There is a certain book of mine which no publisher has paid royalty upon, which has never yet been confined in spidery lines upon any paper, a book that is nevertheless the Book of my Youth, of my Love, and of my Heart.
There never was such a book, and in the chill of type certainly there never will be. It has, so far as I know, no title, this unpublished book of mine. For it would need the blood of rubies and the life of diamonds crusted on ivory to set the title of this book.
Mostly I see it in the late night watches, when the twilight verges to the cock-crowing and the universe is silent, stirless, windless, for about the space of one hour. Then the pages of the book are opened a little; and, as one that reads hungrily, hastily, at the bookstall of an impatient vendor a book he cannot buy, so I scan the idylls, the epics, the dramas of the life of man written in words which thrill me as I read. Some are fiercely tender, some yearning and unsatisfying, some bitter in the mouth but afterward sweet in the belly. All are expressed in words so fit and chaste and noble, that each is an immortal poem which would give me deathless fame—could I, alas! but remember.
Then the morning comes, and with the first red I awake to a sense of utter loss and bottomless despair. Once more I have clutched and missed and forgotten. It is gone from me. The imagination of my heart is left unto me desolate. Sometimes indeed when a waking bird—by preference a mavis—sings outside my window, for a little while after I swim upward out of the ocean of sleep, it seems that I might possibly remember one stanza of the deathless words; or even by chance recapture, like the brown speckled thrush, that "first fine careless rapture" of the adorable refrain.
Even when I arise and walk out in the dawn, as is my custom winter and summer, still I have visions of this book of mine, of which I now remember that the mystic name is "The Book Sealed." Sometimes in these dreams of the morning, as I walk abroad, I find my hands upon the clasps. I touch the binding wax of the seals. When the first rosy fingers of the dawn point upward to the zenith with the sunlight behind them, sanguine like a maid's hand held before a lamp, I catch a farewell glimpse of the hidden pages.
Tales, not poems, are written upon them now. I hear the voices of "Them Ones," as Irish folk impressively say of the Little People, telling me tales out of the Book Sealed, tales which in the very hearing make a man blush hotly and thrill with hopes mysterious. Such stories as they are! The romances of high young blood, of maidens' winsome purity and frank disdain, of strong men who take their lives in hand and hurl themselves upon the push of pikes. And though I cannot grasp more than a hint of the plot, yet as my feet swish through the dewy swathes of the hyacinths or crisp along the frost-bitten snow, a wild thought quickens within me into a belief, that one day I shall hear them all, and tell these tales for my very own so that the world must listen.
But as the rosy fingers of the morn melt and the broad day fares forth, the vision fades, and I who saw and heard must go and sit down to my plain saltless tale. Once I wrote a book, every word of it, in the open air. It was full of the sweet things of the country, so at least as they seemed to me. I saw the hens nestle sleepily in the holes of the bank-side where the dry dust is, and so I wrote it down. I heard the rain drum on the broad leaves over my head, and I wrote that down also. Day after day I rose and wrote in the dawn, and sometimes I seemed to recapture a leaf or a passing glance of a chapter-heading out of the Book Sealed. It came back to me how the girls were kissed and love was made in the days when the Book Sealed was the Book Open, and when I cared not a jot for anything that was written therein. So as well as I could I wrote these things down in the red dawn. And so till the book was done.
Then the day comes when the book is printed and bound, and when the critics write of it after their kind, things good and things evil. But I that have gathered the fairy gold dare not for my life look again within, lest it should be even as they say, and I should find but withered leaves therein. For the sake of the vision of the breaking day and the incommunicable hope, I shall look no more upon it. But ever with the eternal human expectation, I rise and wait the morning and the final opening of the "Book Sealed."
I am deeply in the debt of my friend, Mr. Andrew Lang, for the ballad of 'Kenmure' which he has written to grace my bare boards and spice the plain fare here set out in honour of the ancient Free Province.
Lo, in the dance the wine-drenched coronal
From shoulder white and golden hair doth fall!
