This, I imagine, was shyness, or, rather, that innate reticence of the Celt in all profoundly intimate and spiritual matters; for, from what Ivor told me, I am convinced that old Macarthur had more than once proved himself a seer.
But he admitted that his wife had “it.”
We were seated on an old upturned boat on the rocky little promontory, where once were first laid the innumerable dead, brought for burial to the sacred soil of Iona. For a time Macarthur spoke slowly about this and that; then, abruptly and without preamble, he told me this:
The Christmas before last, Mary, his wife, had seen a man who was not on the island. “And that is true, by St. Martin’s Cross,” he added.
They were, he said, sitting before the fire, when, after a long silence, he looked up to see his wife staring into the shadow in the ingle. He thought she was brooding over the barren womb that had been her life-long sorrow, and now in her old age had become a strange and gnawing grief, and so he turned his gaze upon the red coals again.
But suddenly she exclaimed, “C’ait am bheil thu dol?” (Where are you going?)
He looked up, but saw no one in the room beside themselves.
“What has come to you?” he asked. “What do you see?”
But she took no notice.
“C’uine tha thu falbh?” (When are you going?) she muttered, with the same strained voice and frozen eyes. And then, once again, “C’uine thig thu rithisd?” (When will you come again?) And with that she bowed her head, and the thin backs of the hands upon her knees were wet with falling tears.