pale face and great dark eyes, stooping over my bed, singing "Wae's me
for Prince Charlie," or an old Gaelic Lament, or that sad, forgotten,
beautiful and mournful air that was played at Fotheringay when the Queen
of Scots was done to death, "lest her cries should be heard." Or, later,
I can hear her telling me old tales before the fire; or, later still,
before the glowing peats in her little island-cottage, speaking of men
and women, and strange legends, and stranger dreams and visions. To her,
and to an old islander, Seumas Macleod, of whom I have elsewhere spoken
in this volume, I owe more than to any other influences in my childhood.
Perhaps it is from her that in part I have my great dislike of towns.
There is no smoke in the lark's house, to use one of her frequent
sayings--one common throughout the west.
I never knew any one whose speech, whose thought, was so coloured with
the old wisdom and old sayings and old poetry of her race. To me she
stands for the Gaelic woman, strong, steadfast, true to "her own," her
people, her clan, her love, herself. "When you come to love," she said
to me once, "keep always to the one you love a mouth of silk and a heart
of hemp."
Her mind was a storehouse of proverbial lore. Had I been older and
wiser, I might have learned less fugitively. I cannot attempt to reach
adequately even the most characteristic of these proverbial sayings; it
would take overlong. Most of them, of course, would be familiar to our
proverb-loving people. But, among others of which I have kept note, I
have not anywhere seen the following in print. "You could always tell
where his thoughts would be ... pointing one way like the hounds of
Finn" (_i.e._ the two stars of the north, the Pointers); "It's a
comfort to know there's nothing missing, as the wren said when she
counted the stars"; "The dog's howl is the stag's laugh"; and again, "I
would rather cry with the plover than laugh with the dog" (both meaning
that the imprisoned comfort of the towns is not to be compared with the
life of the hills, for all its wildness); "True love is like a
mountain-tarn; it may not be deep, but that's deep enough that can hold
the sun, moon, and stars"; "It isn't silence where the lark's song
ceases"; "St. Bride's Flower, St. Bride's Bird, and St. Bride's Gift
make a fine spring and a good year." (_Am Bearnan Bhrigde, 'us
Gille-Bhrigde, 'us Lunn-Bata Bhrigde, etc.--the dandelion, the
oyster-catcher, and the cradle_[9]--because the dandelion comes with the
first south winds and in a sunny spring is seen everywhere, and because
in a fine season the oyster-catcher's early breeding-note fortells
prosperity with the nets, and because a birth in spring is good luck for
child and mother.) "It's easier for most folk to say _Lus Bealtainn_
than _La' Bealtainn_": i.e. people can see the small things that
concern themselves better than the great things that concern the world;
literally, "It's easier to say marigold than may-day"--in Gaelic, a
close play upon words; "_Cuir do lamh leinn_," "Lend us a hand," as the
fox in the ditch said to the duckling on the roadside; "_Gu'm a slan
gu'n till thu_," "May you return in health," as the young man said when
his conscience left him; "It's only a hand's-turn from _eunadair_ to
_eunadan_" (from the bird-snarer to the cage); "Saying _eud_ is next
door to saying _eudail_," as the girl laughed back to her sweetheart
(_eud_ is jealousy and _eudail_ my Treasure); "The lark doesn't need
_broggan_ (shoes) to climb the stairs of the sky."
Among those which will not be new to some readers, I have note of a
rhyme about the stars of the four seasons, and a saying about the three
kinds of love, and the four stars of destiny. Wind comes from the spring
star, runs the first; heat from the summer star, water from the autumn
star, and frost from the winter star. Barabal's variant was "wind (air)
from the spring star in the east; fire (heat) from the summer star in
the south; water from the autumn star in the west; wisdom, silence and
death from the star in the north." Both this season-rhyme and that of
the three kinds of love are well known. The latter runs:--
_Gaol nam fear-diolain, mar shruth-lionaidh na mara;
Gaol nam fear-fuadain, mar ghaoith tuath 'thig o'n charraig;
Gaol nam fear-posda, mar luing a' seoladh gu cala._
_Lawless love is as the wild tides of the sea;
And the roamer's love cruel as the north wind blowing from barren
rocks;
But wedded love is like the ship coming safe home to haven._
I have found these two and many others of Barabal's sayings and rhymes,
except those I have first given, in collections of proverbs and
folklore, but do not remember having noted another, though doubtless
"The Four Stars of Destiny (or Fate)" will be recalled by some. It ran
somewhat as follows:--
_Reul Near_ (Star of the East), Give us kindly birth;
_Reul Deas_ (Star of the South), Give us great love;
_Reul Niar_ (Star of the West), Give us quiet age;
_Reul Tuath_ (Star of the North), Give us Death.
