Green Fire: A Romance

They were unmolested in their flight. Indeed, they met no one, till, at the end of the Forest of Kerival, they emerged near the junction with the high-road at a place called Trois Chênes. Then a woman, a gypsy vagrant, insisted disaster would ensue if they went over her tracks that night without first doing something to avert evil. They must cross her hand with silver, she said.

Impatient as he was, Alan stopped, and allowed the gypsy to have her will.

She looked at the hand Ynys held out through the obscurity, and almost immediately dropped it.

"Beware of crossing the sea," she said. "I see your death floating on a green wave."

Ynys shuddered, but said nothing. When Alan put out his hand the woman held it in hers for a few seconds, and then pondered it intently.

"Be quick, my good woman," he urged, "we are in a hurry."

"It will be behind the shadow when we meet again," was all her reply: enigmatical words, which yet in his ears had a sombre significance. But he was even more perturbed by the fact that, before she relinquished his hand, she stooped abruptly and kissed it.

As the fugitives rode onward along the dusky high-road, Alan whispered to Ynys that he could not forget the gypsy; that in some strange way she haunted him; and even seemed to him to be linked to that disastrous day.

"That may well be," Ynys had answered, "for the woman was Annaik."

Onward they rode till they came to Haut-Kerloek, the ancient village on the slope of the hill above the little town. There, at the Gloire de Kerival they stopped for the night. Next morning they resumed their journey, and the same afternoon reached St. Blaise-sur-Loise, where they knew they would find the body of General Alasdair Carmichael.

And it was thus that, by the strange irony of fate, Alasdair Carmichael, who had never seen his son, who in turn had unknowingly witnessed his father's tragic death, was followed to the grave-side by that dear child for whom he had so often longed, and that by Alan's side was the daughter of the man who had done so much to ruin his life and had at the last slain him. At the same hour, on the same day, Lois de Kerival was laid to her rest, with none of her kith and kin to lament her; for Tristran the Silent was alone in his austere grief. Two others were there, at whom the Curé looked askance: the rude woodlander, Judik Kerbastiou, and another forest estray, a gypsy woman with a shawl over her head. The latter must have known the Marquise's charity, for the good woman wept quietly throughout the service of committal, and, when she turned to go, the Curé heard a sob in her throat.

It took but a brief while for Alan to settle his father's few affairs. Among the papers he found one addressed to himself: a long letter wherein was set forth not only all necessary details concerning Alan's mother and father, but also particulars about the small fortune that was in keeping for him in Edinburgh, and the lonely house on the lonely Isle of Rona among the lonely Hebrides.

In St. Blaise Alan and Ynys went before the civil authorities, and were registered as man and wife. The next day they resumed their journey toward that exile which they had in view.

Thereafter, slowly, and by devious ways, they fared far north. At Edinburgh Alan had learned all that was still unexplained. He found that there would be enough money to enable Ynys and himself to live quietly, particularly at so remote a place as Rona. The castle or "keep" there was unoccupied, and had, indeed, long been untenanted save by the widow-woman Kirsten Macdonald, Ian's sister. In return for this home, she had kept the solitary place in order. All the furniture that had been there, when Alasdair Carmichael was last in Rona, remained. In going thither, Alan and Ynys would be going home.

The westward journey was a revelation to them. Never had there been so beautiful a May, they were told. They had lingered long at the first place where they heard the sweet familiar sound of the Gaelic. Hand in hand, they wandered over the hill-sides of which the very names had a poignant home-sweetness; and long, hot hours they spent together on lochs of which Lois de Kerival had often spoken with deep longing in her voice.

As they neared the extreme of the mainland, Alan's excitement deepened. He spoke hardly a word on the day the steamer left the Argyle coast behind, and headed for the dim isles of the sea, Coll and Tiree; and again on the following day Ynys saw how distraught he was, for, about noon, the coast-line of Uist loomed, faintly blue, upon the dark Atlantic horizon.

At Loch Boisdale, where they disembarked, and whence they had to sail the remainder of their journey in a fishing schooner, which by good fortune was then there and disengaged, Ian was for the first time recognized. All that evening Alan and Ynys talked with the islesmen; Alan finding, to his delight, his Gaelic was so good that none for a moment suspected he had not lived in the isles all his life. That of Ynys, however, though fluent, had a foreign sound in it which puzzled the admiring fishermen.

