strangers were.
“Keen are your eyes, Aed,” she said; “can you discern who the men of
yonder cavalcade are?”
“I know them not as men: but it seems to me that they are a troop of
our own Dedannan folk, or perchance they may be of the Milesians.”
But while they were still wondering and discussing, the cavalcade drew
nearer, and the men of it saw the four swans, and, recognising them as
the children of Lir, made signs to Fionula and her brothers to alight
on the shore.
With joy the Dedannans, for so they were, hailed the poor exiles, for
whom indeed they had long been seeking along the north coasts of Erin.
As for the children of Lir they could scarce speak, so great was their
happiness to hear their dear familiar speech once more and to see the
faces of their own people.
Again and again they were embraced by the two chiefs of the Fairy
Host, as the Dedannan warriors were called--Aed the keen-witted,
and Fergus the chess-player, the two sons of Bove Derg, king of the
Tuatha-De-Danann.
With joy the children of Lir learned that their father was still alive,
and was even then celebrating at his house at Shee Finnaha, along with
Bove Derg and the chiefs of the Dedannans, the Feast of Age. As for Aed
and Fergus and all their following, they wept when they heard the tale
of the misery of these lost years, when Fionula and Aed and Fiachra
and Conn were the sport of the winds.
While eagerly and lovingly they were conversing, none noticed that the
sun was sinking upon the low wavering line of the ultimate wave. But
when at last Fionula saw this, she uttered a sad cry of warning to her
brothers, and all four rose on their white wings and made ready to fly
back to the bleak and desolate sea of Moyle. And sad, sadder than ever,
was the heart of Fionula, for she knew that they could not be there
till nightfall, and that the penalty of this would be that they should
not again see the face of their kind, either on the shores of Erin or
Alba, until the end of the three hundred years on the wastes of the
Moyle.
As they circled in the air, she sang this song, the last of the
swan-songs heard of any of the Dedannans who were in that company:
Happy our father Lir afar,
With mead, and songs of love and war:
The salt brine, and the white foam,
With these his children have their home.
In the sweet days of long ago
Soft-clad we wandered to and fro:
But now cold winds of dawn and night
Pierce deep our feathers thin and light.
The hazel mead in cups of gold
We feasted from in days of old:
The sea-weed now our food, our wine
The salt, keen, bitter, barren brine.
On soft warm couches once we pressed
While harpers lulled us to our rest:
Our beds are now where the sea raves,
Our lullaby the clash of waves.
Alas! the fair sweet days are gone
When love was ours from dawn to dawn:
Our sole companion now is pain,
Through frost and snow, through storm and rain.
Beneath my wings my brothers lie
When fierce the ice-winds hurtle by:
On either side and ’neath my breast
Lir’s sons have known no other rest.
Ah, kisses we shall no more know,
Ah, love so dear exchanged for woe,
All that is sweet for us is o’er,
Homeless for aye from shore to shore.
A great lamentation went up from the cavalcade of the Fairy Host
when Fionula ended this song, and she and her brothers flew swiftly
northward athwart the waves, red and wild because of the stormy setting
of the sun.
Sad was the tale the Dedannans had to relate when they returned to Shee
Finnaha.
Nevertheless, Bove Derg, the aged king, and white-haired Lir himself,
took comfort in this, that Fionula and her brothers were still alive.
Moreover, they knew that in the end the spell of Aeifa would be broken
and that the exiles would be freed from their sufferings.
But often, often, they thought with tears, as the slow revolving
seasons lapsed one into the other, of the children of Lir upon the
desolate far seas of the Moyle.
* * * * *
Here Eilidh’s voice lapsed into silence. Then, looking no longer at
Peterkin, but staring into the red heart of the peats, she sang a
Gaelic song, called the Sorrow of the Grey Hairs of Lir.
Peterkin never loved Eilidh so well as when she sang; but he was
sorrowful to-night when he saw that the song brought tears into her
eyes.
“Eilidh,” he whispered.
“Yes, Peterkin, dear.”
“Wouldn’t you be liking to kiss Ian?”
Eilidh laughed low, a faint flush coming and going upon her face.
“For why, boykin?”
“Oh, I know that whenever you have tears in your eyes Ian can chase
them away. I have seen him kiss you when you are tired.”
At this Ian Mor rose and lifted Peterkin in his arms.
“Eilidh is thinking of something sad, Peterkin; that is all. See, she
is smiling now, and laughing too by the same token.” The boy tossed his
curls, and with a roguish smile added:
“Ah, that is just because I said she wanted to kiss you.”