It was from her I first heard of the familiar legend of the waiting of
Fionn and the Feinn (popularly now Fingal and the Fingalians),
"fo-gheasaibh," spellbound, till the day of their return to the living
world. In effect the several legends are the same. That which Barabal
told was as an isleswoman would more naturally tell it. A man so pure
that he could give a woman love and yet let angels fan the flame in his
heart, and so innocent that his thoughts were white as a child's
thoughts, and so brave that none could withstand him, climbed once to
the highest mountain in the Isles, where there is a great cave that no
one has ever entered. A huge white hound slept at the entrance to the
cave. He stepped over it, and it did not wake. He entered, and passed
four tall demons, with bowed heads and folded arms, one with great wings
of red, another with wings of white, another with wings of green, and
another with wings of black. They did not uplift their dreadful eyes.
Then he saw Fionn and the Feinn sitting in a circle.
Their long hair trailed on the ground; their eyebrows fell to their
beards; their beards lay upon their feet, so that nothing of their
bodies was seen but hands like scarped rocks that clasped gigantic
swords. Behind them hung an elk-horn with a mouth of gold. He blew this
horn, but nothing happened, except that the huge white hound came in,
and went to the hollow place round which the Feinn sat, and in silence
ate greedily of treasures of precious stones. He blew the horn again,
and Fionn and all the Feinn opened their great, cold, grey, lifeless
eyes, and stared upon him; and for him it was as though he stood at a
grave and the dead man in the grave put up strong hands and held his
feet, and as though his soul saw Fear.
But with a mighty effort he blew the horn a third time. The Feinn leaned
on their elbows, and Fionn said, "Is the end come?" But the man could
wait no more, and turned and fled, leaving that ancient mighty company
leaning upon its elbow, spellbound thus, waiting for the end. So they
shall be found. The four demons fled into the air, and tumultuous winds
swung him from that place. He heard the baying of the white hound, and
the mountain vanished. He was found lying dead in a pasture in the
little island that was his home. I recall this here because the legend
was plainly in Barabal's mind when her last ill came upon her. In her
delirium she cried suddenly, "The Feinn! The Feinn! they are coming down
the hill!"
"I hear the bells of the ewes," she said abruptly, just before the end:
so by that we knew she was already upon far pastures, and heard the
Shepherd calling upon the sheep to come into the fold.
FOOTNOTE:
[9] It is probably in the isles only that the pretty word _Lunn-Bata_ is
used for _cr[=a]-all (creathall)_, a cradle. It might best be rendered as
boat-on-a-billow, _lunn_ being a heaving billow.
THE WHITE HERON
It was in summer, when there is no night among these Northern Isles. The
slow, hot days waned through a long after-glow of rose and violet; and
when the stars came, it was only to reveal purple depths within depths.
Mary Macleod walked, barefoot, through the dewy grass, on the long
western slope of Innisron, looking idly at the phantom flake of the moon
as it hung like a blown moth above the rose-flush of the West. Below it,
beyond her, the ocean. It was pale, opalescent; here shimmering with the
hues of the moonbow; here dusked with violet shadow, but, for the most
part, pale, opalescent. No wind moved, but a breath arose from the
momentary lips of the sea. The cool sigh floated inland, and made a
continual faint tremor amid the salt grasses. The skuas and guillemots
stirred, and at long intervals screamed.
The girl stopped, staring seaward. The illimitable, pale, unlifted wave;
the hinted dusk of the quiet underwaters; the unfathomable violet gulfs
overhead;--these silent comrades were not alien to her. Their kin, she
was but a moving shadow on an isle; to her, they were the veils of
wonder beyond which the soul knows no death, but looks upon the face of
Beauty, and upon the eyes of Love, and upon the heart of Peace.
Amid these silent spaces two dark objects caught the girl's gaze. Flying
eastward, a solander trailed a dusky wing across the sky. So high its
flight that the first glance saw it as though motionless; yet, even
while Mary looked, the skyfarer waned suddenly, and that which had been
was not. The other object had wings too, but was not a bird. A
fishing-smack lay idly becalmed, her red-brown sail now a patch of warm
dusk. Mary knew what boat it was--the _Nighean Donn_, out of Fionnaphort
in Ithona, the westernmost of the Iarraidh Isles.
