A few battered old seamen, pottering about the boats, looked kindly questions at her, women came to their doors to stare, but she could not ask them anything. Even the hope that her mother might be buried there seemed too fantastic in this chill light of common day. She walked slowly along the beach toward the spire of a church, thinking that she might look among its gravestones and perhaps find shelter in its rectory. She was on British soil, so could count on one spot of order and establishment in the rude little place.
Darkness was closing down with Northern suddenness. Sand grated in her shoes, the bleak wind cut her cheeks, her bag dragged at her arm; but her bodily distress seemed remote and unimportant beside the torment of her exhausted spirit. The end of her endurance had come. She was lost in a bad dream, fumbling through a horror of darkness that had no end. Not till a bar of light struck on her eyes did she know that she had reached the church. The door was open, and she stumbled in.
A hanging lamp had been lit near the chancel, and in its circle of light stood a middle-aged woman busily fitting pew-cushions into new red covers. She moved vigorously, as one who has a great deal to do and is rejoiced to do it. Her worn face had been lined by sadness, but through it a cheerful spirit looked out. Eleanor, still in shadow, crept slowly nearer, pew by pew, till she touched the edge of the lamplight; and still the dream held. She saw her mother. She sank to her knees, hiding her face.
“Who’s there?” She heard the old, warm, welcoming voice. “Land sakes, I didn’t hear no one come in. You kind o’—” There was a pause, and the scissors fell with a clatter. “Who is it?”
Eleanor could not rise or speak; but she slowly lifted her face. In an instant she felt her mother kneeling beside her, gathering her up as she would have gathered up the little hurt Eleanor of twenty years before. Words came dimly through a thickening mist.
“Why, Nellie—why, my girl, did you come all this—I didn’t mean to grieve you, Nellie. I thought you’d be kind o’ glad and relieved, dear, truly. I wouldn’t have hurt you for fifty million dollars! Why, Nellie, you did care about your old mother! She’s worn out, my poor baby! Come and let mother take care of you.”
Blinded, speechless, utterly spent, Eleanor let herself be drawn to her feet and half led, half carried to the house next door, where she was put to bed in a clean little whitewashed room, aglow with firelight from an open stove. Neither of them said much; but their hands clung together, and Eleanor’s face was often pressed against the helping arms. When she had been made comfortable, she felt her mother standing over her, gently stroking her hair.
“Dearie, I didn’t plan to do it,” she was saying. “But there was just me and that pore fellow that pulled me up onto his raft — we was picked up together after I dunno how long, and brought here. The mail didn’t go out for two weeks, so I had time to think; and, oh, dearie, there was such a lot to do here! They’d had an epidemic, and they was all so sick and weak and helpless. My, but it did seem good to get my hands on a job again! I hadn’t had enough to do, dearie, and this was real work. And they was grateful, and loved me. So I kind o’ stayed on and on. But I see it wasn’t right. I didn’t understand, and I ask you to forgive me.” She was gone before Eleanor could shape the difficult words in her heart.
There was no need to shape them. Her mother understood. The miracle had happened, and just by being there, helpless and humbled and clinging, she was making up for all those cruel years. Her mind floated dazedly between the present and the past. Several times she started up in distress.
“I have dreamed so often that you came back,” she exclaimed. “I wanted it so horribly. And the dreams were just as real as this. How can I know that this is true?” Her mother’s hand on hers felt real, but the voice sounded remote and ineffably patient.
“Well, dearie, our hearts have found each other, anyhow. So it’s all right.”
“Yes, it’s all right,” Eleanor repeated, and fell asleep.
In the morning she was too ill to get up. Her mother stayed beside her, and would let no one else in, though she herself was called out twenty times. Evidently she was a power in the village, an undisputed authority on things pertaining to ailing babies and grandmothers, young lovers and parish problems. She answered every call with a jump of alacrity, and came back with the shining eyes of happy service. When Eleanor asked her what she had done for money, she laughed.