A-nigh his breast each youth doth hold an head,
Twin flushing cheeks and locks unfilleted;
Swifter and swifter doth the revel move
Athwart the dim recesses of the grove …
Where Aphrodite reigneth in her prime,
And laughter ringeth all the summer time.
There hemlock branches make a languorous gloom,
And heavy-headed poppies drip perfume
In secret arbours set in garden close;
And all the air, one glorious breath of rose,
Shakes not a dainty petal from the trees.
Nor stirs a ripple on the Cyprian seas.
"The Choice of Herakles."
This window looketh towards the west,
And o'er the meadows grey
Glimmer the snows that coldly crest
The hills of Galloway.
The winter broods on all between—
In every furrow lies;
Nor is there aught of summer green,
Nor blue of summer skies.
Athwart the dark grey rain-clouds flash
The seabird's sweeping wings,
And through the stark and ghostly ash
The wind of winter sings.
The purple woods are dim with rain,
The cornfields dank and bare;
And eyes that look for golden grain
Find only stubble there.
And while I write, behold the night
Comes slowly blotting all,
And o'er grey waste and meadow bright
The gloaming shadows fall.
"From Two Windows."
The wide frith lay under the manse windows of the parish of Dour. The village of Dour straggled, a score of white-washed cottages, along four hundred yards of rocky shore. There was a little port, to attempt which in a south-west wind was to risk an abrupt change of condition. This was what made half of the men in the parish of Dour God-fearing men. The other half feared the minister.
Abraham Ligartwood was the minister. He also feared God exceedingly, but he made up for it by not regarding man in the slightest. The manse of Dour was conspicuously set like a watch-tower on a hill—or like a baron's castle above the huts of his retainers. The fishermen out on the water made it their lighthouse. The lamp burned in the minister's study half the night, and was alight long ere the winter sun had reached the horizon.
Abraham Ligartwood would have been a better man had he been less painfully good. When he came to the parish of Dour he found that he had to succeed a man who had allowed his people to run wild. Dour was a garden filled with the degenerate fruit of a strange vine.
The minister said so in the pulpit. Dour smiled complacently, and considered that its hoary wickednesses would beat the minister in the long-run. But Dour did not at that time know the minister. It was the day of the free-traders. The traffic with the Isle of Man, whence the hardy fishermen ran their cargoes of Holland gin and ankers of French brandy, put good gear on the back of many a burgher's wife, and porridge into the belly of many a fisherman's bairn.
The new minister found all this out when he came. He did not greatly object. It was, he said, no part of his business to collect King George's dues. But he did object when the running of a vessel's cargo became the signal for half his parishioners settling themselves to a fortnight of black, solemn, evil-hearted drinking. He said that he would break up these colloguings. He would not have half the wives in the parish coming to his kirk with black eyes upon the Lord's Sabbath day.
The parish of Dour laughed. But the parish of Dour was to get news of the minister, for Abraham Ligartwood was not a man to trifle with.
One night there was a fine cargo cleanly run at Port Saint Johnston, the village next to Dour. It was got as safely off. The "lingtowmen" went out, and there was the jangling of hooked chains along all the shores; then the troll of the smugglers' song as the cavalcade struck inwards through the low shore-hills for the main free-trade route to Edinburgh and Glasgow. The king's preventive men had notice, and came down as usual three hours late. Then they seized ten casks of the best Bordeaux, which had been left for the purpose on the sand. They were able and intelligent officers—in especial the latter. And they had an acute perception of the fact that if their bread was to be buttered on both sides, it were indeed well not to let it fall.
This cargo-running and seizures were all according to rule, and the minister of Dour had nothing to say. But at night seventeen of his kirk members in good standing and fourteen adherents met at the Back Spital of Port Dour to drink prosperity to the cargo which had been safely run. There was an elder in the chair, and six unbroached casks on a board in the corner.
There was among those who assembled some word of scoffing merriment at the expense of the minister. Abraham Ligartwood had preached a sermon on the Sabbath before, which each man, as the custom was, took home and applied to his neighbour.
"Ay man, Mains, did ye hear what the minister said aboot ye? O man, he was sair on ye!"
"Hoot na, Portmark, it was yersel' he was hittin' at, and the black e'e ye gied Kirsty six weeks syne."
