When not with Lora, he loved well to be with Mary or with Seumas.
In the eyes of the former he would sometimes look for a long time, seeing there the secret home of peace, and perhaps, deeper, the unveiled beauty of the serene and lovely soul.
Seumas he had loved from childhood. The old islesman had never once been on the mainland; though in his youth he had sailed along its endless coasts. Tall and strong he was, despite his great age; and his eyes were the eyes of a young man who hears his first-born laughing and crooning against its mother's breast. Ignorant as he was of the foreign tongue of the mainland, ignorant of books, and unable to read even a verse in the Gaelic Scriptures of which he knew so many chapters by heart, he was yet strong in knowledge and wise in the way of it beyond most men. For he knew all that is to be known concerning the island and the surrounding sea, and what moved thereon and lived therein; and, in his humbleness and simplicity, he saw so deep into the human heart and into the mystery of the soul, that he was not ashamed to know he was man, nor to pray to God to guide him through the shadows.
It was from Seumas that Alastair, in boyhood and youth, had learned much, not only of his store of legends and ancient runes and old Celtic poetry, but also of that living poetry which makes the heart of the Gael more tender than that of other men, and his brain more wrought with vision. From him he had first heard how that for one to have died is to have "gone into the silence"; that for an old man or woman to pass away in extreme age is to "have the white sleep"; that for a fisherman to drown is for him to have "the peace of the quiet wave."
Seumas had filled his brain with lovely words—lovely in themselves and their meaning; but he had made his clansman a poet by one thing that he did and said.
For once, after Alastair had returned to the West, from the University in St. Andrew's, he went to Ithona to stay for some weeks. At sunrise on the morrow of his arrival, on his coming out upon the grass which sloped to the shore a few yards away, he saw Seumas standing, with his wide, blue bonnet in his hand, and the sun shining full upon his mass of white hair—not praying, as at first Alastair thought, but with a rapt look on his face, and with glad, still-youthful eyes gazing lovingly upon the sea.
"What is it, Seumas?" he had asked; and the old islesman, turning to him with a grave smile, had answered:
"Morning after morning, fair weather or foul, after I have risen from my prayers and ere I have broken my fast, I come here and remove my hat and bow my head, with joy and thanksgiving, before the Beauty of the World."
From that day, the world became a new world for Alastair.