It was an hour after sunrise when the Blue Herring sailed out of Loch Boisdale, and it was an hour before sunset when the anchor dropped in Borosay Haven.

On this night Alan perceived the first sign of aloofness among his fellow Gaels. Hitherto every one had been cordial, and he and Ynys had rejoiced in the courtesy and genial friendliness which they had everywhere encountered.

But in Balnaree ("Baille'-na-Righ"), the little village wherein was focussed all that Borosay had to boast of in the way of civic life, he could not disguise from himself that again and again he was looked at askance.

Rightly or wrongly he took this to be resentment because of his having wed Ynys, the daughter of the man who had murdered Alasdair Carmichael. So possessed was he by this idea that he did not remember how little likely the islanders were to know aught concerning Ynys, or indeed any thing beyond the fact that Alasdair MacAlasdair Rhona had died abroad.

The trouble became more than an imaginary one when, on the morrow, he tried to find a boat for the passage to Rona. But for the Frozen Hand, as the triple-peaked hill to the south of Balnaree was called, Rona would have been visible; nor was it, with a fair wind, more than an hour's sail distant.

Nevertheless, every one to whom he spoke showed a strange reluctance. At last, in despair, he asked an old man of his own surname why there was so much difficulty.

In the island way, Sheumas Carmichael replied that the people on Elleray, the island adjacent to Rona, were incensed.

"But incensed at what?"

"Well, at this and at that. But for one thing they are not having any dealings with the Carmichaels. They are all Macdonalds, there, Macdonalds of Barra. There is a feud, I am thinking; though I know nothing of it; no, not I."

"But Seumas mac Eachainn, you know well yourself that there are almost no Carmichaels to have a feud with! There are you and your brother, and there is your cousin over at Sgòrr-Bhan on the other side of Borosay. Who else is there?"

To this the man could say nothing. Distressed, Alan sought Ian and bade him find out what he could. He, also, however, was puzzled and even seriously perturbed. That some evil was at work could not be doubted; and that it was secret boded ill.

Ian was practically a stranger in Borosay because of his long absence. But though this, for a time, shut him off from his fellow islanders, and retarded his discovery of what strange reason accounted for the apparently inexplicable apathy shown by the fishermen of Balnaree, – an apathy, too, so much to their own disadvantage, – it enabled him, on the other hand, to make a strong appeal to the clan-side of the islanders' natures. After all, Ian mac Iain mhic Dhonuill was one of them, and though he came there with a man in a shadow (though this phrase was not used in Ian's hearing), that was not his fault.

Suddenly Ian remembered a fact that he should have thought of at once. There was the old woman, his sister Kirsten. He would speak of her, and of their long separation, and of his desire to see her again before he died.

This made a difficult thing easy. Within an hour a boat was ready to take the travellers to the Isle of the Caves – as Rona was called locally. Before the hour was gone, they, with the stores of food and other things they had been advised to take with them, were slipping seaward out of Borosay Haven.

The moment the headland was rounded the heights of Rona came into view. Great gaunt cliffs they are, precipices of black basalt; though on the south side they fall away in grassy declivities which hang a greenness over the wandering wave forever sobbing round that desolate shore. But it was not till the Sgòrr-Dhu, a conical black rock at the southeast end of the island, was reached that the stone keep, known as Caisteal-Rhona, came in sight.

It stands at the landward extreme of a rocky ledge, on the margin of a green airidh. Westward is a small dark-blue sea loch, no more than a narrow haven. To the northwest rise sheer the ocean-fronting precipitous cliffs; northward, above the green pasture and a stretch of heather, is a woodland-belt of some three or four hundred pine-trees. It might well be called I-monair, as Aodh the Islander sang of it; for it is ever echoing with murmurous noises. If the waves dash against it from the south or east, a loud crying is upon the faces of the rocks; if from the north or north-east, there is a dull iteration, and amid the pines a continual soughing sea voice. But when the wind blows from the south-west, or the huge Atlantic billows surge out of the west, Rona is a place filled with an indescribable tumult. Through the whole island goes the myriad echo of a hollow booming, with an incessant sound as though waters were pouring through vast hidden conduits in the heart of every precipice, every rock, every bowlder. This is because of the arcades of which it consists, for from the westward the island has been honeycombed by the sea. No living man has ever traversed all those mysterious, winding sea galleries. Many have perished in the attempt. In the olden days the Uisteans and Barrovians sought refuge there from the marauding Danes and other pirates out of Lochlin; and in the time when the last Scottish king took shelter in the west many of his island followers found safety among these perilous arcades.

