On a day of the days, Colum was walking alone by the sea-sh.o.r.e. The monks were at the hoe or the spade, and some milking the kye, and some at the fishing. They say it was on the first day of the _Faoilleach Geamhraidh_, the day that is called _Am Fheill Brighde_, and that they call Candlemas over yonder.
The holy man had wandered on to where the rocks are, opposite to Soa. He was praying and praying; and it is said that whenever he prayed aloud, the barren egg in the nest would quicken, and the blighted bud unfold, and the b.u.t.terfly break its shroud.
Of a sudden he came upon a great black seal, lying silent on the rocks, with wicked eyes.
"My blessing upon you, O Rn," he said, with the good kind courteousness that was his. "_Droch spadadh ort_," answered the seal, "A bad end to you, Colum of the Gown."
"Sure now," said Colum angrily, "I am knowing by that curse that you are no friend of Christ, but of the evil pagan faith out of the north. For here I am known ever as Colum the White, or as Colum the Saint; and it is only the Picts and the wanton Normen who deride me because of the holy white robe I wear."
"Well, well," replied the seal, speaking the good Gaelic as though it were the tongue of the deep sea, as G.o.d knows it may be for all you, I, or the blind wind can say; "well, well, let that thing be: it"s a wave-way here or a wave-way there. But now, if it is a druid you are, whether of fire or of Christ, be telling me where my woman is, and where my little daughter."
At this, Colum looked at him for a long while. Then he knew.
"It is a man you were once, O Rn?"
"Maybe ay and maybe no."
"And with that thick Gaelic that you have, it will be out of the north isles you come?"
"That is a true thing."
"Now I am for knowing at last who and what you are. You are one of the race of Odrum the Pagan?"
"Well, I am not denying it, Colum. And what is more, I am Angus MacOdrum, Aonghas mac Torcall mhic Odrum, and the name I am known by is Black Angus."
"A fitting name too," said Colum the Holy, "because of the black sin in your heart, and the black end G.o.d has in store for you."
At that Black Angus laughed.
"Why is the laughter upon you, Man-Seal?"
"Well, it is because of the good company I"ll be having. But, now, give me the word: Are you for having seen or heard of a woman called Kirsteen M"Vurich?"
"Kirsteen--Kirsteen--that is the good name of a nun it is, and no sea-wanton!"
"O, a name here or a name there is soft sand. And so you cannot be for telling me where my woman is?"
"No."
"Then a stake for your belly, and nails through your hands, thirst on your tongue, and the corbies at your eyne!"
And, with that, Black Angus louped into the green water, and the hoa.r.s.e wild laugh of him sprang into the air and fell dead upon the sh.o.r.e like a wind-spent mew.
Colum went slowly back to the brethren, brooding deep. "G.o.d is good," he said in a low voice, again and again; and each time that he spoke there came a daisy into the gra.s.s, or a bird rose, with song to it for the first time, wonderful and sweet to hear.
As he drew near to the House of G.o.d he met Murtagh, an old monk of the ancient race of the isles.
"Who is Kirsteen M"Vurich, Murtagh?" he asked.
"She was a good servant of Christ, she was, in the south isles, O Colum, till Black Angus won her to the sea."
"And when was that?"
"Nigh upon a thousand years ago."
"But can mortal sin live as long as that?"
"Ay, it endureth. Long, long ago, before Oisn sang, before Fionn, before Cuchullin, was a glorious great prince, and in the days when the Tuatha-de-Danann were sole lords in all green Banba, Black Angus made the woman Kirsteen M"Vurich leave the place of prayer and go down to the sea-sh.o.r.e, and there he leaped upon her and made her his prey, and she followed him into the sea."
"And is death above her now?"
"No. She is the woman that weaves the sea-spells at the wild place out yonder that is known as Earraid: she that is called the sea-witch."
"Then why was Black Angus for the seeking her here and the seeking her there?"
"It is the Doom. It is Adam"s first wife she is, that sea-witch over there, where the foam is ever in the sharp fangs of the rocks."
"And who will he be?"
"His body is the body of Angus, the son of Torcall of the race of Odrum, for all that a seal he is to the seeming; but the soul of him is Judas."
"Black Judas, Murtagh?"
"Ay, Black Judas, Colum."
But with that, Ivor Macrae rose abruptly from before the fire, saying that he would speak no more that night. And truly enough there was a wild, lone, desolate cry in the wind, and a slapping of the waves one upon the other with an eerie laughing sound, and the screaming of a seamew that was like a human thing.
So I touched the shawl of his mother, who looked up with startled eyes and said, "G.o.d be with us"; and then I opened the door, and the salt smell of the wrack was in my nostrils, and the great drowning blackness of the night.
