Ah, he had done it well! A line of Froissart's came to Shane: "They were very noble; they cared nothing for their lives!" He had given her no shattered marriage, no empty explanation that breeds only bitterness and perhaps contempt. He had given her a very gallant memory that would exalt her in the coming days.... The world, the flesh, and the devil had played at cards with Alan Donn, and Alan had won....
He thought: Were it I now, I should have drifted into this, and come to ancient tortured days, and not having strength maybe, should have ended, not before as Alan Donn did, gallantly, but afterward, meanly, leaving bitterness and desolation.... Ah, wise Alan.
And it occurred to him suddenly, wise Alan, fey on the threshold of death, remembering him: There is virtue in the yellow gorse of Ulster, in the purple Ulster heather. Come back to where you were born, and rest, and get strength.... This is a deep thing.... Alan knew something.... The rain and the mist and the wind among the rushes had taught him natural secrets.... Maybe from the ground man drew strength, and maybe strange ground was alien to other than its own ... a motherland—why did they call a place a motherland ...? Antæus, the Libyan wrestler, was invincible so long as his feet were on mother earth, and Heracles had lifted him into the air and the air had crushed him.... What did the Greek parable mean ...? It meant something ... the purple hills ... the purple heather.... The Moyle purple in the setting sun....
"I'll go back," he decided. Scots superstition welled up in him. "A man seeing death sees more than death. Sees life. The Keepers of the Door maybe anoint his eyes, and if he looks back for an instant, God knows what he sees ... I'll go."
"Can I give you a lift back to Ballycastle, Simon Fraser? Or a lift anywhere you want. It's the least I can do and you coming this long way to tell me news."
"I'm very thankful to you, Shane Campbell, very thankful indeed. It's just the way of you to ask a poor sailor man does he want a lift halfway across the world. But I'll never again see Ballycastle with living eyes."
"And why not, man Simon?"
"It's this way, Shane Campbell. It's this way. When I came back after six years—four years lost on the coast of Borneo—my three fine sons were gone—twenty and nineteen and seventeen they were. Gone they were following the trade of the sea. And herself the woman of the house was gone, too. I didn't mind the childer, for 't is the way of the young to be roving. But herself went off with another man. A great gift of making a home she had, so there was many would have her, in spite of her forty year. Into the dim City of Glasgow she went, and there was no word of her. And she might have waited, Shane Campbell; she might so. Four years lost on the coast of Borneo to come and find your childer scattered, and your wife putting shame on you. That's a hard thing."
"You're a young man, Simon Fraser. You're as young as I am, forty-two. There's a quarter-century ahead of you. Put the past by and begin again. There'd be love at many a young woman for you. And a house, and new bairns."
"I'm a back-thinking man, Alan's kinsman, a long back-thinking man. And I'd always be putting the new beside the old and the new would not seem good to me. The new bairns would never be like the old bairns, and it would na be fair. And as for women, I've had my bellyful of women after her I was kind to, and was true to for one and twenty years, going off with some sweating landsman to a dingy town.... I was ay a good sailor, Shane Oge....