The wail, and the sudden break in the second line, had always upon me an effect of inexpressible pathos. Often that sad wind-song has been in my ears, when I have been thinking of many things that are pa.s.sed and are pa.s.sing.
I know not what made Silis so abruptly begin to sing, and with that wailing couplet only, or why she lapsed at once into silence again.
Indeed, my remembrance of the incident at all is due to the circ.u.mstance that shortly after Silis had turned her face to the peats again, a knock came to the door, and then Seumas Dhu entered.
"Why do you sing that lament, Silis, sister of my father?" he asked, after he had seated himself beside me, and spread his thin hands against the peat glow, so that the flame seemed to enter within the flesh.
Silis turned to her nephew, and looked at him, as I thought, questioningly. But she did not speak. He, too, said nothing more, either forgetful of his question, or content with what he had learned or failed to learn through her silence.
The wind had come down from the corries before Seumas rose to go. He said he was not returning to Alltnalee, but was going upon the hill, for a big herd of deer had come over the ridge of Mel Mr. Seumas, though skilled in all hill and forest craft, was not a sure shot, as was his kinsman and my host, Alasdair McIan.
"You will need help," I remember Alasdair Ardoch saying mockingly, adding, "_Co dhiubh is fhearr let mise thoir sealladh na faileadh dhiubh?_"--that is to say, Whether would you rather me to deprive them of sight or smell?
This is a familiar saying among the old sportsmen in my country, where it is believed that a few favoured individuals have the power to deprive deer of either sight or smell, as the occasion suggests.
"_Dhuit ciar nan carn!_--The gloom of the rocks be upon you!" replied Seumas, sullenly: "mayhap the hour is come when the red stag will sniff at my nostrils."
With that dark saying he went. None of us saw him again alive.
Was it a forewarning? I have often wondered. Or had he sight of the shadow?
It was three days after this, and shortly after sunrise, that, on crossing the south slope of Mel Mr with Alasdair Ardoch, we came suddenly upon the body of Seumas, half submerged in a purple billow of heather. It did not, at the moment, occur to me that he was dead. I had not known that his prolonged absence had been noted, or that he had been searched for. As a matter of fact, he must have died immediately before our approach, for his limbs were still loose, and he lay as a sleeper lies.
Alasdair kneeled and raised his kinsman"s head. When it lay upon the purple tussock, the warmth and glow from the sunlit ling gave a fugitive deceptive light to the pale face. I know not whether the sun can have any chemic action upon the dead. But it seemed to me that a dream rose to the face of Seumas, like one of those submarine flowers that are said to rise at times and be visible for a moment in the hollow of a wave.
The dream, the light, waned; and there was a great stillness and white peace where the trouble had been. "It is the Smoothing of the Hand,"
said Alasdair McIan, in a hushed voice.
Often I had heard this lovely phrase in the Western Isles, but always as applied to sleep. When a fretful child suddenly falls into quietude and deep slumber, an isleswoman will say that it is because of the Smoothing of the Hand. It is always a profound sleep, and there are some who hold it almost as a sacred thing, and never to be disturbed.
So, thinking only of this, I whispered to my friend to come away; that Seumas was dead weary with hunting upon the hills; that he would awake in due time.
McIan looked at me, hesitated, and said nothing. I saw him glance around. A few yards away, beside a great boulder in the heather, a small rowan stood, flickering its feather-like shadows across the white wool of a ewe resting underneath. He moved thitherward, slowly, plucked a branch heavy with scarlet berries, and then, having returned, laid it across the breast of his kinsman.
I knew now what was that pa.s.sing of the trouble in the face of Seumas Dhu, what that sudden light was, that calming of the sea, that ineffable quietude. It was the Smoothing of the Hand.
FOOTNOTE:
[10] p.r.o.nounce mogh-r[=a]y, mogh-r[=e]e (my heart"s delight--_lit._ my dear one, my heart).
