William Sharp

“ Slow falling; old, old, weary, human tears:
And in the deepening dark my comfort is my Pain,
Sole comfort left of all my hopes and fears,
Pain that alone survives, gaunt hound of the shadowy years.
But, at the last, after many days, he stirred. There was a song in his ears.
He listened. It was like soft rain in a wood in June. It was like the wind laughing among the leaves.
Then his heart leapt. Sure, it was the voice of Eilidh!
“Eilidh! Eilidh! Eilidh!” he cried. But a great weariness came upon him again. ”

“ It is not only the dog, it is not only the wild beast and the wood-dove, that are our close kindred, but the green tree and the green grass, the blue wave and the flowing wind, the flower of a day and the granite peak of an æon. And I for one would rather have the wind for comrade, and the white stars and green leaves as my kith and kin, than many a human companion, whose chief claim is the red blood that differs little from the sap in the grass or in the pines, and whose “deathless soul” is, mayhap, no more than a fugitive light blown idly for an hour betwixt dawn and dark. ”

“ There was a scattering of fire and a clashing of swords and spears, when the word went from Maev. Soon all were at the Stones beneath the great oak.
“Cut the bonds from the feet of the sea-rovers, and let them stand.” Thus commanded the Queen.
The tall fair men out of Lochlin stood, with their hands bound behind them. In their eyes burned wrath and shame, because that they were the sport of women. A bitter death theirs, with no sword-song for music. “Take each by his long yellow hair,” said Scathach, “and tie the hair of each to a down-caught bough of the oak.” ”

“ At that a soft white shining, as of one winged and beautiful, stood beside the dead.
“Art thou Murtagh?” whispered Colum, in deep awe.
“No, I am not Murtagh,” came as the breath of vanishing song.
“What art thou?”
“I am Peace,” said the glory.
Thereupon Colum sank to his knees, sobbing with joy, for the sorrow that had been and was no more.
“Tell me, O White Peace,” he murmured, “can Murtagh hearken there under the apples, where God is?”
“God’s love is a wind that blows hitherward [Pg 173] and hence. Speak, and thou shalt hear.” ”

“ I am Cathal the son of Art the son of Aodh of the race of Alpein, from the isles of the sea. But I am not a druid. I am a priest of Christ, a servant of Mary the Mother of God, and a son of God.”
Ardanna looked at him. A flush came into his face. In his eyes the same light flamed that was there when the Frankish prince told him of the delights of the world.
“Is it true, O Cathal, that the druids—that the priests of Christ and the two other gods, the white-robed men whom we call Culdees, and of whom you are one, is it true that they will have nought to do with women?” ”

“ Bride could bear no longer the mystery of this great love. It moved her to an ecstasy. What tenderness of divine love that could thus redeem the world daily: what long-suffering for all the evil and cruelty done hourly upon the weeping earth, what patience with the bitterness of the blind fates! The beauty of the worship of Be’al was upon her as a golden glory. Her heart leaped to a song that could not be sung. The inexhaustible love and pity in her soul chanted a hymn that was heard of no Druid or mortal anywhere, but was known of the white spirits of Life. ”

“ Sure, O God, I have sorrowed for all my sins: there is not one I have not fasted and prayed for. Sorrow upon me!—Is it accursed I am, or what is the evil that holdeth me by the hand?”
Then Murtagh, calling through sweet dreams and the rainbow-rain of happy tears that make that place so wondrous and so fair, spake once more:
“O Colum, blind art thou. Hast thou yet repented because that after thou didst capture the great black seal, that is a man under spells, thou, with thy monks, didst crucify him upon the great rock at the place where, long ago, thy coracle came ashore?” ”

“ I am Cathal the monk that was, Cathal the man now.”
“How came you out of hell, you that are dead, and the dust of whose crumbling bones is in the hollow of this oak?”
“There is no hell, Culdee.”
“No hell!” Molios the Saint stared at the wood-man in blank amaze.
“No hell!” he said again; “and is there no heaven?”
“A hell there is, and a heaven there is: but not what Colum taught, and you taught.” ”