“You’re much too wise, Peterkin. But there, down with you! Now run to
the door, and tell me if it is still raining.”
Peterkin never could go straight anywhere, for his progress was ever
like that of a kid or lambkin, a series of jumps and little sudden
runs. No sooner was he gone, than Ian turned to Eilidh, and took her in
his arms.
“Sweetheart,” he whispered, “that little burst o’ sunshine is right. A
kiss from your lips is the best thing to chase away the tears. But why
are you sad, mochree?”
“I was thinking of the sorrow of old Lir; and how little it matters
whether one live fifty years or five hundred, as these old Dedannans
did. Then suddenly the thought flashed across me that some day soon we
should lose Peterkin: he too will become a wild swan, and it will be we
who shall hear the far-off singing of his laughing childhood.”
“Perhaps he will take his childhood with him into manhood, dear. Let
him look often into your beautiful eyes, Eilidh, and the little one
will learn much without knowing that he is learning. And then, too,
to be near you: why, that is to be a child always deep down, and to
have sunshine in the heart and mind--for have you forgotten your name,
‘Sunshine’?”
As he spoke, Ian Mor leaned and kissed her. Puzzled at the sudden
radiant smile on her face, he looked round. There was Peterkin, sitting
squatted on the hearth, with an impish smile in his blue eyes. He had
crawled behind the hanging curtain at the door, and unseen and unheard
gained the fireside.
With a joyous laugh he sprang to his feet.
“Ah, Ian, you and your rain! Is it not hearing you are? It’s on the
window as if the brownies were throwing little wee stones. It was not
the rain you were wanting, but only a kiss from Eilidh! Now, Eilidh,
tell me true?”
“Tell you true, Blumpits. Why----”
But here Peterkin, overcome by some sudden memory suggested by the pet
name which Eilidh sometimes gave him, went dancing round the room,
laughing and chuckling by turns, and once and again clapping his hands
in elfin glee.
“Eilidh, Eilidh,” he cried, “do tell me again that story of Blumpits
and the Bunnywig.”
Ian looked puzzled.
“What’s a bunnywig, Blumpits?”
“A bunnywig--you’re not for knowing what a bunnywig is--and you, Ian
Mor, too! A bunnywig is a _kunak_.”[5]
“And what did Blumpits do?”
“He got on the bunnywig, in the green fern, and rode on it into
fairyland, and no one saw him go but a squirrel. But no, Eilidh, I am
not wanting to hear about that now; and don’t be looking at my bed
there, for I haven’t got the sleep upon me yet. Tell me the rest of
the tale about Fionula and Aed and Fiachra and Conn.”
“I wonder, now, if that’s because you really want to hear, or if it’s
because you don’t want to be sent to bed?”
Peterkin had kicked aside his shoes, and taken off his socks, and was
warming his feet at the fire. His body was bent nearly double, as he
looked round, clutching the while his big toe in the hollow of his tiny
fist.
“O Eilidh,” he said reproachfully, but with a light of such mischief in
his eyes that Eilidh laughed. Then stooping, she took him on her lap,
and after a few seconds, when all three looked idly and dreamily into
the red fanwave in the heart of the peats, her lips moved again to the
sorrowful sweet tale of the Children of Lir.
* * * * *
Year after year passed for the four swans that were the children of
Lir. On that bleak and lonely sea of the Moyle they saw none of their
own kind from year’s end to year’s end: only the sea-mew and the
cormorant, the gannet and the tern, the slow droves of the pollack, the
travelling schools of mackerel and herring, the swift seals migrating
from isle to isle. With each Spring they saw the great solanders and
wild swans flying northward towards the polar seas: thence, at the
first days of winter, they saw them again flying southward, athirst for
the thin blue wine of unfrozen seas.
There was no change save the changefulness of the seasons; the
grey-black wave of winter lapsed into the grey-blue wave of spring, and
out of the dark-blue wave of summer grew the grey-green wave of autumn.
Cold and hunger and weariness: these only did not vary.
But at last the long weary exile on the Sea of Moyle came to an end.
One day Fionula told her brothers that on the morrow they would have to
fly far westward, for the three hundred years on the sea-stream of the
Moyle were over, and now they had to begin their long and mayhap still
more bitter, bleak, and mournful exile on the wild western ocean beyond
Erin.
“We must fly straight to the bleak headland of Irros Domnann,” she
said, “and then must remain on the wild and desolate seas off the isle
of Glora, the island that is farthest away from the mainland of our
beloved Erin.”
