For the fourth of an hour thereafter she would say nothing except moan, “Tha an amhuinn domhain; tha an amhuinn domhain; fuar, fuar; domhain, domhain!”[9] (Deep, deep is the river; cold and deep; cold and deep!)
[9] Pronounce Ha aun ah-ween do’-inn; fēw-ar, fēw-ar; do’-inn, do’-inn.
And the man she saw, added Macarthur, was her nephew, Luthais, in Cape Breton, of Nova Scotia, who, as they learned before Easter, was drowned that Christmas-tide. He was the last of his mother’s race, and had been the foster-child of Mary.
II
THE DARK HOUR OF FERGUS
IN September of last year I was ferried across the Sound of Kerrera by an old boatman.
That afternoon I went with my friend, a peasant farmer near the south end of Kerrera, and lay down in the grassy, bouldered wilderness beneath the cliff on which stands the ruin of Gylen Castle. The tide called in a loud insistent whisper, rising to a hoarse gurgle, from the Sound. The breeze that came from the mountains of Mull was honey-sweet with heather smell. The bleating of the ewes and lambs, the screaming of a few gulls,—nothing else was audible. At times, it is true, like a deep sigh, the suspiration of the open sea rose and fell among the islands. Faint echoes of that sigh came round Gylen headland and up the Kyle. It was an hour wherein to dream of the sons of Morven, who had landed here often, long before the ancient stronghold was built; of Fionn and the Féinn of the coming and going of Ossian in his blind old age; of beautiful Malvina; of the galleys of the Fomorians; of the songs and the singers and all the beautiful things of “the old ancient long ago.”
But the tale that I heard from my friend was this:
You know that my mother’s people are Skye folk. It was from the mother of my mother that I heard what you call the Incantation of the Spirit, though I never heard it called anything but old Elsie’s Sian. She lived near the Hart o’ Corry. You know the part? Ay, true, it is wild land—wild even for the wilderness o’ Skye. Old mother Elsie had “the sight” at times, and whenever she wished she could find out the lines o’ life. It was magic, they say. Who am I to know? This is true, she knew much that no one else knew. When my mother’s cousin, Fergus MacEwan, who was mate of a sloop that sailed between Stornoway and Ardrossan, came to see her—and that was in the year before my mother was married, and when she was courted by Fergus, though she was never for giving her life to him, for even then she loved my father, poor fisherman of Ulva though he was (though heir, through his father’s brother, to his crofter-farm on Kerrera here)—when Fergus came to see her, because of the gloom that was upon his spirit, she foretold all. At first she could “see” poorly. But one wild afternoon, when the Cuchullins were black with cloud-smoke, she bade him meet her in that lonely savage glen they call the Loat o’ Corry. He was loath to go, for he feared the place. But he went. He told all to my mother before he went away next dawn, with the heart in him broken, and his hope as dead as a herring in a net.
Mother Elsie came to him out of the dusk in that wuthering place just like a drifting mist, as he said. She gave him no greeting, but was by his side in silence. Before he knew what she was doing she had the soles of her feet upon his, and her hands folding his, and her eyes burning against his like hot coals against ash. He felt shudders come over him, and a wind blew up and down his back; and he grew giddy, and heard the roaring of the tides in his ears. Then he was quiet. Her voice was very far away when she said this thing, but he remembered every word of it: