“It is the Doom. It is Adam’s first wife she is, that sea-witch over there, where the foam is ever in the sharp fangs of the rocks.”
“And who will he be?”
“His body is the body of Angus the son of Torcall of the race of Odrum, for all that a seal he is to the seeming; but the soul of him is Judas.”
“Black Judas, Murtagh?”
“Ay, Black Judas, Colum.”
But with that, Ivor McLean rose abruptly from before the fire, saying that he would speak no more that night. And truly enough there was a wild, lone, desolate cry in the wind, and a slapping of the waves one upon the other with an eerie laughing sound, and the screaming of a sea-mew that was like a human thing.
So I touched the shawl of his mother, who looked up with startled eyes and said, “God be with us;” and then I opened the door, and the salt smell of the wrack was in my nostrils, and the great drowning blackness of the night.