Pharais; and, The Mountain Lovers
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One man, at least, saw it. Under an arch of rock, in a space half filled with fragrant dry bracken, Murdo the shepherd watched.
Doggedness was at once Murdo's strength and weakness. He had been convinced that Anabal Gilchrist, guilty or innocent, had perished along with Torcall Cameron. He had come to the Linn, and till he found her he would wait. Moreover, had he not the word of the Scriptures for it, bidding him be silent? What need, then, for him to go about as an idle rumour? All would be known in time without his telling.
When at last the twilight came, he was still there. If he could not see the body of Anabal in Mairg Water – and he knew that, if there, it would soon or late be swirled out of the Linn or the Kelpie's Pool – he would wait till he saw her wraith.
There were many things – like certain stories told of the speed of great vessels at sea, and about what the electricity, out of which the lightning came, could be made to do – which he doubted, or at least discounted in the telling. But in the sure wisdom of his fathers he knew there was no rock of stumbling; therefore he was well aware that the wraith of the dead comes to and fro between its death-place and that darkness which is deeper than the mirk of the blackest night, on the night following its severance from the body. So, he would wait and see. If her wraith came from up the Strath or from down the hill, he would know that she had not died in the water. Wherever it came from, he would follow it.
He had seen too much, he muttered again and again to himself, with quaking heart: he had seen too much in hill-gloamings and drear mountain nights to have fear of the wraith of a poor widow-body, who lived no further away than over against Cnoc-Ruadh on Tornideon. The moaning and loud soughing of the wind tried him sore. But the night was cloudless, and the moon hung above Iolair, a beacon everywhere in the dark. Then, too, as the hours went, he grew warm and comfortable in his rocky lair; moreover, fresh text after text came into his mind. In multiplicity of these was safety; even were some of them no more than "And Chelub, the brother of Shunah, begat Mehir," or than that (to Murdo, blasphemously familiar) saying in Isaiah, "In that day shall the Lord shave with a razor that is hired" – though, sure, to his shepherd mind, there was comfortable word as of home, as well as sacred influence, in "And it shall come to pass in that day, that a man shall nourish a young cow, and two sheep."
He had been dozing when the first spurt of flame broke out upon Tornideon. A little later he roused with a start, and looked out upon the Pool. There was a gleam there, or somewhere; could it be the woman Anabal?
Then his gaze was drawn swift and steadfast, as iron to a magnet. He realised what and where the flames were. Ardoch-beag was on fire.
In a moment there flashed upon him the recollection of Màm-Gorm, on the white mare Raoilt, in the byre there.
With the thought came another, that he had been mad to believe Anabal was in the Pool at all. She must have discovered the body of Torcall, and set fire to the place – corpse, mare, and byre! There was not a moment to lose. Yet, perhaps it was Alan; well, even then, he muttered, he must go. But supposing … but supposing … that … that Màm-Gorm himself…
Murdo did not know what to do. The dogs would help him, he thought. Crawling from his hiding-place, he whistled to Donn and Luath. Both collies had already crept from the fern, and were standing with stiffened tails and rigid bodies, intently watching the shooting, darting, leaping, ever-spreading flame on the hill opposite. Abruptly, Luath began to growl. Then Donn stole, whining, to the shepherd's feet.
"What ails the dogs?" he muttered, half angrily.
A few minutes later his keen eyes discerned the cause of their uneasiness. The full flood of the moonlight was upon the flank of Tornideon, and it was now possible to see along the whole path from Ardoch-beag to the Ford, "glan mar a ghrian," as he said to himself – clear as in the sunlight.
And this was the thing that Murdo the shepherd saw, to be with him to his death-day, and to be for ever in Strath Iolair a legend of terror.
Down the steep descent that began to fall away a few yards beyond Ardoch-beag, he saw a tall, gaunt woman, with rent garments and long, loosened hair fluttering in the wind, striding down the hillway, often with wild gestures. And before the woman trampled and snorted a horse, mad with the fear of the flame, and knowing, too, it may be, the awful burden of death it bore, now swung crosswise upon its back. As a mad horse will do, it pranced in a strange, stiff, fantastic way: wild to leap forward and race like the wind from what lay behind, from what jerked and jolted above; yet constrained as by another than human force.
Ever and again, in a momentary lull of the wind, Murdo could hear its shrill, appalling neighing. Once, too, he shrank, because of the screaming laughter of the woman.
