and white as the moonshine came Anne’s singing, as she passed along the
corrie leading to the haven. In vain his travelling gaze sought her: she
was still in the shadow, and, besides, a slow drifting cloud obscured
the moonlight. When he looked back again, a stifled exclamation came
from his lips. There was not a sign of Gloom Achanna. He had slipped
noiselessly from the boat, and was now either behind it, or had dived
beneath it, or was swimming under water this way or that. If only the
cloud would sail by, muttered Mànus, as he held himself in readiness for
an attack from beneath or behind. As the dusk lightened, he swam slowly
towards the boat, and then swiftly round it. There was no one there. He
climbed on to the keel, and stood, leaning forward as a salmon-leisterer
by torchlight, with his spear-pointed boat-hook raised. Neither below nor
beyond could he discern any shape. A whispered call to Aulay MacNeill
showed that he, too, saw nothing. Gloom must have swooned, and sank deep
as he slipped through the water. Perhaps the dogfish were already darting
about him.
Going behind the boat, Mànus guided it back to the smack. It was not long
before, with MacNeill’s help, he righted the punt. One oar had drifted
out of sight, but as there was a sculling hole in the stern, that did not
matter.
“What shall we do with it?” he muttered, as he stood at last by the
corpse of Marcus. “This is a bad night for us, Aulay!”
“Bad it is; but let us be seeing it is not worse. I’m thinking we should
have left the boat.”
“And for why that?”
“We could say that Marcus Achanna and Gloom Achanna left us again, and
that we saw no more of them nor of our boat.”
MacCodrum pondered a while. The sound of voices, borne faintly across
the water, decided him. Probably Anne and the lad Donull were talking.
He slipped into the boat, and with a sail-knife soon ripped it here
and there. It filled, and then, heavy with the weight of a great
ballast-stone which Aulay had first handed to his companion, and surging
with a foot-thrust from the latter, it sank.
“We’ll hide the … the man there … behind the windlass, below the spare
sail, till we’re out at sea, Aulay. Quick, give me a hand!”
It did not take the two men long to lift the corpse and do as Mànus
had suggested. They had scarce accomplished this when Anne’s voice came
hailing silver-sweet across the water.
With death-white face and shaking limbs MacCodrum stood holding the mast,
while with a loud voice so firm and strong that Aulay MacNeill smiled
below his fear, he asked if the Achannas were back yet, and, if so, for
Donull to row out at once, and she with him if she would come.
It was nearly half-an-hour thereafter that Anne rowed out towards the
_Luath_. She had gone at last along the shore to a creek where one of
Marcus’ boats was moored, and returned with it. Having taken Donull on
board, she made way with all speed, fearful lest Gloom or Marcus should
intercept her.
It did not take long to explain how she had laughed at Sheumais’ vain
efforts to detain her, and had come down to the haven. As she approached,
she heard Mànus singing, and so had herself broken into a song she knew
he loved. Then, by the water-edge, she had come upon Donull lying upon
his back, bound and gagged. After she had released him, they waited to
see what would happen, but as in the moonlight they could not see any
small boat come in--bound to or from the smack--she had hailed to know if
Mànus were there.
On his side, he said briefly that the two Achannas had come to persuade
him to leave without her. On his refusal, they had departed again,
uttering threats against her as well as himself. He heard their
quarrelling voices as they rowed into the gloom, but could not see them
at last because of the obscured moonlight.
“And now, Ann-mochree,” he added, “is it coming with me you are, and just
as you are? Sure, you’ll never repent it, and you’ll have all you want
that I can give. Dear of my heart, say that you will be coming away this
night of the nights! By the Black Stone on Icolmkill I swear it, and by
the Sun, and by the Moon, and by Himself!”
“I am trusting you, Mànus dear. Sure, it is not for me to be going back
to that house after what has been done and said. I go with you, now and
always, God save us.”
“Well, dear lass o’ my heart, it’s farewell to Eilanmore it is, for by
the Blood on the Cross I’ll never land on it again!”
“And that will be no sorrow to me, Mànus my home!”
* * * * *
And this was the way that my friend Anne Gillespie left Eilanmore to go
to the isles of the west.
It was a fair sailing in the white moonshine with a whispering breeze
astern. Anne leaned against Mànus, dreaming her dream. The lad Donull sat
drowsing at the helm. Forward, Aulay MacNeill, with his face set against
the moonshine to the west, brooded dark.
Though no longer was land in sight, and there was peace among the deeps
of the quiet stars and upon the sea, the shadow of fear was upon the face
of Mànus MacCodrum.
