By that which dwells within thee,
By the lamps that shine upon me,
By the white light I see litten
From the brain now sleeping stilly,
By the silence in the hollows,
By the wind that slow subsideth,
By the life-tide slowly ebbing,
By the deith-tide slowly rising,
By the slowly waning warmth,
By the chill that slowly groweth,
By the dusk that slowly creepeth,
By the darkness near thee,
By the darkness round thee,
By the darkness o’er thee—
O’er thee, round thee, on thee—
By the one that standeth
At thy side and waiteth
Dumb and deaf and blindly,
By the one that moveth,
Bendeth, raiseth, watcheth,
By the dim Grave-Spell upon thee,
By the Silence thou hast wedded....
May the way thy feet are treading,
May the tangled lines now crookèd,
Clear as moonlight lie before me!
Oh! oh! ohrone, ochrone! green the branches bonnie:
Oh! oh! ohrone! ochrone! red the blood-drop berries:
Achrone, arone, arone, arone, I see the green-clad Lady.
She walks the road that’s wet with tears, with rustling sorrows shady....
Oh! oh! mo ghraidh.
Then it was that a great calm came upon Fergus, though he felt like a drowned man, or as one who stood by his own body, but speechless, and feeling no blowing of wind through his shadow-frame.
For, indeed, though the body lived, he was already of the company of the silent. What was that caiodh, that wailing lamentation, sad as the Cumha fir Arais, which followed Elsie’s incantation, her spell upon “the way” before him, that it and all the trailed lines of this life should be clear as moonlight before her? Oh! oh! ohrone, ochrone! red the blood-drop berries; did not these mean no fruit of the quicken-tree, but the falling drops from the maimed tree that was himself? And was not the green-clad lady, she who comes singing low, the sprouting of the green grass that is the hair of the earth? And was not the road, gleaming wet with ruts and pools all of tears, and overhung by dark rustling plumes of sorrow, the road that the soul traverses in the dark hour? And did not all this mean that the Grave Spell was already upon him, and that the Silence was to be his?[10]
[10] (1) Caiodh (a wailing lament) is a difficult word to pronounce. The Irish keen will help the foreigner with Kúë-yh or Kúë-yhn. (2) The Cumha fir Arais (pronounce Kŭv’ah feer Arooss) means the lament of the man of Aros—i. e., the chieftain. Aros Castle, on the great island of Mull, overlooking the Sound, was one of the strongholds of Macdonald, Lord of the Isles. (3) The quicken (rowan, mountain-ash, and other names) is a sacred tree with the Celtic peoples, and its branches can either avert or compel supernatural influences. (4) The green-clad Lady is the Cailleach, the Siren of the Hill-Sides, to see whom portends death or disaster. When she is heard singing, that portends death soon for the hearer. The grass is that which grows quick and green above the dead. The dark hour is the hour of death—i. e., the first hour after death.
But what thing it was she saw, Elsie would not say. Darkly she dreamed awhile, then leaned forward and kissed his breast. He felt the sob in her heart throb into his.
Dazed, and knowing that she had seen more than she had dreamed of seeing, and that his hour was striding over the rocky wilderness of that wild Isle of Skye, he did not know she was gone, till a shuddering fear of the silence and the gloom told him he was alone.
Coll MacColl (he that was my Kerrera friend) stopped here, just as a breeze will suddenly stop in a corrie so that the rowan berries on the side of a quicken will sway this way and that, while the long thin leaves on the other will be as still as the stones underneath, where their shadows sleep.
I asked him at last if Elsie’s second-sight had proved true. He looked at me for a moment, as though vaguely surprised I should ask so foolish a thing.
No sleep came to Fergus that night, he resumed, quietly, as though no other words were needed, and at daybreak he rose and left the cot of his kinsman, Andrew MacEwan. In the gray dawn he saw my mother, and told her all. Then she wished him farewell, and bade him come again when next the Sunbeam should be sailing to Portree, or other port in Skye; for she did not believe that her mother had seen speedy death, or death at all, but perhaps only a time of sorrow, and even that she had done this thing to send Fergus away, for she too had her eyes on Robert MacColl, that was my father.