McIan looked at me, hesitated, and said nothing. I saw him glance around. A few yards away, beside a great boulder in the heather, a small rowan stood, flickering its feather-like shadows across the white wool of a ewe resting underneath. He moved thitherward slowly, plucked a branch heavy with scarlet berries, and then, having returned, laid it across the breast of his kinsman.
I knew now what was that passing of the trouble in the face of Sheumas Dhu, what that sudden light was, that calming of the sea, that ineffable quietude. It was the Smoothing of the Hand.
THE ANOINTED MAN
This story is one of the Achanna series (see “The Dàn-nan-Ròn” and “Green Branches” in Vol. III., “Tragic Romances”). See also the note to these two tales, apposite to the use of the forename Gloom and the surname Achanna.
The forename Alison is properly a woman’s name, but is occasionally given to a male child—whence, no doubt, the not infrequent occurrence of ‘Alison’ as a surname.
THE ANOINTED MAN
Of the seven Achannas—sons of Robert Achanna of Achanna in Galloway, self-exiled in the far north because of a bitter feud with his kindred—who lived upon Eilanmore in the Summer Isles, there was not one who was not, in more or less degree, or at some time or other, fëy.
Doubtless I shall have occasion to allude to one and all again, and certainly to the eldest and youngest: for they were the strangest folk I have known or met anywhere in the Celtic lands, from the sea-pastures of the Solway to the kelp-strewn beaches of Lewis. Upon James, the seventh son, the doom of his people fell last and most heavily. Some day I may tell the full story of his strange life and tragic undoing, and of his piteous end. As it happened, I knew best the eldest and youngest of the brothers, Alison and James. Of the others, Robert, Allan, William, Marcus, and Gloom, none save the last-named survives, if peradventure he does, or has been seen of man for many years past. Of Gloom (strange and unaccountable name, which used to terrify me—the more so as, by the savagery of fate, it was the name of all names suitable for Robert Achanna’s sixth son) I know nothing beyond the fact that, ten years or more ago, he was a Jesuit priest in Rome, a bird of passage, whence come and whither bound no inquiries of mine could discover. Two years ago a relative told me that Gloom was dead; that he had been slain by some Mexican noble in an old city of Hispaniola, beyond the seas. Doubtless the news was founded on truth, though I have ever a vague unrest when I think of Gloom; as though he were travelling hitherward, as though his feet, on some urgent errand, were already white with the dust of the road that leads to my house.
But now I wish to speak only of Alison Achanna. He was a friend whom I loved, though he was a man of close on forty and I a girl less than half his years. We had much in common, and I never knew anyone more companionable, for all that he was called “Silent Ally.” He was tall, gaunt, loosely-built. His eyes were of that misty blue which smoke takes when it rises in the woods. I used to think them like the tarns that lay amid the canna and gale-surrounded swamps in Uist, where I was wont to dream as a child.
I had often noticed the light on his face when he smiled—a light of such serene joy as young mothers have sometimes over the cradles of their firstborn. But for some reason I had never wondered about it, not even when I heard and dimly understood the half-contemptuous, half-reverent mockery with which, not only Alison’s brothers, but even his father, at times used towards him. Once, I remember, I was puzzled when, on a bleak day in a stormy August, I overheard Gloom say, angrily and scoffingly, “There goes the Anointed Man!” I looked, but all I could see was that, despite the dreary cold, despite the ruined harvest, despite the rotting potato-crop, Alison walked slowly onward, smiling, and with glad eyes brooding upon the grey lands around and beyond him.