We were seated on an old upturned boat on the rocky little promontory,
where once were first laid the innumerable dead, brought for burial to
the sacred soil of Iona. For a time Macarthur spoke slowly about this
and that; then, abruptly and without preamble, he told me this:
The Christmas before last, Mary, his wife, had seen a man who was not
on the island. "And that is true, by St. Martin's Cross," he added.
They were, he said, sitting before the fire, when, after a long
silence, he looked up to see his wife staring into the shadow in the
ingle. He thought she was brooding over the barren womb that had been
her life-long sorrow, and now in her old age had become a strange and
gnawing grief, and so he turned his gaze upon the red coals again.
But suddenly she exclaimed, "_C'ait am bheil thu dol?_" (Where are you
going?)
He looked up, but saw no one in the room beside themselves.
"What has come to you?" he asked. "What do you see?"
But she took no notice.
"_C'uine tha thu falbh?_" (When are you going?) she muttered, with the
same strained voice and frozen eyes. And then, once again, "_C'uine
thig thu rithisd?_" (When will you come again?) And with that she
bowed her head, and the thin backs of the hands upon her knees were
wet with falling tears.
For the fourth of an hour thereafter she would say nothing except
moan, "_Tha an amhuinn domhain; tha an amhuinn domhain; fuar, fuar;
domhain, domhain!_"[9] (Deep, deep is the river; cold and deep; cold
and deep!)
[9] Pronounce Ha aun ah-ween do'-inn; fēw-ar, fēw-ar; do'-inn,
do'-inn.
And the man she saw, added Macarthur, was her nephew, Luthais, in Cape
Breton, of Nova Scotia, who, as they learned before Easter, was
drowned that Christmas-tide. He was the last of his mother's race, and
had been the foster-child of Mary.