Page images
PDF
EPUB

Muriel half rose. "James!" she cried, and Ella awoke with a start and stood up dazed by the light, and looked at her brother half-bewildered, as one who gropes in memory for mislaid ideas, or strives to piece together oddments of thought. Then, with a rush, memory returned, and all her fears revived. In an instant her arms were round her brother's neck, and with white, frightened face, looking straight into his troubled eyes, she begged for news of Hector MacLean.

Alas! James had no cheer to give her, but only words that wrung from her lips a piercing scream that quickly brought Lady Agnes and Grace and Lindisfarne upon the scene, to hear what he could tell them.

There are moors in Islay stretching mile upon mile between Mulindry and Dunyvaig, broken by peaty rivers and tiny lochs -vast heathery tracts, above which curlew and plover fly screaming; and there are days when a tireless sun beats mercilessly upon these lonely wastes, when not the gentlest breeze bends the rushes in their swamps, and when even the featherlight bog cotton hangs listless on its slender stem. On such days the Islay hills, rising from this wide expanse of moorland, wear a halo of heat haze, and the lark, invisible in the speckless heaven, trills his pure notes, and a gorgeous western blaze fades gradually away, leaving the pale evening sky dappled with sunset tinted cloudlets, serried across the heavens, rank upon rank, like an aerial army. These are days of sharp contrasts, clear defined; when moors are purple brown, when Laggan Strand is vivid yellow, and Loch Indaal a sapphire blue, edged perhaps with pearl white foam.

But there are other days, quiet and dreamy, and tinged with a universal over-spreading greyness that tones the sky, the hills, the moors, the loch, to neutral tints, and blends their colours till they mix in every shade of brown and green and grey; days, perhaps, of silent, persistent rain, days on which the sun forgets to shine till setting time, when he looks between the clouds and glorifies the quiet waters of Loch Indaal with parting beams, the brighter for the gloomy sky and dark Ben Tartaville as background.

But always the moors are lonely, wide, brown solitudes by day, and by night weird, fear-haunted homes of nameless terrors, peopled by what phantoms no man knows.

When James MacDonald had told his tale, there was a stir in the castle stables, with bringing out of horses, hurrying on of saddles, tossing of manes and curvetting, champing of bits and quieting of plunging beasts fresh and eager for a gallop; and

soon there rode out from Dunyvaig a party making for those

moors.

By Lagavulin Bay, where breakers roared white and sullen in the darkness, they rode, past Black Duncan's forge that glowed still though the smith was abed and asleep. Then, turning their backs upon the sea, they galloped up a gently rising track and gained the moors, facing for Mulindry.

They spurred hard across the waste, urged by no fancied fear, but driven to utmost speed by the MacLeans' necessity. Strong generous horses bore them fleetly onward, as though the spirits of the moors were at their heels.

The shadow of death that hung over Sir Lauchlan MacLean and his followers cast upon them a gloom; they rode in silence, animated with but one desire, the saving of the MacLeans, though they were stirred by different motives.

Ella MacDonald rode for love of Hector, whose life was perilled, and Muriel for love of Ella, but Countess ClanConnell rode for fear. Right well she knew what the result would be if Sir Lauchlan should meet his death at the hands of his rival.

A lesser crime would be sufficient to cause a Government, jealous already of Sir Angus, to decree his downfall, and there were carrion crows enough even in Argyll to rend a wounded eagle. So also thought James MacDonald as he rode beside Lady Agnes.

On they galloped through the boisterous night, all their hopes fixed on Lady Agnes's influence with her headstrong son.

The rain had ceased, and a faint moon appearing ever and anon, showed them stretches of wild, desolate waste and glimpses of spectral glimmering water.

In a longer period of brightness there arose, distinct and definite across the moonlit water, the black outlines of the Rhinns of Islay, the land in dispute.

Ella MacDonald looked at the long strip of land with loathing. All Islay would not have weighed with her against her Hector's clan, so strong a thing is love-as strong to sever as it is to bind.

Behind them in Dunyvaig, Grace MacDonald lay as though crushed upon her bed. A sudden awakening of the heart had come to her. Too late she realised what her cousin, Coll, had meant to her. She pressed her hands together in bitter agony. "Coll," she moaned, "Coll, ah, I have killed you."

(To be continued.)

TH

AN OLD GAELIC GIANT TALE

HE native fiction of a country is of the utmost value to anyone who would attain an insight into the imagination of the people, and seek in its light to comprehend the history of their actions. It shows us, too, what type of men counted and what manner of man impressed himself in the memory of the people.

Some illustration of this is afforded by the quaint if somewhat childish story here translated from the Irish. Written some five or six centuries ago in the West of Ireland, it belongs to the most characteristic type of native fabling; it is an imaginative fairy tale, without a moral, but with a local hero, and placed in surroundings known intimately to the listener. to the matter of the tale, stories of giants and dwarfs are infrequent in the classical saga of Ireland, as indeed in all regular standardised literature, and belong, as this one certainly does, rather to the province of folklore: that is, have found their way into the manuscripts almost directly from the fireside by which they were narrated. Perhaps the earliest example in Irish literature, and one which may probably be put down to local legend, is that in a Life of St. Patrick in the Book of Armagh, which, as it resembles our tale, may be quoted here:

"And Saint Patrick came past the plains in the territory of MacEarca in Dichuil and Aurchuil [in Mayo]. In Dichuil Patrick came unto a mighty sepulchre of wondrous magnitude and length, which his disciples had discovered, and were regarding with wonder that it stretched over a hundred and twenty feet. For they said: We do not believe in this thing, that there should be a man of this stature.'