Furlong by furlong he watched this ghastly march of the dead and dying. Were it not for the flames at Ardoch-beag, where both house and byre were now caught in a swirling blaze, he would have believed the other to be no more than a vision.
With difficulty he silenced the dogs. He would stay where he was now, and see what was going to be done that night: for it was clear that Anabal, seemingly mad, and having set fire to Ardoch-beag, was now driving Raoilt and its corpse-burthen either down to Mairg Water, or with intent to cross and go up the mountain of Màm-Gorm.
This last, indeed, was evidently her aim: for, when at last the Ford was reached, Murdo could see her striving to make the affrighted mare enter the shallows. Raoilt, however, would not budge. With forelegs planted firmly, with head thrown up, quivering flanks, and long tail slashing this way and that, the white mare showed some strange horror of the swift-running ford-water. Suddenly she swung round, and with a grotesque prancing moved along the north bank toward the Linn.
They were now close to him. Murdo could see the bloodshot, gleaming eyeballs of Raoilt: the white set face and staring eyes of Anabal. Either the roar of the whirlpool, or the sight of one of the collies slinking terrified through the fern, added a new terror to the mare. She swerved wildly. The burden she bore became still further unloosed. With scraping hoofs she pawed at a bank of heather, in a vain attempt to find solid footing. A plunge … a fall backward … a staggering recovery among the very rocks of the Linn … and … freedom at last!
But, for the second time since Murdo had last seen him in life, Torcall Cameron was hurled headlong into the Linn o' Mairg.
With a cry the shepherd sprang forward. Anabal heard, but did not see. All she knew was the roar of the linn, the wail of the kelpie, and that– that withering scream of the dead man.
For a moment she stood on the verge of the cataract. Her arms were upraised: her whole body moved with one unutterable supplication.
"Fergus! Fergus!"
The wild appeal rang through the night, above the turmoil of the falling water, the increasing moan and loud blasting vehemence of the wind.
Murdo did not see her leap or fall. His gaze had for a moment sought the mare, who, at that cry, had leaped as though stung by fire, and was careering at breakneck speed up the boulder-strewn bank by which she had come.
But when the shepherd looked again, Anabal Gilchrist was gone.
Throughout that night there was a wilder sound on the hillside than any wail of the wind. This was the screaming of the white horse, as, wrought now to a death-madness, it leaped waywardly through the dark, so passing from height to height upward along the whole mountainal flank of Iolair.
At dawn, in the sheiling high up on Druimnan-Damh, Sorcha awoke, trembling.
For a time she listened in awe to the majesty of the wind, a vast choric chant that filled the morning-twilight with an ocean of flowing sound. Then, again and again, she heard that strange, horrible scream.
Alan stirred. She whispered as she drew closer to him. He, too, listened. A great fear lay upon both. This screaming voice in the night was an omen of sorrow, of doom. Who could it be but the Bandruidh – that evil sorceress of the hills, dark daughter of the Haughty Father, who had already won the soul out of Nial?
Sleep was impossible. It was banished even from thought, when a wild neighing close to the walls of the cot made Sorcha cry out and cling to Alan as though death were already upon them.
They lay shuddering. Clearly this was one of the water-bulls or water-horses which roam the mountain-ways on nights of storm: dread demon-creatures, to see whom even is almost certain death.
"It will not be long till sunrise," Alan whispered; and by that Sorcha was comforted, for she knew that the ravening thing outside would have to haste back to loch or river or sea.
And by daybreak, in truth, the beast was already away. They heard the clamour of its hoofs against the granite stones and rock, as it sped upward still.
When, hand clasping hand, they ventured to go out, they could see no living thing, but an eagle soaring high above the extreme peak of Iolair: for the light of the new glorious day was in their eyes as they faced the Ridge of the Stags.
But suddenly Sorcha caught sight of something white leaping against the sunrise.
Alan's gaze followed her trembling arm and outstretched finger. He, too, saw, but unrecognisingly, a white horse, prancing and screaming along the verge of the granite precipice of Sgòrr-Glan.
The mad beast was now on the Sgòrr itself. Behind were deep corries and ravines: in front, nothing but the flaming disc of fire, nothing but that sheer blank wall of granite, straight from the brow of the Sgòrr to where the Srúantsrhà surged darkly its tortuous way, two thousand feet below.