Some of them reach to an immense height. These are filled with a pale green gloom which in fine weather, and at noon or toward sundown, becomes almost radiant. But most have only a dusky green obscurity, and some are at all times dark with a darkness that has seen neither sun nor moon nor star for unknown ages. Sometimes, there, a phosphorescent wave will spill a livid or a cold blue flame, and for a moment a vast gulf of dripping basalt be revealed; but day and night, night and day, from year to year, from age to age, that awful wave-clamant darkness prevails unbroken.

To the few who know some of the secrets of the Passages, it is possible, except when a gale blows from any quarter but the north, to thrid these dim arcades in a narrow boat, and so to pass from the Hebrid Seas to the outer Atlantic. But to one unaware of the clews there might well be no return to the light of the open day; for in that maze of winding galleries and dim, sea-washed, and forever unlitten arcades, there is only a hopeless bewilderment. Once bewildered, there is no hope; and the lost adventurer will remain there idly drifting from barren corridor to corridor, till he perish of hunger and thirst, or, maddened by the strange and appalling gloom and the unbroken silence, – for there the muffled voice of the sea is no more than a whisper, – he leap into the green waters which forever slide stealthily from ledge to ledge.

From Ian mac Iain Alan had heard of such an isle, though he had not known it to be Rona. Now, as he approached his wild, remote home he thought of these death-haunted corridors, avenues of the grave as they are called in the "Cumha Fhir-Mearanach Aonghas mhic Dhonuill – the Lament of mad Angus Macdonald."

When, at last, the unwieldy brown coble sailed into the little haven it was to create unwonted excitement among the few fishermen who put in there frequently for bait. A group of eight or ten was upon the rocky ledge beyond Caisteal-Rhona, among them the elderly woman who was sister to Ian mac Iain.

At Alan's request, Ian went ashore in advance, in a small punt. He was to wave his hand if all were well, for Alan could not but feel apprehensive on account of the strange ill-will that had shown itself at Borosay.

It was with relief that he saw the signal when, after Ian had embraced his sister, and shaken hands with all the fishermen, he had explained that the son of Alasdair Carmichael was come out of the south, and with a beautiful young wife, too, and was henceforth to live at Caisteal-Rhona.

All there uncovered and waved their hats. Then a shout of welcome went up, and Alan's heart was glad, and that of Ynys. But the moment he had set foot on land he saw a startled look come into the eyes of the fishermen – a look that deepened swiftly into one of aversion, almost of fear.

One by one the men moved away, awkward in their embarrassment. Not one came forward with outstretched hand, nor said a word of welcome.

At first amazed, then indignant, Ian reproached them. They received his words in ashamed silence. Even when with a bitter tongue he taunted them, they answered nothing.

"Giorsal," said Ian, turning in despair to his sister, "what is the meaning of this folly?"

But even she was no longer the same. Her eyes were fixed upon Alan with a look of dread and indeed of horror. It was unmistakable, and Alan himself was conscious of it, with a strange sinking of the heart. "Speak, woman!" he demanded. "What is the meaning of this thing? Why do you and these men look at me askance?"

"God forbid!" answered Giorsal Macdonald with white lips; "God forbid that we look at the son of Alasdair Carmichael askance. But…"

"But what?"

With that the woman put her apron over her head and moved away, muttering strange words.

"Ian, what is this mystery?"

It was Ynys who spoke now, for on Alan's face was a shadow, and in his eyes a deep gloom. She, too, was white, and had fear in her eyes.

"How am I for knowing, Ynys-nighean-Lhois? It is all a darkness to me also. But I will find out."

That, however, was easier for Ian to say than to do. Meanwhile, the brown cobble tacked back to Borosay, and the fishermen sailed away to the Barra coasts, and Alan and Ynys were left solitary in their wild and remote home.

But in that very solitude they found healing. From what Giorsal hinted, they came to believe that the fishermen had experienced one of those strange dream-waves which, in remote isles, occur at times, when whole communities will be wrought by the selfsame fantasy. When day by day went past, and no one came nigh them, at first they were puzzled and even resentful, but this passed and soon they were glad to be alone. Only, Ian knew that there was another cause for the inexplicable aversion that had been shown. But he was silent, and he kept a patient watch for the hour that the future held in its dim shroud. As for Giorsal, she was dumb; but no more looked at Alan askance.