“My land, dearie, what I had sewed into my petticoat would last an old woman all her life, in this place,” she explained.
A fear brought Eleanor up on one elbow. “But you will come back with me!” she exclaimed.
“I’ll do whatever is right and best,” was the grave answer.
Day and night merged into each other. Eleanor floated between fever and vagueness, and started up at intervals, calling desperately for her mother.
“Am I making it up to you?” she would plead. “Oh, mother, I have suffered so! Is it all right now?”
“It’s all right, my baby,” the answer would come, strongly, soothing her like a cool hand on her forehead.
One morning she woke up to a world suddenly stilled and exquisitely peaceful. The wind, which had howled for days, was quieted, and sunshine streamed across the bed. A sense of beauty and fulfillment had descended like a blessing. It might have been the earth’s seventh day, after the first six days of labor. She and her mother smiled into each other’s eyes.
“How long have I been here?” she asked.
“Just a week today, dearie.”
“And I have made you happy?”
“So happy!”
“Am I ill?”
“I think you’re better. I wish you could get out into this nice sunshine.”
“Mother, when can we go hack?”
A shadow fell on the other’s face, but she answered cheerfully: “Why, there’s a boat coming in this morning with a doctor, but you ain’t strong enough to be taken, I’m afraid. We’ll see what he says. Now, will you eat some breakfast, like a good girl?”
Eleanor submitted to the spoon at her lips. When her mother, ruddy and smiling in her fishwife’s cloak, started for the beach to meet the doctor, she called her back. The fever brightness was coming up in her cheeks.
“I have learned how to love,” she said. “All my books and all my teachers never taught me anything so big as what you taught me, mother—just by being you.” They clung to each other, smiling through tears. At the door her mother turned back.
“It’s all right for ever and ever—remember that,” she said, and her voice had a magic beauty.
The sunlight fell on the window like a summons. The churchyard was just beneath, and a confused memory of her need to hunt through its graves goaded Eleanor into dressing. She crept out by a side door, and presently stood in the fresh sunlight among the mounds. She found one with a wooden headboard showing the name “Peter Gannon” and a date. Beside it an oblong had been cut in the sod, and a few spadefuls of earth taken out. Her fevered brain began to conjure up terrors.
“Perhaps that is for me,” she thought, and stood as lost and heart-sick as a child that has slipped from a guardian hand in the crowd. The need of her mother’s sane, strong presence drove her down the beach road, struggling to run in the unwilling sand. At last, rounding the corner of the school-house, she came in sight of the pier and its moving figures, cut with cameo delicacy on the still brightness of the morning. She saw the sail-boat coming in, and her mother’s fluttering cloak, and the excited children scrambling underfoot, all as tiny and brilliant as though she looked through reversed glasses. Her feet had grown very heavy, and she paused, wavering. At that moment a child darted too near the edge, and she saw her mother spring forward.
There was a cry that shattered the scene into a confusion of movement and terror. Eleanor stumbled on until women in the gathering crowd stopped her. By the fright
in their eyes she knew.
“My mother is dead!” The words seemed to come from without and to strike her down like a bolt of lightning.
* * * *
When she came out of the darkness and bewilderment, the same words were on her lips.
“My mother is dead,” she told the figure beside her. A quieting murmur answered. Looking about, she saw hospital walls. Beyond the windows lay a gleam of roofs and spires, white with snow. She was too tired to wonder. Presently tears began to run down her cheeks. The nurse asked some question, but she could not explain that she was crying for her mother. It was pure grief, grief without shame; she cried longingly, yet with a great sense of peace. She had had no right to cry before. The nurse gave her something to drink, and she fell asleep.
When she woke again it was night, and a different nurse sat by her bed.
“How did I come here?” she asked, and at the quiet, lucid question the nurse started, looking keenly into her face.
“Oh, a doctor brought you, a long way,” she said, soothingly. “Don’t bother about that now.”
