MACDONNELL of Morar, on the summer of his marriage, and when the gladness
of it was still in every vein, sailed his sloop among the Isles. He went
from sound to sound, from loch to loch, anchoring wherever the fancy took
his lady, and the two of them were seeking what no one ever found nor
shall find—that last and swooning pang of pleasure the Isles in summer
weather, either at dawn or dusk, seem always to promise to youth and
love. At night they lay in bays in the dim light of the cool north
stars, or in the flush of the sunken sun that made wine of the sea-waves,
and the island cliffs or the sandy shores seemed populous with birds or
singing fisher-people.
It was very well then with Morar.
His wife was still a girl. In the mornings, when she came on deck with
her hair streaming and the breeze making a banner of her gown, her gaiety
surging to her breast in song, she seemed to him and to his men like one
of the olden sea princesses told about in Gaelic stories, born from foam
for the happiness and hurt of the hearts of men. She was lovely, tender,
and good, and he himself, with those that knew him best, was notable for
every manly part. One thing only he had a fear of in his bride—that, as
had happened with others before, and perhaps with himself, a day might
come to him when the riddle of her would be read, her maidenly sweet
mystery revealed; when he could guess with certainty what was in the deep
dark wells of her eyes, and understand, without a word, the cause for
every throb of her bosom. To have her for ever with a part to baffle and
allure, as does the sea in its outer caves, and as do the dawns in
Highland glens—that was the wish of Morar.
The captain of the yacht, who, having no passion for her, knew her, some
ways, better than her husband, perhaps, said she had what, westward in
the Barra Isle he hailed from, they call the Seven Gifts for
Women—content and gentleness, looks and liking, truth, simplicity, and
the fear of God. To him and to his men—gallant fellows from Skye, and
somewhat jealous of her that she was not of the isles herself, but a
stranger—she was at least without a flaw. One time they thought it might
be temper was her weakness, for she walked the deck with pride and had a
noble carriage of the head, but the tiniest cloud of temper never crossed
her honeymoon. Indeed, it was well with Morar.
And it seemed that summer as if the very clime befriended him, for there
never blew but the finest breezes, and the sun was almost constant in the
sky. Round all the remoter isles they sailed—even Harris and the Uists,
and the countless lesser isles that lie to the west of Scotland,—an
archipelago where still are dwelling the ancient Gaelic gods, whereto at
least they come at sunset and sit upon the sands communing, so that
sailors knowing the language, and having the happy ear, can sometimes
catch far off at sea deep murmurs of the olden world that others take for
the plash of waters.
Morar’s wife put the yacht into every creek. She loved the little
creeks, she doted on the burns going mourning through the darkness, and
on the sound of tides on shallow shores; it was her great delight
sometimes to sleep on land below a canvas shelter, bathe at morning in
the inner pools, walk barefooted on the sand, or stand on rocky
promontories facing the rising sun, with her hair tumultuous. Her first
breakfast then was the wild berry, her morning drink the water from
island wells.
“I could live on the berries,” she would say to her husband. “Oh, I love
them!”
“Doubtless, mochree,” would he answer her, laughing. “Faith! it’s my
notion they have been growing all these years in the islands waiting just
for you; their bloom is on your cheek; it’s the berry stain that was on
your lips since ever I knew you. But for a common person like myself
there is a certain seduction in a sea-trout or a herring. Madam, I wish
you joy of your wild berries, and indeed I love the taste of them—on your
lips,—but let me press on you a simple cabin-biscuit, though it suffers
from having been baked by the hand of man.”
“And the berry comes straight from God,” would be her answer. “It’s the
fruiting of the clean wild wind; I sometimes think that if I could eat it
always I should live for ever.”
“Then, faith, I’ll grow it in Morar garden by the pole, and you shall eat
berries at every meal,” said her husband. “Perhaps I’ll acquire the
taste myself. Meanwhile, let me recommend the plain prose of our cooking
galley.”
“And I declare that I can find in pure water something as intoxicating as
wine and far more subtle on the palate.”
“A noble beverage, at least they tell me so, as the piper says in the
story,” said Morar, “yet God forbid that a too exclusive diet of berries
and water should send Macdonnell back a widower to Morar! I take leave
to help you to another egg,” and so saying he would laugh at her again,
and she would laugh also, for the truth was that she never brought to the
cabin table but a yachtsman’s appetite.
One thing she missed in all these island voyagings was the green
companionship of trees. She came from a land of trees, and sailing day
after day past isles that gave no harbour to so little as a sapling, she
fretted sometimes for the shady deeps of thicket and the sway of boughs.
Often she sat on deck at nightfall and imagined what the isles must have
been before disaster overtook them.
“Can you think of us wandering in the avenues, sitting in the glades?
Barefoot or sandal, loose light garments, berries and water, the bland
sea air, shade from the sun and shelter from the shower, and the two of
us always young and always the same to each other”—it was a picture she
put before him many times, half entranced, as if she once had known a
life like that before far back in another age and climate than in
Scotland of the storms. Kissing her lips, wet from some mountain well,
her husband got to look on her now and then as some Greek girl of the
books, and himself as an eternal lover who had heard the wind blowing
through boughs in Arcady.
