IN THE GREEN ARCADES
"In the shadow of pain, one may hear the footsteps of joy." So runs a proverb of old.
It was a true saying for Alan and Ynys. That night they lay down in pain, their hearts heavy with the weight of some burden which they felt and did not know. On the morrow they woke to the rapture of a new day—a day of absolute beauty, when the stars grew pale in the cloudless blue sky before the uprising of the sun, while the last vapor lifted a white wing from the sea, and a dim spiral mist carried skyward the memory of inland dews. The whole wide wilderness of ocean was of living azure, aflame with gold and silver. Around the promontories of the isles the brown-sailed fish-boats of Barra and Berneray, of Borosay and Seila, moved blithely hither and thither. Everywhere the rhythm of life pulsed swift and strong. The first sound which had awakened the sleepers was of a loud singing of fishermen who were putting out from Aonaig. The coming of a great shoal of mackerel had been signalled, and every man and woman of the near isles was alert for the take. The first sign had been the swift congregation of birds, particularly the gannets and skuas. And as the men pulled at the oars, or hoisted the brown sails, they sang a snatch of an old-world tune, wont to be chanted at the first coming of the birds when spring-tide is on the flow again.
"Bui' cheas dha 'n Ti thaine na Gugachan
Thaine 's na h-Eoin-Mhora cuideriu,
Cailin dugh ciaru bo 's a chro!
Bo dhonn! bo dhonn! bo dhonn bheadarrach!
Bo dhonn a ruin a bhlitheadh am baine dhuit
Ho ro! mo gheallag! ni gu rodagach!
Cailin dugh ciaru bo 's a chro—
Na h-eoin air tighinn! cluinneam an ceol!"
[Thanks to the Being, the Gannets have come.
Yes! and the Great Auks along with them.
Dark-haired girl!—a cow in the fold!
Brown cow! brown cow! brown cow, beloved ho!
Brown cow! my love! the milker of milk to thee!
Ho ro! my fair-skinned girl—a cow in the fold,
And the birds have come!—glad sight, I see!]
Eager to be of help, Alan put off in his boat and was soon among the fishermen, who in their new excitement were forgetful of all else than that the mackerel were come, and that every moment was precious. For the first time Alan found himself no unwelcome comrade. Was it, he wondered, because that, there upon the sea, whatever of shadow dwelled about him on the land was no longer visible?
All through that golden noon, he and the others worked hard. From isle to isle went the chorus of the splashing oars and splashing nets; of the splashing of the fish and the splashing of gannets and gulls; of the splashing of the tide leaping blithely against the sun-dazzle, and the innumerous rippling wash moving out of the west—all this blent with the loud, joyous cries, the laughter, and the hoarse shouts of the men of Barra and the adjacent islands. It was close upon dusk before the Rona boats put into the haven of Aonaig again; and by that time none was blither than Alan Carmichael, who in that day of happy toil had lost all the gloom and apprehension of the day before, and now made haste to Caisteal-Rhona to add to his joy by a sight of Ynys in their home.
When, however, he got there, there was no Ynys to see. "She had gone," said Kirsten Macdonald, "she had gone out in the smaller boat midway in the afternoon, and had sailed around to Aoidhu, the great scaur which ran out beyond the precipices at the south-west of Rona."
This Ynys often did; and, of late, more and more often. Ever since she had come to the Hebrid Isles, her love of the sea had deepened, and had grown into a passion for its mystery and beauty. Of late, too, something impelled to a more frequent isolation; a deep longing to be where no eye could see, and no ear hearken. Those strange dreams which, in a confused way, had haunted her mind in her far Breton home, came oftener now and more clear. Sometimes, when she had sat in the twilight at Kerival, holding her mother's hand and listening to tales of that remote North to which her heart had ever yearned, she had suddenly lost all consciousness of the speaker, or of the things said, and had let her mind be taken captive by her uncontrolled imagination, till in spirit she was far away, and sojourned in strange places, hearing a language that she did not know, and yet which she understood, and dwelt in a past or a present which she had never seen and which yet was familiar.