MacDonnell of Morar, on the summer of his marriage, and when the gladness of it was still in every vein, sailed his sloop among the Isles. He went from sound to sound, from loch to loch, anchoring wherever the fancy took his lady, and the two of them were seeking what no one ever found nor shall find—that last and swooning pang of pleasure the Isles in summer weather, either at dawn or dusk, seem always to promise to youth and love. At night they lay in bays in the dim light of the cool north stars, or in the flush of the sunken sun that made wine of the sea-waves, and the island cliffs or the sandy shores seemed populous with birds or singing fisher-people.

It was very well then with Morar.

His wife was still a girl. In the mornings, when she came on deck with her hair streaming and the breeze making a banner of her gown, her gaiety surging to her breast in song, she seemed to him and to his men like one of the olden sea princesses told about in Gaelic stories, born from foam for the happiness and hurt of the hearts of men. She was lovely, tender, and good, and he himself, with those that knew him best, was notable for every manly part. One thing only he had a fear of in his bride—that, as had happened with others before, and perhaps with himself, a day might come to him when the riddle of her would be read, her maidenly sweet mystery revealed; when he could guess with certainty what was in the deep dark wells of her eyes, and understand, without a word, the cause for every throb of her bosom. To have her for ever with a part to baffle and allure, as does the sea in its outer caves, and as do the dawns in Highland glens—that was the wish of Morar.

The captain of the yacht, who, having no passion for her, knew her, some ways, better than her husband, perhaps, said she had what, westward in the Barra Isle he hailed from, they call the Seven Gifts for Women—content and gentleness, looks and liking, truth, simplicity, and the fear of God. To him and to his men—gallant fellows from Skye, and somewhat jealous of her that she was not of the isles herself, but a stranger—she was at least without a flaw. One time they thought it might be temper was her weakness, for she walked the deck with pride and had a noble carriage of the head, but the tiniest cloud of temper never crossed her honeymoon. Indeed, it was well with Morar.And it seemed that summer as if the very clime befriended him, for there never blew but the finest breezes, and the sun was almost constant in the sky. Round all the remoter isles they sailed—even Harris and the Uists, and the countless lesser isles that lie to the west of Scotland,—an archipelago where still are dwelling the ancient Gaelic gods, whereto at least they come at sunset and sit upon the sands communing, so that sailors knowing the language, and having the happy ear, can sometimes catch far off at sea deep murmurs of the olden world that others take for the plash of waters.

Morar’s wife put the yacht into every creek. She loved the little creeks, she doted on the burns going mourning through the darkness, and on the sound of tides on shallow shores; it was her great delight sometimes to sleep on land below a canvas shelter, bathe at morning in the inner pools, walk barefooted on the sand, or stand on rocky promontories facing the rising sun, with her hair tumultuous. Her first breakfast then was the wild berry, her morning drink the water from island wells.

“I could live on the berries,” she would say to her husband. “Oh, I love them!”

“Doubtless, mochree,” would he answer her, laughing. “Faith! it’s my notion they have been growing all these years in the islands waiting just for you; their bloom is on your cheek; it’s the berry stain that was on your lips since ever I knew you. But for a common person like myself there is a certain seduction in a sea-trout or a herring. Madam, I wish you joy of your wild berries, and indeed I love the taste of them—on your lips,—but let me press on you a simple cabin-biscuit, though it suffers from having been baked by the hand of man.”

“And the berry comes straight from God,” would be her answer. “It’s the fruiting of the clean wild wind; I sometimes think that if I could eat it always I should live for ever.”

“Then, faith, I’ll grow it in Morar garden by the pole, and you shall eat berries at every meal,” said her husband. “Perhaps I’ll acquire the taste myself. Meanwhile, let me recommend the plain prose of our cooking galley.”

“And I declare that I can find in pure water something as intoxicating as wine and far more subtle on the palate.”

“A noble beverage, at least they tell me so, as the piper says in the story,” said Morar, “yet God forbid that a too exclusive diet of berries and water should send Macdonnell back a widower to Morar! I take leave to help you to another egg,” and so saying he would laugh at her again, and she would laugh also, for the truth was that she never brought to the cabin table but a yachtsman’s appetite.

One thing she missed in all these island voyagings was the green companionship of trees. She came from a land of trees, and sailing day after day past isles that gave no harbour to so little as a sapling, she fretted sometimes for the shady deeps of thicket and the sway of boughs. Often she sat on deck at nightfall and imagined what the isles must have been before disaster overtook them.