And so the weeks went. Occasionally, a fishing smack came with the provisions for the weekly despatch of which Alan had arranged at Loch Boisdale, and sometimes the Barra men put in at the haven, though they would never stay long, and always avoided Alan as much as was possible.

In that time Alan and Ynys came to know and love their strangely beautiful island home. Hours and hours at a time they spent exploring the dim, green winding sea galleries, till at last they knew the main corridors thoroughly. They had even ventured into some of the narrow snake-like passages, but never for long, because of the awe and dread these held, silent estuaries of the grave.

There, too, they forgot all the sorrow that had been theirs, forgot the shadow of death which lay between them. They buried all in the deep sea of love that was about the rock of their passion. For, as of another Alan and another woman, the mirdhei was upon them: the dream-spell of love.

Day by day, with them as with that Alan and Sorcha of whom they had often heard, their joy had grown, like a flower moving ever to the sun; and as it grew the roots deepened, and the tendrils met and intertwined round the two hearts, till at last they were drawn together and became one, as two moving rays of light will converge into one beam, or the song of two singers blend and become as the song of one.

As the weeks passed the wonder of the dream became at times a brooding passion, at times almost an ecstasy. Ossian and the poets of old speak of a strange frenzy that came upon the brave; and, sure, there is a mircath of another kind now and again in the world, in the green, remote places at least. Aodh the islander, and Ian-Ban of the hills, and other dreamer-poets know of it – the mirdhei, the passion that is deeper than passion, the dream that is beyond the dream. This that was once the fair doom of another Alan and Sorcha, of whom Ian had often told him with hushed voice and dreaming eyes, was now upon himself and Ynys.

They were Love to each other. In each the other saw the beauty of the world. Hand in hand they wandered among the wind-haunted pines, or along the thyme and grass of the summits of the precipices; or they sailed for hours upon the summer seas, blue lawns of moving azure, glorious with the sun-dazzle and lovely with purple cloud-shadows and amethystine straits of floating weed; or, by noontide, or at the full of the moon, they penetrated far into the dim, green arcades, and were as shadows in a strange and fantastic but ineffably sweet and beautiful dream.

Day was lovely and desirable to each, for day dreamed to night; and night was sweet as life because it held the new day against its dark, beating heart. Week after week passed, and to Ynys as to Alan it was as the going of the gray owl's wing, swift and silent.

Then it was that, on a day of the days, Alan was suddenly stricken with a new and startling dread.

CHAPTER X

AT THE EDGE OF THE SHADOW

In the hour that this terror came upon him Alan was alone upon the high slopes of Rona, where the grass fails and the moor purples at an elevation of close on a thousand feet above the sea.

The day had been cloudless since sunrise. The immeasurable range of ocean expanded like the single petal of an azure flower; all of one unbroken blue save for the shadows of the scattered isles and for the fugitive amethyst where floating weed suspended. An immense number of birds congregated from every quarter. Guillemots and skuas and puffins, cormorants and northern divers, everywhere darted, swam, or slept upon the listless sea, whose deep suspiration no more than lifted a league-long calm here and there, to lapse insensibly, even as it rose. Through the not less silent quietudes of air the sea-gulls swept with curving flight, and the narrow-winged terns made a constant shimmer. At remote altitudes the gannet motionlessly drifted. Oceanward the great widths of calm were rent now and again by the shoulders of the porpoises which followed the herring trail, their huge, black revolving bodies looming large above the silent wave. Not a boat was visible anywhere; not even upon the most distant horizons did a brown sail fleck itself duskily against the skyward wall of steely blue.

In the great stillness which prevailed, the noise of the surf beating around the promontory of Aonaig was audible as a whisper; though even in that windless hour the indescribable rumor of the sea, moving through the arcades of the island, filled the hollow of the air overhead. Ever since the early morning Alan had moved under a strange gloom. Out of that golden glory of midsummer a breath of joyous life should have reached his heart, but it was not so. For sure, there is sometimes in the quiet beauty of summer an air of menace, a breath, a suspicion, a dream-premonition, of suspended force – a force antagonistic and terrible. All who have lived in these lonely isles know the peculiar intensity of this summer melancholy. No clamor of tempestuous wind, no prolonged sojourn of untimely rains, and no long baffling of mists in all the drear inclemencies of that remote region, can produce the same ominous and even paralyzing gloom which sometimes can be born of ineffable peace and beauty. Is it that in the human soul there is mysterious kinship with the outer soul which we call Nature; and that in these few supreme hours which come at the full of the year we are, sometimes, suddenly aware of the tremendous forces beneath and behind us, momently quiescent?

