Pharais; and, The Mountain Lovers. Sharp William

a Mhic na oighe cubhraidh

      Cumabh mise o na piantan dorcha,

      'S Micheal geal' an cò 'ail m'anama."

      This night I will lay me down to sleep

      With Mary Virgin and her Son,

      Even with the mother of my King,

      Who protects me from all evil;

      Nor shall evil lie down to sleep with me,

      But I shall sleep with God:

      And with me shall God lie down.

      His right arm shall be under my head:

      The cross of the Nine Angels be about me,

      From the top of my head

      To the soles of my feet.

      I supplicate Peter, I supplicate Paul,

      I supplicate Mary the Virgin and her Son,

      I supplicate the twelve Apostles,

      That evil befall us not this night.

      Mary, in thy goodness and glory,

      And Thou, Son of the sweet-savoured Virgin,

      Protect us this night from all the pains of darkness.

      And thou, Michael, guardian of souls, abide with us, watching.

      When she looked down, at the end of her prayer, Mary saw that Lora's eyes also were closed; though by the muttering of the lips she knew her dear one was not asleep.

      Softly she closed the door behind her; then, passing by the fire, went into the third room of the cottage.

      Soon she too was in bed, softly repeating, as the weariness of sleep came over her:

      Cha laidh mise leis an olc,

      'S cha laidh an t' olc leam.

      Without, came the rising sound of the tide among the pebbles on the shore, the incessant chime of wave lapsing over wave on flat rocks. The sough of the wind fell from the corries of Craig-an-Iolair, and died in whispers among the fern and dew-cold grasses.

      So went the hours from silence into silence. And in time came the dawn, and an ashen-grey upon the sea, and a grey gloom upon each leaf and every dusky frond and blade. But when the black of the mainland became gold, and a trouble of light moved, swiftly-throbbing, across the eastern water, Michael the Watcher withdrew.

      At the window of the room where Alastair and Lora slept, the beautiful sunflood of the new day poured in rejoicingly.

      One long streamer of light fell upon his yellow hair and kissed the eyelids of a veiled, subsiding mind. Downward it moved, and filled with its gleam the dark-brown hair which lay across the white breast of Lora. Then, surely, it passed beneath the flower of her bosom and into her heart, and warmed it with joy; for with a smile she awoke, murmuring,

      "Pharais, Pharais."

      III

      Before the want of that day, the rumour went among the scant population of Innisròn that Alastair, son of Diarmid of Macleod, was mad: that, in the phrasing of the islesman, he had the mind-dark.

      Men and women whispered the thing with awe. In the West, something almost of a hieratic significance is involved in the poetic phrase that God has filled with dusk the house of the brain. Not thus is spoken of the violence of insanity – the mere insurgence of delirium from the fever of hate, or from jealousy, or love, or evil of the blood, or the curse of drink. But that veil of darkness which comes down upon the mind of man or woman in the fullness of life, and puts an impermeable mist or a twilight of awful gloom about the soul, is looked upon not only with an exceeding tenderness, but with awe, and as of a bowing of the head before a divine mystery.

      Yet the rumour was not true, for Alastair Macleod, though he stood within the shadow, had not yet sunk into the darkness.

      As it had chanced, Mrs. Maclean was not the only person who had seen him and Lora on their return.

      Late in the night Ian Maclean had come back from the western side of the isle, and was standing in the shadow of the byre when, hand in hand, Lora and Alastair approached.

      The old man had been unhappy, and, after leaving his kinsman at Ardfeulan, had wandered up among the corries. In the wail of the wind along the heights, in the sough of it in the little glens and shelving uplands, he heard voices to which he would fain not have listened, for they spoke of a terror that was in the air.

      The moment he saw Alastair's eyes, dark within the moonlit pallor of the face, he knew that his premonitions were no mere imaginings. On his forehead he saw the shadow of doom.

      With a sigh he turned, and, having entered the byre and gone to the part of it shut off for his use, lay down upon his bed of fragrant fern. But, weary as he was, he could not sleep.

      Again the vision came to him: and once more he saw Alastair move blindly in an unfamiliar place, with the mist no longer up to his waist only, but risen now to his throat, and with thin tongues reaching upward still.

      The long night went drearily past. When the day was come, Ian rose and let out the kye. The sweet freshness of the air was as balm to his weariness. The wind blew cool upon his brows, and a breath of the sea mingled with the myriad suspiration of the earth and gave him the intoxication of the dawn. His eyes grew brighter, his step firmer, his mien no longer that of profound dejection; and when Ghaoth came leaping toward him, and barked about the half-amused, half-angry cows – who stopped to plash their hoofs in the thick white dew, against which the warm breaths fell revolvingly like grey whorls of steam, and to swing their great horns against their flanks, wild and shaggy as the brown hill-sides in autumn – then all the gloom of the night went from him.

      "Mayhap it was but a dream," he muttered: "and who can tell the folly of the mind?"

      Then, with Ghaoth's help, he got the steers from the neighbouring shed and "Righ-geal," the great tawny-shaggy bull, whose either horn could have pierced right through and beyond the biggest drover who ever crossed the Kyles at Colintraive, and urged all the kine upward to the higher pastures, where the thyme was so sweet, close-clustered as it was among the soft green hair of the isle-grass.

      It seemed to him as though all the larks on Innisròn were singing at one time and just there, everywhere around and above him. In the birk-shaws, there was a mavis that was as a fount wherefrom music spilled intoxicatingly: by the burn, the merles called, recalled, and called yet again, and over and over, sweet and blithe, and with loud, reckless cries of mirth and joy. On every gorse-bush, yellow with bloom, fragrant almost to pain, and filled with the murmur of the wild-bee and the high, thin hum of the wood-wasp, a yellow-hammer flitted to and fro, or sang its tweet – tweet – tweet – o-o-oh sweet! – sweet!

      The sky was almost cloudless save for an angry flush in the north-east – a deep, living blue of infinite, though indiscernibly faint gradation. Here and there, too, were thin, almost invisible grey mare's-tails swept upward, as though they were snow-dust or sea-spray, before the flying feet of the Weaver of the Winds.

      As soon as Ian had reached the last dyke, and had seen "Righ-geal" lead his impatient following toward the uplands, he stood swaying his grey head slowly to and fro, with his right hand moving automatically in rhythmic accord, while he repeated the familiar "Rann Buacbailleac," or Rune on the driving of the cattle to the pasture:

I

      "Siubhal beinne, siubhal baile,

      Siubhal gu re fada farsuinn;

      Buachaille Mhic De m'ar casaibh,

      Gu mu slan a thig sibh dachaidh,

      Buachaille Mhic De m'ar casaibh

      Gu mu slan a thig sibh dachaidh."

II

      "Comraig, Dhia agus Chalum-Chille,

      Bhith m'ar timchioll a fabh's a tilleadh,

      Agus nan or-chiabh down!

      Agus Banachaig nan basa min-gheal,

      Bride