But when the first keg was on the table, and the men, each with his pint-stoup before him, had seated themselves round, there came a knocking at the door—loud, insistent, imperious. Each man ran his hand down his side to the loaded whip or jockteleg (the smuggler's sheath-knife) which he carried with him.
But no man was in haste to open the door. The red coats of King George's troopers might be on the other side. For no mere gauger or preventive man would have the assurance to come chapping on Portmark's door in that fashion.
"Open the door in the name of Most High God!" cried a loud, solemn voice they all knew. The seventeen men and an elder quaked through all their inches; but none moved. Writs from the authority mentioned did not run in the parish of Dour.
The fourteen adherents fled underneath the table like chickens in a storm.
"Then will I open it in my own name!" Whereon followed a crash, and the two halves of the kitchen door sprang asunder with great and sudden noise. Abraham Ligartwood came in.
The men sat awed, each man wishful to creep behind his neighbour.
The minister's breadth of shoulder filled up the doorway completely, so that there was not room for a child to pass. He carried a mighty staff in his hand, and his dark hair shone through the powder which was upon it. His glance swept the gathering. His eye glowed with a sparkle of such fiery wrath that not a man of all the seventeen and an elder, was unafraid. Yet not of his violence, but rather of the lightnings of his words. And above all, of his power to loose and to bind. It is a mistaken belief that priestdom died when they spelled it Presbytery.
The comprehensive nature of the anathema that followed—spoken from the advantage of the doorway, with personal applications to the seventeen individuals and the elder—cannot now be recalled; but scraps of that address are circulated to this day, mostly spoken under the breath of the narrator.
"And you, Portmark," the minister is reported to have said, "with your face like the moon in harvest and your girth like a tun of Rhenish, gin ye turn not from your evil ways, within four year ye shall sup with the devil whom ye serve. Have ye never a word to say, ye scorners of the halesome word, ye blaspheming despisers of doctrine? Your children shall yet stand and rebuke you in the gate. Heard ye not my word on the Sabbath in the kirk? Dumb dogs are ye every one! Have ye not a word to say? There was a brave gabble of tongues enough when I came in. Are ye silent before a man? How, then, shall ye stand in That Day?"
The minister paused for a reply. But no answer came.
"And you, Alexander Kippen, puir windlestrae, the Lord shall thresh ye like ill-grown corn in the day of His wrath. Ye are hardly worth the word of rebuke; but for mine office I wad let ye slip quick to hell! The devil takes no care of you, for he is sure of ye!"
The minister advanced, and with the iron-pointed shod of his staff drove in the bung of the first keg. Then there arose a groan from the seventeen men who sat about. Some of them stood up on their feet. But the minister turned on them with such fearsome words, laying the ban of anathema on them, that their hearts became as water and they sat down. The good spirit gurgled and ran, and deep within them the seventeen men groaned for the pity of it.
Thus the minister broke up the black drinkings. And the opinion of the parish was with him in all, except as to the spilling of the liquor. Rebuke and threatening were within his right, but to pour out the spirit was a waste even in a minister.
"It is the destruction of God's good creature!" said the parish of Dour.
But the minister held on his way. The communion followed after, and Abraham Ligartwood had, as was usual, three days of humiliation and prayer beforehand. Then he set himself to "fence the tables." He stated clearly who had a right to come forward to the table of the Lord, and who were to be debarred. He explained personally and exactly why it was that each defaulter had no right there. As he went on, the congregation, one after another, rose astonished and terrified and went out, till Abraham Ligartwood was left alone with the elements of communion. Every elder and member had left the building, so effective had been the minister's rebuke.
At this the parish of Dour seethed with rebellion. Secret cabals in corners arose, to be scattered like smoke-drift by the whisper that the minister was coming. Deputations were chosen, and started for the manse full of courage and hardihood. Portmark, as the man who smarted sorest, generally headed them; and by the aid of square wide-mouthed bottles of Hollands, it was possible to get the members as far as the foot of the manse loaning. But beyond that they would not follow Portmark's leading, nor indeed that of any man. The footfall of the minister of Dour as he paced alone in his study chilled them to the bone.
