“You are taking away from me the only thing of which I have need,” said the old man sadly. “Nevertheless, it must be. Blessings, blessings go with you, and carry you safely away from the white sands to her who waits for you . . . and may my blessings draw you back again, even though I do not greet you at your returning.”
When Ewen came slowly down the path again he found himself thinking of how he had descended it last August behind Keith Windham, nearly a year ago. The story of Lachlan’s vow had perturbed him, but now he saw it in a far less menacing light. Either his foster-brother’s unquiet spirit was by this time at rest, or the whole thing was a dream of that troubled imagination of the old seer’s, where the distinction between the living and the dead was so tenuous.
Soon he forgot Keith Windham, Angus and everyone. Loch na h-Iolaire lay before him under the sunset, a sunset so tranquil and so smiling that in its sleepy brightness, which mirrored all the mountains round, the loch seemed to hold the very heart of content. Ewen had the sensation that his heart, too, was drowned there. And by his own will he was saying farewell to loch and mountain, island and red crag. He remembered how Alison had said that he would be hard put to it to choose between her and them. Was she right?
There was a place where for a little there was no bank, but marshy ground, and where the water came brimming into the reeds and grasses, setting them faintly swaying. He went to it, and, stooping with difficulty, dipped a cupped hand into the water and raised it to his lips. Perhaps that sacramental draught would give him to see this scene as bright and sharp in dreams, over there in the land of exile whither, like his father, like all who had not counted the cost, he was going.
As he drank there was a loud croak over his head, and, looking up, he saw a heron winging its slow, strong way over the loch towards the sunset. It might almost have been the same heron which he and Alison had watched that evening last summer, when it had seemed to arrive from the western coast like a herald from him who had landed there. Now it was going towards the coast once more, as he, the outlaw, was going, and as his Chief and his fugitive Prince would soon be going. In a little year, between two flights of a heron seen over Loch na h-Iolaire, the whole adventure of ruin had been begun and consummated.
Well, if one’s life remained to one it was in order to come back some day and renew the struggle. Ewen took off his bonnet. “God save King James!” he said firmly, and turned away from the mirrored mountains to take the same path as the heron.
CHAPTER V
This sea-fog, Keith Windham decided, was worse than the inland mist; thicker, more woolly, more capricious. Yesterday, for instance, one had wakened to it, and all day it had cloaked sea and shore and the wild, tumbled mountains of the ‘Rough Bounds’. Yet towards evening it had suddenly lifted, and the night had been clear and moonlit. But this morning the white veil was down again, and only now, some hours after sunset, was it clearing away.