This might well have been because of the as yet unburied dead that lay
beneath the spare sail by the windlass. The dead man, however, did not
affright him. What went moaning in his heart, and sighing and calling in
his brain, was a faint falling echo he had heard as the _Luath_ glided
slow out of the haven. Whether from the water or from the shore he could
not tell, but he heard the wild fantastic air of the Dàn-nan-Ròn, as he
had heard it that very night upon the _feadan_ of Gloom Achanna.
It was his hope that his ears had played him false. When he glanced about
him and saw the sombre flame in the eyes of Aulay MacNeill, staring at
him out of the dusk, he knew that which Oisìn, the son of Fionn, cried in
his pain: “his soul swam in mist.”
II
For all the evil omens, the marriage of Anne and Mànus MacCodrum went
well. He was more silent than of yore, and men avoided rather than sought
him; but he was happy with Anne, and content with his two mates, who were
now Callum MacCodrum and Ranald MacRanald. The youth Donull had bettered
himself by joining a Skye skipper, who was a kinsman; and Aulay MacNeill
had surprised everyone except Mànus by going away as a seaman on board
one of the _Loch_ line of ships which sail for Australia from the Clyde.
Anne never knew what had happened, though it is possible she suspected
somewhat. All that was known to her was that Marcus and Gloom Achanna had
disappeared, and were supposed to have been drowned. There was now no
Achanna upon Eilanmore, for Sheumais had taken a horror of the place and
his loneliness. As soon as it was commonly admitted that his two brothers
must have drifted out to sea, and been drowned, or at best picked up by
some ocean-going ship, he disposed of the island-farm, and left Eilanmore
for ever. All this confirmed the thing said among the islanders of the
West--that old Robert Achanna had brought a curse with him. Blight and
disaster had visited Eilanmore over and over in the many years he had
held it, and death, sometimes tragic or mysterious, had overtaken six
of his seven sons, while the youngest bore upon his brows the “dusk of
the shadow.” True, none knew for certain that three out of the six were
dead, but few for a moment believed in the possibility that Alison and
Marcus and Gloom were alive. On the night when Anne had left the island
with Mànus MacCodrum he, Sheumais, had heard nothing to alarm him. Even
when, an hour after she had gone down to the haven, neither she nor his
brothers had returned, and the _Luath_ had put out to sea, he was not in
fear of any ill. Clearly, Marcus and Gloom had gone away in the smack,
perhaps determined to see that the girl was duly married by priest or
minister. He would have perturbed himself little for days to come, but
for a strange thing that happened that night. He had returned to the
house because of a chill that was upon him, and convinced, too, that all
had sailed in the _Luath_. He was sitting brooding by the peat-fire, when
he was startled by a sound at the window at the back of the room. A few
bars of a familiar air struck painfully upon his ear, though played so
low that they were just audible. What could it be but the Dàn-nan-Ròn;
and who would be playing that but Gloom? What did it mean? Perhaps, after
all, it was fantasy only, and there was no _feadan_ out there in the
dark. He was pondering this when, still low, but louder and sharper than
before, there rose and fell the strain which he hated, and Gloom never
played before him, that of the Davsa-na-mairv, the Dance of the Dead.
Swiftly and silently he rose and crossed the room. In the dark shadows
cast by the byre he could see nothing; but the music ceased. He went out,
and searched everywhere, but found no one. So he returned, took down the
Holy Book, and with awed heart read slowly, till peace came upon him,
soft and sweet as the warmth of the peat-glow.
But as for Anne, she had never even this hint that one of the supposed
dead might be alive; or that, being dead, Gloom might yet touch a shadowy
_feadan_ into a wild, remote air of the Grave.
When month after month went by, and no hint of ill came to break upon
their peace, Mànus grew light-hearted again. Once more his songs were
heard as he came back from the fishing or loitered ashore mending his
nets. A new happiness was nigh to them, for Anne was with child. True,
there was fear also, for the girl was not well at the time when her
labour was near, and grew weaker daily. There came a day when Mànus had
to go to Loch Boisdale in South Uist; and it was with pain, and something
of foreboding, that he sailed away from Berneray in the Sound of Harris,
where he lived. It was on the third night that he returned. He was met
by Katreen MacRanald, the wife of his mate, with the news that, on the
morrow after his going, Anne had sent for the priest, who was staying
at Loch Maddy, for she had felt the coming of death. It was that very
evening she died, and took the child with her.
