounds through
the silence betokened the hour of the setting. Curlews wailed in the
mist: on the seething limpet-covered rocks the skuas and terns screamed,
or uttered hoarse, rasping cries. Ever and again the prolonged note of
the oyster-catcher shrilled against the air, as an echo flying blindly
along a blank wall of cliff. Out of weedy places, wherein the tide sobbed
with long, gurgling moans, came at intervals the barking of a seal.
Inland, by the hamlet of Contullich, there is a reedy tarn called the
Loch-a-chaoruinn.[5] By the shores of this mournful water a man moved.
It was a slow, weary walk that of the man Neil Ross. He had come from
Duninch, thirty miles to the eastward, and had not rested foot, nor
eaten, nor had word of man or woman, since his going west an hour after
dawn.
[5] _Contullich_: _i.e._ Ceann-nan-tulaich, “the end of the
hillocks.” _Loch-a-chaoruinn_ means the loch of the rowan-trees.
At the bend of the loch nearest the clachan he came upon an old woman
carrying peat. To his reiterated question as to where he was, and if the
tarn were Feur-Lochan above Fionnaphort that is on the strait of Iona on
the west side of the Ross of Mull, she did not at first make any answer.
The rain trickled down her withered brown face, over which the thin grey
locks hung limply. It was only in the deep-set eyes that the flame of
life still glimmered, though that dimly.
The man had used the English when first he spoke, but as though
mechanically. Supposing that he had not been understood, he repeated his
question in the Gaelic.
After a minute’s silence the old woman answered him in the native tongue,
but only to put a question in return.
“I am thinking it is a long time since you have been in Iona?”
The man stirred uneasily.
“And why is that, mother?” he asked, in a weak voice hoarse with damp and
fatigue; “how is it you will be knowing that I have been in Iona at all?”
“Because I knew your kith and kin there, Neil Ross.”
“I have not been hearing that name, mother, for many a long year. And as
for the old face o’ you, it is unbeknown to me.”
“I was at the naming of you, for all that. Well do I remember the day
that Silis Macallum gave you birth; and I was at the house on the croft
of Ballyrona when Murtagh Ross--that was your father--laughed. It was an
ill laughing that.”
“I am knowing it. The curse of God on him!”
“’Tis not the first, nor the last, though the grass is on his head three
years agone now.”
“You that know who I am will be knowing that I have no kith or kin now on
Iona?”
“Ay; they are all under grey stone or running wave. Donald your brother,
and Murtagh your next brother, and little Silis, and your mother Silis
herself, and your two brothers of your father, Angus and Ian Macallum,
and your father Murtagh Ross, and his lawful childless wife, Dionaid, and
his sister Anna--one and all, they lie beneath the green wave or in the
brown mould. It is said there is a curse upon all who live at Ballyrona.
The owl builds now in the rafters, and it is the big sea-rat that runs
across the fireless hearth.”
“It is there I am going.”
“The foolishness is on you, Neil Ross.”
“Now it is that I am knowing who you are. It is old Sheen Macarthur I am
speaking to.”
“_Tha mise_ … it is I.”
“And you will be alone now, too, I am thinking, Sheen?”
“I am alone. God took my three boys at the one fishing ten years ago; and
before there was moonrise in the blackness of my heart my man went. It
was after the drowning of Anndra that my croft was taken from me. Then I
crossed the Sound, and shared with my widow sister Elsie McVurie: till
_she_ went: and then the two cows had to go: and I had no rent: and was
old.”
In the silence that followed, the rain dribbled from the sodden bracken
and dripping loneroid. Big tears rolled slowly down the deep lines on
the face of Sheen. Once there was a sob in her throat, but she put her
shaking hand to it, and it was still.
Neil Ross shifted from foot to foot. The ooze in that marshy place
squelched with each restless movement he made. Beyond them a plover
wheeled, a blurred splatch in the mist, crying its mournful cry over and
over and over.
It was a pitiful thing to hear: ah, bitter loneliness, bitter patience of
poor old women. That he knew well. But he was too weary, and his heart
was nigh full of its own burthen. The words could not come to his lips.
But at last he spoke.
“Tha mo chridhe goirt,” he said, with tears in his voice, as he put his
hand on her bent shoulder; “my heart is sore.”
She put up her old face against his.
“’S tha e ruidhinn mo chridhe,” she whispered; “it is touching my heart
you are.”
After that they walked on slowly through the dripping mist, each dumb and
brooding deep.
“Where will you be staying this night?” asked Sheen suddenly, when
they had traversed a wide boggy stretch of land; adding, as by an
afterthought--“Ah, it is asking you were if the tarn there were
Feur-Lochan. No; it is Loch-a-chaoruinn, and the clachan that is near is
Contullich.”
“Which way?”
“Yonder: to the right.”
“And you are not going there?”
“No. I am going to the steading of Andrew Blair. Maybe you are for
knowing it? It is called the Baile-na-Chlais-nambuidheag.”[6]
[6] The farm in the hollow of the yellow flowers.
“I do not remember. But it is remembering a Blair I am. He was Adam, the
son of Adam, the son of Robert. He and my father did many an ill deed
together.”
“Ay, to the stones be it said. Sure, now, there was, even till this weary
day, no man or woman who had a good word for Adam Blair.”
“And why that … why till this day?”
“It is not yet the third hour since he went into the silence.”
Neil Ross uttered a sound like a stifled curse. For a time he trudged
wearily on.
“Then I am too late,” he said at last, but as though speaking to himself.
“I had hoped to see him face to face again, and curse him between the
eyes. It was he who made Murtagh Ross break his troth to my mother, and
marry that other woman, barren at that, God be praised! And they say ill
of him, do they?”
“Ay, it is evil that is upon him. This crime and that, God knows; and the
shadow of murder on his brow and in his eyes. Well, well, ’tis ill to be
speaking of a man in corpse, and that near by. ’Tis Himself only that
knows, Neil Ross.”
“Maybe ay and maybe no. But where is it that I can be sleeping this
night, Sheen Macarthur?”
“They will not be taking a stranger at the farm this night of the nights,
I am thinking. There is no place else for seven miles yet, when there is
the clachan, before you will be coming to Fionnaphort. There is the warm
byre, Neil, my man; or, if you can bide by my peats, you may rest, and
welcome, though there is no bed for you, and no food either save some of
the porridge that is over.”
“And that will do well enough for me, Sheen; and Himself bless you for
it.”
And so it was.
* * * * *
After old Sheen Macarthur had given the wayfarer food--poor food at that,
but welcome to one nigh starved, and for the heartsome way it was given,
and because of the thanks to God that was upon it before even spoon was
lifted--she told him a lie. It was the good lie of tender love.
“Sure now, after all, Neil, my man,” she said, “it is sleeping at the
farm I ought to be, for Maisie Macdonald, the wise woman, will be sitting
by the corpse, and there will be none to keep her company. It is there I
must be going; and if I am weary, there is a good bed for me just beyond
the dead-board, which I am not minding at all. So, if it is tired you are
sitting by the peats, lie down on my bed there, and have the sleep; and
God be with you.”
With that she went, and soundlessly, for Neil Ross was already asleep,
where he sat on an upturned _claar_, with his elbows on his knees, and
his flame-lit face in his hands.
The rain had ceased; but the mist still hung over the land, though in
thin veils now, and these slowly drifting seaward. Sheen stepped wearily
along the stony path that led from her bothy to the farm-house. She
stood still once, the fear upon her, for she saw three or four blurred
yellow gleams moving beyond her, eastward, along the dyke. She knew what
they were--the corpse-lights that on the night of death go between the
bier and the place of burial. More than once she had seen them before the
last hour, and by that token had known the end to be near.
Good Catholic that she was, she crossed herself, and took heart. Then,
muttering
_Crois nan naoi aingeal leam_
_’O mhullach mo chinn_
_Gu craican mo bhonn_
(The cross of the nine angels be about me,
From the top of my head
To the soles of my feet),
she went on her way fearlessly.
When she came to the White House, she entered by the milk-shed that was
between the byre and the kitchen. At the end of it was a paved place,
with washing-tubs. At one of these stood a girl that served in the
house,--an ignorant lass called Jessie McFall, out of Oban. She was
ignorant, indeed, not to know that to wash clothes with a newly dead
body near by was an ill thing to do. Was it not a matter for the knowing
that the corpse could hear, and might rise up in the night and clothe
itself in a clean white shroud?
She was still speaking to the lassie when Maisie Macdonald, the
deid-watcher, opened the door of the room behind the kitchen to see who
it was that was come. The two old women nodded silently. It was not till
Sheen was in the closed room, midway in which something covered with a
sheet lay on a board, that any word was spoken.
“Duit sìth mòr, Beann Macdonald.”
“And deep peace to you, too, Sheen; and to him that is there.”
“Och, ochone, mise ’n diugh; ’tis a dark hour this.”
“Ay; it is bad. Will you have been hearing or seeing anything?”
“Well, as for that, I am thinking I saw lights moving betwixt here and
the green place over there.”
“The corpse-lights?”
“Well, it is calling them that they are.”
“I _thought_ they would be out. And I have been hearing the noise of the
planks--the cracking of the boards, you know, that will be used for the
coffin to-morrow.”
A long silence followed. The old women had seated themselves by the
corpse, their cloaks over their heads. The room was fireless, and was lit
only by a tall wax death-candle, kept against the hour of the going.
At last Sheen began swaying slowly to and fro, crooning low the while. “I
would not be for doing that, Sheen Macarthur,” said the deid-watcher in a
low voice, but meaningly; adding, after a moment’s pause, “_The mice have
all left the house._”
Sheen sat upright, a look half of terror half of awe in her eyes.
“God save the sinful soul that is hiding,” she whispered.
Well she knew what Maisie meant. If the soul of the dead be a lost soul
it knows its doom. The house of death is the house of sanctuary; but
before the dawn that follows the death-night the soul must go forth,
whosoever or whatsoever wait for it in the homeless, shelterless plains
of air around and beyond. If it be well with the soul, it need have no
fear: if it be not ill with the soul, it may fare forth with surety; but
if it be ill with the soul, ill will the going be. Thus is it that the
spirit of an evil man cannot stay, and yet dare not go; and so it strives
to hide itself in secret places anywhere, in dark channels and blind
walls; and the wise creatures that live near man smell the terror, and
flee. Maisie repeated the saying of Sheen; then, after a silence, added--
“Adam Blair will not lie in his grave for a year and a day because of the
sins that are upon him; and it is knowing that, they are, here. He will
be the Watcher of the Dead for a year and a day.”
“Ay, sure, there will be dark prints in the dawn-dew over yonder.”
Once more the old women relapsed into silence. Through the night there
was a sighing sound. It was not the sea, which was too far off to be
heard save in a day of storm. The wind it was, that was dragging itself
across the sodden moors like a wounded thing, moaning and sighing.
Out of sheer weariness, Sheen twice rocked forward from her stool, heavy
with sleep. At last Maisie led her over to the niche-bed opposite, and
laid her down there, and waited till the deep furrows in the face relaxed
somewhat, and the thin breath laboured slow across the fallen jaw.
“Poor old woman,” she muttered, heedless of her own grey hairs and greyer
years; “a bitter, bad thing it is to be old, old and weary. ’Tis the
sorrow, that. God keep the pain of it!”
As for herself, she did not sleep at all that night, but sat between
the living and the dead, with her plaid shrouding her. Once, when Sheen
gave a low, terrified scream in her sleep, she rose, and in a loud voice
cried, “_Sheeach-ad! Away with you!_” And with that she lifted the shroud
from the dead man, and took the pennies off the eyelids, and lifted
each lid; then, staring into these filmed wells, muttered an ancient
incantation that would compel the soul of Adam Blair to leave the spirit
of Sheen alone, and return to the cold corpse that was its coffin till
the wood was ready.
The dawn came at last. Sheen slept, and Adam Blair slept a deeper sleep,
and Maisie stared out of her wan, weary eyes against the red and stormy
flares of light that came into the sky.
When, an hour after sunrise, Sheen Macarthur reached her bothy, she found
Neil Ross, heavy with slumber, upon her bed. The fire was not out, though
no flame or spark was visible; but she stooped and blew at the heart
of the peats till the redness came, and once it came it grew. Having
done this, she kneeled and said a rune of the morning, and after that a
prayer, and then a prayer for the poor man Neil. She could pray no more
because of the tears. She rose and put the meal and water into the pot
for the porridge to be ready against his awaking. One of the hens that
was there came and pecked at her ragged skirt. “Poor beastie,” she said.
“Sure, that will just be the way I am pulling at the white robe of the
Mother o’ God. ’Tis a bit meal for you, cluckie, and for me a healing
hand upon my tears. O, och, ochone, the tears, the tears!”
It was not till the third hour after sunrise of that bleak day in that
winter of the winters, that Neil Ross stirred and arose. He ate in
silence. Once he said that he smelt the snow coming out of the north.
Sheen said no word at all.
After the porridge, he took his pipe, but there was no tobacco. All that
Sheen had was the pipeful she kept against the gloom of the Sabbath. It
was her one solace in the long weary week. She gave him this, and held a
burning peat to his mouth, and hungered over the thin, rank smoke that
curled upward.
It was within half-an-hour of noon that, after an absence, she returned.
“Not between you and me, Neil Ross,” she began abruptly, “but just for
the asking, and what is beyond. Is it any money you are having upon you?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Then how will you be getting across to Iona? It is seven long miles to
Fionnaphort, and bitter cold at that, and you will be needing food, and
then the ferry, the ferry across the Sound, you know.”
“Ay, I know.”
“What would you do for a silver piece, Neil, my man?”
“You have none to give me, Sheen Macarthur; and, if you had, it would not
be taking it I would.”
“Would you kiss a dead man for a crown-piece--a crown-piece of five good
shillings?”
Neil Ross stared. Then he sprang to his feet.
“It is Adam Blair you are meaning, woman! God curse him in death now that
he is no longer in life!”
Then, shaking and trembling, he sat down again, and brooded against the
dull red glow of the peats.
But, when he rose, in the last quarter before noon, his face was white.
“The dead are dead, Sheen Macarthur. They can know or do nothing. I will
do it. It is willed. Yes, I am going up to the house there. And now I am
going from here. God Himself has my thanks to you, and my blessing too.
They will come back to you. It is not forgetting you I will be. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Neil, son of the woman that was my friend. A south wind to
you! Go up by the farm. In the front of the house you will see what you
will be seeing. Maisie Macdonald will be there. She will tell you what’s
for the telling. There is no harm in it, sure: sure, the dead are dead.
It is praying for you I will be, Neil Ross. Peace to you!”
“And to you, Sheen.”
And with that the man went.
* * * * *
When Neil Ross reached the byres of the farm in the wide hollow, he saw
two figures standing as though awaiting him, but separate, and unseen of
the other. In front of the house was a man he knew to be Andrew Blair;
behind the milk-shed was a woman he guessed to be Maisie Macdonald.
It was the woman he came upon first.
“Are you the friend of Sheen Macarthur?” she asked in a whisper, as she
beckoned him to the doorway.
“I am.”
“I am knowing no names or anything. And no one here will know you, I am
thinking. So do the thing and begone.”
“There is no harm to it?”
“None.”
“It will be a thing often done, is it not?”
“Ay, sure.”