Thither, accordingly, the four swans flew on the morrow. It was with
joy that they left the sea of the Moyle, where they had known so much
privation and misery; but little cause had they for joy, for not less
bleak were the skies, not less desolate the coasts, not less wild the
storm-lashed, rain-swept seas, off the lifeless, barren isle of Glora.
The great waves of the shoreless western ocean beat upon it for ever,
and their thunder often filled the darkness for countless leagues with
a sound most dreadful to hear.
But after many years it chanced that a young man, named Ebric, the son
of a Dedannan lord, came to farm a tract of land lying along the shore
of Irros Domnann. This youth, who was a poet, and loved all beautiful
things, soon cared more for the sweet, wonderful singing of the four
swans, which often he heard, and to see their white bodies glistening
in the sun, than to till his land.
One day Fionula and her brothers descried him. Flying to the shore,
they called, and great was his wonder to hear the dear familiar Gaelic
speech in the mouths of wild swans.
From that time he walked daily down to the extreme rocks on the shore,
that he might converse with the children of Lir, and hear all they had
to tell of their sad story; though he, on his part, could relate little
to them of what had happened, or was happening further inland in Erin,
though they heard from him with sorrow that the Milesians were now
mightier than the Dedannans, and that the Fairy Host was no longer able
to withstand the might of these enemies who long since had come out of
the south.
“For,” he said, “it is the way of what is beautiful and wonderful; that
the wonder passes and the beauty fades.”
That night he heard Fionula singing, and knew that the burden of her
song was no other than the saying he had uttered:
Dim face of Beauty haunting all the world,
Fair face of Beauty all too fair to see,
Where the lost stars adown the heavens are hurled,
There, there alone for thee
May white peace be.
For here where all the dreams of men are whirled
Like sere torn leaves of autumn to and fro,
There is no place for thee in all the world,
Who driftest as a star,
Beyond, afar.
Beauty, sad face of Beauty, Mystery, Wonder,
What are these dreams to foolish babbling men --
Who cry with little noises ’neath the thunder
Of ages ground to sand,
To a little sand.
Ebric moved homeward through the moonlight wondering much at that song
of Fionula. But because he was a poet, he understood.
From him the people of the hills, and the valleys round about Irros
Domnann, heard the story of the speaking swans; and soon the wonder of
it, and the whole sorrowful tale of the Children of Lir became as well
known in that region as, long, long ago, to the Dedannans and Milesians
on the shores of Lough Darvra, when they encamped by its shores because
of the slow, sweet, fairy music of the four swans.
Then once again it chanced that the four children of Lir unwittingly
transgressed their doom, and so had to leave the shores where they
could converse with the people who loved them. But Ebric, to whom they
had told everything, was a poet, and wrought of their story a tale so
sweet and marvellous that it has lasted all these ages, and is heard to
this day on the lips of peasants in the west of Erin.
From that time onward the sufferings of Fionula and her brothers were
no less than they had been on the sea of the Moyle. Yet even the
worst they had there known was surpassed midway in the heart of a
terrible winter, a winter when cattle died in covered sheds, and men
and women in their houses, and the wild creatures of the forest under
their branches, and the storm-inured seabirds in the hollows of their
ocean-fronting cliffs.
On that day the whole surface of the sea from Irros Domnann to Achill
was frozen into one solid mass of ice. Across this a polar wind drove
sheets of hail and sleet. By nightfall, Aed and Fiachra and Conn were
so far spent that they despaired of any morrow; and at the last Fionula
herself, who had striven to comfort them, was herself in so pitiful a
misery that she could only lament with them that death was so long in
coming.
But in the full horror of midnight, while they clung nigh-frozen to
the rock of Glora, Fionula had a vision. It was of that God, that new
faith, that great wonder and beauty which was even then coming towards
Erin, though St. Patrick had not yet set foot upon its shores.
“Brothers,” she cried, “take heart. I have had a vision. Of a truth
our ancient gods are but the children of a greater than they. Aed, dear
Aed and Fiachra and Conn, believe now in this great and loving God, the
most splendid God of the living truth: for it is He who has made all
things, the pleasant, fruitful land and the wild barren sea; and it has
been revealed to me that if we put our trust in Him, He will comfort us
and send us help.”
“That we now do, O Fionula!” cried Aed and Fiachra and Conn.
Thereupon they fell into a deep slumber. When they awoke the sun was
shining; the fierce wind no longer blew; the waves danced joyously,
tossing little sheets of spray from one to another. The bitter cold was
gone, and they rejoiced exceedingly.
“It is Spring!” Aed cried, with joy.
“It is the answer of God,” said Fionula gravely.