“ I am no more Cathal Gille-Muire, but Cathal mac Art. Nay, I am Cathal Gille-Ardanna.”
With that he plucked the branch of a rowan that grew near. He stripped it of its leaves, and threw them from him north, south, east, and west.
“Why do you do that, Cathal-aluinn?” Ardanna asked, looking at him with eyes of love, and she like a summer morning there, because of the sunshine in her hair, and the wild roses on her face, and the hill-tarn blue of her eyes.
“These are all the hymns that Colum taught me. I give them back. I am knowing them no more. They are idle, foolish songs.” ”

“ At edge o’ dark on Friday, and by the same token the thirteenth day it was, I fell asleep, and dreamed the mools were on my breast, and that the roots of the white daisies were in the hollows where the eyes were that loved you, Alasdair, my son.”
The man looked at her with troubled gaze. No words would come. Of what avail to speak when there is nothing to be said? God sends the gloom upon the cloud, and there is rain: God sends the gloom upon the hill, and there is mist: God sends the gloom upon the sun, and there is winter. It is God, too, sends the gloom upon the soul, and there is change. ”

“ IN the year when Cuchullin left the Isle of Skye, where Scathach the warrior-Queen ruled with the shadow of death in the palm of her sword-hand, there was sorrow because of his beauty. He had fared back to Eiré, at the summons of Concobar mac Nessa, Ard-Righ of Ulster. For the Clan of the Red Branch was wading in blood, and there were seers who beheld that bitter tide rising and spreading.
Cuchullin was only a youth in years: but he had come to Skye a boy, and he had left it a man. None fairer had ever been seen of Scathach or of any woman. ”

“ Cathal bade the man eat silence, or it would go ill with him. But the words rankled. That night in his cell he woke, with on his lips his own sinful words:
White hands make better songs than hymns, white hands are young and sweet;
O, a sword for me, O Honey-Mouth, and a war-horse fleet!
On the morrow he went to Colum and told him that the Evil One would not give him peace. That night the Saint bade him make ready to go east to the Isle of Arran—the sole isle, then, where the Pictish folk would let the white robes of the Culdees go scatheless. ”

“ One night we were sitting before the peats, listening to the wind crying amid the corries, though, ominously as it seemed to us, there was not a breath in the rowan-tree that grew in the sun’s-way by the house. Silis had been singing, but silence had come upon us. In the warm glow from the fire we saw each others’ faces. There the silence lay, strangely still and beautiful, as snow in moonlight. Silis’s song was one of the Dana Spioradail, known in Gaelic as the Hymn of the Looms. ”

“ At that Deòin called. Many green phantoms glided out of the trees, and others, hand-in-hand, flower-crowned, crossed the glade.
“Look, green lives,” Deòin cried in her sweet leaf-whisper, rising now like a wind-song among birchen boughs: “Look, here is a human. His life is mine, for I saved him. I have put the moonshine dew upon his eyes. He sees as we see. He would be one of us, for all that he has no tree for his body, but flesh, white over red.”
[Pg 223] One who had moved thitherward out of an ancient oak looked at Cathal. ”

“ But the sun spell is even more fugitive upon the face of this wild land than the spell of beauty upon a woman. So runs one of our proverbs: as the falling of the wave, as the fading of the leaf, so is the beauty of a woman, unless—ah, that unless, and the indiscoverable fount of joy that can only be come upon by hazard once in life, and thereafter only in dreams, and the Land of the Rainbow that is never reached, and the green sea-doors of Tir-na-thonn, that open now no more to any wandering wave! ”

“ But it seemed to me that a dream rose to the face of Sheumas, like one of those submarine flowers that are said to rise at times and be visible for a moment in the hollow of a wave. The dream, the light, waned; and there was a great stillness and white peace where the trouble had been. “It is the Smoothing of the Hand,” said Alasdair McIan, in a hushed voice.
Often I had heard this lovely phrase in the Western Isles, but always as applied to sleep. When a fretful child suddenly falls into quietude and deep slumber, an isles-woman will say that it is because of the Smoothing of the Hand. ”