A faint, impalpable mist was in the air. This, doubtless, it was that made the white horse loom larger and larger, till it stood out against the morning, vast as Liath-Macha, the untamable phantom steed, "grey to whiteness," that Cuculain the Hero rode triumphantly through the valley of the shadow of death.
Then it was as though it leaped against the sun itself.
XII
Week after week went by, changelessly fine, so that in the Strath men began to shake their heads ominously because of the long drought. In the memory of none had there been an autumn so lovely. For a brief spell, in mid August, coming indeed with the storm of wind which had helped the flames utterly to consume the few poor buildings of Anabal Gilchrist on Tornideon, great clouds had travelled inland from the Atlantic, and had burst floodingly upon hill and valley. But in less than a week the sky was clear again, and of a richer, deeper blue. The whole mountain-land was veiled in beauty.
The woods at the end of October were, other than the pine-forests, a blaze of glory. Few leaves had fallen, except from the limes and sycamores, and these sparsely only … scarce enough to lay a pathway of flakes of yellow gold before the hinds and fawns that trooped through the sunlit glades. The innumerable rowan-trees wore fiery hues upon their feathery foliage: everywhere the scarlet berries suspended in blood-red clusters against the blue sky or the cool greenness.
The dream, the spell, was not only upon the beautiful green earth. It lay elsewhere than there, or in the deeps of heaven: elsewhere than on the quiet waters which slept against the shores beyond the mountains and slumbered immeasurably toward the ever-receding west, with a soft moaning only, wonderful and sweet to hear.
For it was upon the heart and in the brain of each of the mountaineers of Iolair: but most upon Sorcha and Alan.
For them the days had gone past, days of rapt happiness in that golden weather. Already the world had become to them no more than a dream. They went to and fro, hushed, upon the hills, each oblivious of all save the other, all save the ceaseless thrilling wonder of the pageant of the hours from dawn to moonset. That strange rapture which comes at times to isolated, visionary dreamers upon the hills, wrought a spell upon Alan. Scarce less was it upon Sorcha, and that less only, if at all, because of the second life that she sustained. The "mirdeeay" was a glamour in their eyes, in their mind, in their heart, from the hour of the waning star to the coming of night. Not all an evil thing is it to dream. The world well lost! Ah, shadowy-eyed dreamers that know the secret wisdom, it is well to dream!
None of the Strath-folk saw them now. The people murmured against them because of the tragic mystery of the deaths of Torcall Cameron and Anabal Gilchrist. Little had been learned from Murdo, and none now encountered Oona or Nial. But a dropped word, a reluctant admission, a careful evasion, from the shepherd, went far. Hints grew into a legend: soon a perverted yet not wholly misleading version of the facts became current.
On the same morning when, from the mountain-sheiling, they had seen the white mare, screaming in her madness, leap from the precipice of Sgòrr-Glan, as though full against the sun, Alan and Sorcha learned from Murdo what had happened. Below all the grief and horror of the double tragedy, there was one thing not to be gainsaid. The hand of God was here.
After their first passionate sorrow they whispered this thing the one to the other. It was ordained. God had wrought thus with the thread of all their lives. There was none to blame, neither Torcall, nor Anabal, nor the child Oona, unwitting instrument of the Divine will. Is duilich cuir an aghaidh dàn: Who can oppose Fate, who set himself against Destiny?
A strange thing, that had a terrifying significance for the Strath-dwellers, was this: never were the bodies of Torcall Cameron and Anabal Gilchrist found. The Linn was dragged, the Kelpie's Pool poled over and over, the lower reaches of Mairg Water were examined under every shelving bank, or wherever a sunken bole or submerged boulder might have caught the castaways. No trace was seen anywhere, then or later. Possibly it was true, what an old man of Inverglas averred, that there was a slope at the bottom of the Kelpie's Pool, which ran in beneath a shelving ledge, whence the water poured down a funnel-like passage into a cavern filled with stalactites, through the innumerable holes and crannies at the base of which the flow vanished even as it came.
He had this knowledge, he said, from his father before him, who in the great drought of the first year of the century had seen the Pool shrunken so that a man might stand in it and yet not be wet above the knees. "And the word of my father will not be for doubting," the old crofter added: "for he lived with God before him till he died, and now was with his own folk in Flaitheanas itself, praising Himself for evermore."
Thereafter, as was but natural, the home upon Tornideon being no more, Alan and Sorcha lived at Màm-Gorm. There was none to dispute their possession, for Torcall Cameron was without blood-kin, and all that was his was Sorcha's.