Mànus heard as one in a dream. It seemed to him that the tide was ebbing
in his heart, and a cold sleety rain falling, falling through a mist in
his brain.
Sorrow lay heavily upon him. After the earthing of her whom he loved he
went to and fro solitary; often crossing the Narrows and going to the old
Pictish Tower under the shadow of Ben Breac. He would not go upon the
sea, but let his kinsman Callum do as he liked with the _Luath_.
Now and again Father Allan MacNeill sailed northward to see him. Each
time he departed sadder. “The man is going mad, I fear,” he said to
Callum, the last time he saw Mànus.
The long summer nights brought peace and beauty to the isles. It was a
great herring-year, and the moon-fishing was unusually good. All the Uist
men who lived by the sea-harvest were in their boats whenever they could.
The pollack, the dogfish, the otters, and the seals, with flocks of
sea-fowl beyond number, shared in the common joy. Mànus MacCodrum alone
paid no need to herring or mackerel. He was often seen striding along the
shore, and more than once had been heard laughing. Sometimes, too, he was
come upon at low tide by the great Reef of Berneray, singing wild strange
runes and songs, or crouching upon a rock and brooding dark.
The midsummer moon found no man on Berneray except MacCodrum, the
Reverend Mr Black, the minister of the Free Kirk, and an old man named
Anndra McIan. On the night before the last day of the middle month,
Anndra was reproved by the minister for saying that he had seen a man
rise out of one of the graves in the kirkyard, and steal down by the
stone-dykes towards Balnahunnur-sa-mona,[2] where Mànus MacCodrum lived.
[2] _Baille-’na-aonar’sa mhonadh_, “the solitary farm on the
hill-slope.”
“The dead do not rise and walk, Anndra.”
“That may be, maighstir; but it may have been the Watcher of the Dead.
Sure, it is not three weeks since Padruic McAlistair was laid beneath the
green mound. He’ll be wearying for another to take his place.”
“Hoots, man, that is an old superstition. The dead do not rise and walk,
I tell you.”
“It is right you may be, maighstir; but I heard of this from my father,
that was old before you were young, and from his father before him. When
the last buried is weary with being the Watcher of the Dead he goes
about from place to place till he sees man, woman, or child with the
death-shadow in the eyes, and then he goes back to his grave and lies
down in peace, for his vigil it will be over now.”
The minister laughed at the folly, and went into his house to make ready
for the Sacrament that was to be on the morrow. Old Anndra, however,
was uneasy. After the porridge he went down through the gloaming to
Balnahunnur-sa-mona. He meant to go in and warn Mànus MacCodrum. But when
he got to the west wall, and stood near the open window, he heard Mànus
speaking in a loud voice, though he was alone in the room.
“_B’ionganntach do ghràdh dhomhsa, a’ toirt barrachd air gràdh nam
ban!…_”[3]
[3] “Thy love to me was wonderful, surpassing the love of women.”
This Mànus cried in a voice quivering with pain. Anndra stopped still,
fearful to intrude, fearful also, perhaps, to see someone there beside
MacCodrum whom eyes should not see. Then the voice rose into a cry of
agony.
“_Aoram dhuit, ay an déigh dhomh fàs aosda!_”[4]
[4] “I shall worship thee, ay even after I have become old.”
With that Anndra feared to stay. As he passed the byre he started, for he
thought he saw the shadow of a man. When he looked closer he could see
nought, so went his way trembling and sore troubled.
It was dusk when Mànus came out. He saw that it was to be a cloudy night,
and perhaps it was this that, after a brief while, made him turn in his
aimless walk and go back to the house. He was sitting before the flaming
heart of the peats, brooding in his pain, when, suddenly, he sprang to
his feet.
Loud and clear, and close as though played under the very window of the
room, came the cold white notes of an oaten flute. Ah, too well he knew
that wild fantastic air. Who could it be but Gloom Achanna, playing upon
his _feadan_; and what air of all airs could that be but the Dàn-nan-Ròn?
Was it the dead man, standing there unseen in the shadow of the grave?
Was Marcus beside him--Marcus with the knife still thrust up to the hilt,
and the lung-foam upon his lips? Can the sea give up its dead? Can there
be strain of any _feadan_ that ever was made of man--there in the Silence?
In vain Mànus MacCodrum tortured himself thus. Too well he knew that he
had heard the Dàn-nan-Ròn, and that no other than Gloom Achanna was the
player.