“And the evil does not abide?”
“No. The … the … person … the person takes them away, and …”
“_Them?_”
“For sure, man! Them … the sins of the corpse. He takes them away; and
are you for thinking God would let the innocent suffer for the guilty? No
… the person … the Sin-Eater, you know … takes them away on himself, and
one by one the air of heaven washes them away till he, the Sin-Eater, is
clean and whole as before.”
“But if it is a man you hate … if it is a corpse that is the corpse of
one who has been a curse and a foe … if …”
“_Sst!_ Be still now with your foolishness. It is only an idle saying,
I am thinking. Do it, and take the money and go. It will be hell enough
for Adam Blair, miser as he was, if he is for knowing that five good
shillings of his money are to go to a passing tramp because of an old,
ancient silly tale.”
Neil Ross laughed low at that. It was for pleasure to him.
“Hush wi’ ye! Andrew Blair is waiting round there. Say that I have sent
you round, as I have neither bite nor bit to give.”
Turning on his heel, Neil walked slowly round to the front of the house.
A tall man was there, gaunt and brown, with hairless face and lank brown
hair, but with eyes cold and grey as the sea.
“Good day to you, an’ good faring. Will you be passing this way to
anywhere?”
“Health to you. I am a stranger here. It is on my way to Iona I am. But I
have the hunger upon me. There is not a brown bit in my pocket. I asked
at the door there, near the byres. The woman told me she could give me
nothing--not a penny even, worse luck,--nor, for that, a drink of warm
milk. ’Tis a sore land this.”
“You have the Gaelic of the Isles. Is it from Iona you are?”
“It is from the Isles of the West I come.”
“From Tiree? … from Coll?”
“No.”
“From the Long Island … or from Uist … or maybe from Benbecula?”
“No.”
“Oh well, sure it is no matter to me. But may I be asking your name?”
“Macallum.”
“Do you know there is a death here, Macallum?”
“If I didn’t, I would know it now, because of what lies yonder.”
Mechanically Andrew Blair looked round. As he knew, a rough bier was
there, that was made of a dead-board laid upon three milking-stools.
Beside it was a _claar_, a small tub to hold potatoes. On the bier was a
corpse, covered with a canvas sheeting that looked like a sail.
“He was a worthy man, my father,” began the son of the dead man, slowly;
“but he had his faults, like all of us. I might even be saying that he
had his sins, to the Stones be it said. You will be knowing, Macallum,
what is thought among the folk … that a stranger, passing by, may take
away the sins of the dead, and that, too, without any hurt whatever … any
hurt whatever.”
“Ay, sure.”
“And you will be knowing what is done?”
“Ay.”
“With the bread … and the water…?”
“Ay.”
“It is a small thing to do. It is a Christian thing. I would be doing it
myself, and that gladly, but the … the … passer-by who …”
“It is talking of the Sin-Eater you are?”
“Yes, yes, for sure. The Sin-Eater as he is called--and a good Christian
act it is, for all that the ministers and the priests make a frowning at
it--the Sin-Eater must be a stranger. He must be a stranger, and should
know nothing of the dead man--above all, bear him no grudge.”
At that Neil Ross’s eyes lightened for a moment.
“And why that?”
“Who knows? I have heard this, and I have heard that. If the Sin-Eater
was hating the dead man he could take the sins and fling them into the
sea, and they would be changed into demons of the air that would harry
the flying soul till Judgment-Day.”
“And how would that thing be done?”
The man spoke with flashing eyes and parted lips, the breath coming
swift. Andrew Blair looked at him suspiciously; and hesitated, before, in
a cold voice, he spoke again.
“That is all folly, I am thinking, Macallum. Maybe it is all folly, the
whole of it. But, see here, I have no time to be talking with you. If you
will take the bread and the water you shall have a good meal if you want
it, and … and … yes, look you, my man, I will be giving you a shilling
too, for luck.”
“I will have no meal in this house, Anndra-mhic-Adam; nor will I do this
thing unless you will be giving me two silver half-crowns. That is the
sum I must have, or no other.”
“Two half-crowns! Why, man, for one half-crown …”
“Then be eating the sins o’ your father yourself, Andrew Blair! It is
going I am.”
“Stop, man! Stop, Macallum. See here: I will be giving you what you ask.”
“So be it. Is the … Are you ready?”
“Ay, come this way.”
With that the two men turned and moved slowly towards the bier.
In the doorway of the house stood a man and two women; farther in, a
woman; and at the window to the left, the serving-wench, Jessie McFall,
and two men of the farm. Of those in the doorway, the man was Peter, the
half-witted youngest brother of Andrew Blair; the taller and older woman
was Catreen, the widow of Adam, the second brother; and the thin, slight
woman, with staring eyes and drooping mouth, was Muireall, the wife of
Andrew. The old woman behind these was Maisie Macdonald.
Andrew Blair stooped and took a saucer out of the _claar_. This he put
upon the covered breast of the corpse. He stooped again, and brought
forth a thick square piece of new-made bread. That also he placed upon
the breast of the corpse. Then he stooped again, and with that he emptied
a spoonful of salt alongside the bread.
“I must see the corpse,” said Neil Ross simply.
“It is not needful, Macallum.”
“I must be seeing the corpse, I tell you--and for that, too, the bread
and the water should be on the naked breast.”
“No, no, man; it …”
But here a voice, that of Maisie the wise woman, came upon them, saying
that the man was right, and that the eating of the sins should be done in
that way and no other.
With an ill grace the son of the dead man drew back the sheeting.
Beneath it, the corpse was in a clean white shirt, a death-gown long ago
prepared, that covered him from his neck to his feet, and left only the
dusky yellowish face exposed.
While Andrew Blair unfastened the shirt and placed the saucer and the
bread and the salt on the breast, the man beside him stood staring
fixedly on the frozen features of the corpse. The new laird had to speak
to him twice before he heard.
“I am ready. And you, now? What is it you are muttering over against the
lips of the dead?”
“It is giving him a message I am. There is no harm in that, sure?”
“Keep to your own folk, Macallum. You are from the West you say, and we
are from the North. There can be no messages between you and a Blair of
Strathmore, no messages for _you_ to be giving.”
“He that lies here knows well the man to whom I am sending a
message”--and at this response Andrew Blair scowled darkly. He would fain
have sent the man about his business, but he feared he might get no other.
“It is thinking I am that you are not a Macallum at all. I know all of
that name in Mull, Iona, Skye, and the near isles. What will the name of
your naming be, and of your father, and of his place?”
Whether he really wanted an answer, or whether he sought only to divert
the man from his procrastination, his question had a satisfactory result.
“Well, now, it’s ready I am, Anndra-mhic-Adam.”
With that, Andrew Blair stooped once more and from the _claar_ brought a
small jug of water. From this he filled the saucer.
“You know what to say and what to do, Macallum.”
There was not one there who did not have a shortened breath because
of the mystery that was now before them, and the fearfulness of it.
Neil Ross drew himself up, erect, stiff, with white, drawn face. All
who waited, save Andrew Blair, thought that the moving of his lips was
because of the prayer that was slipping upon them, like the last lapsing
of the ebb-tide. But Blair was watching him closely, and knew that it was
no prayer which stole out against the blank air that was around the dead.
Slowly Neil Ross extended his right arm. He took a pinch of the salt and
put it in the saucer, then took another pinch and sprinkled it upon the
bread. His hand shook for a moment as he touched the saucer. But there
was no shaking as he raised it towards his lips, or when he held it
before him when he spoke.
“With this water that has salt in it, and has lain on thy corpse, O Adam
mhic Anndra mhic Adam Mòr, I drink away all the evil that is upon thee …”
There was throbbing silence while he paused.
“… And may it be upon me and not upon thee, if with this water it cannot
flow away.”
Thereupon, he raised the saucer and passed it thrice round the head of
the corpse sun-ways; and, having done this, lifted it to his lips and
drank as much as his mouth would hold. Thereafter he poured the remnant
over his left hand, and let it trickle to the ground. Then he took the
piece of bread. Thrice, too, he passed it round the head of the corpse
sun-ways.
He turned and looked at the man by his side, then at the others, who
watched him with beating hearts.
With a loud clear voice he took the sins.
“_Thoir dhomh do ciontachd, O Adam mhic Anndra mhic Adam Mòr!_ Give me
thy sins to take away from thee! Lo, now, as I stand here, I break this
bread that has lain on thee in corpse, and I am eating it, I am, and in
that eating I take upon me the sins of thee, O man that was alive and is
now white with the stillness!”
Thereupon Neil Ross broke the bread and ate of it, and took upon himself
the sins of Adam Blair that was dead. It was a bitter swallowing, that.
The remainder of the bread he crumbled in his hand, and threw it on the
ground, and trod upon it. Andrew Blair gave a sigh of relief. His cold
eyes lightened with malice.
“Be off with you, now, Macallum. We are wanting no tramps at the farm
here, and perhaps you had better not be trying to get work this side
Iona; for it is known as the Sin-Eater you will be, and that won’t be for
the helping, I am thinking! There: there are the two half-crowns for you
… and may they bring you no harm, you that are _Scapegoat_ now!”
The Sin-Eater turned at that, and stared like a hill-bull. _Scapegoat!_
Ay, that’s what he was. Sin-Eater, Scapegoat! Was he not, too, another
Judas, to have sold for silver that which was not for the selling? No,
no, for sure Maisie Macdonald could tell him the rune that would serve
for the easing of this burden. He would soon be quit of it.
Slowly he took the money, turned it over, and put it in his pocket.
“I am going, Andrew Blair,” he said quietly, “I am going now. I will not
say to him that is there in the silence, _A chuid do Pharas da!_--nor
will I say to you, _Gu’n gleidheadh Dia thu_,--nor will I say to this
dwelling that is the home of thee and thine, _Gu’n beannaicheadh Dia an
tigh!_”[7]
[7] (1) _A chuid do Pharas da!_ “His share of heaven be his.”
(2) _Gu’n gleidheadh Dia thu_, “May God preserve you.” (3) _Gu’n
beannaicheadh Dia an tigh!_ “God’s blessing on this house.”
Here there was a pause. All listened. Andrew Blair shifted uneasily, the
furtive eyes of him going this way and that, like a ferret in the grass.
“But, Andrew Blair, I will say this: when you fare abroad, _Droch caoidh
ort!_ and when you go upon the water, _Gaoth gun direadh ort!_ Ay, ay,
Anndra-mhic-Adam, _Dia ad aghaidh ’s ad aodann … agus bas dunach ort!
Dhonas ’s dholas ort, agus leat-sa!_”[8]
[8] (1) _Droch caoidh ort!_ “May a fatal accident happen to you”
(_lit._ “bad moan on you”). (2) _Gaoth gun direadh ort!_ “May you
drift to your drowning” (_lit._ “wind without direction on you”).
(3) _Dia ad aghaidh_, etc., “God against thee and in thy face … and
may a death of woe be yours … Evil and sorrow to thee and thine!”
The bitterness of these words was like snow in June upon all there. They
stood amazed. None spoke. No one moved.
Neil Ross turned upon his heel, and, with a bright light in his eyes,
walked away from the dead and the living. He went by the byres, whence he
had come. Andrew Blair remained where he was, now glooming at the corpse,
now biting his nails and staring at the damp sods at his feet.
When Neil reached the end of the milk-shed he saw Maisie Macdonald there,
waiting.
“These were ill sayings of yours, Neil Ross,” she said in a low voice, so
that she might not be overheard from the house.
“So, it is knowing me you are.”
“Sheen Macarthur told me.”
“I have good cause.”
“That is a true word. I know it.”
“Tell me this thing. What is the rune that is said for the throwing into
the sea of the sins of the dead? See here, Maisie Macdonald. There is no
money of that man that I would carry a mile with me. Here it is. It is
yours, if you will tell me that rune.”
Maisie took the money hesitatingly. Then, stooping, she said slowly the
few lines of the old, old rune.
“Will you be remembering that?”
“It is not forgetting it I will be, Maisie.”
“Wait a moment. There is some warm milk here.”
With that she went, and then, from within, beckoned to him to enter.
“There is no one here, Neil Ross. Drink the milk.”
He drank; and while he did so she drew a leather pouch from some hidden
place in her dress.
“And now I have this to give you.”
She counted out ten pennies and two farthings.
“It is all the coppers I have. You are welcome to them. Take them, friend
of my friend. They will give you the food you need, and the ferry across
the Sound.”
“I will do that, Maisie Macdonald, and thanks to you. It is not
forgetting it I will be, nor you, good woman. And now, tell me, is it
safe that I am? He called me a ‘scapegoat’; he, Andrew Blair! Can evil
touch me between this and the sea?”
“You must go to the place where the evil was done to you and yours--and
that, I know, is on the west side of Iona. Go, and God preserve you. But
here, too, is a sian that will be for the safety.”
Thereupon, with swift mutterings she said this charm: an old, familiar
Sian against Sudden Harm:--
“Sian a chuir Moire air Mac ort,
Sian ro’ marbhadh, sian ro’ lot ort,
Sian eadar a’ chlioch ’s a’ ghlun,
Sian nan Tri ann an aon ort,
O mhullach do chinn gu bonn do chois ort:
Sian seachd eadar a h-aon ort,
Sian seachd eadar a dha ort,
Sian seachd eadar a tri ort,
Sian seachd eadar a ceithir ort,
Sian seachd eadar a coig ort,
Sian seachd eadar a sia ort,
Sian seachd paidir nan seach paidir dol deiseil ri diugh
narach ort, ga do ghleidheadh bho bheud ’s bho mhi-thapadh!”
Scarcely had she finished before she heard heavy steps approaching.
“Away with you,” she whispered, repeating in a loud, angry tone, “Away
with you! _Seachad!_ _Seachad!_”
And with that Neil Ross slipped from the milk-shed and crossed the yard,
and was behind the byres before Andrew Blair, with sullen mien and swift,
wild eyes, strode from the house.
It was with a grim smile on his face that Neil tramped down the wet
heather till he reached the high road, and fared thence as through a
marsh because of the rains there had been.
For the first mile he thought of the angry mind of the dead man, bitter
at paying of the silver. For the second mile he thought of the evil that
had been wrought for him and his. For the third mile he pondered over all
that he had heard and done and taken upon him that day.
Then he sat down upon a broken granite heap by the way, and brooded deep
till one hour went, and then another, and the third was upon him.
A man driving two calves came towards him out of the west. He did not
hear or see. The man stopped: spoke again. Neil gave no answer. The
drover shrugged his shoulders, hesitated, and walked slowly on, often
looking back.
An hour later a shepherd came by the way he himself had tramped. He was a
tall, gaunt man with a squint. The small, pale-blue eyes glittered out of
a mass of red hair that almost covered his face. He stood still, opposite
Neil, and leaned on his _cromak_.
“_Latha math leat_,” he said at last: “I wish you good day.”
Neil glanced at him, but did not speak.
“What is your name, for I seem to know you?”
But Neil had already forgotten him. The shepherd took out his snuff-mull,
helped himself, and handed the mull to the lonely wayfarer. Neil
mechanically helped himself.
“_Am bheil thu ’dol do Fhionphort?_” tried the shepherd again: “Are you
going to Fionnaphort?”
“_Tha mise ’dol a dh’ I-challum-chille_,” Neil answered, in a low, weary
voice, and as a man adream: “I am on my way to Iona.”
