With the coming of that child upon whom such high hopes had been set—its birth, still and quiet as a snowdrop fallen before an icy wind upon the snow which nurtured it—all the fear of a mysterious Nemesis, because of her union with Alan despite the shadow of tragic crime which made that union ominous of evil destiny; all the vague forebodings which had possessed her ever since she left Kerival; and, at the last, all the mystic elation with which her mind had become a winged and wandering spirit, passed from her.
The gloom of that northern winter was tonic to them both. As soon as her weakness was past, and once more she was able to go about with Alan, her old joyousness returned. In her eyes it was almost as though the islanders shared her recovered happiness. For one thing, they no more avoided her and Alan. With the death of the man who had so long sustained a mysterious existence upon Rona, their superstitious aversion went; they ceased to speak of Am Buchaille Bàn and, whether Donnacha Bàn had found on Rona one of the hidden ways to heaven or had only dallied upon one of the byways to hell, it was commonly held that he had paid his death-eric by his lonely and even appalling life of unredeemed solitude. Now that there was no longer any possibility of confusion between the outcast who had come to his tragic end, among the sea caves of Rona, and his kinsman who bore to him so extraordinary a resemblance, a deep sense of the injustice that had been done to Alan Carmichael prevailed among the islanders. In many ways they showed their regret; but most satisfactorily, so far as Alan was concerned, by taking him as one of themselves; as a man no longer under the shadow of doom or in any way linked to a disastrous fate.
True, there were still some of the isle folk on Borosay and Barra who maintained that the man who had been found in the sea cave, whether Donnacha Bàn or some other, had nothing to do with the mysterious Herdsman, whose advent, indeed, had long been anticipated by a section of the older inhabitants. It was only seven years since Murdo Macphail—better known as Murdo-Bronnach-namhara, Brown Murdoch of the Sea, from his habit of preaching to the islanders from where he stood waist-deep in the water—had prophesied that the Herdsman who was Shepherd of Israel would indeed come again, and that within seven years. And had he not added that if the Fair Lonely One were not accepted of the people, there would be deep sorrow for one and all, and a bitter wrong upon all the isles of the west?
These murmurers now shook their heads and whispered often. Of a truth, they said, the Herdsman was come as foretold, and Alan Carmichael was blind indeed not to see that Ynys, his wife, had received a vision, and, because of her silence, been punished in the death of her first-born.
But with the white growth of winter, the pleasant, familiar intercourse that everywhere prevailed wrought finally against the last threadbare fabric of superstition. Before the glow of the peats the sadness and gloom slowly dissipated. It was a new delight to both Alan and Ynys to find that the islanders could be so genial and almost gay, with a love of laughter and music and grotesque humor which, even in the blithe little fishing haven of Ploumaliou, they had never seen surpassed.
The cold months passed for them in a quiet content. That could not be happiness upon which was the shadow of so much pain; but there was something akin to it in the sweet serenity which came like calm after storm.
Possibly they might have been content to remain in Rona; to find in the island their interest and happiness. Ynys, indeed, often longed to leave the place where she had been so sadly disillusioned; and yet she did not urge that the home at Caisteal-Rhona should be broken up. While they were still in this state of quiet suspense, news came that affected them strangely.
They had had no word from Kerival since they left, but one windy March day a boat from Borosay put into the haven with letters from Alan's agents in Edinburgh. Among them was one from the Abbé Cæsar de La Bruyère, from Kerloek. From this Alan learned strange news.
On the very day that he and Ynys had left Kerival, Annaik had disappeared. None knew where she had gone. At first it was thought that Judik Kerbastiou had something to do with her absence, but two days after she had gone he was again at Kerival. The house was a place of anarchy. No one knew whom to obey; what to do. With the Marquise Lois in her grave, with both Ynys and Annaik mysteriously absent and apparently with no intention to return, and with Tristran the Silent more morosely taciturn than his wont, and more than ever an invalid, with all this it was difficult for those in authority to exact the habitual duties. But in addition to this there were the imperious claims of Judik Kerbastiou, emphasized by his refusal to be addressed by any other name than the Sieur Jud de Kerival.