So week after week went by. Even in the Strath the people said: "It was willed." There was no man nor woman among them, even of those who were angry with Sorcha that she was not wedded before the minister – forgetful, always, that it was the minister who had refused to wed Alan and Sorcha, because of the feud between Torcall and Anabal (and, though none had inkling of it, because of the sin he knew of that lay between them, the sin that lived and moved and had its being in the person of the child Oona) – and still more who were angry with her because she came never among them, but was as one lost to the world, and she too with the second life in her, when she ought to be seeing and talking to older womenfolk – there was none among these who, in his or her heart of hearts, did not recognise that it is ever an idle thing for small wings to baffle against a great wind. It was to be: it would be. That was the unspoken refrain of all thoughts: the undertone of all comments.
The tragic end of Anabal Gilchrist, the doom that had fulfilled itself for Torcall Cameron: what was either but apiece with the passing of the ancient language, though none wished it to go; with the exile of the sons, though they would fain live and die where their fathers wooed their mothers; with the coming of strangers, and strange ways, and a new bewildering death-cold spirit, that had no respect for the green graves, and jeered at ancient things and the wisdom of old – strangers whom none had sought, none wished, and whose coming meant the going of even the few hillfolk who prospered in the màchar, the fertile meadows and pastures along the mountain bases? It was to be: it would be.
Among the old there was exceeding bitterness. An angry and a brooding pain frowned in many hearts. But, alas, what good to meet the inevitable with wailing? What had to be, surely would be. Old wifeless men, old childless women, took comfort in that bitter-sweet saying of the Psalmist: "is iad ìobairtean Dhé spiorad briste" – "the sacrifice of God is a broken spirit."
But, with the harvesting, the Strath-folk forgot for a while the very existence of the mountain-lovers.
Smitten with the strange rapt elation of their dream, Alan and Sorcha still went to and fro as though spellbound. Sometimes he herded the cows alone: as before, Sorcha milked the sweet-breath kine, singing low her songs of holy St. Bridget or old-world cadences rare and nigh-forgotten now as the Fonnsheen, the fairy melodies once wont to be heard on the hills and in remote places. But, though apart for a brief while, it was only to dream the more.
Yet, strange to say, Alan knew in his heart that this could not endure. It could not be for over long: God, soon or late, lays winter upon the heart, as well as upon the song of the bird, the bloom of the flower.
Nevertheless, he had no trouble because of this. There is, at times, in deep happiness, a gloom as of dark water filled with sunlight. While the glow is there, a living joy, the gloom is no more than the quiet sorrow of the world.
Often, of late, he had noticed upon the hillside, upon brier and bramble, fern-covert or dwarf-elder, that indescribable shadow of light, visible too at full noon in that golden weather as well as at the passing of the sun: that glow of omen, known of Celtic poets and seers in far-gone days. The first line of a fragmentary rune, come down from one of these singers, who walked nearer to nature than does any now among the sons of men, was upon his lips over and over, because of this thing:
"Tha bruaillean air aghaidh nan tom."
"There is boding gloom on the face of the bushes."
Once only the gloom lay upon him, the gloom that is upon the mind as a dark cloud upon a field of grain. What if ill should have come to Sorcha?
He turned, and went swiftly home. The gloaming had fallen, and Sorcha was sitting before the flaming peats, with clasped hands and dreaming eyes. She was crooning, half breathing, half crooning, a song, low and sweet against his ear as the noise of a running brook heard in sleep as one fares by green pastures under a moon strange and new in a strange land. And the song was one he had not known, not since he was a child, and heard Morag, the wife of Kenneth, foster-brother of Fergus Gilchrist, sing it before, in a day of mourning, she brought forth her firstborn:
"An' O, an' O, St. Bride's sweet song 'tis I am hearing, dearie,Dearie, dearie, dearie, my wee white babe that's weary,Weary, weary, weary, with this my womb sae weary,And Bride's sweet song ye hear it too, and stir and sigh, my dearie!"Oh, oh, leánaban-mo,Wee hands that give me pain and woe:Pain and woe, but be it so,'Tis his dear self that now doth grow,Leánaban-mo, leánaban-mo,'Tis his dear self one day you'll know,Leánaban-mo, leánaban-mo!"St. Bridget dear, the cradle show,My baby comes, and I must go,Leánaban-mo, leánaban-mo!Arone!.. Arò!Arone!.. Arò!"He had stood in the shadow, silent, listening with awe and a strange joy. His heart yearned to go to her, but he knew that a mother's first tears were in the dreaming eyes, and that it was not for him, nor any save God, to be seeing them.