“I am thinking I know now who you are. You are the man Macallum.”
Neil looked, but did not speak. His eyes dreamed against what the other
could not see or know. The shepherd called angrily to his dogs to keep
the sheep from straying; then, with a resentful air, turned to his victim.
“You are a silent man for sure, you are. I’m hoping it is not the curse
upon you already.”
“What curse?”
“Ah, _that_ has brought the wind against the mist! I was thinking so!”
“What curse?”
“You are the man that was the Sin-Eater over there?”
“Ay.”
“The man Macallum?”
“Ay.”
“Strange it is, but three days ago I saw you in Tobermory, and heard you
give your name as Neil Ross to an Iona man that was there.”
“Well?”
“Oh, sure, it is nothing to me. But they say the Sin-Eater should not be
a man with a hidden lump in his pack.”[9]
[9] _i.e._ With a criminal secret, or an undiscovered crime.
“Why?”
“For the dead know, and are content. There is no shaking off any sins,
then--for that man.”
“It is a lie.”
“Maybe ay and maybe no.”
“Well, have you more to be saying to me? I am obliged to you for your
company, but it is not needing it I am, though no offence.”
“Och, man, there’s no offence between you and me. Sure, there’s Iona
in me, too; for the father of my father married a woman that was the
granddaughter of Tomais Macdonald, who was a fisherman there. No, no; it
is rather warning you I would be.”
“And for what?”
“Well, well, just because of that laugh I heard about.”
“What laugh?”
“The laugh of Adam Blair that is dead.”
Neil Ross stared, his eyes large and wild. He leaned a little forward. No
word came from him. The look that was on his face was the question.
“Yes: it was this way. Sure, the telling of it is just as I heard it.
After you ate the sins of Adam Blair, the people there brought out the
coffin. When they were putting him into it, he was as stiff as a sheep
dead in the snow--and just like that, too, with his eyes wide open. Well,
someone saw you trampling the heather down the slope that is in front
of the house, and said, ‘It is the Sin-Eater!’ With that, Andrew Blair
sneered, and said--‘Ay, ’tis the scapegoat he is!’ Then, after a while,
he went on: ‘The Sin-Eater they call him: ay, just so: and a bitter good
bargain it is, too, if all’s true that’s thought true!’ And with that he
laughed, and then his wife that was behind him laughed, and then …”
“Well, what then?”
“Well, ’tis Himself that hears and knows if it is true! But this is the
thing I was told:--After that laughing there was a stillness and a dread.
For all there saw that the corpse had turned its head and was looking
after you as you went down the heather. Then, Neil Ross, if that be your
true name, Adam Blair that was dead put up his white face against the
sky, and laughed.”
At this, Ross sprang to his feet with a gasping sob.
“It is a lie, that thing!” he cried, shaking his fist at the shepherd.
“It is a lie!”
“It is no lie. And by the same token, Andrew Blair shrank back white
and shaking, and his woman had the swoon upon her, and who knows but
the corpse might have come to life again had it not been for Maisie
Macdonald, the deid-watcher, who clapped a handful of salt on his eyes,
and tilted the coffin so that the bottom of it slid forward, and so let
the whole fall flat on the ground, with Adam Blair in it sideways, and as
likely as not cursing and groaning, as his wont was, for the hurt both to
his old bones and his old ancient dignity.”
Ross glared at the man as though the madness was upon him. Fear and
horror and fierce rage swung him now this way and now that.
“What will the name of you be, shepherd?” he stuttered huskily.
“It is Eachainn Gilleasbuig I am to ourselves; and the English of that
for those who have no Gaelic is Hector Gillespie; and I am Eachainn mac
Ian mac Alasdair of Strathsheean that is where Sutherland lies against
Ross.”
“Then take this thing--and that is, the curse of the Sin-Eater! And a
bitter bad thing may it be upon you and yours.”
And with that Neil the Sin-Eater flung his hand up into the air, and then
leaped past the shepherd, and a minute later was running through the
frightened sheep, with his head low, and a white foam on his lips, and
his eyes red with blood as a seal’s that has the death-wound on it.
* * * * *
On the third day of the seventh month from that day, Aulay Macneill,
coming into Balliemore of Iona from the west side of the island, said to
old Ronald MacCormick, that was the father of his wife, that he had seen
Neil Ross again, and that he was “absent”--for though he had spoken to
him, Neil would not answer, but only gloomed at him from the wet weedy
rock where he sat.
The going back of the man had loosed every tongue that was in Iona.
When, too, it was known that he was wrought in some terrible way, if not
actually mad, the islanders whispered that it was because of the sins of
Adam Blair. Seldom or never now did they speak of him by his name, but
simply as “The Sin-Eater.” The thing was not so rare as to cause this
strangeness, nor did many (and perhaps none did) think that the sins of
the dead ever might or could abide with the living who had merely done a
good Christian charitable thing. But there was a reason.
Not long after Neil Ross had come again to Iona, and had settled down
in the ruined roofless house on the croft of Ballyrona, just like a fox
or a wild-cat, as the saying was, he was given fishing-work to do by
Aulay Macneill, who lived at Ard-an-teine, at the rocky north end of the
_machar_ or plain that is on the west Atlantic coast of the island.
One moonlit night, either the seventh or the ninth after the earthing of
Adam Blair at his own place in the Ross, Aulay Macneill saw Neil Ross
steal out of the shadow of Ballyrona and make for the sea. Macneill was
there by the rocks, mending a lobster-creel. He had gone there because of
the sadness. Well, when he saw the Sin-Eater, he watched.
Neil crept from rock to rock till he reached the last fang that churns
the sea into yeast when the tide sucks the land just opposite.
Then he called out something that Aulay Macneill could not catch. With
that he springs up, and throws his arms above him.
“Then,” says Aulay when he tells the tale, “it was like a ghost he was.
The moonshine was on his face like the curl o’ a wave. White! there is no
whiteness like that of the human face. It was whiter than the foam about
the skerry it was; whiter than the moon shining; whiter than … well, as
white as the painted letters on the black boards of the fishing-cobles.
There he stood, for all that the sea was about him, the slip-slop waves
leapin’ wild, and the tide making, too, at that. He was shaking like
a sail two points off the wind. It was then that, all of a sudden, he
called in a womany, screamin’ voice--
“‘I am throwing the sins of Adam Blair into the midst of ye, white dogs
o’ the sea! Drown them, tear them, drag them away out into the black
deeps! Ay, ay, ay, ye dancin’ wild waves, this is the third time I am
doing it, and now there is none left; no, not a sin, not a sin!
“‘O-hi, O-ri, dark tide o’ the sea,
I am giving the sins of a dead man to thee!
By the Stones, by the Wind, by the Fire, by the Tree,
From the dead man’s sins set me free, set me free!
Adam mhic Anndra mhic Adam and me,
Set us free! Set us free!’
“Ay, sure, the Sin-Eater sang that over and over; and after the third
singing he swung his arms and screamed--
“‘And listen to me, black waters an’ running tide,
That rune is the good rune told me by Maisie the wise,
And I am Neil the son of Silis Macallum
By the black-hearted evil man Murtagh Ross,
That was the friend of Adam mac Anndra, God against him!’
“And with that he scrambled and fell into the sea. But, as I am Aulay mac
Luais and no other, he was up in a moment, an’ swimmin’ like a seal, and
then over the rocks again, an’ away back to that lonely roofless place
once more, laughing wild at times, an’ muttering an’ whispering.”
It was this tale of Aulay Macneill’s that stood between Neil Ross and the
isle-folk. There was something behind all that, they whispered one to
another.
So it was always the Sin-Eater he was called at last. None sought him.
The few children who came upon him now and again fled at his approach, or
at the very sight of him. Only Aulay Macneill saw him at times, and had
word of him.
After a month had gone by, all knew that the Sin-Eater was wrought to
madness because of this awful thing: the burden of Adam Blair’s sins
would not go from him! Night and day he could hear them laughing low, it
was said.
But it was the quiet madness. He went to and fro like a shadow in the
grass, and almost as soundless as that, and as voiceless. More and more
the name of him grew as a terror. There were few folk on that wild west
coast of Iona, and these few avoided him when the word ran that he had
knowledge of strange things, and converse, too, with the secrets of the
sea.
One day Aulay Macneill, in his boat, but dumb with amaze and terror for
him, saw him at high tide swimming on a long rolling wave right into
the hollow of the Spouting Cave. In the memory of man, no one had done
this and escaped one of three things: a snatching away into oblivion, a
strangled death, or madness. The islanders know that there swims into the
cave, at full tide, a Mar-Tarbh, a dreadful creature of the sea that some
call a kelpie; only it is not a kelpie, which is like a woman, but rather
is a sea-bull, offspring of the cattle that are never seen. Ill indeed
for any sheep or goat, ay, or even dog or child, if any happens to be
leaning over the edge of the Spouting Cave when the Mar-tarbh roars: for,
of a surety, it will fall in and straightway be devoured.
With awe and trembling Aulay listened for the screaming of the doomed
man. It was full tide, and the sea-beast would be there.
The minutes passed, and no sign. Only the hollow booming of the sea, as
it moved like a baffled blind giant round the cavern-bases: only the rush
and spray of the water flung up the narrow shaft high into the windy air
above the cliff it penetrates.
At last he saw what looked like a mass of sea-weed swirled out on the
surge. It was the Sin-Eater. With a leap, Aulay was at his oars. The boat
swung through the sea. Just before Neil Ross was about to sink for the
second time, he caught him and dragged him into the boat.
But then, as ever after, nothing was to be got out of the Sin-Eater save
a single saying: _Tha e lamhan fuar: Tha e lamhan fuar!_--“It has a
cold, cold hand!”
The telling of this and other tales left none free upon the island to
look upon the “scapegoat” save as one accursed.
It was in the third month that a new phase of his madness came upon Neil
Ross.
The horror of the sea and the passion for the sea came over him at the
same happening. Oftentimes he would race along the shore, screaming wild
names to it, now hot with hate and loathing, now as the pleading of a man
with the woman of his love. And strange chants to it, too, were upon his
lips. Old, old lines of forgotten runes were overheard by Aulay Macneill,
and not Aulay only: lines wherein the ancient sea-name of the island,
_Ioua_, that was given to it long before it was called Iona, or any other
of the nine names that are said to belong to it, occurred again and again.
The flowing tide it was that wrought him thus. At the ebb he would wander
across the weedy slabs or among the rocks: silent, and more like a lost
duinshee than a man.
Then again after three months a change in his madness came. None knew
what it was, though Aulay said that the man moaned and moaned because of
the awful burden he bore. No drowning seas for the sins that could not be
washed away, no grave for the live sins that would be quick till the day
of the Judgment!
For weeks thereafter he disappeared. As to where he was, it is not for
the knowing.
Then at last came that third day of the seventh month when, as I have
said, Aulay Macneill told old Ronald MacCormick that he had seen the
Sin-Eater again.
It was only a half-truth that he told, though. For, after he had seen
Neil Ross upon the rock, he had followed him when he rose, and wandered
back to the roofless place which he haunted now as of yore. Less
wretched a shelter now it was, because of the summer that was come,
though a cold, wet summer at that.
“Is that you, Neil Ross?” he had asked, as he peered into the shadows
among the ruins of the house.
“That’s not my name,” said the Sin-Eater; and he seemed as strange then
and there, as though he were a castaway from a foreign ship.
“And what will it be, then, you that are my friend, and sure knowing me
as Aulay mac Luais--Aulay Macneill that never grudges you bit or sup?”
“_I am Judas._”
* * * * *
“And at that word,” says Aulay Macneill, when he tells the tale, “at that
word the pulse in my heart was like a bat in a shut room. But after a bit
I took up the talk.
“‘Indeed,’ I said; ‘and I was not for knowing that. May I be so bold as
to ask whose son, and of what place?’
“But all he said to me was, ‘_I am Judas._’
“Well, I said, to comfort him, ‘Sure, it’s not such a bad name in
itself, though I am knowing some which have a more home-like sound.’ But
no, it was no good.
“‘I am Judas. And because I sold the Son of God for five pieces of
silver …’
“But here I interrupted him and said,--‘Sure, now, Neil--I mean,
Judas--it was eight times five.’ Yet the simpleness of his sorrow
prevailed, and I listened with the wet in my eyes.
“‘I am Judas. And because I sold the Son of God for five silver
shillings, He laid upon me all the nameless black sins of the world. And
that is why I am bearing them till the Day of Days.’”
* * * * *
And this was the end of the Sin-Eater; for I will not tell the long story
of Aulay Macneill, that gets longer and longer every winter: but only the
unchanging close of it.
I will tell it in the words of Aulay.
* * * * *
“A bitter, wild day it was, that day I saw him to see him no more. It
was late. The sea was red with the flamin’ light that burned up the air
betwixt Iona and all that is west of West. I was on the shore, looking
at the sea. The big green waves came in like the chariots in the Holy
Book. Well, it was on the black shoulder of one of them, just short of
the ton o’ foam that swept above it, that I saw a spar surgin’ by.
“‘What is that?’ I said to myself. And the reason of my wondering was
this: I saw that a smaller spar was swung across it. And while I was
watching that thing another great billow came in with a roar, and hurled
the double spar back, and not so far from me but I might have gripped it.
But who would have gripped that thing if he were for seeing what I saw?
“It is Himself knows that what I say is a true thing.
“On that spar was Neil Ross, the Sin-Eater. Naked he was as the day he
was born. And he was lashed, too--ay, sure, he was lashed to it by ropes
round and round his legs and his waist and his left arm. It was the Cross
he was on. I saw that thing with the fear upon me. Ah, poor drifting
wreck that he was! _Judas on the Cross_: It was his _eric_!
“But even as I watched, shaking in my limbs, I saw that there was life
in him still. The lips were moving, and his right arm was ever for
swinging this way and that. ’Twas like an oar, working him off a lee
shore: ay, that was what I thought.
“Then, all at once, he caught sight of me. Well he knew me, poor man,
that has his share of heaven now, I am thinking!
“He waved, and called, but the hearing could not be, because of a big
surge o’ water that came tumbling down upon him. In the stroke of an
oar he was swept close by the rocks where I was standing. In that
flounderin’, seethin’ whirlpool I saw the white face of him for a moment,
an’ as he went out on the re-surge like a hauled net, I heard these words
fallin’ against my ears,--
“‘_An eirig m’anama_ … In ransom for my soul!’
“And with that I saw the double-spar turn over and slide down the
back-sweep of a drowning big wave. Ay, sure, it went out to the deep sea
swift enough then. It was in the big eddy that rushes between Skerry-Mòr
and Skerry-Beag. I did not see it again--no, not for the quarter of an
hour, I am thinking. Then I saw just the whirling top of it rising out
of the flying yeast of a great, black-blustering wave, that was rushing
northward before the current that is called the Black-Eddy.
“With that you have the end of Neil Ross: ay, sure, him that was called
the Sin-Eater. And that is a true thing; and may God save us the sorrow
of sorrows.
“And that is all.”
_THE NINTH WAVE_
THE NINTH WAVE
The wind fell as we crossed the Sound. There was only one oar in the
boat, and we lay idly adrift. The tide was still on the ebb, and so we
made way for Soa; though, well before the island could be reached, the
tide would turn, and the sea-wind would stir, and we be up the Sound and
at Balliemore again almost as quick as the laying of a net.