THE WHITE FEVER
One night, before the peats, I was told this thing by old Cairstine Macdonald, in the isle of Benbecula. It is in her words that I give it:
In the spring of the year that my boy Tormaid died, the moon-daisies were as thick as a woven shroud over the place where Giorsal, the daughter of Ian, the son of Ian MacLeod of Baille "n Bad-a-sgailich, slept night and day.[11]
All that March the cormorants screamed, famished. There were few fish in the sea, and no kelp-weed was washed up by the high tides. In the island and in the near isles, ay, and far north through the mainland, the blight lay. Many sickened. I knew young mothers who had no milk. There are green mounds in Carnan kirkyard that will be telling you of what this meant. Here and there are little green mounds, each so small that you might cuddle it in your arm under your plaid.
Tormaid sickened. A bad day was that for him when he came home, weary with the sea, and drenched to the skin, because of a gale that caught him and his mates off Barra Head. When the March winds tore down the Minch, and leaped out from over the Cuchullins, and came west, and lay against our homes, where the peats were sodden and there was little food, the minister told me that my lad would be in the quiet havens before long. This was because of the white fever. It was of that same that Giorsal waned, and went out like a thin flame in sunlight.
The son of my man (years ago weary no more) said little ever. He ate nothing almost, even of the next to nothing we had. At nights he couldna sleep because of his cough. The coming of May lifted him awhile. I hoped he would see the autumn; and that if he did, and the herring came, and the harvest was had, and what wi" this and what wi" that, he would forget his Giorsal that lay i" the mools in the quiet place yonder.
Maybe then, I thought, the sorrow would go, and take its shadow with it.
One gloaming he came in with all the whiteness of his wasted body in his face. His heart was out of its sh.e.l.l; and mine, too, at the sight of him.[12]
This was the season of the hanging of the dog"s mouth.
"What is it, Tormaid-a-ghaolach?" I asked, with the sob that was in my throat.
"_Thraisg mo chridhe_," he muttered (My heart is parched). Then, feeling the asking in my eyes, he said, "I have seen her."
I knew he meant Giorsal. My heart sank. But I wore my nails into the palms of my hands. Then I said this thing, that is an old saying in the isles: "Those who are in the quiet havens hear neither the wind nor the sea." He was so weak he could not lie down in the bed. He was in the big chair before the peats, with his feet on a _claar_.
When the wind was still I read him the Word. A little warm milk was all he would take. I could hear the blood in his lungs sobbing like the ebb-tide in the sea-weed. This was the thing that he said to me:
"She came to me, like a grey mist, beyond the d.y.k.e of the green place, near the road. The face of her was grey as a grey dawn, but the voice was hers, though I heard it under a wave, so dull and far was it. And these are her words to me, and mine to her--and the first speaking was mine, for the silence wore me:
Am bheil thu" falbh, O mo ghraidh?
_B"idh mi falbh, Muirnean!_
C"uin a thilleas tu, O mo ghraidh?
_Cha till mi an rathad so; Tha an"t ait e c.u.mhann-- O Muirnean, Muirnean!
B"idh mi falbh an drugh Am tigh Pharais, Muirnean!_
Seol dhomh an rathad, Mo ghraidh!
_Thig an so, Muirnean-mo, Thig an so!_
Are you going, My dear one?
_Yea, now I am going, Dearest._
When will you come again, My dear one?
_I will not return this way; The place is narrow-- O my Darling!
I will be going to Paradise, Dear, my dear one!_
Show me the way, Heart of my heart!
_Come hither, dearest, come hither, Come with me!_
"And then I saw that it was a mist, and that I was alone. But now this night it is that I feel the breath on the soles of my feet."
And with that I knew there was no hope. "_Ma tha sin an dan!_ ... if that be ordained," was all that rose to my lips. It was that night he died. I fell asleep in the second hour. When I woke in the grey dawn, his face was greyer than that, and more cold.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] _Baille "n Bad-a-sgailich_: the Farm of the Shadowy Clump of Trees.
_Cairstine_, or _Cairistine_, is the Gaelic for _Christina_ (for _Christian_), as _Tormaid_ is for Norman, and _Giorsal_ for Grace. "The quiet havens" is the beautiful island phrase for graves. Here, also, a swift and fatal consumption that falls upon the doomed is called "The White Fever." By "the mainland," Harris and the Lewis are meant.