Suddenly an access of fury wrought him to madness. With an abrupt lilt
the tune swung into the Davsa-na-mairv, and thence, after a few seconds,
and in a moment, into that mysterious and horrible _Codhail-nan-Pairtean_
which none but Gloom played.
There could be no mistake now, nor as to what was meant by the muttering,
jerking air of the “Gathering of the Crabs.”
With a savage cry Mànus snatched up a long dirk from its place by the
chimney, and rushed out.
There was not the shadow of a sea-gull even in front: so he sped round by
the byre. Neither was anything unusual discoverable there.
“Sorrow upon me,” he cried; “man or wraith, I will be putting it to the
dirk!”
But there was no one; nothing; not a sound.
Then, at last, with a listless droop of his arms, MacCodrum turned and
went into the house again. He remembered what Gloom Achanna had said:
“_You’ll hear the Dàn-nan-Ròn the night before you die, Mànus MacCodrum,
and lest you doubt it, you’ll hear it in your death-hour._”
He did not stir from the fire for three hours; then he rose, and went
over to his bed and lay down without undressing.
He did not sleep, but lay listening and watching. The peats burned low,
and at last there was scarce a flicker along the floor. Outside he could
hear the wind moaning upon the sea. By a strange rustling sound he
knew that the tide was ebbing across the great reef that runs out from
Berneray. By midnight the clouds had gone. The moon shone clear and full.
When he heard the clock strike in its worm-eaten, rickety case, he sat
up, and listened intently. He could hear nothing. No shadow stirred.
Surely if the wraith of Gloom Achanna were waiting for him it would make
some sign, now, in the dead of night.
An hour passed. Mànus rose, crossed the room on tip-toe, and soundlessly
opened the door. The salt-wind blew fresh against his face. The smell
of the shore, of wet sea-wrack and pungent gale, of foam and moving
water, came sweet to his nostrils. He heard a skua calling from the rocky
promontory. From the slopes behind, the wail of a moon-restless lapwing
rose and fell mournfully.
Crouching, and with slow, stealthy step, he stole round by the seaward
wall. At the dyke he stopped, and scrutinised it on each side. He could
see for several hundred yards, and there was not even a sheltering sheep.
Then, soundlessly as ever, he crept close to the byre. He put his ear to
chink after chink; but not a stir of a shadow even. As a shadow, himself,
he drifted lightly to the front, past the hay-rick: then, with swift
glances to right and left, opened the door and entered. As he did so,
he stood as though frozen. Surely, he thought, that was a sound as of a
step, out there by the hay-rick. A terror was at his heart. In front,
the darkness of the byre, with God knows what dread thing awaiting him:
behind, a mysterious walker in the night, swift to take him unawares.
The trembling that came upon him was nigh overmastering. At last, with
a great effort, he moved towards the ledge, where he kept a candle.
With shaking hand he struck a light. The empty byre looked ghostly and
fearsome in the flickering gloom. But there was no one, nothing. He was
about to turn, when a rat ran along a loose hanging beam, and stared
at him, or at the yellow shine. He saw its black eyes shining like
peat-water in moonlight.
The creature was curious at first, then indifferent. At least, it began
to squeak, and then make a swift scratching with its forepaws. Once or
twice came an answering squeak: a faint rustling was audible here and
there among the straw.
With a sudden spring Mànus seized the beast. Even in the second in
which he raised it to his mouth, and scrunched its back with his strong
teeth, it bit him severely. He let his hands drop, and grope furtively
in the darkness. With stooping head he shook the last breath out of
the rat, holding it with his front teeth, with back-curled lips. The
next moment he dropped the dead thing, trampled upon it, and burst out
laughing. There was a scurrying of pattering feet, a rustling of straw.
Then silence again. A draught from the door had caught the flame and
extinguished it. In the silence and darkness MacCodrum stood, intent
but no longer afraid. He laughed again, because it was so easy to kill
with the teeth. The noise of his laughter seemed to him to leap hither
and thither like a shadowy ape. He could see it: a blackness within the
darkness. Once more he laughed. It amused him to see the _thing_ leaping
about like that.
Suddenly he turned, and walked out into the moonlight. The lapwing was
still circling and wailing. He mocked it, with loud, shrill _pēē-wēēty,
pēē-wēēty, pēē-wēēt_. The bird swung waywardly, alarmed: its abrupt
cry, and dancing flight, aroused its fellows. The air was full of the
lamentable crying of plovers.
