Slowly, as though a veil were withdrawn, the cloudy dusk passed from the
lift. The moon, lying in violet shadow, grew golden: while the sheen of
her pathway, trailed waveringly across the sea and athwart the isle,
made Innisròn seem as a beautiful body motionlessly adrift on the deep.
One by one the stars came forth--solemn eyes watching for ever the white
procession move onward orderly where there is neither height, nor depth,
nor beginning, nor end.
In the vast stellar space the moon-glow waned until it grew cold, white,
ineffably remote. Only upon our little dusky earth, upon our restless
span of waters, the light descended in a tender warmth. Drifting upon
the sea, it moved tremulously onward, weaving the dark waters into a
weft of living beauty.
Strange murmur of ocean, even when deep calm prevails, and not the most
homeless wind lifts a weary wing from wave-gulf to wave-gulf. As a voice
heard in dream; as a whisper in the twilight of one's own soul; as a
breath, as a sigh from one knows not whence, heard suddenly and with
recognising awe; so is this obscure, troublous echo of a tumult that is
over, that is not, but that may be, that awaiteth.
To Lora it was almost inaudible. Rather, her ears held no other sound
than the babbling repetitive chime and whisper of the lip of the sea
moving to and fro the pebbles on the narrow strand just beyond her.
Her eyes saw the lift of the dark, the lovely advance of the lunar
twilight, the miracle of the yellow bloom--golden here and here white as
frost-fire--upon sea and land: they saw, and yet saw not. Her ears heard
the muffled voice of ocean and the sweet recurrent whispering of the
foam-white runnels beside her: they heard, and yet heard not.
Surely, in the darkness, in the loneliness, she would have knowledge of
Alastair. Surely, she thought, he would come to her in the spirit. In
deep love there is a living invisible line from soul to soul whereby
portent of joy or disaster, or passion of loneliness, or passion of
fear, or passion of longing may be conveyed with terrifying surety.
How beyond words dreadful was this remoteness which environed her, as
the vast dome of night to a single white flower growing solitary in a
waste place.
Inland upon the isle, seaward, skyward, Lora looked with aching eyes.
The moonlight wounded her with its peace. The shimmering sea beat to a
rhythm atune to a larger throb than that of a petty human life. In the
starry infinitude her finitude was lost, absorbed, as a grain of sand
wind-blown a few yards across an illimitable desert.
That passionate protest of the soul against the absolute unheed of
nature was hers: that already defeated revolt of the whirling leaf
against the soaring, far-come, far-going wind that knows nothing of what
happens beneath it in the drift of its inevitable passage.
With a sob, she turned, vaguely yearning for the human peace that abode
in the cottage. As she moved, she saw a shadow, solidly clear-cut in the
moonlight, sweep from a rock close by, as though it were a swinging
scythe.
Instinctively she glanced upward, to see if the cloud-counterpart were
overhead. The sky was now cloudless: neither passing vapour nor
travelling wild-swan had made that shadow leap from the smooth boulder
into the darkness.
She trembled: for she feared she had seen the Watcher of the Dead. At
the wane of the last moon, an old islesman had passed into the white
sleep. Lora knew that his spirit would have to become the Watcher of
Graves till such time as another soul should lapse into the silence. Was
this he, she wondered with instinctive dread--was this Fergus, weary of
his vigil, errant about the isle which had been the world to him, a
drifting shadow from graveyard to byre and sheiling, from fold to dark
fold, from the clachan-end to the shore-pastures, from coble to havened
coble, from the place of the boats to the ferry-rock? Did he know that
he would soon have one to take over from him his dreadful peace? Or was
he in no satiate peace, but anhungered as a beast of prey for the death
of another? And then ... and then ... who was this other? Who next upon
the isle would be the Watcher of the Dead?