From that hour they had peace. Thenceforth they suffered no more from
cold or hunger. When the savage frosts of winter, or the wild rains of
autumn, came over the western sea, the four swans alighted on Innis
Glora, and sang their wild, sweet, beautiful music, and then fell
asleep, nestling side by side, till they awoke to warmth and joy.
So was it till the end of the three hundred years. Three hundred years
on the lough of Darvra; three hundred on the sea-stream of the Moyle;
three hundred on the sea of Glora, to the west of Erin. All these ages
had they endured, and now their exile was at an end.
“On the morrow, dear brothers,” Fionula sang rejoicingly, “on the
morrow we shall wing our way inland; for our hearts ache to see again
our own country and our kindred, and the faces of Lir our father, and
Bove Derg the king, and all whom we love. Great shall be the joy at
Shee Finnaha when they behold us once more; but not more joyous shall
their delight be than it will be for us to see the smoke rising from
the fires of our people, and to see the greatness and beauty of Shee
Finnaha.”
They could not sleep that night for eagerness. At dawn they rose on
white wings, circling through the wide blue spaces of the air. When the
yellow stream of the sun poured westward out of the mountain-ridges of
Achill, they chanted a farewell song, and then stretched their wide
pinions and flew homeward with beating hearts.
Sweet it was to see below them the green grass instead of the cold,
running wave; and the hollows of the meadows, how much dearer were they
than the troughs of the drowning billows!
When they came to the great hill above Shee Finnaha, their wings were
seized with so great a trembling that scarcely could they reach into
view of Lir’s high shining house.
Descending, therefore, they alit on a rock and rested awhile. A deep
sadness oppressed Fionula. There was so great a silence on every rock,
on every tree. Moreover, she had seen a stag stand staring inland with
idle eyes, and had seen the hill-fox and the wolf prowling in the glen
where as a child she had often played.
“What is the fear that is in your eyes, Fionula?” asked one of her
brothers with sudden dread.
“Alas! Aed, if Lir and the Dedannans were still here, would a stag
stand staring inland, where Shee Finnaha is, with heedless eyes and no
hoof lifted, and nostrils idly sniffing the unfrequented wind?”
“Of a surety no, Fionula.”
“Yet that have I seen, Aed. And if in Shee Finnaha still dwelled our
Dedannan folk, would the hill-fox and the wolf prowl in the Glen of the
White Water, there where we were wont to play and bathe, we and all the
little children?”
“Of a surety no, Fionula.”
“Yet that have I seen, O Aed and Fiachra and Conn. Come! we are rested
now. Let us hasten homeward to Shee Finnaha, that we have longed for
all these years, and to our father Lir, who awaiteth us.”
Onward they flew.
But just as they soared over the shoulder of Knoc-na-Shee, Fionula
uttered a piercing cry.
There indeed was the valley where Lir long, long ago had made his home.
But now there was not a single wreath of smoke rising to the sky, not a
single cow lowed in the pastures, neither man nor woman nor child moved
to and fro. Nay, there were not even any houses. All had gone. Amid the
desolate place rose the gaunt, dishevelled ruins of Lir’s great dun;
its halls empty and roofless, or tenanted only by the rank grass and
tall companies of nettles.
“Alas!” cried Aed, “for the omen of the stag staring idly on Shee
Finnaha, and for that of the hill-fox and the wolf prowling in the Glen
of the White Water.”
But Fionula could speak no word, for her heart was breaking.
For long they crouched silent amid the desolation of that ruined place.
Thrice three hundred years had passed since they had played in front of
the house of Lir: beneath yonder ruined wooden arch they had set forth
with Aeifa on that ill-fated journey.
The dusk came. Still the four children of Lir crouched silent amid the
ruined desolation which was all that remained of lordly Shee Finnaha.
The wolf prowled near, but turned away the flame of his yellow eyes,
for he feared those who crouched there and had the voices of the human
kind. The bats and owls alone paid no heed.
When the stars glistened in the sky, and the moon rose, and on the
night wind there was not the lowing of a cow or the barking of a
dog, or any sound whatsoever, save from the rustling forest and the
murmuring stream, Fionula and Aed and Fiachra and Conn fell into a
bitter sobbing and a long, mournful keen, that rose into the hills
with plaintive echoes.
When the day broke, each told the other that they could no longer stay
in Shee Finnaha. That desolation was now to them more bitter than
the wilderness of the bleak seas of the Moyle. While they were still
speaking thus sorrowfully, Conn descried an old man--so old and worn
that his hair hung about his wrinkled face like thistledown, so white
and bleached was it. He carried a small harp, but in his eyes was the
look of one who saw only far into the mind and never from the mind
outward.