“Can you think of us wandering in the avenues, sitting in the glades? Barefoot or sandal, loose light garments, berries and water, the bland sea air, shade from the sun and shelter from the shower, and the two of us always young and always the same to each other”—it was a picture she put before him many times, half entranced, as if she once had known a life like that before far back in another age and climate than in Scotland of the storms. Kissing her lips, wet from some mountain well, her husband got to look on her now and then as some Greek girl of the books, and himself as an eternal lover who had heard the wind blowing through boughs in Arcady.

Loving trees as she did, it was strange that so long they should have failed to visit Island Faoineas, for often in their voyagings it lay before them on the sea—green, gracious, and inviting, its single hill luxuriant with hazel-grown eas or corrie, its little glen adorned with old plantations. It lies behind Bernera, south of Harris, hiding coy among other isles and out of the track of vessels, and for reasons of his own the captain of the yacht sailed always at a distance from it, keeping it in the sun’s eye so that its trees should seem like black tall cliffs with the white waves churning at their feet. But one day Morar and his wife came to him with the chart. “This island here,” they said together. “We have not seen it close at hand; let us go there to-night.”

The captain’s face changed; he made many excuses. “A shabby, small place,” he told them, “with a poor anchorage. And the wind is going westward with the sun. I think myself Lochmaddy better for an anchoring this night than Ealan Faoineas.”

“What does the name mean—this Ealan Faoineas?” asked Morar’s wife, looking out toward the island that was too distant yet to show its trees.

“It means,” said Morar, “the Isle of Seeming—that is to say, the Isle of Illusion.”

“What a dear name!” she cried, clapping her hands. “I should love to see it. Are there trees?” Her eyes were on the captain’s face: he dared not lie.

“What you might be calling a sort of trees,” he grudgingly admitted. “Oh yes, I will not be saying but what there are two or three trees, or maybe more, for I have not paid much attention to Ealan Faoineas myself.”

“Indeed!” said she. “Then it is time you were amending your knowledge of it. I think we will risk the anchorage for the sake of the trees.”

It was her own hand put down the helm and herself who called the men to the sheets, for the captain had a sudden slackness in his office and was forward murmuring with his crew.

“What ails him?” the lady asked her husband.

“You have me there!” he answered her, as puzzled as herself. “I think it is likely there may be some superstition about the island; the name suggests as much, and now that I come to think of it, I remember I once heard as a boy that sailors never cared to land on one or two of the Outer Isles, believing them the domain of witchcraft. We must have passed that island frequently and the captain always kept us wide of it. I will ask him what its story is that makes him frightened for it.”

He went forward by-and-by and talked with the captain.“I am a plain man; I have not the education except for boats,” said the seaman, “and I would not set foot on Faoineas for the wide world. You will not get a man in all the Outer Islands, from Barra Head to the Butt of Lewis, who would step on Faoineas if the deck of his skiff was coming asunder in staves below the very feet of him. I am brave myself—oh yes! I come of people exceeding brave and notable for deeds, but there is not that much gold in all the Hebrides, no, nor in the realm of Scotland, would buy my landing in that place yonder.”

“Come! come! what is wrong with the island that you should have such a fear of it?” asked Morar, astounded at so strong a feeling.

“It is bad for men, and it is worse for women,” said the Captain.

“Is it something to hurt the body?”

“If it was but the body I would be the first ashore! I have not so much money put past me that I have any need to be afraid for my life,” said the captain.

“Are there ghosts there, then?” said Morar, determined to be at the root of the mystery.

“Ghosts!” cried the captain. “Where are they not, these gentlemen?”

By this time the sloop that Morar’s wife was steering had drawn closer on the island, breaking her way among the billows striving into Harris Sound; and to the gaze of Morar’s wife, and to her great bewilderment, she saw the little glen with its bushes climbing high on either side of it, and the tall, great, dark old Highland trees beyond, and thickets like gardens to the south, and under all the deep cool dusk of shadows she had longed for all those days that she and her husband had sought for the last pang of pleasure in their honeymoon among the Outer Isles. She leaned upon the tiller and stared entranced and unbelieving, for it seemed a fairy isle, such as grows fast in dreams and sinks to the sea-depths again when dawn is on the window. Only when she saw rooks rise with cawings from the branches, and heard the song of birds unknown on the treeless islands, was she altogether convinced of its reality.

“Darling,” she cried to her husband, “look! Were we not right? Here’s a forgotten paradise.”