They told one another on the way home how Ganger Patie, of the black blood of the gypsy Marshalls, finding his occupation gone, cursed the minister on Glen Morrison brae; but broke neck-bone by the sudden fright of his horse and his own drunkenness at the foot of the same brae on his home-coming. They said that the minister had prophesied that in the spot where Ganger Patie had cursed the messenger of God, even there God would enter into judgment with him. And they told how the fair whitethorn hedge was blasted for ten yards about the spot where the Death Angel had waited for the blasphemer. There were four men who were willing to give warrandice that their horses had turned with them and refused to pass the place.
So the parish was exceedingly careful of its words to the minister. It left him severely alone. He even made his own porridge in the wide-sounding kitchen of the gabled manse, on the hill above the harbour. He rang with his own hands the kirk-bell on the Sabbath morn. But none came near the preachings. There was no child baptized in the parish of Dour; and no wholesome diets of catechising, where old and young might learn the Way more perfectly.
Mr. Ligartwood's brethren spoke to him and pled with him to use milder courses; but all in vain. In those days the Pope was not so autocratic in Rome as a minister in his own parish.
"They left me of their own accord, and of their own accord shall they return," said Abraham Ligartwood.
But in the fall of the year the White Death came to Dour. They say that it came from the blasted town of Kirk Oswald, where the plague had been all the summer. The men of the landward parishes set a watch on all that came out of the accursed streets. But in the night-time men with laden horses ran the blockade, for the prices to be obtained within were like those in a besieged city.
Some said that it was the farmer of Portmark who had done this thing once too often. At least it is sure that it was to his house that the Death first came in the parish of Dour. At the sound of the shrill crying, of which they every one knew the meaning, men dropped their tools in the field and fled to the hills. It was like the Day of Judgment. The household servants disappeared. Hired men and field-workers dispersed like the wave from a stone in a pool, carrying infection with them. Men fell over at their own doors with the rattle in their throats, and there lay, none daring to touch them. In Kirk Oswald town the grass grew in the vennels and along the High Street. In Dour the horses starved in the stables, the cattle in the byres.
Then came Abraham Ligartwood out of the manse of Dour. He went down to the farm towns and into the village huts and lifted the dead. He harnessed the horse in the cart, and swathed the body in sheets. He dug the graves, and laid the corpse in the kindly soil. He nursed the sick. He organised help everywhere. He went from house to stricken house with the high assured words of a messenger fresh from God.
He let out the horses to the pasture. He milked the kine, that bellowed after him with the plague of their milk. He had thought and hands for all. His courage shamed the cowards. He quickened the laggards. He stilled the agony of fear that killed three for every one who died of the White Death.
For the first time since the minister came to Dour, the kirk-bell did not ring on Sabbath, for the minister was at the other end of the parish setting a house in order whence three children had been carried. In the kirkyard there was the dull rattle of sods. The burying-party consisted of the roughest rogues in the parish, whom the minister had fetched from their hiding-holes in the hills.
Up the long roads that led to the kirk on its windy height the scanty funerals wended their way. For three weeks they say that in the kirkyard, from dawn to dusk, there was always a grave uncovered or a funeral in sight. There was no burial service in the kirkyard save the rattle of the clods; for now the minister had set the carpenters to work and coffins were being made. But the minister had prayer in all the houses ere the dead was lifted.
Then he went off to lay hot stones to the feet of another, and to get a nurse for yet another. For twenty days he never slept and seldom ate, till the plague was stayed.
The last case was on the 27th of September. Then Abraham Ligartwood himself was stricken in one of the village hovels, and fell forward across a sick man's bed. They carried him to the manse of Dour, and wept as they went. The next day all the men that were alive in the parish of Dour stood about the minister's grave in the kirkyard on the hill. There was none there that could pray. But as they were about to separate, some one, it was never known who, raised the tune of the first Psalm. And the wind wafted to the weeping wives in the cottages of the stricken parish of Dour the sound of the hoarse and broken singing of men. In three weeks the minister had brought the evil parish of Dour into the presence of God.