As we--and by “us” I am meaning Phadric Macrae and Ivor McLean, fishermen
of Iona, and myself beside Ivor at the helm--as we slid slowly past the
ragged islet known as Eilean-na-h’ Aon-Chaorach, torn and rent by the
tides and surges of a thousand years, I saw a school of seals basking in
the sun. One by one slithered into the water, and I could note the dark
forms, like moving patches of sea-weed, drifting in the green underglooms.
Then, after a time, we bore down upon Sgeir-na-Oir, a barren rock. Three
great cormorants stood watching us. Their necks shone in the sunlight
like snakes mailed in blue and green. On the upper ledges were eight or
ten northern-divers. They did not seem to see us, though I knew that
their fierce light-blue eyes noted every motion we made. The small
sea-ducks bobbed up and down, first one flirt of a little black-feathered
rump, then another, then a third, till a score or so were under water,
and half-a-hundred more were ready at a moment’s notice to follow suit.
A skua hopped among the sputtering weed, and screamed disconsolately at
intervals. Among the myriad colonies of close-set mussels, which gave
a blue bloom like that of the sloe to the weed-covered boulders, a few
kittiwakes and dotterels flitted to and fro. High overhead, white against
the blue as a cloudlet, a gannet hung motionless, seemingly frozen to the
sky.
Below the lapse of the boat the water was pale green. I could see the
liath and saith fanning their fins in slow flight, and sometimes a little
scurrying cloud of tiny flukies and inch-long codling. For two or three
fathoms beyond the boat the waters were blue. If blueness can be alive
and have its own life and movement, it must be happy on these western
seas, where it dreams into shadowy Lethes of amethyst and deep, dark
oblivions of violet.
Suddenly a streak of silver ran for a moment along the sea to starboard.
It was like an arrow of moonlight shot along the surface of the blue and
gold. Almost immediately afterward, a stertorous sigh was audible. A
black knife cut the flow of the water: the shoulder of a pollack.
“The mackerel are coming in from the sea,” said Macrae. He leaned
forward, wet the palm of his hand, and held it seaward. “Ay, the tide has
turned----”
_“Ohrone--achree--an--Srùth-màra!_
_Ohrone--achree--an--Lionadh!”_
he droned monotonously, over and over, with few variations.
“An’ it’s Oh an’ Oh for the tides o’ the sea,
An’ it’s Oh for the flowing tide,”
I sang at last in mockery.
“Come, Phadric,” I cried, “you are as bad as Peter McAlpin’s lassie,
Fiona, with the pipes!”
Both men laughed lightly. On the last Sabbath, old McAlpin had held a
prayer-meeting in his little house in the “street,” in Balliemore of
Iona. At the end of his discourse he told his hearers that the voice of
God was terrible only to the evil-doer, but beautiful to the righteous
man, and that this voice was even now among them, speaking in a thousand
ways, and yet in one way. And at this moment, that elfin granddaughter
of his, who was in the byre close by, let go upon the pipes with so long
and weary a whine that the collies by the fire whimpered, and would have
howled outright but for the Word of God that still lay open on the big
stool in front of old Peter. For it was in this way that the dogs knew
when the Sabbath readings were over, and there was not one that would
dare to bark or howl, much less rise and go out, till the Book was closed
with a loud, solemn bang. Well, again and again that weary quavering moan
went up and down the room, till even old McAlpin smiled, though he was
fair angry with Fiona. But he made the sign of silence, and began: “My
brethren, even in this trial it may be the Almighty has a message for
us----,” when at that moment Fiona was kicked by a cow, and fell against
the board with the pipes, and squeezed out so wild a wail that McAlpin
started up and cried, in the Lowland way that he had won out of his wife,
“_Hoots, havers, an’ a’! come oot o’ that, ye deil’s spunkie!_”
So it was this memory that made Phadric and Ivor smile. Suddenly Ivor
began, with a long rising and falling cadence, an old Gaelic rune of the
Faring of the Tide:
_“Athair, A mhic, A Spioraid Naoimh,_
_Biodh an Tri-aon leinn, a la’s a dh’ oidhche;_
_S’ air chul nan tonn, no air thaobh nam beann!”_
“O Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
Be the Three-in-One with us day and night,
On the crested wave, when waves run high!”
And out of the place in the West
Where Tir-nan-Òg, the Land of Youth
Is, the Land of Youth everlasting,
Send the great tide that carries the sea-weed
And brings the birds, out of the North:
And bid it wind as a snake through the bracken,
As a great snake through the heather of the sea,
The fair blooming heather of the sunlit sea.
And may it bring the fish to our nets,
And the great fish to our lines:
And may it sweep away the sea-hounds
That devour the herring:
And may it drown the heavy pollack
That respect not our nets
But fall into and tear them and ruin them wholly.
And may I, or any that is of my blood,
Behold not the Wave-Haunter who comes in with the Tide;
Or the Maighdeann-màra who broods in the shallows,
Where the sea-caves are, in the ebb:
And fair may my fishing be, and the fishing of those near to me,
And good may this Tide be, and good may it bring:
And may there be no calling in the Flow, this Srùth-màra,
And may there be no burden in the Ebb! _ochone!_
_An ainm an Athar, s’ an Mhic, s’ an Spioraid Naoimh,_
_Biodh an Tri-aon leinn, a la’s a dh’ oidhche,_
_S’ air chul nan tonn, no air thaobh nam beann!_
_Ochone! arone!_
Both men sang the closing lines, with loudly swelling voices, and with a
wailing fervour which no words of mine could convey.
Runes of this kind prevail all over the isles, from the Butt of Lewis to
the Rhinns of Islay: identical in spirit, though varying in lines and
phrases, according to the mood and temperament of the _rannaiche_ or
singer, the local or peculiar physiognomy of nature, the instinctive
yielding to hereditary wonder-words, and other compelling circumstances
of the outer and inner life. Almost needless to say, the sea-maid or
sea-witch and the Wave-Haunter occur in many of those wild runes,
particularly in those that are impromptu. In the Outer Hebrides, the
runes are wild natural hymns rather than Pagan chants: though marked
distinctions prevail there also,--for in Harris and the Lews the folk are
Protestant almost to a man, while in Benbecula and the Southern Hebrides
the Catholics are in a like ascendancy. But all are at one in the common
Brotherhood of Sorrow.
The only lines in Ivor McLean’s wailing song which puzzled me were the
two last which came before “the good words,” “in the name of the Father,
the Son, and the Spirit,” etc.
“Tell me, in English, Ivor,” I said, after a silence, wherein I pondered
the Gaelic words, “what is the meaning of
“‘And may there be no calling in the Flow, this Srùth-màra,
And may there be no burden in the Ebb’?”
“Yes, I will be telling you what is the meaning of that. When the great
tide that wells out of the hollow of the sea, and sweeps towards all
the coasts of the world, first stirs, when she will be knowing that the
Ebb is not any more moving at all, she sends out nine long waves. And
I will be forgetting what these waves are: but one will be to shepherd
the sea-weed that is for the blessing of man; and another is for to wake
the fish that sleep in the deeps; and another is for this, and another
will be for that; and the seventh is to rouse the Wave-Haunter and all
the creatures of the water that fear and hate man; and the eighth no man
knows, though the priests say it is to carry the Whisper of Mary; and the
ninth----”
“And the ninth, Ivor?”
“May it be far from us, from you and from me, and from those of us. An’ I
will be sayin’ nothing against it, not I; nor against anything that is in
the sea. An’ you will be noting that!
“Well, this ninth wave goes through the water on the forehead of the
tide. An’ wherever it will be going it _calls_. An’ the call of it
is--‘_Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow!… Come away, come away,
the sea waits! Follow!_’[10] An’ whoever hears that must arise and go,
whether he be fish or pollack, or seal or otter, or great skua or small
tern, or bird or beast of the shore, or bird or beast of the sea, or
whether it be man or woman or child, or any of the others.”
[10] Ivor, of course, gave these words in the Gaelic, the sound of
which has the sweet wail of the sea in it.
“_Any of the others_, Ivor?”
“I will not be saying anything about that,” replied McLean gravely; “you
will be knowing well what I mean, and if you do not it is not for me to
talk of that which is not to be talked about.
“Well, as I was for saying, that calling of the ninth wave of the Tide
is what Ian Mòr of the hills speaks of as ‘the whisper of the snow that
falls on the hair, the whisper of the frost that lies on the cold face of
him that will never be waking again.’”
“_Death?_”
“It is _you_ that will be saying it.”
“Well,” he resumed, after a moment’s hush, “a man may live by the sea for
five-score years and never hear that ninth wave call in any _Srùth-màra_;
but soon or late he will hear it. An’ many is the Flood that will be
silent for all of us; but there will be one Flood for each of us that
will be a dreadful Voice, a voice of terror and of dreadfulness. And
whoever hears that voice, he for sure will be the burden in the Ebb.”
“Has any heard that Voice, and lived?”
McLean looked at me, but said nothing. Phadric Macrae rose, tautened a
rope, and made a sign to me to put the helm a-lee. Then, looking into
the green water slipping by--for the tide was feeling our keel, and a
stronger breath from the sea lay against the hollow that was growing in
the sail--he said to Ivor:
“You should be telling her of Ivor MacIvor Mhic Niall.”
“Who was Ivor MacNeill?” I said.
“He was the father of my mother,” answered McLean, “and was known
throughout the north isles as Ivor Carminish: for he had a farm on the
eastern lands of Carminish which lie between the hills called Strondeval
and Rondeval, that are in the far south of the Northern Hebrides, and
near what will be known to you as the Obb of Harris.
“And I will now be telling you about him in the Gaelic, for it is more
easy to me, and more pleasant for us all.
“When Ivor MacEachainn Carminish, that was Ivor’s father, died, he left
the farm to his elder son, and to his second son Sheumais. By this time
Ivor was married, and had the daughter who is my mother. But he was a
lonely man, and an islesman to the heart’s core. So … but you will be
knowing the isles that lie off the Obb of Harris: the Saghay, and Ensay,
and Killegray, and, farther west, Berneray; and north-west, Pabaidh; and,
beyond that again, Shillaidh?”
For the moment I was confused, for these names are so common: and I was
thinking of the big isle of Berneray that lies in huge Loch Roag that has
swallowed so great a mouthful of Western Lewis, to the seaward of which
also are the two Pabbays, Pabaidh Mòr and Pabaidh Beag. But when McLean
added, “and other isles of the Caolas Harrish (the Sound of Harris),” I
remembered aright; and indeed I knew both, though the nor’ isles better,
for I had lived near Callernish on the inner waters of Roag.
“Well, Carminish had sheep-runs upon some of these. One summer the gloom
came upon him, and he left Sheumais to take care of the farm, and of
Morag his wife, and of Sheen their daughter; and he went to live upon
Pabbay, near the old castle that is by the Rua Dune on the south-east
of the isle. There he stayed for three months. But on the last night of
each month he heard the sea calling in his sleep; and what he heard was
like ‘_Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow!_… _Come away, come
away, the sea waits! Follow!_’ And he knew the voice of the ninth wave;
and that it would not be there in the darkness of sleep if it were not
already moving towards him through the dark ways of _An Dàn_ (Destiny).
So, thinking to pass away from a place doomed for him, and that he might
be safe elsewhere, he sailed north to a kinsman’s croft on Aird-Vanish
in the island of Taransay. But at the end of that month he heard in his
sleep the noise of tidal waters, and at the gathering of the ebb he heard
‘_Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow!_’ Then once more, when
the November heat-spell had come he sailed farther northward still.
He stopped awhile at Eilean Mhealastaidh, which is under the morning
shadow of high Griomabhal on the mainland, and at other places; till he
settled, in the third week, at his cousin Eachainn MacEachainn’s bothy,
near Callernish, where the Great Stones of old stand by the sea, and hear
nothing for ever but the noise of the waves of the North Sea and the cry
of the sea-wind.
“And when the last night of November had come and gone, and he had heard
in his sleep no calling of the ninth wave of the Flowing Tide, he took
heart of grace. All through that next day he went in peace. Eachainn
wondered often with slant eyes when he saw the morose man smile, and
heard his silence give way now and again to a short, mirthless laugh.
“The two were at the porridge, and Eachainn was muttering his _Bui’cheas
dha’n Ti_, the Thanks to the Being, when Carminish suddenly leaped to his
feet, and, with white face, stood shaking like a rope in the wind.
“‘In the name of the Son, what is it, Ivor Mhic Ivor? What is it,
Carminish?’ cried Eachainn.
“But the stricken man could scarce speak. At last, with a long sigh,
he turned and looked at his kinsman, and that look went down into the
shivering heart like the polar wind into a crofter’s hut.
“‘_What will be that?_’ said Carminish, in a hoarse whisper.
“Eachainn listened, but he could hear no wailing _beann-sith_, no
unwonted sound.
“‘Sure, I hear nothing but the wind moaning through the Great Stones, an’
beyond them the noise of the Flowin’ Tide.’
“‘The Flowing Tide! the Flowing Tide!’ cried Carminish, and no longer
with the hush in the voice. ‘An’ what is it you hear in the Flowing Tide?’
“Eachainn looked in silence. What was the thing he could say? For now he
knew.
“‘Ah, och, och, ochone, you may well sigh, Eachainn Mhic Eachainn! For
the ninth wave o’ the Flowing Tide is coming out o’ the North Sea upon
this shore, an’ already I can hear it calling ‘_Come away, come away, the
sea waits! Follow!_… _Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow!_’
“And with that Carminish dashed out the light that was upon the table,
and leaped upon Eachainn, and dinged him to the floor, and would have
killed him, but for the growing noise of the sea beyond the Stannin’
Stones o’ Callernish, and the woe-weary sough o’ the wind, an’ the
calling, calling, ‘_Come, come away!_ _Come, come away!_’
“And so he rose and staggered to the door, and flung himself out into the
night: while Eachainn lay upon the floor and gasped for breath, and then
crawled to his knees, an’ took the Book from the shelf by his fern-straw
mattress, an’ put his cheek against it, an’ moaned to God, an’ cried like
a child for the doom that was upon Ivor McIvor Mhic Niall, who was of his
own blood, and his own _dall_ at that.
“And while he moaned, Carminish was stalking through the great, gaunt,
looming Stones of the Druids that were here before St Colum and his
_Shona_ came, and laughing wild. And all the time the tide was coming in,
and the tide and the deep sea and the waves of the shore, and the wind in
the salt grass and the weary reeds and the black-pool gale, made a noise
of a dreadful hymn, that was the death-hymn, the going-rune of Ivor the
son of Ivor of the kindred of Niall.
“And it was there that they found his body in the grey dawn, wet and
stiff with the salt ooze. For the soul that was in him had heard the call
of the ninth wave that was for him. So, and may the Being keep back that
hour for us, there was a burden upon that ebb on the morning of that day.
“Also, there is this thing for the hearing. In the dim dark before the
curlew cried at dawn, Eachainn heard a voice about the house, a voice
going like a thing blind and baffled,
_“‘Cha till, cha till, cha till mi tuille!’”_
(I return, I return, I return never more!)
