Tragic Romances

In this volume all the tales, except the first and last, are re-issued from The Sin-Eater. “Morag of the Glen” is reprinted from the November issue of The Savoy; “The Archer” has not hitherto appeared in print. As the other tales have not been reset, they are, except in the matter of pagination and arrangement, necessarily unaltered.

MORAG OF THE GLEN

MORAG OF THE GLEN

I

It was a black hour for Archibald Campbell of Gorromalt in Strathglas, and for his wife and for Morag their second daughter, when the word came that Muireall had the sorrow of sorrows. What is pain, and is death a thing to fear? But there is a sorrow that no man can have and yet go free for evermore of a shadow upon his brow: and there is a sorrow that no woman can have and keep the moonshine in her eyes. And when a woman has this sorrow, it saves or mars her: though, for sure, none of us may discern just what that saving may be, or from whom or what, or what may be that bitter or sweet ruin. We are shaped as clay in the potter’s hand: ancient wisdom, that we seldom learn till the hand is mercifully still, and the vessel, finished for good or evil, is broken.

It is a true saying that memory is like the sea-weed when the tide is in--but the tide ebbs. Each frond, each thick spray, each fillicaun or pulpy globe, lives lightly in the wave: the green water is full of strange rumour, of sea-magic and sea-music: the hither flow and thither surge give continuity and connection to what is fluid and dissolute. But when the ebb is far gone, and the wrack and the weed lie sickly in the light, there is only one confused intertangled mass. For most of us, memory is this tide-left strand: though for each there are pools, or shallows which even the ebb does not lick up in its thirsty way depthward,--narrow overshadowed channels to which we have the intangible clues. But for me there will never be any ebb-tide of memory, of one black hour, and one black day.

A wild lone place it was where we lived: among the wet hills, in a country capped by slate-black mountains. To the stranger the whole scene must have appeared grimly desolate. We, dwellers there, and those of our clan, and the hill folk about and beyond, knew that there were three fertile straths hidden among the wilderness of rock and bracken: Strathmòr, Strathgorm, and Strathglas. It was in the last we lived. All Strathglas was farmed by Archibald Campbell, and he had Strathgorm to where the Gorromalt Water cuts it off from the head of Glen Annet. The house we lived in was a long two-storeyed whitewashed building with projecting flanks. There was no garden, but only a tangled potato-acre, and a large unkempt space where the kail and the bracken flourished side by side, with the kail perishing day by day under the spreading strangling roots of the usurper. The rain in Strathglas fell when most other spots were fair. It was because of the lie of the land, I have heard. The grey or black cloud would slip over Ben-Bhreac or Melbèinn, and would become blue-black while one was wondering if the wind would lift it on to Maol-Dunn, whose gloomy ridge had two thin lines of pine-trees which, from Strathglas, stood out like bristling eyebrows. But, more likely than not, it would lean slowly earthward, then lurch like a water-logged vessel, and spill, spill, through a rising misty vapour, a dreary downfall. Oh! the rain--the rain--the rain! how weary I grew of it, there; and of the melancholy méh’ing of the sheep, that used to fill the hills with a lamentation, terrible, at times, to endure.