And these were the words of their singing, while the gravediggers stood with the red earth ready on their spades, but before a clod fell on the minister's grave:—
"That man hath perfect blessedness
Who walketh not astray
In counsel of ungodly men,
Nor stands in sinners' way,
Nor sitteth in the scorner's chair;
But placeth his delight
Upon God's law, and meditates
On his law day and night."
The new minister who succeeded had an easy time and a willing people. But he can never be to them what Abraham Ligartwood was. They graved on his tomb, and that with good cause, the words, "Here lyes a Man who never feared the face of Man."
The lovers are whispering under thy shade,
Grey Tower of Dalmeny!
I leave them and wander alone in the glade
Beneath thee, Dalmeny.
Their thoughts are of all the bright years coming on,
But mine are of days and of dreams that are gone;
They see the fair flowers Spring has thrown on the grass,
And the clouds in the blue light their eyes as they pass;
But my feet are deep dawn in a drift of dead leaves,
And I hear what they hear not—a lone bird that grieves.
What matter? the end is not far for us all,
And spring, through the summer, to winter must fall,
And the lovers' light hearts, e'en as mine, will be laid,
At last, and for ever, low under thy shade,
Grey Tower of Dalmeny.
With Rosemary for remembrance, And Rue, sweet Rue, for you.
It was at the waterfoot of the Ken, and the time of the year was June.
"Boat ahoy!"
The loud, bold cry carried far through the still morning air. The rain had washed down all that was in the sky during the night, so that the hail echoed through a world blue and empty.
Gregory Jeffray, a noble figure of a youth, stood leaning on the arch of his mare's neck, quieting the nervous tremors of Eulalie, that very dainty lady. His tall, alert figure, tight-reined and manly, was brought out by his riding-dress. His pose against the neck of the beautiful beast, from which a moment before he had swung himself, was that of Hadrian's young Antinous.
"Boat ahoy!"
Gregory Jeffray, growing a little impatient, made a trumpet of his hands, and sent the powerful voice, with which one day he meant to thrill listening senates, sounding athwart the dancing ripples of the loch.
On the farther shore was a flat white ferry-boat, looking, as it lay motionless in the river, like a white table chained in the water with its legs in the air. The chain along which it moved plunged into the shallows beside him, and he could see it descending till he lost it in the dusky pool across which the ferry plied. To the north, Loch Ken ran in glistening levels and island-studded reaches to the base of Cairnsmuir.
"Boat ahoy!"
A figure, like a white mark of exclamation moving over green paper, came out of the little low whitewashed cottage opposite, and stood a moment looking across the ferry, with one hand resting on its side and the other held level with the eyes. Then the observer disappeared behind a hedge, to be seen immediately coming down the narrow, deep-rutted lane towards the ferry-boat. When the figure came again in sight of Gregory Jeffray, he had no difficulty in distinguishing a slim girl, clad in white, who came sedately towards him.
When she arrived at the white boat which floated so stilly on the morning glitter of the water, only just stirred by a breeze from the south, she stepped at once on board. Gregory could see her as she took from the corner of the flat, where it stood erect along with other boating gear, something which looked like a short iron hoe. With this she walked to the end of the boat nearest him. She laid the hoe end of the instrument against a chain that ran breast-high along one side of the boat and at the stern plunged diagonally into the water. His mare lifted her feet impatiently, as though the shoreward end of the chain had brought a thrill across the loch from the moving ferry-boat. Turning her back to him, the girl bent her slim young body without an effort; and, as though by the gentlest magic, the ferry-boat drew nearer to him. It did not seem to move; yet gradually the space of blue water between it and the shore on which the whitewashed cottage stood spread and widened. He could hear the gentle clatter of the wavelets against the lip of the landing-drop as the boat came nearer. His mare tossed her head and snuffed at this strange four-footed thing that glided towards them.
Gregory, who loved all women, watched with natural interest the sway and poise of the girlish figure. He heard the click and rattle of the chain as she deftly disengaged her gripper-iron at the farther end, and, turning, walked the deck's length towards him.
