There is an old man on the island named Daibhidh (David) Macarthur.[8] It was Ivor McLean, my boatman friend, who took me to him. He is a fine old man, though "heavy" a little; with years, perhaps, for his head is white as the crest of a wave. He is one of the very few of Iona, perhaps of the two or three at most, who do not speak any English.
[8] As there are several Macarthurs on Iona, I may say that the old man I allude to was not so named. Out of courtesy I disguise his name: though, since the above was written, he is no more.
"No," he told me, "he had never had the sight himself. Ivor was wrong in saying that he had."
This, I imagine, was shyness, or, rather, that innate reticence of the Celt in all profoundly intimate and spiritual matters; for, from what Ivor told me, I am convinced that old Macarthur had more than once proved himself a seer.
We were seated on an old upturned boat on the rocky little promontory, where once were first laid the innumerable dead, brought for burial to the sacred soil of Iona. For a time Macarthur spoke slowly about this and that; then, abruptly and without preamble, he told me this:
The Christmas before last, Mary, his wife, had seen a man who was not on the island. "And that is true, by St. Martin's Cross," he added.
They were, he said, sitting before the fire, when, after a long silence, he looked up to see his wife staring into the shadow in the ingle. He thought she was brooding over the barren womb that had been her life-long sorrow, and now in her old age had become a strange and gnawing grief, and so he turned his gaze upon the red coals again.
But suddenly she exclaimed, "_C'ait am bheil thu dol?_" (Where are you going?)
He looked up, but saw no one in the room beside themselves.
"What has come to you?" he asked. "What do you see?"
"_C'uine tha thu falbh?_" (When are you going?) she muttered, with the same strained voice and frozen eyes. And then, once again, "_C'uine thig thu rithisd?_" (When will you come again?) And with that she bowed her head, and the thin backs of the hands upon her knees were wet with falling tears.
For the fourth of an hour thereafter she would say nothing except moan, "_Tha an amhuinn domhain; tha an amhuinn domhain; fuar, fuar; domhain, domhain!_"[9] (Deep, deep is the river; cold and deep; cold and deep!)