There was no one visible on board the _Nighean Donn_, but a boy's voice
sang a monotonous Gaelic cadence, indescribably sweet as it came, remote
and wild as an air out of a dim forgotten world, across the still
waters. Mary Macleod knew the song, a strange _iorram_ or boat-song made
by Pol the Freckled, and by him given to his friend Angus Macleod of
Ithona. She muttered the words over and over, as the lilt of the boyish
voice rose and fell--
It is not only when the sea is dark and chill and desolate
I hear the singing of the queen who lives beneath the ocean:
Oft have I heard her chanting voice when moon o'erfloods his golden
gate,
Or when the moonshine fills the wave with snow-white mazy motion.
And some day will it hap to me, when the black waves are leaping,
Or when within the breathless green I see her shell-strewn door,
That singing voice will lure me where my sea-drown'd love lies
sleeping
Beneath the slow white hands of her who rules the sunken shore.
For in my heart I hear the bells that ring their fatal beauty.
The wild, remote, uncertain bells that chant their lonely sorrow:
The lonely bells of sorrow, the bells of fatal beauty,
Oft in my heart I hear the bells, who soon shall know no morrow.
The slow splashing of oars in the great hollow cavern underneath her
feet sent a flush to her face. She knew who was there--that it was the
little boat of the _Nighean Donn_, and that Angus Macleod was in it.
She stood among the seeding grasses, intent. The cluster of white
moon-daisies that reached to her knees was not more pale than her white
face; for a white silence was upon Mary Macleod in her dreaming
girlhood, as in her later years.
She shivered once as she listened to Angus's echoing song, while he
secured his boat, and began to climb from ledge to ledge. He too had
heard the lad Uille Ban singing as he lay upon a coil of rope, while the
smack lay idly on the unmoving waters; and hearing, had himself taken up
the song--
_For in my heart I hear the bells that ring their fatal beauty,
The wild, remote, uncertain bells that chant their lonely sorrow:
The lonely bells of sorrow, the bells of fatal beauty,
Oft in my heart I hear the bells, who soon shall know no morrow._
Mary shivered with the vague fear that had come upon her. Had she not
dreamed, in the bygone night, that she heard some one in the sea singing
that very song--some one with slow, white hands which waved idly above a
dead man? A moment ago she had listened to the same song sung by the lad
Uille Ban; and now, for the third time, she heard Angus idly chanting
it as he rose invisibly from ledge to ledge of the great cavern below.
Three idle songs yet she remembered that death was but the broken
refrain of an idle song.
When Angus leaped onto the slope and came towards her, she felt her
pulse quicken. Tall and fair, he looked fairer and taller than she had
ever seen him. The light that was still in the west lingered in his
hair, which, yellow as it was, now glistened as with the sheen of
bronze. He had left his cap in the boat; and as he crossed swiftly
towards her, she realized anew that he deserved the Gaelic name given
him by Pol the poet--Angus the yellow-haired son of Youth. They had
never spoken of their love, and now both realized in a flash that no
words were needed. At midsummer noon no one says the sun shines.
Angus came forward with outreaching hands. "Dear, dear love!" he
whispered. "Mhairi mo run, muirnean, mochree!"
She put her hands in his; she put her lips to his; she put her head to
his breast, and listened, all her life throbbing in response to the
leaping pulse of the heart that loved her.
"Dear, dear love!" he whispered again.
"Angus!" she murmured.
They said no more, but moved slowly onward, hand in hand.
The night had their secret. For sure, it was in the low sighing of the
deep when the tide put its whispering lips against the sleeping sea; it
was in the spellbound silences of the isle; it was in the phantasmal
light of the stars--the stars of dream, in a sky of dream, in a world of
dream. When, an hour--or was it an eternity, or a minute?--later, they
turned, she to her home near the clachan of Innisron, he to his boat, a
light air had come up on the forehead of the tide. The sail of the
_Nighean Donn_ flapped, a dusky wing in the darkness. The penetrating
smell of sea-mist was in the air.
Mary had only one regret as she turned her face inland, when once the
invisibly gathering mist hid from her even the blurred semblance of the
smack--that she had not asked Angus to sing no more that song of Pol the
Freckled, which vaguely she feared, and even hated. She had stood
listening to the splashing of the oars, and, later, to the voices of
Angus and Uille Ban; and now, coming faintly and to her weirdly through
the gloom, she heard her lover's voice chanting the words again. What
made him sing that song, in that hour, on this day of all days?
For in my heart I hear the bells that ring their fatal beauty,
The wild, remote, uncertain bells that chant their lonely sorrow:
The lonely bells of sorrow, the bells of fatal beauty,
Oft in my heart I hear the bells, who soon shall know no morrow.