“ If there is spiritual truth in the vision of the Blind Harper who saw the Washer of the Ford, or in that of Molios who hailed the seals as brethren, or in that of Colum who blessed the birds and the fish of the sea and even the vagrant flies of the air, and saw the Moon-Child, and in that seeing learned the last mystery of the life of the soul, if in these, as in the “Fisher of Men” and “The Last Supper,” I have given faint utterance to the heart-knowledge we all have, I would not have you or any think that the pagan way is therefore to me as the way of darkness. ”

“ She was clad only in her own loveliness, though the moonshine was about her as a garment.
“Like a green leaf, like a green leaf,” Cathal muttered over and over below his breath.
“Are you a dream?” he asked simply, having no words for his wonder.
“No, Cathal, I am no dream. I am a woman.”
“A woman? But ... but ... you have no body as other women have: and I see the moonbeam that is on your breast shining upon the moss behind you!”
[Pg 220] “Is it thinking you are, poor Cathal, that there are no women and no men in the world except those who are in thick flesh, and move about in the suntide.” ”

“ On the eve of the day following that sailing a wild wind sprang up, blowing straight against the north. All of the south-faring galleys save one made for haven, though it was a savage coast which lay along the south of Skye. In the darkness of the storm Olaus thought that the other nine wave-steeds were following him, and he drove before the gale, with his men crouching under the lee of the bulwarks, and with Finnleikr the Harper singing a wild song of sea-foam and flowing blood and the whirling of swords. ”

“ I knew he meant Giorsal. My heart sank. But I wore my nails into the palms of my hands. Then I said this thing, that is an old saying in the isles: “Those who are in the quiet havens hear neither the wind nor the sea.” He was so weak he could not lie down in the bed. He was in the big chair before the peats, with his feet on a claar.
When the wind was still I read him the Word. A little warm milk was all he would take. I could hear the blood in his lungs sobbing like the ebb-tide in the sea-weed. ”

“ Then Molios saw.
And what he saw was a strangeness and a terror to him. For everywhere were green lives, fair and comely, gentle-eyed, lovely, of a soft shining. From tree to tree they flitted, or passed to and fro from the tree-boles, as wild bees from their hives.
Beside Cathal stood a woman. Beautiful she was, with eyes like stars in the gloaming. All of green flame she seemed, though the old monk saw her breast rise and fall, and the light lift of her earth-brown hair by a wind-breath eddying there, and the hand of her clasped in that of Cathal. ”

“ It was in a white June, as they call it, in the third year after the pirates of Lochlin had fed the corbies of the Hebrid Isles, that the summer-sailors once more came down the Minch of Skye.
An east wind blew fresh from the mountains, though between dawn and sunrise it veered till it chilled itself upon the granite peaks of the Cuchullins, and then leaped north-westward with the white foam of its feet caught from behind by the sun-glint. ”

“ Once, in her ninth year, he came upon her on the hillside of Dun-I singing these selfsame words. Her eyes dreamed afar away. He bowed his head, and, praying to the Giver of light, hurried to Cathal. The old man bade him speak no more to the child concerning the mysteries.
Bride lived the hours of her days upon the slopes of Dun-I, herding the sheep, or in following the kye upon the green hillocks and grassy dunes of what then as now was called the Machar. The beauty of the world was her daily food. ”

“ The slow hot drone filled the cell.
“Master,” said Oran, “it is the will of the brethren that you break your fast. You are old, and God has your glory. Give us peace.”
“Father,” urged Keir, seeing that Colum kneeled unnoticingly, his lips still moving above his black beard, with the white hair of him falling about his head like a snowdrift slipping from a boulder. “Father, be pitiful! We hunger and thirst for your presence. We can fast no longer, yet have we no heart to break our fast if you are not with us. ”

“ He had not gone with the Frankish prince, nor wished to go. But he dreamed often. It was on a day of dream that he lay on his back in the hot grass upon a dune, near where the cells of the monks were. The sun-glow bathed the isle in a golden haze. The strait was a shimmering dazzle, and the blue wavelets that made curves in the soft white sand seem to spill gold flakes and change them straightway into little jets of foam or bubbles of rainbow-spray. ”