“Doubtless, mochree,” would he answer her, laughing. “Faith! it’s my notion they have been growing all these years in the islands waiting just for you; their bloom is on your cheek; it’s the berry stain that was on your lips since ever I knew you. But for a common person like myself there is a certain seduction in a sea-trout or a herring. Madam, I wish you joy of your wild berries, and indeed I love the taste of them—on your lips,—but let me press on you a simple cabin-biscuit, though it suffers from having been baked by the hand of man.”
“And the berry comes straight from God,” would be her answer. “It’s the fruiting of the clean wild wind; I sometimes think that if I could eat it always I should live for ever.”
“Then, faith, I’ll grow it in Morar garden by the pole, and you shall eat berries at every meal,” said her husband. “Perhaps I’ll acquire the taste myself. Meanwhile, let me recommend the plain prose of our cooking galley.”
“And I declare that I can find in pure water something as intoxicating as wine and far more subtle on the palate.”
“A noble beverage, at least they tell me so, as the piper says in the story,” said Morar, “yet God forbid that a too exclusive diet of berries and water should send Macdonnell back a widower to Morar! I take leave to help you to another egg,” and so saying he would laugh at her again, and she would laugh also, for the truth was that she never brought to the cabin table but a yachtsman’s appetite.
One thing she missed in all these island voyagings was the green companionship of trees. She came from a land of trees, and sailing day after day past isles that gave no harbour to so little as a sapling, she fretted sometimes for the shady deeps of thicket and the sway of boughs. Often she sat on deck at nightfall and imagined what the isles must have been before disaster overtook them.
“Can you think of us wandering in the avenues, sitting in the glades? Barefoot or sandal, loose light garments, berries and water, the bland sea air, shade from the sun and shelter from the shower, and the two of us always young and always the same to each other”—it was a picture she put before him many times, half entranced, as if she once had known a life like that before far back in another age and climate than in Scotland of the storms. Kissing her lips, wet from some mountain well, her husband got to look on her now and then as some Greek girl of the books, and himself as an eternal lover who had heard the wind blowing through boughs in Arcady.
Loving trees as she did, it was strange that so long they should have failed to visit Island Faoineas, for often in their voyagings it lay before them on the sea—green, gracious, and inviting, its single hill luxuriant with hazel-grown eas or corrie, its little glen adorned with old plantations. It lies behind Bernera, south of Harris, hiding coy among other isles and out of the track of vessels, and for reasons of his own the captain of the yacht sailed always at a distance from it, keeping it in the sun’s eye so that its trees should seem like black tall cliffs with the white waves churning at their feet. But one day Morar and his wife came to him with the chart. “This island here,” they said together. “We have not seen it close at hand; let us go there to-night.”
The captain’s face changed; he made many excuses. “A shabby, small place,” he told them, “with a poor anchorage. And the wind is going westward with the sun. I think myself Lochmaddy better for an anchoring this night than Ealan Faoineas.”
“What does the name mean—this Ealan Faoineas?” asked Morar’s wife, looking out toward the island that was too distant yet to show its trees.