When I was a child I used to throw offerings--small coins, flowers, sh.e.l.ls, even a newly caught trout, once a treasured flint arrow-head--into the sea-loch by which we lived. My Hebridean nurse had often told me of Shony, a mysterious sea-G.o.d, and I know I spent much time in wasted adoration: a fearful worship, not unmixed with disappointment and some anger. Not once did I see him. I was frighted time after time, but the sudden cry of a heron, or the snort of a pollack chasing the mackerel, or the abrupt uplifting of a seal"s head, became over-familiar, and I desired terror, and could not find it by the sh.o.r.e. Inland, after dusk, there was always the mysterious mult.i.tude of shadow. There too, I could hear the wind leaping and growling. But by the sh.o.r.e I never knew any dread, even in the darkest night. The sound and company of the sea washed away all fears.
I was amused not long ago to hear a little girl singing, as she ran wading through the foam of a troubled sunlit sea, as it broke on those wonderful white sands of Iona--
"Shanny, Shanny, Shanny, Catch my feet and tickle my toes!
And if you can, Shanny, Shanny, Shanny, I"ll go with you where no one knows!"
I have no doubt this daintier Shanny was my old friend Shony, whose more terrifying way was to clutch boats by the keel and drown the sailors, and make a death-necklace of their teeth. An evil Shony; for once he netted a young girl who was swimming in a loch, and when she would not give him her love he tied her to a rock, and to this day her long brown hair may be seen floating in the shallow green wave at the ebb of the tide. One need not name the place!
The Shanny song recalls to me an old Gaelic alphabet rhyme, wherein a _Maigh-deann-M"hara_, or Mermaid, stood for M, and a Suire (also a mermaid) stood for S; and my long perplexities as to whether I would know a shuera from a midianmara when I saw either. It also recalls to me that it was from a young schoolmaster priest, who had come back from Ireland to die at home, that I first heard of the Beth-Luis-Nuin, the Gaelic equivalent of "the A B C." Every letter in the Gaelic alphabet is represented by a tree, and Beithe and Luis and Nuin are the Birch, the Rowan, and the Ash. The reason why the alphabet is called the Beth-Luis-Nuin is that B, L, N, and not A, B, C, are its first three letters. It consists of eighteen letters--and in ancient Gaelic seventeen, for H (the Uath, or Whitethorn) does not exist there, I believe: and these run, B, L, N, F, S (H), D, T, C, M, G, P, R, A, O, U, E, I--each letter represented by the name of a tree, Birch, Rowan, Ash, etc. Properly, there is no C in Gaelic, for though the letter C is common, it has always the sound of K.
Since this page first appeared I have had so many letters about the Gaelic alphabet of to-day that I take the opportunity to add a few lines. To-day as of old all the letters of the Gaelic alphabet are called after trees, from the oak to the shrub-like elder, with the exception of G, T, and U, which stand for Ivy, Furze and Heather. It no longer runs B, L, N, etc., but in sequence follows the familiar and among western peoples, universal A, B, C, etc. It is, however, short of our Roman alphabet by eight letters J, K, Q, V, W, X, Y and Z. On the other hand, each of these is represented, either by some other letter having a like value or by a combination: thus K is identical with C, which does not exist in Gaelic as a soft sound any more than it does in Greek, but only as the C in English words such as _cat_ or _cart_, or in combination with h as a gutteral as in _loch_--while v as common a sound in Gaelic as the hiss of s in English exists in almost every second or third word as _bh_ or _mh_. The Gaelic A, B, C of to-day, then, runs as follows: Ailm, Beite, Coll, Durr, Eagh, Fearn, Gath, Huath, Togh, Luis, Muin, Nuin, Oir, Peith, Ruis, Suil, Teine, Ur--which again is equivalent to saying Elm, Birch, Hazel, Oak, Aspen, Alder, Ivy, Whitethorn, Yew, Rowan or Quicken, Vine, Ash, Spindle-tree, Pine, Elder, Willow, Furze, Heath.
The little girl who knew so much about Shanny knew nothing about her own A B C. But I owe her a debt, since through her I came upon my good friend "Gunainm." From her I heard first, there on Iona, on a chance visit of a few summer days, of two of the most beautiful of the ancient Gaelic hymns, the Fiacc Hymn and the Hymn of Broccan. My friend had delineated them as missals, with a strangely beautiful design to each.
How often I have thought of one, ill.u.s.trative of a line in the Fiacc Hymn: "There was pagan darkness in Eire in those days: the people adored Faerie." In the Broccan Hymn (composed by one Broccan in the time of Lugaid, son of Loegaire, A.D. 500) is one particularly lovely line: "Victorious Bride (Briget) loved not this vain world: here, ever, she sat the seat of a bird on a cliff."