“They told you I had lost my mother?” Eleanor went on; and remembered the woman who had lost her child and could speak of nothing else.
The nurse was bent over a chart. “You must try not to think of dreadful things,” she said.
“Ah, but this was so wonderful!” Eleanor spoke with sudden strength. “It was like a perfect dream, and yet it was real. Real as my hand here—feel. Sad—oh yes, terribly sad; but she wouldn’t call it dreadful. And it makes all the rest of my life possible. But no one will ever understand.”
“You are not to talk,” the nurse said, gently. “I want you to go to sleep.”
Eleanor wound her arms about the pillow and hid her face. “Oh, it is so good to cry for my mother!” she murmured.
GREEN BRANCHES, by Fiona Macleod
In the year that followed the death of Manus MacCodrum, James Achanna saw nothing of his brother Gloom. He might have thought himself alone in the world, of all his people, but for a letter that came to him out of the west. True, he had never accepted the common opinion that his brothers had both been drowned on that night when Anne Gillespie left Eilanmore with Manus.
In the first place he had nothing of that inner conviction concerning the fate of Gloom which he had concerning that of Marcus; in the next, had he not heard the sound of the feadan, which no one that he knew played except Gloom; and, for further token, was not the tune that which he hated above all others—the “Dance of the Dead”—for who but Gloom would be playing that, he hating it so, and the hour being late, and no one else on Eilanmore? It was no sure thing that the dead had not come back; but the more he thought of it the more Achanna believed that his sixth brother was still alive. Of this, however, he said nothing to any one.
It was as a man set free that, at last, after long waiting and patient trouble, with the disposal of all that was left of the Achanna heritage, he left the island. It was a grey memory for him. The bleak moorland of it, the blight that had lain so long and so often upon the crops, the rains that had swept the isle for grey days and grey weeks and grey months, the sobbing of the sea by day and its dark moan by night, its dim relinquishing sigh in the calm of dreary ebbs, its hollow, baffling roar when the storm-shadow swept up out of the sea—one and all oppressed him, even in memory. He had never loved the island, even when it lay green and fragrant in the green and white seas under white and blue skies, fresh and sweet as an Eden of the sea.
He had ever been lonely and weary, tired of the mysterious shadow that lay upon his folk, caring little for any of his brothers except the eldest—long since mysteriously gone out of the ken of man—and almost hating Gloom, who had ever borne him a grudge because of his beauty, and because of his likeness to and reverent heed for Alison. Moreover, ever since he had come to love Katreen Macarthur, the daughter of Donald Macarthur who lived in Sleat of Skye, he had been eager to live near her; the more eager as he knew that Gloom loved the girl also, and wished for success not only for his own sake, but so as to put a slight upon his younger brother.
So, when at last he left the island, he sailed southward gladly. He was leaving Eilanmore; he was bound to a new home in Skye, and perhaps he was going to his long-delayed, long dreamed-of happiness. True, Katreen was not pledged to him; he did not even know for sure if she loved him. He thought, hoped, dreamed, almost believed that she did; but then there was her cousin Ian, who had long wooed her, and to whom old Donald Macarthur had given his blessing. Nevertheless, his heart would have been lighter than it had been for long, but for two things. First, there was the letter. Some weeks earlier he had received it, not recognizing the writing, because of the few letters he had ever seen, and, moreover, as it was in a feigned hand. With difficulty he had deciphered the manuscript, plain printed though it was. It ran thus:
“Well, Sheumais, my brother, it is wondering if I am dead, you will be. Maybe ay, and maybe no. But I send you this writing to let you know that I know all you do and think of. So you are going to leave Eilanmore without an Achanna upon it? And you will be going to Sleat in Skye? Well, let me be telling you this thing. Do not go. I see blood there. And there is this, too: neither you nor any man shall take Katreen away from me. You know that; and Ian Macarthur knows it; and Katreen knows it; and that holds whether I am alive or dead. I say to you: do not go. It will be better for you, and for all. Ian Macarthur is away in the north-sea with the whaler-captain who came to us at Eilanmore, and will not be back for three months yet. It will be better for him not to come back. But if he comes back he will have to reckon with the man who says that Katreen Macarthur is his. I would rather not have two men to speak to, and one my brother. It does not matter to you where I am. I want no money just now. But put aside my portion for me. Have it ready for me against the day I call for it. I will not be patient that day; so have it ready for me. In the place that I am I am content. You will be saying: why is my brother away in a remote place (I will say this to you: that it is not further north than St. Kilda nor further south than the Mull of Cantyre!), and for what reason? That is between me and silence. But perhaps you think of Anne sometimes. Do you know that she lies under the green grass? And of Manus MacCodrum? They say that he swam out into the sea and was drowned; and they whisper of the seal-blood, though the minister is wrath with them for that. He calls it a madness. Well, I was there at that madness, and I played to it on my feadan. And now, Sheumais, can you be thinking of what the tune was that I played?
