That skull her home, that eye her den,
Her song is, Morag o’ the Glen!
“For when she went I did not go,
But washed my hands in blood-red woe:
O wren, trill out your sweet song’s flow,
Morag is white as the driven snow!”
II
That night the wind had a dreadful soughing in its voice—a lamentable voice that came along the rain-wet face of the hills, with a prolonged moaning and sobbing.
Down in the big room, that was kitchen and sitting-room in one, where Gorromalt sat—for he had risen from his bed, for all that he was so weak and giddy—there was darkness. His wife had pleaded for the oil-lamp, because the shadows within and the wild wind without—though, I am thinking, most the shadows within her brain—filled her with dread; but he would not have it, no, not a candle even. The peats glowed, red-hot; above them the small narrow pine-logs crackled in a scarlet and yellow blaze.
Hour after hour went by in silence. There were but the three of us. Morag? Ah, did Gorromalt think she would stay at Teenabrae, and Muireall near by, and in the clutch of the death-frost, and she, her sister dear, not go to her? He had put the ban upon us, soon as the blood was out of his brain, and he could half rise from his pillow. No one was to go to see her, no one was to send word to her, no one was to speak of her.