Pharais; and, The Mountain Lovers. Sharp William

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СКАЧАТЬ the three men huddled under the wall. At last, slowly, and with hearts wildly a-throb, they raised themselves and looked within.

      The room was bare in its clean poverty. On the rickety wooden table was a bowl with a little unfinished porridge in it. A yard away was an open Gaelic Bible, with a pair of horn spectacles laid across the open page. At a spinning stool between the table and the peat-fire was an old woman, kneeling, with her hands clasped and her face upraised. On the poor, tired, worn features was a look of pathetic yearning, straining from a white and beautiful peace.

      So rapt was she that she did not see a hand move the outer latch of the window, or feel the sudden breath of the night-air.

      Then those without, waiting to hearken to sorcery more appalling than the savagery of the tempest, heard old Ealasaid repeat this prayer:

      "Tha 'n la nis air falbh ùainn,

      Tha 'n oidhche 'tighinn orm dlùth;

      'S ni mise luidhe gu dion

      Fo dhubhar sgiath mo rùin.

      O gach cunnart 's o gach bàs,

      'S o gach nàmhaid th' aig Mac Dhe,

      O nàdur dhaoine borba,

      'S o choirbteachd mo nàduir fèin,

      Gabhaidh mis' a nis armachd Dhe,

      Gun bhi reubta no brisd',

      'Sge b' oil leis an t' sàtan 's le phàirt

      Bi'dh mis' air mo gheàrd a nis."

      The day is now gone;

      Dark night gathers around,

      And I will lay me safely down (to sleep)

      Under the shadow of my Beloved One's wing.

      Against all dangers, and death in every form,

      Against each enemy of God's good Son,

      Against the anger of the turbulent people,

      And against the corruption of my own nature,

      I will take unto me the armour of God —

      That shall protect me from all assaults:

      And in spite of Satan and all his following,

      I shall be well and surely guarded.

      When, after an interval of speechless prayer, the lonely old woman rose painfully to her feet, she noticed the open window, and heard the sough of the wind without.

      With a tired sigh, she crossed the room to close the inside latch. But, at the window, she stood irresolute, held by the noise of the sea beating against the clamour of the wind. She stooped, and peered forth.

      Not a thing was visible. Suddenly a broad wavering gleam of sheet-lightning lit up the whole brae. Almost, she fancied, she could have sworn she saw three human figures, with bowed heads, moving across the brow of the slope.

      She could not know that three men, stricken with shame and remorse – remorse which would ere long bloom into the white flower of repentance, to be worn lovingly by all on the isle – were stealing homeward from a vain and wicked errand.

      With a shudder, she crossed herself, fearing that the figures she had imagined, or had really seen, were the three dreadful Accursed who drove the spear into Christ's side and the nails into His hands and feet, and with mocking offered Him the bitter sponge.

      Slowly repeating:

      "O gach cunnart 's o gach bàs,

      'S o gach nàmhaid th' aig Mac Dhe,"

      she quenched with charred peat the flame of her fire, and was soon in a child-like rest "under the shadow of the wing of her Beloved One."

      When midnight came upon the isle, the worst violence of the storm was over. Nevertheless, upon the sea was the awfulness of desolation, the rumour of a terrible wrath.

      All slept at last: the innocent Ealasaid, the foolish seekers of evil, the isle-folk one and all – except two.

      Alastair and Lora lay in each others' arms as children terrified in the dark.

      That afternoon his madness had come upon him for a while; and he had smiled grimly at he knew not what, and laughed while the tears streamed from the eyes of Lora and Mary; and moaned betimes; and cried out against the calling of the sea; and closed his ears against the frightful wailing of a kelpie in the tarn beyond the byre; and, at the last, shook as in an ague before the fire, fearful of some informulate terror, but with such a crown of sorrow on his forehead that the two women bowed their faces in their hands, speechless with grief: with such a horror in his eyes that Ghaoth shrank from him with bristling fell and upcurled, snarling lip.

      But with the night came yet another merciful lifting of the veil.

      While the storm raged at its worst, the three kneeled, and Mrs. Maclean read from the beautiful Gaelic Scripture. Then, with all the tenderness of her childless passion of maternity, she prayed for God's balm and peace and the healing of His hand.

      When, in time, she went to her own room, Alastair and Lora talked for long in a low voice.

      On the day he had first heard that the seed of life had taken root in her womb, and knew that a child was to be born of their great love, he had known a thrill of such rapture that he could scarce see Lora for the blinding of the tears of joy.

      Beautiful she was to all: to him, lovely and tender as twilight and dear beyond words: but at that moment, when he learned from her own lips of her only half explicable trouble, he knew he had passed into a Holy of Holies of love and reverent passion such as he had but vaguely dreamed of as possible.

      But now, on this wild night of storm without and more awful dread within, he recalled with horror what had been driven from his mind.

      Bitter as was the doom he and Lora had to face, tenfold bitter was it made by the thought that they were to bring into the world yet another soul shrouded in the shadow of his own intolerable ill.

      And so it was that, at the last, Alastair and Lora Macleod, knowing his madness was at hand and could be cured of no man, and that their lives were spilled out as lees from a cup, and that they were witlessly dooming the unborn child to a heritage of grief, gave solemn troth to each other that on the morrow they would go forth hand in hand, and, together in death as in life, lay themselves beneath that ever-wandering yet ever-returning wave which beats day and night, and week by week, and year by year, and without end for ever, about the sea-gathered graveyard on the remote west of Innisròn.

      Then was a great peace theirs. For the last time they laid themselves down on their bed: for the last time twined their arms around each other, while on the same pillow their heads lay side by side, the hair about his forehead wet with her falling tears: for the last time they kept vigil through the terror of the dark – an awful terror now, with the wrath of the sea without, with the shadow of Death within the room, with the blackness of oblivion creeping, creeping from chamber to chamber in the darkened house of a dulled, subsiding brain.

      Ere dawn, Alastair slept. Lora lay awake, trembling, longing for the day, yet praying God to withhold it; sick with baffled hope, with the ache of weariness, with the sound of the moan and hollow boom of the sea. More deep and terrible in her ears grew that midnight Voice, reverberant in the room as in the whorl of a shell: a dreadful iterance of menace, a dirge that confusedly she seemed to know well, a swelling chant, a requiem.

      IV

      An hour after sunrise there СКАЧАТЬ