Green Fire: A Romance

by William Sharp

Slowly, brooding deep over what he had heard, he traversed the Mona-nan-Con, as the hill-tract there was called, till he came to the rocky wilderness known as the Slope of the Caverns.

There for a time he leaned against a high bowlder, idly watching a few sheep nibbling the short grass which grew about the apertures of some of the many caves which disclosed themselves in all directions. Below and beyond, he saw the illimitable calm beauty of the scene; southward with no break anywhere; eastward, a sun-blaze void; south-westward, the faint, blue film of the coast of Ulster; westward, the same immeasurable windless expanse. From where he stood he could just hear the murmur of the surge whispering all round the isle; the surge that, even on days of profoundest calm, makes a murmurous rumor among the rocks and shingle of the island shores. Not upon the moor side, but in the blank hollows of the caves around him he heard, as in gigantic shells, the moving of a strange and solemn rhythm: wave haunted-shells indeed, for the echo that was bruited from one to the other came from beneath, from out of those labyrinthine corridors and dim, shadowy arcades, where through the intense green glooms the Atlantic waters lose themselves in a vain wandering.

For long he leaned there, revolving in his mind the mystery of Morag MacNeill's words. Then, abruptly, the stillness was broken by the sound of a dislodged stone. So little did he expect the foot of a fellow that he did not turn at what he thought to be the slip of a sheep. But when upon the slope of the grass, just beyond where he stood, a dusky blue shadow wavered fantastically, he swung round with a sudden instinct of dread.

And this was the dread which, at the end of the third month after he and Ynys had come to Rona, was upon Alan Carmichael.

For there, standing quietly by another bowlder, at the mouth of another cave, stood a man who was in all appearance identical with himself. Looking at this apparition, he beheld one of the same height as himself, with hair of the same hue, with eyes the same, and features the same, with the same carriage, the same smile, even the same expression. No, it was there, and there alone, that a difference was.

Sick at heart, Alan wondered if he looked upon his own wraith. Familiar as he was with the legends of his people, it would be no strange thing to him that there, upon the hillside, should appear the phantasm of himself. Had not old Ian MacIain—and that, too, though far away in a strange land—seen the death of Lois Macdonald moving upward from her feet to her knees, from her knees to her waist, from her waist to her neck and, just before the end, how the shroud darkened along the face until it hid the eyes? Had he not often heard from her, from Ian, of the second self which so often appears beside the living when already the shadow of doom is upon him whose hours are numbered? Was this, then, the reason of what had been his inexplicable gloom? Was he indeed at the extreme of life; was his soul amid shallows, already a rock upon a blank, inhospitable shore? If not, who or what was this second self which leaned there negligently; looking at him with scornfully smiling lips, but with intent, unsmiling eyes.

Then, slowly, there came into his mind this thought: How could a phantom, that was itself intangible, throw a shadow upon the grass, as though it were a living corporeal being? Sure, a shadow there was indeed. It lay between the apparition and himself. A story heard in boyhood came back to him; instinctively he stooped and lifted a stone and flung it midway into the shadow.

"Go back into the darkness," he cried, "if out of the darkness you came; but, if you be a living thing, put out your hands!"

The shadow remained motionless; though when Alan looked again at his second self, he saw that the scorn which had been upon the lips was now in the eyes also. Ay, for sure, that was scornful laughter that lay in those cold wells of light. No phantom that; a man he, even as Alan himself. His heart pulsed like that of a trapped bird, but, even in the speaking, his courage came back to him.