“Who art thou, O stranger?” Conn asked.
The man looked at the swan that spoke to him in human speech, and in
the sweet, familiar tongue of the Gael.
“I have heard strange things,” he muttered, “and in my madness have
come to learn of the beasts. Have not the hawks and eagles of Shee
Finnaha told me bitter tidings, and has not the hill-fox barked to me
of the graves of dead hopes, and has not the she-wolf whined to me in
the dusk of the sorrows that flit through the woods--the old ancient
sorrows of the wise and the beautiful and the brave that are now no
more? Why then should not a wild swan speak? Have I forgotten that,
ages ago, the children of Lir were changed into swans, and that they
spoke with the human tongue, and sang songs so passing sweet that life
and death became as the selfsame dream? Ah! that dream of dreams:
fragrant it was as the breath of Moy Mell, the honey-sweet plain of
Heaven; restful as the sound of the waves beating on the shores of
Tir-fa-Tonn, where the dead dwell in youth and joy; strange and wild as
the noise of invisible wings over the blessed isle that is Hy Brásil in
the west.”
Conn spake again:
“Art thou a Dedannan, old man?”
“A Dedannan I am, O Swan, that speakest with the tongue of man; yea, a
Dedannan I am, if a sere and fallen leaf can be called a child of the
green tree. Say, rather, a Dedannan I was.”
“Dost thou know aught of Bove Derg, the King of the Dedannans, or of
Lir, the lord of Shee Finnaha?”
The stranger sighed, and by the veiling of his eyes Conn knew that the
old harper was with the past.
“Ay,” he muttered at last, “but who can note the passage of the years
when one is old and broken and sick unto death? A hundred years have
trodden the red leaves again, or it may be thrice a hundred, since I
chanted the death-song of Bove Derg, the King of the Dedannans; since
I looked on the white face of Lir, as he lay grey and ashy among the
ashy-grey thistles.”
Conn uttered a cry of sorrow, and a bitter keen of lament came from his
two brothers and from Fionula.
“Then these also speak,” muttered the old harper: “almost can I
persuade myself that I look on the wild swans that are the four
children of Lir--Fionula and Aed and Fiachra and Conn. Ages ago I
thought they had lapsed in death. All are gone now, save only Aeifa,
who is a demon of the air, and wails among the hills and in desolate
places.”
All this time Fionula had been looking earnestly at the old man. Now
she spoke.
“Tell me, art thou not Irbir the Harper?”
“It is Irbir the Harper I am, the chief harper of Bove Derg, that
was King of the Dedannans before the Fairy Host faded away from the
meadows and pastures of Erin. And if indeed ye be the children of Lir,
know I am that Irbir who sang the birth-song at the birthing of ye,
Fionula and Aed, and at the birthing of ye, Fiachra and Conn.”
Thereupon the old harper embraced the four swans, tears running down
his face the while.
While he was yet embracing them, his wildered mind began to wander, and
he talked idly of vain things.
Nevertheless, they learned from him that more than a hundred years
back, and maybe thrice a hundred, the Tuatha-De-Danann had fought a
last great battle with the Milesians and had been utterly defeated.
They were now a dispersed and hidden people, some deathless, others
living to the thousand and one years of the old-world folk, and some
with a new and terrible mortality upon them. As for Bove Derg and all
the Fairy Host, the wild thistle waved over their nameless graves. Lir
lay beneath the grass outside his great dun of Shee Finnaha. His last
words had been: “I hear the beating of wings. O wild swans, I hear the
beating of thy wings.”
Thereafter Irbir the Harper moved aimlessly away, and with him passed
the shadow of the greatness that was gone.
The children of Lir now spoke wearily among themselves of what they
should do. At the last they decided to go back to the Isle of Glora,
and there await the fulfilment of their doom.
One more night they spent at Shee Finnaha, mourning over the grey
sorrow of Lir, and over the desolation of that noble place, and over
the ruin of the Dedannan folk. So wild and mournful was their singing
that night that the beasts of the forest congregated round the ruined
dun, and from the crags of the hills thronged the cliff-hawks and the
eagles. In the heart of the woods Irbir, the old harper, died, dreaming
that he was in Tir-nan-Og, the Land of Youth, and was listening again
to the voices of Love.
On the morrow the children of Lir flew sorrowfully away from Shee
Finnaha and returned to Innis Glora. They alit at a small lake in the
heart of that isle, and there began once more to sing their slow,
sweet, fairy music.