Glad am I that wherever and whenever I listen intently I can hear the
looms of Nature weaving Beauty and Music. But some of the most
beautiful things are learned otherwise--by hazard, in the Way of Pain,
or at the Gate of Sorrow.
I learned two things on the day when I saw Sheumas McIan dead upon the
heather. He of whom I speak was the son of Ian McIan Alltnalee, but
was known throughout the home straths and the countries beyond as
Sheumas Dhu, Black James, or, to render the subtler meaning implied in
this instance, James the Dark One. I had wondered occasionally at the
designation, because Sheumas, if not exactly fair, was not dark. But
the name was given to him, as I learned later, because, as commonly
rumoured, he knew that which he should not have known.
I had been spending some weeks with Alasdair McIan and his wife Silis
(who was my foster-sister), at their farm of Ardoch, high in a remote
hill country. One night we were sitting before the peats, listening to
the wind crying amid the corries, though, ominously as it seemed to
us, there was not a breath in the rowan-tree that grew in the
sun's-way by the house. Silis had been singing, but silence had come
upon us. In the warm glow from the fire we saw each others' faces.
There the silence lay, strangely still and beautiful, as snow in
moonlight. Silis's song was one of the _Dana Spioradail_, known in
Gaelic as the Hymn of the Looms. I cannot recall it, nor have I ever
heard or in any way encountered it again.
It had a lovely refrain, I know not whether its own or added by Silis.
I have heard her chant it to other runes and songs. Now, when too
late, my regret is deep that I did not take from her lips more of
those sorrowful strange songs or chants, with their ancient Celtic
melodies, so full of haunting sweet melancholy, which she loved so
well. It was with this refrain that, after a long stillness, she
startled us that October night. I remember the sudden light in the
eyes of Alasdair McIan, and the beat at my heart, when, like rain in a
wood, her voice fell unawares upon us out of the silence:
_Oh! oh! ohrone, arone! Oh! Oh! mo ghraidh, mo chridhe!
Oh! oh! mo ghraidh, mo chridhe!_[13]
[13] Pronounce mogh-rāy, mogh-rēe (my heart's delight--_lit._,
my dear one, my heart).
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 passed
and are passing.
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
circumstance that shortly after Silis had turned her face to the peats
again, a knock came to the door, and then Sheumas 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 Sheumas 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-Mòr. Sheumas,
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 fàileadh
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 ciàr nan carn!_--The gloom of the rocks be upon you!" replied
Sheumas, 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 Mòr with Alasdair Ardoch, we came
suddenly upon the body of Sheumas, 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 Sheumas, 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 isles-woman 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
Sheumas 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 featherlike 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 passing of the trouble in the face of Sheumas
Dhu, what that sudden light was, that calming of the sea, that
ineffable quietude. It was the Smoothing of the Hand.