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 other’s 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!_[4]
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 feather-like 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.
_THE ANOINTED MAN_
_This story is one of the Achanna series (see “The Dàn-nan-Ròn” and
“Green Branches” in Vol. III., “Tragic Romances”). See also the note to
these two tales, apposite to the use of the forename Gloom and the
surname Achanna._
_The forename Alison is properly a woman’s name, but is occasionally
given to a male child—whence, no doubt, the not infrequent occurrence of
‘Alison’ as a surname._