“If paradise it be, then may you have your share of it,” said the captain as he put them ashore. “Myself, I would not risk it so long as this world has so many pleasant things to be going on with. All I can tell you of Island Faoineas is that, paradise or purgatory, it depends on what one eats and drinks there. I heard it from a priest in Eriskay, a noble and namely man through all the islands of the West. Once he had landed here and known some wonders. He died in Arisaig, and in his dying blessed with the seven blessings one well upon this island, but which of all that run there I never learned.”That night Morar and his bride slept out in the shelter of hazel-bushes and shelisters. They built a fire and drank out of the same glass from a burn that sang through the shelisters, and as they slept there were many wells that ran merrily through their dreams, but one particularly that rose from a hillock beside them, and tinkled more sweetly than golden jewels streaming down a golden stair.

II.

She was the first to waken in the morning, and stealing softly from him, she left the embers of their fire among the rushes and went wandering among the trees, so that when he rose he saw her figure, airy and white, among their columns. She seemed the spirit of the trees to his doting eye, as though ’twas there among them she had always dwelt; the wood was furnished and completed by her presence.

“There is not in the world a sweeter place,” she cried, “and I have never seen such berries! Look, I have brought you some, Sir Sluggard, that we might taste them first together.” She put a spray of the berries between her teeth and let him sweeten the fruit with a kiss as he took his share from her lips with his own.

“The woman tempted me, and I did eat,” said Morar, laughing, and culled the berries with his arms around her. They burst on his palate with a savour sharp and heady. He was about to ask for more when he saw her change. The smile had suddenly gone from her face at his words; for the first time he saw that her eyes were capable of anger.

“Upon my word,” said she in an impatient voice, “I think it a poor compliment to me after my trouble in getting the berries for you that you should have such a thought in your head about me.”

“There you go,” he answered quickly, an unreasonable vexation sweeping through him in a gust. “Did ever any one hear the like, that because I am indifferent to your silly berries you should snarl like a cat?”

“A cat!” she cried, furious.

“Just a cat,” he repeated deliberately. “For God’s sake give me peace, and get your hair up before the men come ashore for us. It is time we were home; I am heart-sick of this sailing. And it ill becomes a woman of your years to play-act the child and run barefoot about island sands.”

The berries she still held in her hand she crushed between her palms till the juice of them stained her gown and ran like blood between her fingers. The perfume rose to her nostrils and seemed to fill her head with a pungent vapour.

“Well? Well?” he said with irritation at her staring. She covered her eyes with her hands and burst into tears.

He only whistled. Someway she appeared a sloven in dress, awkward in gesture, and a figure of insincerity. If he had not a sudden new conviction that she was everything she should not be, there was the accent of her voice, the evidence of his eyesight. For when, in wild exasperation at his manner, she took her hands from her face, she showed a visage stained and sour, tempestuous eyes, and lips grown thin and pallid.

“I hate you! I hate you!” she cried, and stamped with her bare feet on the sand. “I cannot for my life understand what I ever saw in you that I should have married you. Any one with her senses might have hesitated to tie herself for life to a man with so much evil in his countenance.”

“Yours would be none the worse for washing,” said Morar remorselessly, with an eye on her berry-stained face.

“There’s a gentleman!” she cried. “Oh, my grief, that I should have spoiled my life!”

“You knew what I was when you took me,” said Morar. “Lord knows, I made no pretence at angelic virtues, and ’twas there, by my faith, I was different from yourself!”

“And there’s the coward and liar too!” cried his wife. “You were far too cunning to show me what you really were, and it must have been a woeful ignorance of the world that made me take you on your own estimate.”

“Well, then, the mistake has been on both sides,” said Morar. “There’s no one could be more astonished than myself that my real wife should be so different from what till this hour I had imagined her. Madam, you need not be so noisy; if you scream a little louder the crew will be let into a pretty secret. It is like enough they know you already, for I have been singularly blind.”

He put up what seemed to her for the first time an unlovely hand to stifle a forced yawn: she saw an appalling cruelty in the mouth that had so often kissed her and called her sweet names; his very attitude expressed contempt for her.

“What have I done?” she asked, distracted.

“It is not what you have done,” he said with a coarse deliberation, “’tis what you are and what you cannot help being. The repentance must lie with me. I would give, gaily, ten years of my life to obliterate the past six months.”

“Faith, ’tis a man of grace and character says so to his newly-married wife.”

At these words Morar started slightly, and looked for a moment confused. “Newly married!” he said; “Lord help us! so we are. Some way, I fancied we had been married for years. Well, we have not taken long to discover each other, and will have the more leisure to repent. I understand you, madam, into the very core; there is not a vein of your body hides a secret from me. I was mistaken; I thought your beauty something more than a pink cheek; I thought you generous till I saw how generous you could be at my expense, and how much the rent-roll of Morar weighed with you in your decision to marry me. I thought you humble and unaffected, and now I see you posing about this business of bare feet on the sand, the morning breeze in your gown, breakfasts of berries and water.”

