Before the want of that day, the rumour went among the scant population
of Innisròn that Alastair, son of Diarmid of Macleod, was mad: that, in
the phrasing of the islesman, he had the mind-dark.
Men and women whispered the thing with awe. In the West, something
almost of a hieratic significance is involved in the poetic phrase that
God has filled with dusk the house of the brain. Not thus is spoken of
the violence of insanity--the mere insurgence of delirium from the fever
of hate, or from jealousy, or love, or evil of the blood, or the curse
of drink. But that veil of darkness which comes down upon the mind of
man or woman in the fullness of life, and puts an impermeable mist or a
twilight of awful gloom about the soul, is looked upon not only with an
exceeding tenderness, but with awe, and as of a bowing of the head
before a divine mystery.
Yet the rumour was not true, for Alastair Macleod, though he stood
within the shadow, had not yet sunk into the darkness.
As it had chanced, Mrs. Maclean was not the only person who had seen him
and Lora on their return.
Late in the night Ian Maclean had come back from the western side of the
isle, and was standing in the shadow of the byre when, hand in hand,
Lora and Alastair approached.
The old man had been unhappy, and, after leaving his kinsman at
Ardfeulan, had wandered up among the corries. In the wail of the wind
along the heights, in the sough of it in the little glens and shelving
uplands, he heard voices to which he would fain not have listened, for
they spoke of a terror that was in the air.
The moment he saw Alastair's eyes, dark within the moonlit pallor of the
face, he knew that his premonitions were no mere imaginings. On his
forehead he saw the shadow of doom.
With a sigh he turned, and, having entered the byre and gone to the
part of it shut off for his use, lay down upon his bed of fragrant fern.
But, weary as he was, he could not sleep.
Again the vision came to him: and once more he saw Alastair move blindly
in an unfamiliar place, with the mist no longer up to his waist only,
but risen now to his throat, and with thin tongues reaching upward
still.
The long night went drearily past. When the day was come, Ian rose and
let out the kye. The sweet freshness of the air was as balm to his
weariness. The wind blew cool upon his brows, and a breath of the sea
mingled with the myriad suspiration of the earth and gave him the
intoxication of the dawn. His eyes grew brighter, his step firmer, his
mien no longer that of profound dejection; and when Ghaoth came leaping
toward him, and barked about the half-amused, half-angry cows--who
stopped to plash their hoofs in the thick white dew, against which the
warm breaths fell revolvingly like grey whorls of steam, and to swing
their great horns against their flanks, wild and shaggy as the brown
hill-sides in autumn--then all the gloom of the night went from him.
"Mayhap it was but a dream," he muttered: "and who can tell the folly of
the mind?"
Then, with Ghaoth's help, he got the steers from the neighbouring shed
and "Righ-geal," the great tawny-shaggy bull, whose either horn could
have pierced right through and beyond the biggest drover who ever
crossed the Kyles at Colintraive, and urged all the kine upward to the
higher pastures, where the thyme was so sweet, close-clustered as it was
among the soft green hair of the isle-grass.
It seemed to him as though all the larks on Innisròn were singing at one
time and just there, everywhere around and above him. In the birk-shaws,
there was a mavis that was as a fount wherefrom music spilled
intoxicatingly: by the burn, the merles called, recalled, and called yet
again, and over and over, sweet and blithe, and with loud, reckless
cries of mirth and joy. On every gorse-bush, yellow with bloom, fragrant
almost to pain, and filled with the murmur of the wild-bee and the high,
thin hum of the wood-wasp, a yellow-hammer flitted to and fro, or sang
its _tweet--tweet--tweet--o-o-oh sweet!--sweet!_
The sky was almost cloudless save for an angry flush in the
north-east--a deep, living blue of infinite, though indiscernibly faint
gradation. Here and there, too, were thin, almost invisible grey
mare's-tails swept upward, as though they were snow-dust or sea-spray,
before the flying feet of the Weaver of the Winds.
As soon as Ian had reached the last dyke, and had seen "Righ-geal" lead
his impatient following toward the uplands, he stood swaying his grey
head slowly to and fro, with his right hand moving automatically in
rhythmic accord, while he repeated the familiar "Rann Buacbailleac," or
Rune on the driving of the cattle to the pasture:
I
"_Siubhal beinne, siubhal baile,
Siubhal gu re fada farsuinn;
Buachaille Mhic De m'ar casaibh,
Gu mu slan a thig sibh dachaidh,
Buachaille Mhic De m'ar casaibh
Gu mu slan a thig sibh dachaidh._