But long before she was back at the peat-fire again she forgot that sad,
haunting cadence, and remembered only his words--the dear words of him
whom she loved, as he came towards her, across the dewy grass, with
outstretched hands--
"Dear, dear love!--Mhairi mo run, muirnean, mochree!"
She saw them in the leaping shadows in the little room; in the red glow
that flickered along the fringes of the peats; in the darkness which,
like a sea, drowned the lonely croft. She heard them in the bubble of
the meal, as slowly with wooden spurtle she stirred the porridge; she
heard them in the rising wind that had come in with the tide; she heard
them in the long resurge and multitudinous shingly inrush as the hands
of the Atlantic tore at the beaches of Innisron.
After the smooring of the peats, and when the two old people, the father
of her father and his white-haired wife, were asleep, she sat for a
long time in the warm darkness. From a cranny in the peat ash a
smouldering flame looked out comfortingly. In the girl's heart a great
peace was come as well as a great joy. She had dwelled so long with
silence that she knew its eloquent secrets; and it was sweet to sit
there in the dusk, and listen, and commune with silence, and dream.
Above the long, deliberate rush of the tidal waters round the piled
beaches she could hear a dull, rhythmic beat. It was the screw of some
great steamer, churning its way through the darkness; a stranger,
surely, for she knew the times and seasons of every vessel that came
near these lonely isles. Sometimes it happened that the Uist or Tiree
steamers passed that way; doubtless it was the Tiree boat, or possibly
the big steamer that once or twice in the summer fared northward to
far-off St. Kilda.
She must have slept, and the sound have passed into her ears as an echo
into a shell; for when, with a start, she arose, she still heard the
thud-thud of the screw, although the boat had long since passed away.
It was the cry of a sea-bird which had startled her. Once--twice--the
scream had whirled about the house. Mary listened, intent. Once more it
came, and at the same moment she saw a drift of white press up against
the window.
She sprang to her feet, startled.
"It is the cry of a heron," she muttered, with dry lips; "but who has
heard tell of a white heron?--and the bird there is white as a
snow-wreath."
Some uncontrollable impulse made her hesitate. She moved to go to the
window, to see if the bird were wounded, but she could not. Sobbing with
inexplicable fear, she turned and fled, and a moment later was in her
own little room. There all her fear passed. Yet she could not sleep for
long. If only she could get the sound of that beating screw out of her
ears, she thought. But she could not, neither waking nor sleeping; nor
the following day; nor any day thereafter; and when she died, doubtless
she heard the thud-thud of a screw as it churned the dark waters in a
night of shrouding mist.
For on the morrow she learned that the _Nighean Donn_ had been run down
in the mist, a mile south of Ithona, by an unknown steamer. The great
vessel came out of the darkness, unheeding; unheeding she passed into
the darkness again. Perhaps the officer in command thought that his
vessel had run into some floating wreckage; for there was no cry heard,
and no lights had been seen. Later, only one body was found--that of the
boy Uille Ban.
When heartbreaking sorrow comes, there is no room for words. Mary
Macleod said little; what, indeed, was there to say? The islanders gave
what kindly comfort they could. The old minister, when next he came to
Innisron, spoke of the will of God and the Life Eternal.
Mary bowed her head. What had been, was not: could any words, could any
solace, better that?
"You are young, Mary," said Mr. Macdonald, when he had prayed with her.
"God will not leave you desolate."
She turned upon him her white face, with her great, brooding, dusky
eyes:
"Will He give me back Angus?" she said, in her low, still voice, that
had the hush in it of lonely places.
He could not tell her so.
"It was to be," she said, breaking the long silence that had fallen
between them.
"Ay," the minister answered.
She looked at him, and then took his hand. "I am thanking you, Mr.
Macdonald, for the good words you have put upon my sorrow. But I am not
wishing that any more be said to me. I must go now, for I have to see
to the milking, an' I hear the poor beasts lowing on the hillside. The
old folk too are weary, and I must be getting them their porridge."
After that no one ever heard Mary Macleod speak of Angus. She was a good
lass, all agreed, and made no moan; and there was no croft tidier than
Scaur-a-van, and because of her it was; and she made butter better than
any on Innisron; and in the isles there was no cheese like the
Scaur-a-van cheese.
Had there been any kith or kin of Angus, she would have made them hers.