“Pray go on,” cried the lady. “Pray go on. Every word you say confirms the character I now see in your face.”

“I thought you truthful, so you are—in the letter and the word; but the flattery you have for those you would conciliate, the insincerity of your laugh in the presence of those you would please, the unscrupulousness of your excuses for the omission of duties unpleasant to you—what are these but lies of the worst kind?”

“Oh heavens,” she cried, “I was not always so! If I am so now I must be what you made me. I remember—” she drew her hand across her brow; “I seem to remember some one else I thought was me, that loved you, and could not be too good and pure for you even in her imagination. You seemed a king to that poor foolish girl’s imagination; she loved you so—she loved you so, she was so happy!”

“Just so!” said Morar. “You had, seemingly, well deceived yourself. And now I can tell you that you may cry your eyes out, for I know what a woman gets her tears so readily for. It is that when she is crying and lamenting she may not betray her chagrin and ill-temper in her face. Have done with it, and let us get out of this! I see the men put out the boat; they will be with us in a moment; for Heaven’s sake let us have no more theatricals. The fate of us both is sealed, and we must, I suppose, live the rest of our lives together like the other married fools we know—putting as fair a face as we can on a ghastly business.”

She was standing beside tall blades of shelister—the iris of the isles—and when he spoke like this to her she suddenly plucked a handful and began to tear them wantonly with her fingers.“I assure you that you have seen the last of my tears,” said she. “I would not cry out if you struck me! There is something almost as sweet as love, and that is hate, and I seem to have come from a race that must have either. I have a feeling in me that I could have loved eternally if I had found the proper object, but now I know that I can always be sure you will keep me hating, and I am not sorry. Yes, yes, you have said it, Morar, a ghastly business; but I will not put any fair face on it to deceive the world, I assure you! It could not be deceived: blind would it be, indeed, if it could not see the sneer in your face, and hear the coward in your voice.”

“Silence, you fool; the men are coming!” he said, clutching at her wrist and twisting it cruelly.

She gave a little shriek of pain, and caught at her breast with the other hand that held the broken blades of shelisters.

“Oh, you have struck me!” she cried. “That is the end of my shame, and I shall make you suffer.”

He saw a poignard glint momentarily in the morning sun that was turning Isle Faoineas’ sands to gold, and before he could prevent her she had plunged the weapon in her bosom. She fell with a cry at his feet, her hair in the ashes of the fire they had last night sat by. The blood came bubbling to her mouth and welled out on her bosom where the poignard rose and fell with her moaning.

For a moment, instead of pity and remorse, there was a feeling of release. Behind him sounded the plash of oars; he turned hastily and saw the men had left the sloop and were approaching land. “Oh Dhia!” he said to himself, “here’s a bonny business to explain!” and then ’twas very far from well with Morar, for he heard the woman moan her wish for water, and he knew she shared the agony of that inward fire that scorched his throat as if the berries he had swallowed had been beads of heated metal. At his feet was the glass they had drunk from on the last night of their happiness; he picked it up and ran to the well that tinkled on the hillock, then hurried to her side and raised her up to let her drink.

The draught, it seemed, revived her; she shuddered and sighed, and turned in his arms; then his own torment mastered him, and he drank too.

Through his whole flesh went a pleasant chill; a gladness danced in him, and he saw a thing miraculous in his bride—the flush come back to her cheek, and all her wild sweet beauty, and her smile, as she leaned against his shoulder like one new waked from sleep, so that he looked into her face and saw himself reflected in her eyes. The berry stains were on her lips, the bosom of her gown was reddened with their juices, and in between her breasts lay the blade of the shelister, sparkling with dew, and glinting in the sunshine as it rose and fell in time with her heart’s pulsations.“Oh, love!” she said, and put her arms about his neck, “I dreamt—I dreamt a dreadful dream!”

“And I, sweetheart,” said Morar, looking aghast at the berry stains, and the mark of his fingers on her wrist, and on the iris blade that were evidence it had been no dream. “I dreamt, too, love—my God! such dreaming! I do not wonder now the world holds far aloof from this Island of Illusion. God bless the well, the holy well; but the curse of curses on the berries of Ealan Faoineas!”

Together, hand in hand, they fled to the shore and waded out on the sandy shallow to meet the boat; the sloop shook out her sails like some proud eager bird; from her deck, together waist-encircled, they saw the blue tide rise on the yellow sands, the trees nod, the birds flit among the thickets of the glen, and heard the tinkle of the well in Ealan Faoineas.