Standing with Ynys upon a grassy headland, Alan had looked long at the dream-blue perspectives to the southward, seeing there at first no more than innumerable hidden pathways of the sun, with blue-green and silver radiance immeasurable, and the very breath and wonder and mystery of ocean life suspended as in a dream. In the hearts of each deep happiness brooded. Perhaps it was out of these depths that rose the dark flower of this sudden apprehension that came upon him. It was no fear for Ynys, nor for himself, not for the general weal: but a profound disquietude, a sense of inevitable ill. Ynys felt the tightening of his hand; and saw the sudden change in his face. It was often so with him. The sun-dazzle, at which he would look with endless delight, finding in it a tangible embodiment of the fugitive rhythms of cosmic music which floated everywhere, would sometimes be a dazzle also in his brain. In a moment a strange bewilderment would render unstable those perilous sands of the human brain which are forever laved by the strange waters of the unseen life. When this mood or fantasy, or uncalculable accident occurred, he was often wrought either by vivid dreams, or creative work, or else would lapse into a melancholy from which not even the calling love of Ynys would arouse him. When she saw in his face and in his eyes this sudden bewildered look, and knew that in some mysterious way the madness of the beauty of the sea had enthralled him, she took his hand and moved with him inland. In a brief while the poignant fragrance from the trodden thyme and short hill-grass, warmed by the sun, rose as an intoxication. For that hour the gloom went. But when, later, he wandered away from Caisteal-Rhona, once more the sense of foreboding was heavy upon him. Determined to shake it off, he wandered high among the upland solitudes. There a cool air forever moved even in the noons of August; and there, indeed, at last, there came upon him a deep peace. With joy his mind dwelled over and over again upon all that Ynys had been and was to him; upon the depth and passion of their love; upon the mystery and wonder of that coming life which was theirs and yet was not of them, itself already no more than an unrisen wave or an unbloomed flower, but yet as inevitable as they, but dowered with the light which is beyond where the mortal shadows end. Strange, this passion of love for what is not; strange, this deep longing of the woman – the longing of the womb, the longing of the heart, the longing of the brain, the longing of the soul – for the perpetuation of the life she shares in common with one whom she loves; strange, this longing of the man, a longing deep-based in his nature as the love of life or the fear of death, for the gaining from the woman he loves this personal hostage against oblivion. For indeed something of this so commonplace, and yet so divine and mysterious tide of birth, which is forever at the flow upon this green world, is due to an instinctive fear of cessation. The perpetuation of life is the unconscious protest of humanity against the destiny of mortality. Thoughts such as these were often with Alan now; often, too, with Ynys, in whom, indeed, all the latent mysticism which had ever been a bond between them had latterly been continually evoked. Possibly it was the mere shadow of his great love; possibly it was some fear of the dark way wherein the sunrise of each new birth is involved; possibly it was no more than the melancholy of the isles, that so wrought him on this perfect day. Whatsoever the reason, a deeper despondency prevailed as noon waned into afternoon. An incident, deeply significant to him, in that mood, at that time, happened then. A few hundred yards away from where he stood, half hidden in a little glen where a fall of water made a continual spray among the shadows of the rowan and birch, was the bothie of a woman, the wife of Neil MacNeill, a fisherman of Aonaig. She was there, he knew, for the summer pasturing, and even as he recollected this, he heard the sound of her voice as she sang down somewhere by the burnside. Moving slowly toward the corrie, he stopped at a mountain ash which overhung a deep pool. Looking down, he saw the woman, Morag MacNeill, washing and peeling potatoes in the clear brown water. And as she washed and peeled, she sang an old-time shealing hymn of the Virgin-Shepherdess, of Michael the White, and of Coluaman the Dove. It was a song that, far away in Brittany, he had heard Lois, the mother of Ynys, sing in one of those rare hours when her youth came back to her with something of youth's passionate intensity. He listened now to every word of the doubly familiar Gaelic, and when Morag finished the tears were in his eyes, and he stood for a while as one entranced.1