So Alan turned, and went up through the dusk to the low green summit of Cnoc-na-shee, a brief way from the sheiling. And when he was there he looked and saw nothing in all the light-gloom sky but one star low in the south —Reul-na-dhuil, the star of hope. Peace was in his heart. He kneeled down and made a prayer for Sorcha, and the child she bore, and for him too. And when he rose, and went home, and looked back at green Cnoc-na-shee, he saw there for a moment a figure as of an angel, shining bright.
Night and day they were alone there. Murdo the shepherd was up at the high sheiling on Ben Iolair, and rarely came to Màm-Gorm save to help with the kye, or do what was needed about the steading. Oona, too, was seldom seen of them; and of late, even she had not always come at sunrise for the food Sorcha placed for her on the bench by the door each morning. As for Nial, he was for long seen of none, save Oona, and where and when that was no one knew.
As October waned, the day of the mountain lovers became more and more a life of joy. Hand in hand they would sit on the bench in the sun, happily content: or dream, hand clasping hand, before the glowing peats. It was in vain that Murdo, fearing "the quiet madness," reproached Alan, urging upon him that he should go down into Inverglas and see to the sale of the cattle and the sheep. The young man shook his head, smiled gently at the shepherd, and once at least murmured these ominous words: "There is a time for all things, and it is my time to be still. I have peace."
Sorcha, being heavy with child, could not now walk far, and indeed cared little to go beyond the door-bench, or, at farthest, to the green slope of the hillock of Cnoc-na-shee. Her beauty had not waned because of her trouble. Her eyes had grown more large and beautiful: wonderful stars of light to Alan always – stars that shone out of infinite depths, wherein his soul could sink till it reached that ninth wave of darkness which is the sea of light beating upon the coasts of heaven.
So, ever and again, glad with his joy and ungrievingly gloomed because of the shadow that day by day wove a closer veil about his spirit, he not grieving because not in himself knowing the mystery, he went out upon the hillside or into the forest. Often it was, then, that he heard the singing of Oona in the woods at sunrise and during the hot noons. Sometimes now, too, when late-wandering through the forest at gloaming, he saw afar off the still figure of Nial crouching by the tarn, or seated with bent head among the flags and rushes of the drought-dried pools. More than once, as he went home by the remoter glades, he heard the elf-man chanting wildly among the pines at night.
It was on one such evening that, returning with his mind strangely troubled because of the soulless man of the woods, and of his futile quest and the bitter wrong and pity of it, he was met by Murdo with startling news. Sorcha had had a vision; and, being wrought by it, had fallen into premature labour. But she was not alone. He, Murdo, had brought his foster-sister, Anna MacAnndra, back with him from the clachan by the Ford of the Sheep: for as he had gone down with some young ewes that noontide he had seen a look like death in Sorcha's face, so white and drawn was it with sudden pain. Anna, he added, was a leal friend and dear to Sorcha, so that all was well.
And that night, in truth, the child of their great love was born to them. A night it was of pain and joy, of agony and rapture. But when at last the long-waited dawn came – when, as the woman Anna said, there was no more need to fear, for the death-hour of woman in travail was well past – there was deep breathing of quiet happiness upon the sleeping mother, deep slumber of birth-weariness upon the child that lay against her breast, deep peace in the heart of Alan.
It was not till the eve of that day that Sorcha told him of her vision. She had been sitting in the sun upon Cnoc-na-shee, when she was amazed to see three people pass from the forest and make their way up the hill. Because of the noon-glare she could not discern who they were, though each seemed vaguely familiar. Dark in the glowing light, their figures were visible till they reached the ancient stones beside the cairn of Marsail. There she thought they passed into the long hollow beyond; but, when she looked again, she saw that they were now four in number, and that they were coming down the kye-path to Màm-Gorm. Her heart had begun to waver; but it was not till they were half-way down that she recognised the white faces of them: Torcall her father and Marsail her mother, Anabal and her man Fergus. All four walked in peace. And she heard a thin song in the air, that may have been from them or may have been behind her: a song that said, "Beannachd do t'anam is buaidh," "Blessing to thy soul, and victory," "Blessing, blessing to thy soul, and peace!" But still the spirit in her was strong, for why should she fear, dead, those whom she had loved, living?