_THE JUDGMENT O’ GOD_
THE JUDGMENT O’ GOD
The wind that blows on the feet of the dead came calling loud across the
Ross as we put about the boat off the Rudhe Callachain. The ebb sucked
at the keel, while, like a cork, we were swung lightly by the swell. For
we were in the strait between Eilean Dubh and the Isle of the Swine; and
that is where the current has a bad pull--the current that is made of the
inflow and the outflow. I have heard that a weary woman of the olden days
broods down there in a cave, and that day and night she weaves a web of
water, which a fierce spirit in the sea tears this way and that as soon
as woven.
So we put about, and went before the east wind: and below the dip of the
sail a-lee I watched Soa grow bigger and gaunter and blacker against the
white wave. As we came so near that it was as though the wash of the sea
among the hollows bubbled in our ears, I saw a large bull-seal lying
half-in half-out of the water, and staring at us with an angry, fearless
look.
Phadric and Ivor caught sight of it almost at the same moment.
To my surprise Macrae suddenly rose and put a rosad upon it. I could hear
the wind through his clothes as he stood by the mast.
The rosad or spell was, of course, in the Gaelic; but its meaning was
something like this--
_Ho, ro, O Ron dubh, O Ron dubh!_
_An ainm an Athar, O Ron!_
_’S an mhic, O Ron!_
_’S an Spioraid Naoimh._
_O Ron-à-mhàra, O Ron dubh!_
Ho, ro, O black Seal, O black Seal!
In the name of the Father,
And of the Son,
And of the Holy Ghost,
O Seal of the deep sea, O black Seal!
Hearken the thing that I say to thee,
I, Phadric MacAlastair MhicCrae,
Who dwell in a house on the Island
That you look on night and day from Soa!
For I put _rosad_ upon thee,
And upon the woman-seal that won thee,
And the women-seal that are thine,
And the young that thou hast;
Ay, upon thee and all thy kin
I put _rosad_, O Ron dubh, O Ron-à-mhàra!
And may no harm come to me or mine,
Or to any fishing or snaring that is of me;
Or to any sailing by storm or dusk,
Or when the moonshine fills the blind eyes of the dead,
No harm to me or mine
From thee or thine!
With a slow swinging motion of his head Phadric broke out again into the
first words of the incantation, and now Ivor joined him; and with the
call of the wind and the leaping and the splashing of the waves was blent
the chant of the two fishermen--
_Ho, ro, O Ron dubh, O Ron dubh!_
_An ainm an Athar, ’s an Mhic, ’s an Spioriad Naoimh,_
_O Ron-à-mhàra, O Ron dubh!_
Then the men sat back, with that dazed look in the eyes I have so often
seen in those of men or women of the Isles who are wrought. No word was
spoken till we came almost straight upon Eilean-na-h’ Aon-Chaorach. Then
at the rocks we tacked, and went splashing up the Sound like a pollack on
a Sabbath noon.[11]
[11] The Iona fishermen, and, indeed, the Gaelic and Scottish
fishermen generally, believe that the pollack (porpoise) knows when
it is the Sabbath, and on that day will come closer to the land,
and be more wanton in its gambols on the sun-warmed surface of the
sea, than on the days when the herring-boats are abroad.
“What was wrong with the old man of the sea?” I asked Macrae.
At first he would say nothing. He looked vaguely at a coiled rope; then,
with hand-shaded gaze, across to the red rocks at Fionnaphort. I repeated
my question. He took refuge in English.
“It wass ferry likely the _Clansman_ would be pringing ta new
minister-body. Did you pe knowing him, or his people, or where he came
from?”
But I was not to be put off thus; and at last, while Ivor stared down the
green-shelving lawns of the sea below us, Phadric told me this thing.
His reluctance was partly due to the shyness which, with the Gael,
almost invariably follows strong emotion, and partly to that strange,
obscure, secretive instinct which is also so characteristically Celtic,
and often prevents Gaels of far apart isles, or of different clans, from
communicating to each other stories or legends of a peculiarly intimate
kind.
“I will tell you what my father told me, and what, if you like, you may
hear again from the sister of my father, who is the wife of Ian Finlay,
who has the farm on the north side of Dûn-I.
“You will have heard of old James Achanna of Eilanmore, off the Ord o’
Sutherland? To be sure, for have you not stayed there. Well, I need not
tell you how he came there out of the south, but it will be news to you
to learn that my elder brother Murdoch was had by him as a shepherd, and
to help on the farm. And the way of that thing was this. Murdoch had gone
to the fishing north of Skye, with Angus and William Macdonald, and in
the great gale that broke up their boat, among so many others, he found
himself stranded on Eilanmore. Achanna told him that, as he was ruined,
and so far from home, he would give him employment; and though Murdoch
had never thought to serve under a Galloway man, he agreed.
“For a year he worked on the upper farm, Ardoch-beag as it was called.
There the gloom came upon him. Turn which way he would, the beauty that
is in the day was no more. In vain, when he came out into the air in the
morning did he cry _Deasiul_! and keep by the sun-way. At night he heard
the sea calling in his sleep. So, when the lambing was over, he told
Achanna that he must go, for he hungered for the sea. True, the wave ran
all around Eilanmore, but the farm was between bare hills and among high
moors, and the house was in a hollow place. But it was needful for him to
go. Even then, though he did not know it, the madness of the sea was upon
him.
“But the Galloway man did not wish to lose my brother, who was a quiet
man, and worked for a small wage. Murdoch was a silent lad, but he had
often the light in his eyes, and none knew of what he was thinking: maybe
it was of a lass, or a friend, or of the ingle-neuk where his old mother
sang o’ nights, or of the sight and sound of Iona that was his own land;
but I’m considerin’ it was the sea he was dreamin’ of, how the waves ran
laughin’ an’ dancin’ against the tide, like lambkins comin’ to meet the
shepherd, or how the big green billows went sweepin’ white an’ ghostly
through the moonless nights.
“So the troth that was come to between them was this: that Murdoch should
abide for a year longer, that is till Lammastide; then that he should no
longer live at Ardoch-beag, but, instead, should go and keep the sheep on
Bac-Mòr.”
* * * * *
“On Bac-Mòr, Phadric,” I interrupted, “for sure, you do not mean _our_
Bac-Mòr?”
“For sure, I mean no other: Bac-Mòr, of the Treshnish Isles, that is
eleven miles north of Iona, and a long four north-west of Staffa: an’
just Bac-Mòr, an’ no other.”
“Murdoch would be near home, there.”
“Ay, near, an’ farther away: for ’tis to be farther off to be near that
which your heart loves but ye can’t get.”
* * * * *
“Well, Murdoch agreed to this, but he did not know there was no boat
on the island. It was all very well in the summer. The herrin’ smacks
lay off Bac-Mòr or Bac-beag many a time; and he could see them mornin’,
noon, an’ night; an’ nigh every day he could watch the big steamer comin’
southward down the Mornish and Treshnish coasts of Mull, and stand by
for an hour off Staffa, or else come northward out of the Sound of Iona
round the Eilean Rabach; and once or twice a week he saw the _Clansman_
coming or going from Bunessan in the Ross to Scarnish in the Isle of
Tiree. Maybe, too, now and again, a foreign sloop or a coasting schooner
would sail by; and twice, at least, a yacht lay off the wild shore, and
put a boat in at the landing-place, and let some laughing folk loose upon
that quiet place. The first time it was a steam yacht, owned by a rich
foreigner, either an Englishman or an American,--I misremember now,--an’
he spoke to Murdoch as though he were a savage, and he and his gay folk
laughed when my brother spoke in the only English he had (an’ sober, good
English it was), an’ then he shoves some money into his hand, as though
both were evil-doers and were ashamed to be seen doing what they did.
“‘An’ what is this for?’ said my brother.
“‘Oh, it’s for yourself, my man, to drink our health with,’ answered the
English lord, or whatever he was, rudely. Then Murdoch looked at him and
his quietly, an’ he said, ‘God has your health an’ my health in the
hollow of His hands. But I wish you well. Only, I am not being your man,
any more than I am for calling _you_, _my_ man; an’ I will ask you to
take back this money to drink with; nor have I any need for money, but
only for that which is free to all, but that only God can give,’ And with
that the foreign people went away, and laughed less. But when the second
yacht came, though it was a yawl and owned by a Glasgow man who had folk
in the west, Murdoch would not come down to the shore, but lay under the
shadow of a rock amid his sheep, and kept his eyes upon the sun that was
moving west out of the south.
“Well, all through the fine months Murdoch stayed on Bac-Mòr, and
thereafter through the early winter. The last time I saw him was at the
New Year. On Hogmanay night my father was drinking hard, and nothing
would serve him but he must borrow Alec Macarthur’s boat, and that he and
our mother and myself, and Ian Finlay and his wife, my sister, should go
out before the quiet south wind that was blowing, and see Murdoch where
he lay sleeping or sat dreaming in his lonely bothy. And, truth, we went.
It was a white sailing that I remember. The moon-shinings ran in and out
of the wavelets like herrings through salmon nets. The fire-flauchts,
too, went speeding about. I was but a laddie then, an’ I noted it all;
an’ the sheet-lightning that played behind the cloudy lift in the
nor’-west.
“But when we got to Bac-Mòr there was no sign of Murdoch at the bothy:
no, not though we called high and low. Then my father and Ian Finlay went
to look, and we stayed by the peats. When they came back, an hour later,
I saw that my father was no more in drink. He had the same look in his
eyes as Ronald McLean had that day last winter when they told him his bit
girlie had been caught by the small-pox in Glasgow.
“I could not hear, or I could not make out, what was said; but I know
that we all got into the boat again, all except my father. And he stayed.
And next day Ian Finlay and Alec Macarthur went out to Bac-Mòr, and
brought him back.
“And from him and from Ian I knew all there was to be known. It was a
hard New Year for all, and since that day, till a night of which I will
tell you, my father brooded and drank, drank and brooded, and my mother
wept through the winter gloamings and spent the nights starin’ into the
peats, wi’ her knittin’ lyin’ on her lap.
“For when they had gone to seek Murdoch that Hogmanay night, they came
upon him away from his sheep. But this was what they saw. There was a
black rock that stood out in the moonshine, with the water all about it;
and on this rock Murdoch lay naked, and laughing wild. An’ every now and
then he would lean forward and stretch his arms out, an’ call to his
dearie. An’ at last, just as the watchers, shiverin’ wi’ fear an’ awe,
were going to close in upon him, they saw a--a--thing--come out o’ the
water. It was long an’ dark, an’ Ian said its eyes were like clots o’
blood; but as to that no man can say yea or nay, for Ian himself admits
it was a seal.
“An’ this thing is true, _an ainm an Athar_! they saw the dark beast o’
the sea creep on to the rock beside Murdoch, an’ lie down beside him,
and let him clasp an’ kiss it. An’ then he stood up, and laughed till the
skin crept on those who heard, and cried out on his dearie and on a’ the
dumb things o’ the sea, an’ the Wave-Haunter an’ the Grey Shadow; an’
he raised his hands, an’ cursed the world o’ men, and cried out to God,
‘_Turn your face to your own airidh, O God, an’ may rain an’ storm an’
snow be between us!_’
“An’ wi’ that, Deirg, his collie, could bide no more, but loupit across
the water, and was on the rock beside him, wi’ his fell bristling like a
hedge-rat. For both the naked man an’ the wet, gleamin’ beast, a great
she-seal out o’ the north, turned upon Deirg, an’ he fought for his
life. But what could the puir thing do? The seal buried her fangs in his
shoulder at last, an’ pinned him to the ground. Then Murdoch stooped,
an’ dragged her off, an’ bent down an’ tore at the throat o’ Deirg wi’
his own teeth. Ay, God’s truth it is! An’ when the collie was stark, he
took him up by the hind legs an’ the tail, an’ swung him round an’ round
his head, an’ whirled him into the sea, where he fell black in a white
splatch o’ the moon.
“An’ wi’ that, Murdoch slipped, and reeled backward into the sea, his
hands gripping at the whirling stars. An’ the thing beside him louped
after him, an’ my father an’ Ian heard a cry an’ a cryin’ that made their
hearts sob. But when they got down to the rock they saw nothing, except
the floating body o’ Deirg.
“Sure it was a weary night for the old man, there on Bac-Mòr by himself,
with that awful thing that had happened. He stayed there to see and hear
what might be seen and heard. But nothing he heard--nothing saw. It was
afterwards that he heard how Donncha MacDonald was on Bac-Mòr three
days before this, and how Murdoch had told him he was in love wi’ a
_maighdeann-mhara_, a sea-maid.
“But this thing has to be known. It was a month later, on the night o’
the full moon, that Ian Finlay and Ian Macarthur and Sheumais Macallum
were upset in the calm water inside the Sound, just off Port-na-Frang,
and were nigh drowned, but that they called upon God and the Son, and so
escaped, and heard no more the laughter of Murdoch from the sea.
“And at midnight my father heard the voice of his eldest son at the door;
but he would not let him in. And in the morning he found his boat broken
and shred in splinters, and his one net all torn. An’ that day was the
Sabbath; so, being a holy day, he took the Scripture with him, an’ he and
Neil Morrison the minister, having had the Bread an’ Wine, went along
the Sound in a boat, following a shadow in the water, till they came to
Soa. An’ there Neil Morrison read the Word o’ God to the seals that lay
baskin’ in the sun; and one, a female, snarled and showed her fangs; and
another, a black one, lifted its head and made a noise that was not like
the barking of any seal, but was as the laughter of Murdoch when he swung
the dead body of Deirg.
“And that is all that is to be said. And silence is best now between you
and any other. And no man knows the judgments o’ God.
“And that is all.”
_GREEN BRANCHES_
_NOTE_
This story is one of the Achanna series, of which “The Anointed Man” is
in _Spiritual Tales_, and “The Dàn-nan-Ròn” is in the present volume--to
which, indeed, “Green Branches” is properly a sequel. (See the note to
“The Dàn-nan-Ròn” about the name ‘Gloom.’ I may add here that the surname
Achanna is that familiar in the South as Hannay.)
GREEN BRANCHES
In the year that followed the death of Mànus MacCodrum, James Achanna saw
nothing of his brother Gloom. He might have thought himself alone in the
world, of all his people, but for a letter that came to him out of the
west. True, he had never accepted the common opinion that his brothers
had both been drowned on that night when Anne Gillespie left Eilanmore
with Mànus. In the first place, he had nothing of that inner conviction
concerning the fate of Gloom which he had concerning that of Marcus; in
the next, had he not heard the sound of the _feadan_, which no one that
he knew played, except Gloom; and, for further token, was not the tune
that which he hated above all others--the Dance of the Dead--for who but
Gloom would be playing that, he hating it so, and the hour being late,
and no one else on Eilanmore? It was no sure thing that the dead had not
come back; but the more he thought of it the more Achanna believed that
his sixth brother was still alive. Of this, however, he said nothing to
anyone.
