“It is bad for men, and it is worse for women,” said the Captain.
“Is it something to hurt the body?”
“If it was but the body I would be the first ashore! I have not so much money put past me that I have any need to be afraid for my life,” said the captain.
“Are there ghosts there, then?” said Morar, determined to be at the root of the mystery.
“Ghosts!” cried the captain. “Where are they not, these gentlemen?”
By this time the sloop that Morar’s wife was steering had drawn closer on the island, breaking her way among the billows striving into Harris Sound; and to the gaze of Morar’s wife, and to her great bewilderment, she saw the little glen with its bushes climbing high on either side of it, and the tall, great, dark old Highland trees beyond, and thickets like gardens to the south, and under all the deep cool dusk of shadows she had longed for all those days that she and her husband had sought for the last pang of pleasure in their honeymoon among the Outer Isles. She leaned upon the tiller and stared entranced and unbelieving, for it seemed a fairy isle, such as grows fast in dreams and sinks to the sea-depths again when dawn is on the window. Only when she saw rooks rise with cawings from the branches, and heard the song of birds unknown on the treeless islands, was she altogether convinced of its reality.
“Darling,” she cried to her husband, “look! Were we not right? Here’s a forgotten paradise.”
“If paradise it be, then may you have your share of it,” said the captain as he put them ashore. “Myself, I would not risk it so long as this world has so many pleasant things to be going on with. All I can tell you of Island Faoineas is that, paradise or purgatory, it depends on what one eats and drinks there. I heard it from a priest in Eriskay, a noble and namely man through all the islands of the West. Once he had landed here and known some wonders. He died in Arisaig, and in his dying blessed with the seven blessings one well upon this island, but which of all that run there I never learned.”
That night Morar and his bride slept out in the shelter of hazel-bushes and shelisters. They built a fire and drank out of the same glass from a burn that sang through the shelisters, and as they slept there were many wells that ran merrily through their dreams, but one particularly that rose from a hillock beside them, and tinkled more sweetly than golden jewels streaming down a golden stair.