“Your brother, who waits his own day,
“GLOOM.”
“Do not be forgetting this thing: I would rather not be playing the ‘Damhsa-na-Mairbh.’ It was an ill hour for Manus when he heard the ‘Dan-nan-Ron’; it was the song of his soul, that; and yours is the ‘Davsa-na-Mairv.’”
This letter was ever in his mind; this, and what happened in the gloaming when he sailed away for Skye in the herring-smack of two men who lived at Armandale in Sleat. For, as the boat moved slowly out of the haven, one of the men asked him if he was sure that no one was left upon the island; for he thought he had seen a figure on the rocks, waving a black scarf. Achanna shook his head; but just then his companion cried that at that moment he had seen the same thing. So the smack was put about, and when she was moving slowly through the haven again, Achanna sculled ashore in the little coggly punt. In vain he searched here and there, calling loudly again and again. Both men could hardly have been mistaken, he thought. If there were no human creature on the island, and if their eyes had not played them false, who could it be? The wraith of Marcus, mayhap; or might it be the old man himself (his father), risen to bid farewell to his youngest son, or to warn him?
It was no use to wait longer, so, looking often behind him, he made his way to the boat again, and rowed slowly out toward the smack.
Jerk—jerk—jerk across the water came, low but only too
loud for him, the opening motif of the “Damhsa-na-Mairbh.” A horror came upon him, and he drove the boat through the water so that the sea splashed over the bows. When he came on deck he cried in a hoarse voice to the man next him to put up the helm, and let the smack swing to the wind.
“There is no one there, Callum Campbell,” he whispered.
“And who is it that will be making that strange music?”
“What music?”
“Sure it has stopped now, but I heard it clear, and so did Anndra MacEwan. It was like the sound of a reed pipe, and the tune was an eery one at that.”
“It was the Dance of the Dead.”
“And who will be playing that?” asked the man, with fear in his eyes.
“No living man.”
“No living man?”
“No. I’m thinking it will be one of my brothers who was drowned here, and by the same token that it is Gloom, for he played upon the feadan. But if not, then—then—”
The two men waited in breathless silence, each trembling with superstitious fear; but at last the elder made a sign to Achanna to finish.
“Then—it will be the Kelpie.”
“Is there—is there one of the—cave-women here?”
“It is said; and you know of old that the Kelpie sings or plays a strange tune to wile seamen to their death.”
At that moment the fantastic, jerking music came loud and clear across the bay. There was a horrible suggestion in it, as if dead bodies were moving along the ground with long jerks, and crying and laughing wild. It was enough; the men, Campbell and MacEwan, would not now have waited longer if Achanna had offered them all he had in the world. Nor were they, or he, out of their panic haste till the smack stood well out at sea, and not a sound could be heard from Eilanmore.
The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK: 25 Classic Haunts! Page 54