A sough of the sea came inland. Mànus inhaled its breath with a sigh
of delight. A passion for the running wave was upon him. He yearned to
feel green water break against his breast. Thirst and hunger, too, he
felt at last, though he had known neither all day. How cool and sweet,
he thought, would be a silver haddock, or even a brown-backed liath,
alive and gleaming wet with the sea-water still bubbling in its gills.
It would writhe, just like the rat; but then how he would throw his head
back, and toss the glittering thing up into the moonlight, catch it on
the downwhirl just as it neared the wave on whose crest he was, and then
devour it with swift voracious gulps!
With quick jerky steps he made his way past the landward side of the
small thatchroofed cottage. He was about to enter, when he noticed that
the door, which he had left ajar, was closed. He stole to the window and
glanced in.
A single thin, wavering moonbeam flickered in the room. But the flame at
the heart of the peats had worked its way through the ash, and there was
now a dull glow, though that was within the “smooring,” and threw scarce
more than a glimmer into the room.
There was enough light, however, for Mànus MacCodrum to see that a man
sat on the three-legged stool before the fire. His head was bent, as
though he were listening. The face was away from the window. It was his
own wraith, of course--of that Mànus felt convinced. What was it doing
there? Perhaps it had eaten the Holy Book, so that it was beyond his
putting a _rosad_ on it! At the thought, he laughed loud. The shadow-man
leaped to his feet.
The next moment MacCodrum swung himself on to the thatched roof, and
clambered from rope to rope, where these held down the big stones which
acted as dead-weight for the thatch against the fury of tempests. Stone
after stone he tore from its fastenings, and hurled to the ground over
and beyond the door. Then, with tearing hands, he began to burrow an
opening in the thatch. All the time he whined like a beast.
He was glad the moon shone full upon him. When he had made a big enough
hole, he would see the evil thing out of the grave that sat in his room,
and would stone it to death.
Suddenly he became still. A cold sweat broke out upon him. The _thing_,
whether his own wraith, or the spirit of his dead foe, or Gloom Achanna
himself, had begun to play, low and slow, a wild air. No piercing cold
music like that of the _feadan_! Too well he knew it, and those cool
white notes that moved here and there in the darkness like snowflakes. As
for the air, though he slept till Judgment Day and heard but a note of it
amidst all the clamour of heaven and hell, sure he would scream because
of the Dàn-nan-Ròn!
The Dàn-nan-Ròn: the _Roin_! the Seals! Ah, what was he doing there, on
the bitter-weary land! Out there was the sea. Safe would he be in the
green waves.
With a leap he was on the ground. Seizing a huge stone he hurled it
through the window. Then, laughing and screaming, he fled towards the
Great Reef, along whose sides the ebb-tide gurgled and sobbed, with
glistering white foam.
He ceased screaming or laughing as he heard the Dàn-nan-Ròn behind him,
faint, but following; sure, following. Bending low, he raced towards the
rock-ledges from which ran the reef.
When at last he reached the extreme ledge, he stopped abruptly. Out on
the reef he saw from ten to twenty seals, some swimming to and fro,
others clinging to the reef, one or two making a curious barking sound,
with round heads lifted against the moon. In one place there was a surge
and lashing of water. Two bulls were fighting to the death.
With swift stealthy movements Mànus unclothed himself. The damp had
clotted the leathern thongs of his boots, and he snarled with curled lip
as he tore at them. He shone white in the moonshine, but was sheltered
from the sea by the ledge behind which he crouched. “What did Gloom
Achanna mean by that,” he muttered savagely, as he heard the nearing air
change into the “Dance of the Dead.” For a moment Mànus was a man again.
He was nigh upon turning to face his foe, corpse or wraith or living
body, to spring at this thing which followed him, and tear it with hands
and teeth. Then, once more, the hated Song of the Seal stole mockingly
through the night.
With a shiver he slipped into the dark water. Then, with quick, powerful
strokes, he was in the moon-flood, and swimming hard against it out by
the leeside of the reef.
So intent were the seals upon the fight of the two great bulls that they
did not see the swimmer, or, if they did, took him for one of their own
people. A savage snarling and barking and half-human crying came from
them. Mànus was almost within reach of the nearest, when one of the
combatants sank dead, with torn throat. The victor clambered on to the
reef, and leaned high, swaying its great head and shoulders to and fro.
In the moonlight its white fangs were like red coral. Its blinded eyes
ran with gore.
There was a rush, a rapid leaping and swirling, as Mànus surged in among
the seals, which were swimming round the place where the slain bull had
sunk.
The laughter of this long white seal terrified them.