It was nearly a year thereafter—I remember the date, because it was that of my last visit to Eilanmore—that I understood more fully. I was walking westward with Alison towards sundown. The light was upon his face as though it came from within; and when I looked again, half in awe, I saw that there was no glamour out of the west, for the evening was dull and threatening rain. He was in sorrow. Three months before, his brothers Allan and William had been drowned; a month later, his brother Robert had sickened, and now sat in the ingle from morning till the covering of the peats, a skeleton almost, shivering, and morosely silent, with large staring eyes. On the large bed in the room above the kitchen old Robert Achanna lay, stricken with paralysis. It would have been unendurable for me but for Alison and James, and, above all, for my loved girl-friend, Anne Gillespie, Achanna’s niece, and the sunshine of his gloomy household.
As I walked with Alison I was conscious of a well-nigh intolerable depression. The house we had left was so mournful; the bleak sodden pastures were so mournful; so mournful was the stony place we were crossing, silent but for the thin crying of the curlews; and, above all, so mournful was the sound of the ocean as, unseen, it moved sobbingly round the isle: so beyond words distressing was all this to me, that I stopped abruptly, meaning to go no farther, but to return to the house, where at least there was warmth, and where Anne would sing for me as she spun.
But when I looked up into my companion’s face I saw in truth the light that shone from within. His eyes were upon a forbidding stretch of ground, where the blighted potatoes rotted among a wilderness of round skull-white stones. I remember them still, these strange far-blue eyes, lamps of quiet joy, lamps of peace they seemed to me.
“Are you looking at Achnacarn?” (as the tract was called), I asked, in what I am sure was a whisper.
“Yes,” replied Alison slowly; “I am looking. It is beautiful—beautiful. O God, how beautiful is this lovely world!”
I know not what made me act so, but I threw myself on a heathery ridge close by, and broke out into convulsive sobbings.
Alison stooped, lifted me in his strong arms, and soothed me with soft, caressing touches and quieting words.
“Tell me, my fawn, what is it? What is the trouble?” he asked again and again.
“It is you—it is you, Alison,” I managed to say coherently at last. “It terrifies me to hear you speak as you did a little ago. You must be fëy. Why—why do you call that hateful, hideous field beautiful on this dreary day—and—and after all that has happened,—O Alison?”
At this, I remember, he took his plaid and put it upon the wet heather, and then drew me thither, and seated himself and me beside him.