“I see that you are brooding over something. Will you not tell me?”
“Tell her,” said Padruic quietly.
But Ivor kept silent. There was a look in his eyes which I understood. Thereafter we sailed on, with no word in the boat at all.
That night, a dark, rainy night it was, with an uplift wind beating high over against the hidden moon, I went to the cottage where Ivor McLean lived with his old deaf mother,—deaf nigh upon twenty years, ever since the night of the nights when she heard the women whisper that Callum, her husband, was among the drowned, after a death-wind had blown.
When I entered, he was sitting before the flaming coal-fire; for on Iona, now, by decree of MacCailin Mòr, there is no more peat burned.
“You will tell me now, Ivor?” was all I said.
“Yes; I will be telling you now. And the reason why I did not tell you before was because it is not a wise or a good thing to tell ancient stories about the sea while still on the running wave. Macrae should not have done that thing. It may be we shall suffer for it when next we go out with the nets. We were to go to-night: but no, not I, no, no, for sure, not for all the herring in the Sound.”
“Is it an ancient sgeul, Ivor?”
“Ay. I am not for knowing the age of these things. It may be as old as the days of the Féinn for all I know. It has come down to us. Alasdair MacAlasdair of Tiree, him that used to boast of having all the stories of Colum and Brighde, it was he told it to the mother of my mother, and she to me.”
“What is it called?”