"Patrick answered: If you wish you shall see him,' and striking on the flagstone at the head of the grave with his staff, he made the sign of the cross over the sepulchre, saying: 'Open, O Lord'; and it opened. And a tall man arose in life and spoke: 'Blessed be you, a holy man ; even for one hour you have raised me up from many sorrows.'

"And, lo! he wept bitterly, and spoke: 'I will accompany

you.' They answered: 'We cannot have you go with us; men cannot look upon your countenance for terror; but give faith to God in heaven and receive the Baptism of the Lord, and you will not return to the place where you suffered; and tell us who you are.'

"I am,' he said, 'Mac Maccais, a cow-herd of King Lugir of Herot; the warrior-band of Mac Con murdered me during the reign of King Cairbre, a hundred years ago from shis day.'

"And he was baptised and made confession of God, then became silent again,* and was laid once more in his sepulchre " (Lib. Ardm., p. 27a, b).

This passage is taken from one of our most ancient documents, the Life of St. Patrick by Tirechán, who compiled his rough and unpolished memoirs largely from traditional and legendary accounts of the Saint not long after the year 666; and it shews clearly the antiquity and strength of this popular belief in giants.

There is, I think, no question that the people believed in them. In the Annals we find reports of giant corpses cast up by the sea (e.g., Chronicon Scotorum, anno 900), recorded in all good faith. One can easily account for such things. Anyone who has seen the pitifully human look of a drowned seal will realise what effect it might have on an imaginative and superstitious people. One knows to this day men and women who, living in wild and strange places, see and hear-whether in imagination or simplicity-strange things. An old woman in Donegal I heard telling of a giant woman she saw washing clothes in a lake; or of a man on a shining horse," who rode up to her door, and stopped and vanished. A man told me once how a rich farmer of the place was heard crying for help at a ford one night; how next day he was found stark naked and raving, and his dog lay at the ford with its throat cut. It is unnecessary to lengthen the list: phantasms of the imagination or distortions of fact, these tales are familiar to all who have ever lived among peasants, whether told seriously or ad delectationem stultorum, and with such the fable here translated may be associated.

The original Irish text has been published by Dr. Kuno Meyer. It occurs in a vellum manuscript kept in the Royal Irish Academy, and known as the Liber Flavus Fergusiorum,

* Resticuit MS. an leg. reticuit vel requievit ?

or Yellow Book of the MacFerguses. This book was written in County Roscommon about the year 1435, and contains for the most part sermons and lives of the saints; but here and there the scribe has inserted little tales like this one to diversify the somewhat heavy contents of his book.

One or two errors in this manuscript show clearly that the scribe copied the story from another book. The story, as we have it, is, therefore, older than the Book of the MacFerguses, and may have been first written down in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. It probably originated whilst the people it is concerned with were still remembered locally, for the two chief persons who figured in it are actual and historical. Erard Mac Coisse is the famous poet "priomh-éigeas Eireann," some of whose works are still extant, and who died in the year 990. Congalach, son of Mael Mithidh, King of Ireland, is equally historical; he is mentioned no less than ten times in the Annals of the Four Masters (confirmed by the Annals of Ulster) between the years 936 and 954. The latter year contains the entry of death as follows: "Congalach, son of Maelmithidh, King of Ireland, was killed by the Norsemen of Dublin and the Leinstermen at Tech Giughrann [on the Liffey] in Leinster."

The setting of our story is, as the place-names show, in Westmeath where the Mac Coisse lived; and perhaps the story originated in his own countryside amongst those who remembered him vaguely after both king and poet were long in their graves, to be written down long after in his manuscript by some Westmeath scribe to whom the fable was familiar.† In this way, at least, many stories are current to-day in Munster of Pierce Ferriter, poet, warrior, and cavalier of the seventeenth century, some of which have been recorded at this distance of time by his countryman, that most indefatigable and enterprising native Irish scholar, Father Dinneen.

*A good deal of confusion has been caused as to his date, as the Four Masters give it erroneously at 1024; but the Annals of Ulster and the Chronicon Scotorum correctly at 990. On his date and the literature existing about him, see O'Curry, Manners and Customs, ii. 126 sq.; also Zeitschr. für celt. Phil., 8, p. 474.

†The Liber Flavus was written, as has been said, in Roscommon; of the places mentioned in the tale Loch Lein and Raconell are in Westmeath, whilst Clonmacnois (where, by the way, Mac Coisse is recorded to have died) is on the Shannon between the two counties, Sidh Codhail probably in Kildare, the adjoining county, and perhaps within thirty miles of Clonmacnois. The reference to the Druid's Flagstone shows local knowledge on the part of the author, which, with the other data, makes it probable that this was a local story.

« PreviousContinue »