It was as a man set free that, at last, after long waiting and patient
trouble with the disposal of all that was left of the Achanna heritage,
he left the island. It was a grey memory for him. The bleak moorland
of it, the blight that had lain so long and so often upon the crops,
the rains that had swept the isle for grey days and grey weeks and grey
months, the sobbing of the sea by day and its dark moan by night, its dim
relinquishing sigh in the calm of dreary ebbs, its hollow baffling roar
when the storm-shadow swept up out of the sea, one and all oppressed him,
even in memory. He had never loved the island, even when it lay green and
fragrant in the green and white seas under white and blue skies, fresh
and sweet as an Eden of the sea. He had ever been lonely and weary, tired
of the mysterious shadow that lay upon his folk, caring little for any
of his brothers except the eldest--long since mysteriously gone out of
the ken of man--and almost hating Gloom, who had ever borne him a grudge
because of his beauty, and because of his likeness to and reverent heed
for Alison. Moreover, ever since he had come to love Katreen Macarthur,
the daughter of Donald Macarthur who lived in Sleat of Skye, he had been
eager to live near her; the more eager as he knew that Gloom loved the
girl also, and wished for success not only for his own sake, but so as to
put a slight upon his younger brother.
So, when at last he left the island, he sailed southward gladly. He was
leaving Eilanmore; he was bound to a new home in Skye, and perhaps he
was going to his long-delayed, long dreamed-of happiness. True, Katreen
was not pledged to him; he did not even know for sure if she loved him.
He thought, hoped, dreamed, almost believed that she did; but then there
was her cousin Ian, who had long wooed her, and to whom old Donald
Macarthur had given his blessing. Nevertheless, his heart would have been
lighter than it had been for long, but for two things. First, there was
the letter. Some weeks earlier he had received it, not recognising the
writing, because of the few letters he had ever seen, and, moreover,
as it was in a feigned hand. With difficulty he had deciphered the
manuscript, plain printed though it was. It ran thus:--
“Well, Sheumais, my brother, it is wondering if I am dead, you will
be. Maybe ay and maybe no. But I send you this writing to let you
see that I know all you do and think of. So you are going to leave
Eilanmore without an Achanna upon it? And you will be going to
Sleat in Skye? Well, let me be telling you this thing. _Do not go._
I see blood there. And there is this, too: neither you nor any man
shall take Katreen away from me. _You_ know that; and Ian Macarthur
knows it; and Katreen knows it: and that holds whether I am alive
or dead. I say to you: do not go. It will be better for you and for
all. Ian Macarthur is away in the north-sea with the whaler-captain
who came to us at Eilanmore, and will not be back for three months
yet. It will be better for him not to come back. But if he comes
back he will have to reckon with the man who says that Katreen
Macarthur is his. I would rather not have two men to speak to, and
one my brother. It does not matter to you where I am. I want no
money just now. But put aside my portion for me. Have it ready for
me against the day I call for it. I will not be patient that day:
so have it ready for me. In the place that I am I am content. You
will be saying: why is my brother away in a remote place (I will
say this to you: that it is not farther north than St Kilda nor
farther south than the Mull of Cantyre!), and for what reason? That
is between me and silence. But perhaps you think of Anne sometimes.
Do you know that she lies under the green grass? And of Mànus
MacCodrum? They say that he swam out into the sea and was drowned;
and they whisper of the seal-blood, though the minister is wroth
with them for that. He calls it a madness. Well, I was there at
that madness, and I played to it on my _feadan_. And now, Sheumais,
can you be thinking of what the tune was that I played?
“Your brother, who waits his own day,
“GLOOM.”
“Do not be forgetting this thing: _I would rather not be playing
the ‘Damhsà-na-mairbh.’_ It was an ill hour for Mànus when he
heard the Dàn-nan-Ròn; it was the song of his soul, that; and
yours is the Davsa-na-Mairv.”
This letter was ever in his mind: this, and what happened in the gloaming
when he sailed away for Skye in the herring-smack of two men who lived
at Armadale in Sleat. For, as the boat moved slowly out of the haven,
one of the men asked him if he was sure that no one was left upon the
island; for he thought he had seen a figure on the rocks, waving a black
scarf. Achanna shook his head, but just then his companion cried that at
that moment he had seen the same thing. So the smack was put about, and
when she was moving slow through the haven again, Achanna sculled ashore
in the little coggly punt. In vain he searched here and there, calling
loudly again and again. Both men could hardly have been mistaken, he
thought. If there were no human creature on the island, and if their eyes
had not played them false, who could it be? The wraith of Marcus, mayhap;
or might it be the old man himself (his father), risen to bid farewell to
his youngest son, or to warn him?
It was no use to wait longer; so, looking often behind him, he made his
way to the boat again, and rowed slowly out towards the smack.
_Jerk_--_jerk_--_jerk_ across the water came, low but only too loud for
him, the opening bars of the Damhsa-na-Mairbh. A horror came upon him,
and he drove the boat through the water so that the sea splashed over the
bows. When he came on deck he cried in a hoarse voice to the man next him
to put up the helm, and let the smack swing to the wind.
“There is no one there, Callum Campbell,” he whispered.
“And who is it that will be making that strange music?”
“What music?”
“Sure, it has stopped now, but I heard it clear, and so did Anndra
MacEwan. It was like the sound of a reed-pipe, and the tune was an eerie
one at that.”
“It was the Dance of the Dead.”
“And who will be playing that?” asked the man, with fear in his eyes.
“No living man.”
“No living man?”
“No. I’m thinking it will be one of my brothers who was drowned here, and
by the same token that it is Gloom, for he played upon the _feadan_; but
if not, then … then …”
The two men waited in breathless silence, each trembling with
superstitious fear; but at last the elder made a sign to Achanna to
finish.
“Then … it will be the Kelpie.”
“Is there … is there one of the … the cave-women here?”
“It is said; and you know of old that the Kelpie sings or plays a strange
tune to wile seamen to their death.”
At that moment, the fantastic jerking music came loud and clear across
the bay. There was a horrible suggestion in it, as if dead bodies were
moving along the ground with long jerks, and crying and laughing wild.
It was enough; the men, Campbell and MacEwan, would not now have waited
longer if Achanna had offered them all he had in the world. Nor were
they, or he, out of their panic haste till the smack stood well out at
sea, and not a sound could be heard from Eilanmore.
They stood watching, silent. Out of the dusky mass that lay in the
seaward way to the north came a red gleam. It was like an eye staring
after them with blood-red glances.
“What is that, Achanna?” asked one of the men at last.
“It looks as though a fire had been lit in the house up in the island.
The door and the window must be open. The fire must be fed with wood, for
no peats would give that flame; and there were none lit when I left. To
my knowing, there was no wood for burning except the wood of the shelves
and the bed.”
“And who would be doing that?”
“I know of that no more than you do, Callum Campbell.”
No more was said, and it was a relief to all when the last glimmer of the
light was absorbed in the darkness.
At the end of the voyage Campbell and MacEwan were well pleased to be
quit of their companion; not so much because he was moody and distraught,
as because they feared that a spell was upon him--a fate in the working
of which they might become involved. It needed no vow of the one to the
other for them to come to the conclusion that they would never land on
Eilanmore, or, if need be, only in broad daylight, and never alone.
* * * * *
The days went well for James Achanna, where he made his home at
Ranza-beag, on Ranza Water in the Sleat of Skye. The farm was small but
good, and he hoped that with help and care he would soon have the place
as good a farm as there was in all Skye.
Donald Macarthur did not let him see much of Katreen, but the old man was
no longer opposed to him. Sheumais must wait till Ian Macarthur came back
again, which might be any day now. For sure, James Achanna of Ranza-beag
was a very different person from the youngest of the Achanna-folk who
held by on lonely Eilanmore; moreover, the old man could not but think
with pleasure that it would be well to see Katreen able to walk over the
whole land of Ranza, from the cairn at the north of his own Ranza-Mòr to
the burn at the south of Ranza-beag, and know it for her own.
But Achanna was ready to wait. Even before he had the secret word of
Katreen he knew from her beautiful dark eyes that she loved him. As
the weeks went by they managed to meet often, and at last Katreen told
him that she loved him too, and would have none but him; but that they
must wait till Ian came back, because of the pledge given to him by her
father. They were days of joy for him. Through many a hot noon-tide
hour, through many a gloaming, he went as one in a dream. Whenever he
saw a birch swaying in the wind, or a wave leaping upon Loch Liath, that
was near his home, or passed a bush covered with wild roses, or saw the
moonbeams lying white on the boles of the pines, he thought of Katreen:
his fawn for grace, and so lithe and tall, with sun-brown face and wavy
dark mass of hair and shadowy eyes and rowan-red lips. It is said that
there is a god clothed in shadow who goes to and fro among the human
kind, putting silence between lovers with his waving hands, and breathing
a chill out of his cold breath, and leaving a gulf of deep water flowing
between them because of the passing of his feet. That shadow never
came their way. Their love grew as a flower fed by rains and warmed by
sunlight.
When midsummer came, and there was no sign of Ian Macarthur, it was
already too late. Katreen had been won.
During the summer months, it was the custom for Katreen and two of
the farm girls to go up Maol-Ranza, to reside at the shealing of
Cnoc-an-Fhraoch: and this because of the hill-pasture for the sheep.
Cnoc-an-Fhraoch is a round, boulder-studded hill covered with heather,
which has a precipitous corrie on each side, and in front slopes down to
Lochan Fraoch, a lochlet surrounded by dark woods. Behind the hill, or
great hillock rather, lay the shealing. At each week-end Katreen went
down to Ranza-Mòr, and on every Monday morning at sunrise returned to
her heather-girt eyrie. It was on one of these visits that she endured
a cruel shock. Her father told her that she must marry some one else
than Sheumais Achanna. He had heard words about him which made a union
impossible, and, indeed, he hoped that the man would leave Ranza-beag.
In the end, he admitted that what he had heard was to the effect that
Achanna was under a doom of some kind; that he was involved in a blood
feud; and, moreover, that he was fëy. The old man would not be explicit
as to the person from whom his information came, but hinted that he was a
stranger of rank, probably a laird of the isles. Besides this, there was
word of Ian Macarthur. He was at Thurso, in the far north, and would be
in Skye before long, and he--her father--had written to him that he might
wed Katreen as soon as was practicable.
“Do you see that lintie yonder, father?” was her response to this.
“Ay, lass; and what about the birdeen?”
“Well, when she mates with a hawk, so will I be mating with Ian
Macarthur, but not till then.”
With that she turned, and left the house, and went back to
Cnoc-an-Fhraoch. On the way she met Achanna.
It was that night that, for the first time, he swam across Lochan Fraoch
to meet Katreen.
The quickest way to reach the shealing was to row across the lochlet,
and then ascend by a sheep-path that wound through the hazel copses at
the base of the hill. Fully half-an-hour was thus saved, because of the
steepness of the precipitous corries to right and left. A boat was kept
for this purpose, but it was fastened to a shore-boulder by a padlocked
iron chain, the key of which was kept by Donald Macarthur. Latterly he
had refused to let this key out of his possession. For one thing, no
doubt, he believed he could thus restrain Achanna from visiting his
daughter. The young man could not approach the shealing from either side
without being seen.
But that night, soon after the moon was whitening slow in the dark,
Katreen stole down to the hazel copse and awaited the coming of her
lover. The lochan was visible from almost any point on Cnoc-an-Fhraoch,
as well as from the south side. To cross it in a boat unseen, if any
watcher were near, would be impossible, nor could even a swimmer hope
to escape notice unless in the gloom of night, or, mayhap, in the dusk.
When, however, she saw, half way across the water, a spray of green
branches slowly moving athwart the surface, she knew that Sheumais was
keeping his tryst. If, perchance, any one else saw, he or she would never
guess that those derelict rowan-branches shrouded Sheumais Achanna.
It was not till the estray had drifted close to the ledge, where, hid
among the bracken and the hazel undergrowth, she awaited him, that
Katreen descried the face of her lover, as with one hand he parted the
green sprays and stared longingly and lovingly at the figure he could
just discern in the dim fragrant obscurity.
And as it was this night, so was it on many of the nights that followed.
Katreen spent the days as in a dream. Not even the news of her cousin
Ian’s return disturbed her much.
One day the inevitable meeting came. She was at Ranza-Mòr, and when a
shadow came into the dairy where she was standing she looked up, and saw
Ian before her. She thought he appeared taller and stronger than ever,
though still not so tall as Sheumais, who would appear slim beside the
Herculean Skye man. But as she looked at his close curling black hair,
and thick bull neck, and the sullen eyes in his dark wind-red face, she
wondered that she had ever tolerated him at all.
He broke the ice at once.
“Tell me, Katreen, are you glad to see me back again?”
“I am glad that you are home once more safe and sound.”
“And will you make it my home for me by coming to live with me, as I’ve
asked you again and again.”
“No, as I’ve told you again and again.”
He gloomed at her angrily for a few moments before he resumed.
“I will be asking you this one thing, Katreen, daughter of my father’s
brother: do you love that man Achanna who lives at Ranza-beag?”
“You may ask the wind why it is from the east or the west, but it won’t
tell you. You’re not the wind’s master.”
“If you think I will let this man take you away from me, you are thinking
a foolish thing.”
“And you saying a foolisher.”
“Ay?”
“Ay, sure. What could you do, Ian-mhic-Ian? At the worst, you could do
no more than kill James Achanna. What then? I too would die. You cannot
separate us. I would not marry you, now, though you were the last man on
the world and I the last woman.”
“You’re a fool, Katreen Macarthur. Your father has promised you to me,
and I tell you this: if you love Achanna you’ll save his life only by
letting him go away from here. I promise you he will not be here long.”
“Ay, you promise _me_; but you will not say that thing to James Achanna’s
face. You are a coward.”
With a muttered oath the man turned on his heel.
“Let him beware o’ me, and you, too, Katreen-mo-nighean-donn. I swear it
by my mother’s grave and by St Martin’s Cross that you will be mine by
hook or by crook.”
The girl smiled scornfully. Slowly she lifted a milk-pail.
“It would be a pity to waste the good milk, Ian-gòrach; but if you don’t
go it is I that will be emptying the pail on you, and then you’ll be as
white without as your heart is within.”
“So, you call me witless, do you? _Ian-gòrach!_ Well, we shall be seeing
as to that; and as for the milk, there will be more than milk spilt
because of _you_, Katreen-donn.”
From that day, though neither Sheumais nor Katreen knew of it, a watch
was set upon Achanna.
It could not be long before their secret was discovered; and it was
with a savage joy overmastering his sullen rage that Ian Macarthur knew
himself the discoverer, and conceived his double vengeance. He dreamed,
gloatingly, on both the black thoughts that roamed like ravenous beasts
through the solitudes of his heart. But he did not dream that another
man was filled with hate because of Katreen’s lover--another man who had
sworn to make her his own; the man who, disguised, was known in Armadale
as Donald McLean, and in the north isles would have been hailed as Gloom
Achanna.
There had been steady rain for three days, with a cold raw wind. On
the fourth the sun shone, and set in peace. An evening of quiet beauty
followed, warm, fragrant, dusky from the absence of moon or star, though
the thin veils of mist promised to disperse as the night grew.
There were two men that eve in the undergrowth on the south side of
the lochlet. Sheumais had come earlier than his wont. Impatient for
the dusk, he could scarce await the waning of the afterglow. Surely,
he thought, he might venture. Suddenly his ears caught the sound of
cautious footsteps. Could it be old Donald, perhaps, with some inkling
of the way in which his daughter saw her lover, in despite of all; or,
mayhap, might it be Ian Macarthur tracking him, as a hunter stalking a
stag by the water-pools? He crouched, and waited. In a few minutes he saw
Ian carefully picking his way. The man stooped as he descried the green
branches; smiled as, with a low rustling, he raised them from the ground.