Loving trees as she did, it was strange that so long they should have
failed to visit Island Faoineas, for often in their voyagings it lay
before them on the sea—green, gracious, and inviting, its single hill
luxuriant with hazel-grown _eas_ or corrie, its little glen adorned with
old plantations. It lies behind Bernera, south of Harris, hiding coy
among other isles and out of the track of vessels, and for reasons of his
own the captain of the yacht sailed always at a distance from it, keeping
it in the sun’s eye so that its trees should seem like black tall cliffs
with the white waves churning at their feet. But one day Morar and his
wife came to him with the chart. “This island here,” they said together.
“We have not seen it close at hand; let us go there to-night.”
The captain’s face changed; he made many excuses. “A shabby, small
place,” he told them, “with a poor anchorage. And the wind is going
westward with the sun. I think myself Lochmaddy better for an anchoring
this night than Ealan Faoineas.”
“What does the name mean—this Ealan Faoineas?” asked Morar’s wife,
looking out toward the island that was too distant yet to show its trees.
“It means,” said Morar, “the Isle of Seeming—that is to say, the Isle of
Illusion.”
“What a dear name!” she cried, clapping her hands. “I should love to see
it. Are there trees?” Her eyes were on the captain’s face: he dared not
lie.
“What you might be calling a sort of trees,” he grudgingly admitted. “Oh
yes, I will not be saying but what there are two or three trees, or maybe
more, for I have not paid much attention to Ealan Faoineas myself.”
“Indeed!” said she. “Then it is time you were amending your knowledge of
it. I think we will risk the anchorage for the sake of the trees.”
It was her own hand put down the helm and herself who called the men to
the sheets, for the captain had a sudden slackness in his office and was
forward murmuring with his crew.
“What ails him?” the lady asked her husband.
“You have me there!” he answered her, as puzzled as herself. “I think it
is likely there may be some superstition about the island; the name
suggests as much, and now that I come to think of it, I remember I once
heard as a boy that sailors never cared to land on one or two of the
Outer Isles, believing them the domain of witchcraft. We must have
passed that island frequently and the captain always kept us wide of it.
I will ask him what its story is that makes him frightened for it.”
He went forward by-and-by and talked with the captain.
“I am a plain man; I have not the education except for boats,” said the
seaman, “and I would not set foot on Faoineas for the wide world. You
will not get a man in all the Outer Islands, from Barra Head to the Butt
of Lewis, who would step on Faoineas if the deck of his skiff was coming
asunder in staves below the very feet of him. I am brave myself—oh yes!
I come of people exceeding brave and notable for deeds, but there is not
that much gold in all the Hebrides, no, nor in the realm of Scotland,
would buy my landing in that place yonder.”
“Come! come! what is wrong with the island that you should have such a
fear of it?” asked Morar, astounded at so strong a feeling.
“It is bad for men, and it is worse for women,” said the Captain.
“Is it something to hurt the body?”
“If it was but the body I would be the first ashore! I have not so much
money put past me that I have any need to be afraid for my life,” said
the captain.
“Are there ghosts there, then?” said Morar, determined to be at the root
of the mystery.
“Ghosts!” cried the captain. “Where are they not, these gentlemen?”
By this time the sloop that Morar’s wife was steering had drawn closer on
the island, breaking her way among the billows striving into Harris
Sound; and to the gaze of Morar’s wife, and to her great bewilderment,
she saw the little glen with its bushes climbing high on either side of
it, and the tall, great, dark old Highland trees beyond, and thickets
like gardens to the south, and under all the deep cool dusk of shadows
she had longed for all those days that she and her husband had sought for
the last pang of pleasure in their honeymoon among the Outer Isles. She
leaned upon the tiller and stared entranced and unbelieving, for it
seemed a fairy isle, such as grows fast in dreams and sinks to the
sea-depths again when dawn is on the window. Only when she saw rooks
rise with cawings from the branches, and heard the song of birds unknown
on the treeless islands, was she altogether convinced of its reality.
“Darling,” she cried to her husband, “look! Were we not right? Here’s a
forgotten paradise.”
“If paradise it be, then may you have your share of it,” said the captain
as he put them ashore. “Myself, I would not risk it so long as this
world has so many pleasant things to be going on with. All I can tell
you of Island Faoineas is that, paradise or purgatory, it depends on what
one eats and drinks there. I heard it from a priest in Eriskay, a noble
and namely man through all the islands of the West. Once he had landed
here and known some wonders. He died in Arisaig, and in his dying
blessed with the seven blessings one well upon this island, but which of
all that run there I never learned.”
That night Morar and his bride slept out in the shelter of hazel-bushes
and shelisters. They built a fire and drank out of the same glass from a
burn that sang through the shelisters, and as they slept there were many
wells that ran merrily through their dreams, but one particularly that
rose from a hillock beside them, and tinkled more sweetly than golden
jewels streaming down a golden stair.