She took the consumptive mother of Uille Ban from Ithona, and kept her
safe-havened at Scaur-a-van, till the woman sat up one night in her bed,
and cried in a loud voice that Uille Ban was standing by her side and
playing a wild air on the strings of her heart, which he had in his
hands, and the strings were breaking, she cried. They broke, and Mary
envied her, and the whispering joy she would be having with Uille Ban.
But Angus had no near kin. Perhaps, she thought, he would miss her the
more where he had gone. He had a friend, whom she had never seen. He was
a man of Iona, and was named Eachain MacEachain Maclean. He and Angus
had been boys in the same boat, and sailed thrice to Iceland together,
and once to Peterhead, that maybe was as far or further, or perhaps upon
the coast-lands further east. Mary knew little geography, though she
could steer by the stars. To this friend she wrote, through the
minister, to say that if ever he was in trouble he was to come to her.
It was on the third night after the sinking of the _Nighean Donn_ that
Mary walked alone, beyond the shingle beaches, and where the ledges of
trap run darkly into deep water. It was a still night and clear. The
lambs and ewes were restless in the moonshine; their bleating filled the
upper solitudes. A shoal of mackerel made a spluttering splashing sound
beyond the skerries outside the haven. The ebb, sucking at the weedy
extremes of the ledges, caused a continuous bubbling sound. There was no
stir of air, only a breath upon the sea; but, immeasurably remote,
frayed clouds, like trailed nets in yellow gulfs of moonlight, shot
flame-shaped tongues into the dark, and seemed to lick the stars as
these shook in the wind. "No mist to-night," Mary muttered; then,
startled by her own words, repeated, and again repeated, "There will be
no mist to-night."
Then she stood as though become stone. Before her, on a solitary rock, a
great bird sat. It was a heron. In the moonshine its plumage glistened
white as foam of the sea; white as one of her lambs it was.
She had never seen, never heard of, a white heron. There was some old
Gaelic song--what was it?--no, she could not remember--something about
the souls of the dead. The words would not come.
Slowly she advanced. The heron did not stir. Suddenly she fell upon her
knees, and reached out her arms, and her hair fell about her shoulders,
and her heart beat against her throat, and the grave gave up its sorrow,
and she cried--
"Oh, Angus, Angus, my beloved! Angus, Angus, my dear, dear love!"
She heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing, knew nothing, till, numbed
and weak, she stirred with a cry, for some creeping thing of the sea had
crossed her hand. She rose and stared about her. There was nothing to
give her fear. The moon rays danced on a glimmering sea-pasture far out
upon the water; their lances and javelins flashed and glinted merrily. A
dog barked as she crossed the flag-stones at Scaur-a-van, then suddenly
began a strange furtive baying. She called, "Luath! Luath!"
The dog was silent a moment, then threw its head back and howled,
abruptly breaking again into a sustained baying. The echo swept from
croft to croft, and wakened every dog upon the isle.
Mary looked back. Slowly circling behind her she saw the white heron.
With a cry, she fled into the house.
For three nights thereafter she saw the white heron. On the third she
had no fear. She followed the foam-white bird; and when she could not
see it, then she followed its wild, plaintive cry. At dawn she was still
at Ardfeulan, on the western side of Innisron; but her arms were round
the drowned heart whose pulse she had heard leap so swift in joy, and
her lips put a vain warmth against the dear face that was wan as spent
foam, and as chill as that.
Three years after that day Mary saw again the white heron. She was alone
now, and she was glad, for she thought Angus had come, and she was
ready.
Yet neither death nor sorrow happened. Thrice, night after night, she
saw the white gleam of nocturnal wings, heard the strange bewildering
cry.
It was on the fourth day, when a fierce gale covered the isle with a
mist of driving spray. No Innisron boat was outside the haven; for that,
all were glad. But in the late afternoon a cry went from mouth to mouth.
There was a fishing-coble on the skerries! That meant death for all on
board, for nothing could be done. The moment came soon. A vast drowning
billow leaped forward, and when the cloud of spray had scattered, there
was no coble to be seen. Only one man was washed ashore, nigh dead, upon
the spar he clung to. His name was Eachain MacEachain, son of a Maclean
of Iona.
And that was how Mary Macleod met the friend of Angus, and he a ruined
man, and how she put her life to his, and they were made one.
Her man ... yes, he was her man, to whom she was loyal and true, and
whom she loved right well for many years. But she knew, and he too knew
well, that she had wedded one man in her heart, and that no other could
take his place there, then or for ever. She had one husband only, but it
was not he to whom she was wed, but Angus, the son of Alasdair--him whom
she loved with the deep love that surpasseth all wisdom of the world
that ever was, or is, or shall be.