Meanwhile, yet another man watched and waited, though on the farther
side of the lochan, where the hazel copses were. Gloom Achanna half
hoped, half feared the approach of Katreen. It would be sweet to see her
again, sweet to slay her lover before her eyes, brother to him though he
was. But, there was the chance that she might descry him, and, whether
recognisingly or not, warn the swimmer. So it was that he had come there
before sundown, and now lay crouched among the bracken underneath a
projecting mossy ledge close upon the water, where it could scarce be
that she or any should see him.
As the gloaming deepened, a great stillness reigned. There was no breath
of wind. A scarce audible sigh prevailed among the spires of the heather.
The churring of a nightjar throbbed through the darkness. Somewhere
a corncrake called its monotonous _crék-craik_--the dull harsh sound
emphasising the utter stillness. The pinging of the gnats hovering over
and among the sedges made an incessant rumour through the warm sultry air.
There was a splash once as of a fish; then silence. Then a lower but
more continuous splash, or rather wash of water. A slow susurrus rustled
through the dark.
Where he lay among the fern Gloom Achanna slowly raised his head, stared
through the shadows, and listened intently. If Katreen were waiting there
she was not near.
Noiselessly he slid into the water. When he rose it was under a clump of
green branches. These he had cut and secured three hours before. With his
left hand he swam slowly, or kept his equipoise in the water; with his
right he guided the heavy rowan bough. In his mouth were two objects, one
long and thin and dark, the other with an occasional glitter as of a dead
fish.
His motion was scarce perceptible. None the less he was nigh the
middle of the loch almost as soon the other clump of green branches.
Doubtless the swimmer beneath it was confident that he was now safe from
observation.
The two clumps of green branches drew nearer. The smaller seemed a mere
estray--a spray blown down by the recent gale. But all at once the larger
clump jerked awkwardly and stopped. Simultaneously a strange low strain
of music came from the other.
The strain ceased. The two clumps of green branches remained motionless.
Slowly at last the larger moved forward. It was too dark for the swimmer
to see if any one lay hid behind the smaller. When he reached it he
thrust aside the leaves.
It was as though a great salmon leaped. There was a splash, and a narrow
dark body shot through the gloom. At the end of it something gleamed.
Then suddenly there was a savage struggle. The inanimate green branches
tore this way and that, and surged and swirled. Gasping cries came from
the leaves. Again and again the gleaming thing leaped. At the third leap
an awful scream shrilled through the silence. The echo of it wailed
thrice with horrible distinctness in the corrie beyond Cnoc-an-Fhraoch.
Then, after a faint splashing, there was silence once more. One clump of
green branches drifted loosely up the lochlet. The other moved steadily
towards the place whence, a brief while before, it had stirred.
Only one thing lived in the heart of Gloom Achanna--the joy of his
exultation. He had killed his brother Sheumais. He had always hated him
because of his beauty; of late he had hated him because he had stood
between him, Gloom, and Katreen Macarthur, because he had become her
lover. They were all dead now except himself--all the Achannas. He was
“Achanna.” When the day came that he would go back to Galloway there
would be a magpie on the first birk, and a screaming jay on the first
rowan, and a croaking raven on the first fir. Ay, he would be their
suffering, though they knew nothing of him meanwhile! He would be Achanna
of Achanna again. Let those who would stand in his way beware. As for
Katreen: perhaps he would take her there, perhaps not. He smiled.
These thoughts were the wandering fires in his brain while he slowly swam
shoreward under the floating green branches, and as he disengaged himself
from them, and crawled upward through the bracken. It was at this moment
that a third man entered the water from the farther shore.
Prepared as he was to come suddenly upon Katreen, Gloom was startled
when, in a place of dense shadow, a hand touched his shoulder, and her
voice whispered, “_Sheumais, Sheumais!_”
The next moment she was in his arms. He could feel her heart beating
against his side.
“What was it, Sheumais? What was that awful cry?” she whispered.
For answer he put his lips to hers, and kissed her again and again.
The girl drew back. Some vague instinct warned her.
“What is it, Sheumais? Why don’t you speak?”
He drew her close again.
“Pulse of my heart, it is I who love you--I who love you best of all. It
is I, Gloom Achanna!”
With a cry, she struck him full in the face. He staggered, and in that
moment she freed herself.
“You _coward_!”
“Katreen, I …”
“Come no nearer. If you do, it will be the death of you!”
“The death o’ me! Ah, bonnie fool that you are, and is it you that will
be the death o’ me?”
“Ay, Gloom Achanna, for I have but to scream and Sheumais will be here,
an’ he would kill you like a dog if he knew you did me harm.”
“Ah, but if there were no James, or any man, to come between me an’ my
will!”
“Then there would be a woman! Ay, if you overbore me I would strangle you
with my hair, or fix my teeth in your false throat!”
“I was not for knowing you were such a wild-cat! But I’ll tame you yet,
my lass! Aha, wild-cat!” and, as he spoke, he laughed low.
“It is a true word, Gloom of the black heart. I _am_ a wild-cat, and like
a wild-cat I am not to be seized by a fox, and that you will be finding
to your cost, by the holy St Bridget! But now, off with you, brother of
my man!”
“Your man … ha! ha!…”
“Why do you laugh?”
“Sure, I am laughing at a warm white lass like yourself having a dead man
as your lover!”
“A … dead … man?”
No answer came. The girl shook with a new fear. Slowly she drew closer
till her breath fell warm against the face of the other. He spoke at last.
“Ay, a dead man.”
“It is a lie.”
“Where would you be that you were not hearing his goodbye? I’m thinking
it was loud enough!”
“It is a lie … it is a lie!”
“No, it is no lie. Sheumais is cold enough now. He’s low among the weeds
by now. Ay, by now; down there in the lochan.”
“_What_ … you, _you devil_! Is it for killing your own brother you would
be!”
“I killed no one. He died his own way. Maybe the cramp took him. Maybe
… maybe a kelpie gripped him. I watched. I saw him beneath the green
branches. He was dead before he died, I saw it in the white face o’ him.
Then he sank. He’s dead--James is dead. Look here, girl, I’ve always
loved you. I swore the oath upon you--you’re mine. Sure, you’re mine now,
Katreen! It is loving you I am! It will be a south wind for you from this
day, _muirnean mochree_! See here, I’ll show you how I …”
“Back … back … _murderer_!”
“Be stopping that foolishness now, Katreen Macarthur! By the Book, I am
tired of it! I am loving you, and it’s having you for mine I am! And if
you won’t come to me like the dove to its mate, I’ll come to you like
the hawk to the dove!”
With a spring he was upon her. In vain she strove to beat him back. His
arms held her as a stoat grips a rabbit.
He pulled her head back, and kissed her throat till the strangulating
breath sobbed against his ear. With a last despairing effort she screamed
the name of the dead man--“_Sheumais! Sheumais! Sheumais!_” The man who
struggled with her laughed.
“Ay, call away! The herrin’ will be coming through the bracken as soon as
Sheumais comes to your call! Ah, it is mine you are now, Katreen! He’s
dead an’ cold, … an’ you’d best have a living man … an’ …”
She fell back, her balance lost in the sudden releasing. What did it
mean? Gloom still stood there, but as one frozen. Through the darkness
she saw at last that a hand gripped his shoulder--behind him a black mass
vaguely obtruded.
For some moments there was absolute silence. Then a hoarse voice came out
of the dark.
“You will be knowing now who it is, Gloom Achanna!”
The voice was that of Sheumais, who lay dead in the lochan. The murderer
shook as in a palsy. With a great effort, slowly he turned his head. He
saw a white splatch--the face of the corpse. In this white splatch flamed
two burning eyes, the eyes of the soul of the brother whom he had slain.
He reeled, staggered as a blind man, and, free now of that awful clasp,
swayed to and fro as one drunken.
Slowly Sheumais raised an arm, and pointed downward through the wood
towards the lochan. Still pointing, he moved swiftly forward. With a cry
like a beast, Gloom Achanna swung to one side, stumbled, rose, and leaped
into the darkness.
For some minutes Sheumais and Katreen stood, silent, apart, listening to
the crashing sound of his flight--the race of the murderer against the
pursuing shadow of the Grave.
_THE ARCHER_
THE ARCHER
The man who told me this thing was Coll McColl, an islander of Barra, in
the Southern Hebrides. He spoke in the Gaelic, and it was while he was
mending his net; and by the same token I thought at the time that his
words were like herring-fry in that net, some going clean through, and
others sticking fast by the gills. So I do not give it exactly as I heard
it, but in substance as Coll gave it.
He is dead now, and has perhaps seen the Archer. Coll was a poet, and the
island-folk said he was mad: but this was only because he loved beyond
the reach of his fate.
* * * * *
There were two men who loved one woman. It is of no mere girl with the
fair looks upon her I am speaking, but of a woman, that can put the spell
over two men. The name of the woman was Silis: the names of the men were
Sheumas and Isla.
Silis was the wife of Sheumas. So Sheumas had his home, for her breast
was his pillow when he willed it: and he had her voice for daily music:
and his eyes had never any thirst, for they could drink of her beauty by
day and by night. But Isla had no home. He saw his home afar off, and his
joy and his strength failed, because the shining lights of it were not
for him.
One night the two men were upon the water. It was a dead calm, and the
nets had been laid. There was no moon at all, and only a star or two up
in the black corner of the sky. The sea had the wandering flames in it:
and when the big jellyfish floated by, they were like the tide-lamps that
some are for saying the dead bear on their drowned faces.
“Some day I may be telling you a strange thing, Sheumas,” said Isla,
after the long silence there had been since the last net had sent a
little cloud of sparkles up from the gulfs.
“Ay?” said Sheumas, taking his pipe from his mouth, and looking at the
spire of smoke rising just forward o’ the mast. The water slipped by,
soft and slow. It was only the tide feeling its way up the sea-loch, for
there was not a breath of wind. Here and there were dusky shadows: the
boats of the fishermen of Inchghunnais. Each carried a red light, and in
some were green lanterns slung midway up the mast.
No other word was said for a long time.
“And I’m wondering,” said Isla at last: “I’m wondering what you’ll think
of that story.”
Sheumas made no answer to that. He smoked, and stared down into the dark
water.
After a time he rose, and leaned against the mast. Though there was no
light of either moon or lamp, he put his hand above his eyes, as his wont
was.
“I’m thinking the mackerel will be coming this way to-night. This is the
third time I’ve heard the snoring of the pollack … away yonder, beyond
Peter Macallum’s boat.”
“Well, Sheumas, I’ll sleep a bit. I had only the outside of a sleep last
night.”
With that Isla knocked the ash out of his pipe, and lay over against a
pile of rope, and shut his eyes, and did not sleep at all because of the
sick dull pain of the homeless man he was--home, home, home, and Silis
the name of it.
When, an hour or more later, he grew stiff he moved, and opened his eyes.
His mate was sitting at the helm, but the light in his pipe was out,
though he held the pipe in his mouth, and his eyes were wide staring open.
“I would not be telling me that story, Isla,” he said.
Isla answered nothing, but shifted back to where he was before, for all
his cramped leg. He closed his eyes again.
At the full of the tide, in the deep dark hour before the false dawn, as
the first glimmer is called, the glimmer that comes and goes, both men
got up, and moved about, stamping their feet. Each lit his pipe, and the
smoke hung long in little greyish puffs, so dead-still was it.
On the _Brudhearg_, John Macalpine’s boat, young Neil Macalpine sang. The
two men on the _Luath_ could hear his singing. It was one of the strange
songs of Ian Mòr.
O, she will have the deep dark heart, for all her face is fair,
As deep and dark as though beneath the shadow of her hair:
For in her hair a spirit dwells that no white spirit is,
And hell is in the hopeless heaven of that lost spirit’s kiss.
She has two men within the palm, the hollow of her hand:
She takes their souls and blows them forth as idle drifted sand:
And one falls back upon her breast that is his quiet home,
And one goes out into the night and is as wind-blown foam.
And when she sees the sleep of one, ofttimes she rises there
And looks into the outer dark and calleth soft and fair:
And then the lost soul that afar within the dark doth roam
Comes laughing, laughing, laughing, and crying _Home! Home!_
And is there any home for him, whose portion is the night?
And is there any peace for him whose doom is endless flight?
O wild sad bird, O wind-spent bird, O bird upon the wave,
There is no home for thee, wild bird, but in the cold sea-grave!
Sheumas leaned against the tiller of the _Luath_, and looked at Isla. He
saw a shadow on his face. With his right foot the man tapped against a
loose spar that was on the starboard deck.
When the singer ceased, Isla raised his arm and shook menacingly his
clenched fist, over across the water to where the _Brudhearg_ lay.
There were words on his lips, but they died away when Neil Macalpine
broke into a love song, “Mo nighean donn.”
“Can you be telling me, Isla,” said Sheumas, “who was the man that made
that song about the homeless man?”
“Ian Mòr.”
“Ian Mòr of the Hills?”
“Ay.”
“They say he had the shadow upon him?”
“Well, what then?”
“Was it because of love?”
“It was because of love.”
“Did the woman love him?”
“Ay.”
“Did she go to him?”
“No.”
“Was that why he had the mind-dark?”
“Ay.”
“But he loved her, and she loved him?”
“He loved her, and she loved him.”
For a time Sheumas kept silence. Then he spoke again.
“She was the wife of another man?”
“Ay; she was the wife of another man.”
“Did _he_ love her?”
“Yes, for sure.”
“Did _she_ love _him_?”
“Yes … yes.”
“Whom, then, did she love? For a woman can love one man only.”
“She loved both.”
“That is not a possible thing: not the one deep love. It is a lie, Isla
Macleod.”
“Yes, it is a lie, Sheumas Maclean.”
“Which man did she love?”
Isla slowly shook the ash from his pipe, and looked for a second or two
at a momentary quiver in the sky in the north-east.
“The dawn will be here soon now, Sheumas.”
“Ay. I was asking you, Isla, which man did she love?”
“Sure she loved the man who gave her the ring.”
“Which man did she love?”
“O for sure, man, you’re asking me just like the lawyer who has the
trials away at Balliemore on the mainland yonder.”
“Well, I’ll tell you that thing myself, Isla Macleod, if you’ll tell me
the name of the woman.”
“I am not for knowing the name.”
“Was it Mary … or Jessie … or mayhap was it Silis, now?”
“I am not for knowing the name.”
“Well, well, it might be Silis, then?”
“Ay, for sure it might be Silis. As well Silis as any other.”
“And what would the name of the other man be?”
“What man?”
“The man whose ring she wore?”
“I am not remembering that name.”
“Well, now, would it be Padruic, or mayhap Ivor, or … or … perhaps, now,
Sheumas?”
“Ay, it might be that.”
“Sheumas?”
“Ay, as well that as any other.”
“And what was the end?”
“The end o’ what?”
“The end of that loving?”
Isla Macleod gave a low laugh. Then he stooped to pick up the pipe he had
dropped. Suddenly he rose without touching it. He put his heel on the
warm clay, and crushed it.
“That is the end of that kind of loving,” he said. He laughed low again
as he said that.
Sheumas leaned and picked up the trodden fragments.
“They’re warm still, Macleod.”
“Are they?” Isla cried at that, his eyes with a red light coming into
the blue: “then they will go where the man in the song went, the man who
sought his home for ever and ever and never came any nearer than into the
shine of the window-lamps.”
With that he threw the pieces into the dark water that was already
growing ashy-grey.
“’Tis a sure cure, that, Sheumas Maclean.”
“Ay, so they say, … and so, so: ay, as you were saying, Ian Mòr went into
the shadow because of that home he could not win?”
“So they say. And now we’ll take the nets. ’Tis a heavy net that comes
out black, as the sayin’ is. They’re heavy for sure, after this still
night, an’ the wind southerly, an’ the pollack this way an’ that.”
“Well, now, that’s strange.”
“What is strange, Sheumas Maclean?”
“That you should say that thing.”
“And for why that?”
“Oh, just this. Silis had a dream the other night, she had. She dreamed
she saw you standing alone on the _Luath_: and you were hauling hard
a heavy net, so that the sweat ran down your face. And your face was
dead-white pale, she said. An’ you hauled an’ you hauled. An’ someone
beside you that she couldn’t see laughed an’ laughed: an’ …”
With a stifled oath, Isla broke in upon the speaker’s words:
“Why, man alive, you said he, the man, myself it is, was alone on the
_Luath_.”
“Well, Silis saw no one but yourself, Isla Macleod.”
“But she heard some one beside me laughing an’ laughing.”
“So she said. And you were dead-white, she said: with the sweat pouring
down you. An’ you pulled an’ you pulled. Then you looked up at her and
said: ‘_It’s a heavy net that comes up black, as the sayin’ is._’”
Isla Macleod made no answer to that, but slowly began to haul at the
nets. A swift moving light slid hither and thither well away to the
north-east. The sea greyed. A new, poignant, salt smell came up from the
waves. Sail after sail of the smacks ceased to be a blur in the dark:
each lifted a brown shadowy wing against a dusk through which a flood of
myriad drops of light steadily oozed.
Now from this boat, now from that, hoarse cries resounded.
The _Mairi Ban_ swung slowly round before the faint dawn-wind, and
lifted her bow homeward with a little slapping splash. The _Maggie_, the
_Trilleachan_, the _Eilid_, the _Jessie_, and the _Mairi Donn_ followed
one by one.
In silence the two men on the _Luath_ hauled in their nets. The herring
made a sheet of shifting silver as they lay in the hold. As the dawn
lightened, the quivering silver mass sparkled. The decks were mailed with
glittering scales: these, too, gleamed upon the legs, arms, and hands of
the two fishermen.
“Well, that’s done!” exclaimed Sheumas at last. “Up with the helm, Isla,
and let us make for home.”
The _Luath_ forged ahead rapidly when once the sail had its bellyful of
wind. She passed the _Tern_, then the _Jessie Macalpine_, caught up the
big, lumbering _Maggie_, and went rippling and rushing along the wake of
the _Eilid_, the lightest of the Inchghunnais boats.
Off shore, the steamer _Osprey_ met the smacks, and took the herring
away, cran by cran. Long before her screw made a yeast of foam athwart
the black-green inshore water, the _Luath_ was in the little haven and
had her nose in the shingle at Craigard point.
In silence Sheumas and Isla walked by the rock-path to the isolated
cottage where the Macleans lived. The swallows were flitting hither and
thither in front of its low, whitewashed wall, like flying shuttles
against a silent loom. The pale gold of a rainy dawn lit the whiteness
with a vivid gleam. Suddenly Isla stopped.
“Will you be telling me now, Sheumas, which man it was that she loved?”
Maclean did not look at the speaker, though he stopped too. He stared at
the white cottage, and at the little square window with the geranium-pot
on the lintel.
But while he hesitated, Isla Macleod turned away, and walked swiftly
across the wet bracken and bog-myrtle till he disappeared over
Cnoc-na-Hurich, on the hidden slope of which his own cottage stood amid a
wilderness of whins.
Sheumas watched him till he was out of sight. It was then only that he
answered the question.
“I’m thinking,” he muttered slowly, “I’m thinking she loved Ian Mòr.”
“Yes,” he muttered again later, as he took off his sea-soaked clothes,
and lay down on the bed in the kitchen, whence he could see into the
little room where Silis was in a profound sleep: “Yes, I’m thinking she
loved Ian Mòr.”
He did not sleep at all, for all his weariness.
When the sunlight streamed in across the red sandstone floor, and crept
towards his wife’s bed, he rose softly and looked at her. He did not need
to stoop when he entered the room, as Isla Macleod would have had to do.
He looked at Silis a long time. Her shadowy hair was all about her face.
She had never seemed to him more beautiful. Well was she called “Silis
the Fawn” in the poem that some one had made about her.
The poem that some one had made about her? … yes, for sure, how could he
be forgetting who it was. Was it not Isla, and he a poet too, another Ian
Mòr they said.
“Another Ian Mòr.” As he repeated the words below his breath, he bent
over his wife. Her white breast rose and fell, the way a moonbeam does
in moving water.
Then he knelt. When he took the slim white hand in his she did not wake.
It closed lovingly upon his own.
A smile slowly came and went upon the dreaming face--ah, lovely, white,
dreaming face, with the hidden starry eyes. There was a soft flush, and
a parting of the lips. The half-covered bosom rose and fell as with some
groundswell from the beating heart.
“_Silis_,” he whispered. “_Silis_ … _Silis_ …”
She smiled. He leaned close above her lips.
“Ah, heart o’ me,” she whispered, “O Isla, Isla, mo rùn, moghray, Isla,
Isla, Isla!”
Sheumas drew back. He too was like the man in her dream, for it was
dead-white he was, with the sweat in great beads upon his face.
He made no noise as he went back to the hearthside, and took his wet
clothes from where he had hung them before the smoored peats, and put
them on again.
Then he went out.
It was a long walk to Isla Macleod’s cottage that few-score yards: a
long, long walk.
When Sheumas stood on the wet grass round the flagstones he saw that the
door was ajar. Isla had not lain down. He had taken his ash-lute, and was
alternately playing and singing low to himself.
Maclean went close up to the wall, and listened. At first he could hear
no more than snatches of songs.
And is there any home for him whose portion is the night?…
And one goes out into the night and is as wind-blown foam …
O heart that is breaking,
Breaking, breaking,
O for the home that I canna, canna win:
O the weary aching,
The weary, weary aching
To be in the home that I canna, canna win!
Then suddenly the man within put down his ash-lute, and stirred. In a
loud vibrant voice he sang:
O far away upon the hills at the lighting of the dawn
I saw a stirring in the fern and out there leapt a fawn:
And O my heart was up at that and like a wind it blew
Till its shadow hovered o’er the fawn as ’mid the fern it flew.
And _Silis! Silis! Silis!_ was the wind-song on the hill,
And _Silis! Silis! Silis!_ did the echoing corries fill:
My hunting heart was glad indeed, at the lighting of the dawn,
For O it was the hunting then of my bonnie, bonnie Fawn!
For some moments there was dead silence. Then a heavy sigh came from
within the cottage.
Sheumas Maclean at last made a step forward. But before his shadow fell
across the doorway Isla had breathed a few melancholy notes from his
_feadan_, and then began a slow wailing song.
O heart that is breaking,
Breaking, breaking,
O for the home that I canna, canna win:
O the weary aching,
The weary, weary aching
To be in the home that I canna, canna win!
For O the long home-sickness,
The long, long home-sickness!
’Tis slow, slow death for me who long for home, for home!
And a heart is breaking,
I know a heart that’s breaking,
All to be at home at last, to be at home, at home,
O Silis, Silis,
Home, Home, Home!
Sheumas’ face was white and tired. It is weary work with the herring, no
doubt.
He lifted a white stone and rapped loudly on the door. Isla came out, and
looked at him. The singer smiled, though that smiling had no light in it.
It was dark as a dark wave it was.
“Well?” he said.
“May I come in?”
“Come in, and welcome. And what will you be wanting, Sheumas Maclean?”
“Sure, it’s too late to sleep, an’ I’m thinking I would like to hear now
that story you were to tell me.”
The man gave no answer to that. Each looked at the other with luminous
unwinking eyes.
“It will not be a fair thing,” said Isla slowly, at last. “It will not be
a fair thing: for I am bigger and stronger.”
“There is another way, Isla Macleod.”
“Ay?”
“That you or I go to her, and tell her all, and then at the last say:
‘Come with me, or stay with him.’”
“So be it.”
So there and then they drew for chance. The gaining of that hazard was
with Sheumas Maclean.
Without a word Isla turned and went into the house. There he took his
_feadan_, and played low to himself, staring into the red heart of the
smouldering peats. He neither smiled nor frowned; but only once he
smiled, and that was when Sheumas came back, and said _Come_.
So the two walked in silence across the dewy grass. There was a loud
calling of skuas and terns, and the raucous laughing cry of the great
herring-gull, upon the weedy shore of Craigard. The tide bubbled and
oozed through the wilderness of wrack. Farther off there were the
cackling of hens, the lowing of restless kye, and the bleating of the
sheep on the slopes of Melmonach. A shrewd salt air tingled in the
nostrils of the two men.
At the closed door Sheumas made a sign of silence. Then he unfastened the
latch, and entered.
“Silis,” he said in a low voice, but clear.
“Silis, I’ve come back again. Dry your tears, my lass, and tell me once
again--for I’m dying to hear the blessed truth once again--tell me once
again if it’s me you love best, or Isla Macleod.”
“I have told you, Sheumas.”
Without, Isla heard her words and drew closer.
“And it is a true thing that you love me best, and that since the choice
between him and me has come, you choose me?”
“It is a true thing.”
A shadow fell across the room. Isla Macleod stood in the doorway.
Silis turned the white beautiful face of her, and looked at the man she
loved with all her heart and all her soul. He smiled. She was no coward,
his Silis, though he called her his fawn.
“Is--it--a--true--thing, Silis?” he asked slowly.
She looked at Sheumas, then at Isla, then back at her husband.
“It might kill Sheumas,” she muttered below her breath, so that neither
heard her: “it might kill him,” she repeated.
Then, with a swift turn of her eyes, she spoke.
“Yes, it is a true thing, Isla. I abide by Sheumas.”
That was all.
She was conscious of the wave of relief that went into Sheumas’ face. She
saw the rising of a dark, strange tide in the eyes of Isla.
He stared at her. Perhaps he did not hear? Perhaps he was dreaming still?
He was a dreamer, a poet: perhaps he could not understand.
It was a little while wherein to kill a man.
“My Fawn,” he whispered hoarsely, “my wee Fawn!”
But Silis was frozen.
The deadly frost in her eyes slew the dream that the brain of the poet
dreamed.
Then it slew the poet.
Isla, the man, stood awhile, strangely tremulous. She could see his
nerves quivering below his clothes. He was a big, strong giant of a
lover: but he trembled now just like a bit fawn, she thought. His blue
eyes were suddenly grown cloudy and dim. Then the deadly frost slew the
brain that was the altar where the poet offered up his dreams of beauty.
And that is how Isla the dreamer ceased to dream.
He was quite white and still when they found him three days later. He
seemed a giant of a man as he lay, face upward, among the green flags
by the water-edge. The chill starlight of three nights had got into the
quiet of his face.
* * * * *
That night, resumed Coll McColl, after a long pause--that night he, Coll,
was walking in the moonlight across the hither slope of Melmonach.
He stood under a rowan-tree, and watched a fawn leaping wildly through
the fern. While he watched, amazed, he saw a tall shadowy woman pass
by. She stopped, and drew a great bow she carried, and shot an arrow.
It went through the air with a sharp whistling sound--just like
_Silis--Silis--Silis_, Coll said, to give me an idea of it.
The arrow went right through the fawn.
But here was a strange thing. The fawn leapt away sobbing into the night:
while its heart suspended, arrow-pierced, from the white stem of a
silver birch.
“And to this day,” said Coll at the last, “I am not for knowing who that
archer was, or who that fawn. You think it was these two who loved? Well,
’tis Himself knows. But I have this thought of my thinking: that it was
only a vision I saw, and that the fawn was the poor suffering heart
of Love, and that the Archer was the great Shadowy Archer that hunts
among the stars. For in the dark of the morrow after that night I was
on Cnoc-na-Hurich, and I saw a woman there shooting arrow after arrow
against the stars. At dawn she rose and passed away, like smoke, beyond
those pale wandering fires.”
[Illustration]
RE-ISSUE OF
Miss Fiona Macleod’s Stories
Rearranged, and with Additional Tales
VOL. I.
_SPIRITUAL TALES_
Contents
ST BRIDE OF THE ISLES.
THE THREE MARVELS OF IONA.
THE MELANCHOLY OF ULAD.
ULA AND URLA.
THE DARK NAMELESS ONE.
THE SMOOTHING OF THE HAND.
THE ANOINTED MAN.
THE HILLS OF RUEL.
THE FISHER OF MEN.
THE LAST SUPPER.
THE AWAKENING OF ANGUS OGUE.
VOL II.
_BARBARIC TALES_
Contents
THE SONG OF THE SWORD.
THE FLIGHT OF THE CULDEES.
MIRCATH.
THE LAUGHTER OF THE QUEEN.
THE HARPING OF CRAVETHEEN.
AHEZ THE PALE.
SILK O’ THE KINE.
CATHAL OF THE WOODS.
THE WASHER OF THE FORD.
VOL III.
_TRAGIC ROMANCES_
Contents
MORAG OF THE GLEN.
THE DÀN-NAN-RÒN.
THE SIN-EATER.
THE NINTH WAVE.
THE JUDGMENT O’ GOD.
GREEN BRANCHES.
THE ARCHER.
BY FIONA MACLEOD.
PHARAIS: A Romance of the Isles.
THE MOUNTAIN LOVERS.
THE SIN-EATER: and other Tales.
THE WASHER OF THE FORD.
GREEN FIRE: A Romance.
FROM THE HILLS OF DREAM: Mountain Songs and Island Runes.
“_Not beauty alone, but that element of strangeness in beauty which Mr
Pater rightly discerned as the inmost spirit of romantic art--it is this
which gives to Miss Macleod’s work its peculiar æsthetic charm. But apart
from and beyond all those qualities which one calls artistic, there is
a poignant human cry, as of a voice with tears in it, speaking from out
a gloaming which never lightens to day, which will compel and hold the
hearing of many who to the claims of art as such are wholly or largely
unresponsive._” (JAMES ASHCROFT NOBLE, in THE NEW AGE.)
“_Of the products of what has been called the Celtic Renascence_, ‘The
Sin-Eater’ _and its companion Stories seem to us the most remarkable.
They are of imagination and a certain terrible beauty all compact._”
(From an article in THE DAILY CHRONICLE on “The Gaelic Glamour.”)
“_For sheer originality, other qualities apart, her tales are as
remarkable, perhaps, as anything we have had of the kind since Mr Kipling
appeared … Their local colour, their idiom, their whole method, combine
to produce an effect which may be unaccustomed, but is therefore the more
irresistible. They provide as original an entertainment as we are likely
to find in this lingering century, and they suggest a new romance among
the potential things of the century to come._” (THE ACADEMY.)
[Illustration]
PRINTED BY W. H. WHITE AND CO. LTD.
EDINBURGH RIVERSIDE PRESS
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