She seemed but a young thing to move so large a boat. He forgot to be angry at being kept so long waiting, for of all women, he told himself, he most admired tall girls in simple dresses. His exceptional interest arose from the fact that he had never before seen one manage a ferry-boat.
As he stood on the shore, and the great flat boat moved towards him, he saw that the end of it nearest him was pulled up a couple of feet clear of the water. Still the boat moved noiselessly forward, till he heard it first grate and then ground gently, as the graceful pilot bore her weight upon the iron bar to stay its progress. Gregory specially admired the flex of her arms bent outwardly as she did so. Then she went to the end of the boat, and let down the tilted gangway upon the pebbles at his feet.
Gregory Jeffray instinctively took off his hat as he said to this girl,
"Good-morning! Can I get to the village of Dullarg by this ferry?"
"This is the way to the Dullarg," said the girl, simply and naturally, leaning as she spoke upon her dripping gripper-iron.
Her eyes did not refuse to take in the goodliness of the youth while his attention was for the moment given to his mare.
"Gently, gently, lass!" he said, patting the neck which arched impatiently as she felt the boards hollow beneath her feet. Yet she came obediently enough on deck, arching her fore-feet high and throwing them out in an uncertain and tentative manner.
Then the girl, with a quiet and matter-of-fact acceptance of her duties, placed her iron once more upon the chain, and bent herself to the task with well-accustomed effort of her slender body.
The heart of the young man was stirred within him. True, he might have beheld fifty field-wenches breaking their backs among the harvest sheaves without a pang. This, however, was very different.
"Let me help you," he said.
"It is better that you stand by your horse," she said.
Gregory Jeffray looked disappointed.
"Is it not too hard work for you?" he queried, humbly and with abased eyes.
"No," said the girl. "Ye see, sir, I live with my mother's two sisters at the boathouse. They are very kind to me. They brought me up, though I had neither father nor mother. And what signifies bringing the boat across the Water a time or two?"
Her ready and easy movements told the tale for her. She needed no pity. She asked for none, for which Gregory was rather sorry. He liked to pity people, and then to right their grievances, if it were not very difficult. Of what use otherwise was it to be, what he was called in Galloway, the "Boy Sheriff"? Besides, he was taking a morning ride from the Great House of the Barr, and upon his return to breakfast he desired to have a tale to tell which would rivet attention upon himself.
"And do you do nothing all day, but only take the boat to and fro across the loch?" he asked.
He saw the way clear now, he thought, to matter for an interesting episode—the basis of which should be the delight of a beautiful girl in spending her life in the carrying of desirable young men, riding upon horses, over the shining morning waters of the Ken. They should all look with eyes of wonder upon her; but she, the cold Dian of the lochside, would never return look for look to any of them, save perhaps to Gregory Jeffray. Gregory went about the world finding pictures and making romances for himself. He meant to be a statesman; and, with this purpose in view, it was wholly necessary for him to study the people, and especially, he might have added, the young women of the people. Hitherto he had done this chiefly in his imagination, but here certainly was material attractive to his hand.
"Do you work at nothing else?" he repeated, for the girl was uncomplimentarily intent upon her gripper-iron. How deftly she lifted it just at the right moment, when it was in danger of being caught upon the revolving wheel! How exactly she exerted just the right amount of strength to keep the chain running sweetly upon its cogs! How daintily she stepped back, avoiding the dripping of the water from the linked iron which rose from the bed of the loch, passed under her hand, and dipped diagonally down again into the deeps! Gregory had never seen anything like it, so he told himself.
It was not until he had put his question the third time that the girl answered, "Whiles I take the boat over to the waterfoot when there's a cry across the Black Water."
The young man was mystified.
"'A cry across the Black Water!' What may that be?" he said.
The girl looked at him directly almost for the first time. Was he making fun of her? She wondered. His face seemed earnest enough, and handsome. It was not possible, she concluded.
"Ye'll be a stranger in these parts?" she answered interrogatively, because she was a Scottish girl, and one question for another is good national barter and exchange.
Gregory Jeffray was about to declare his names, titles, and expectations; but he looked at the girl again, and saw something that withheld him.
"Yes," he said, "I am staying for a week or two over at Barr."
The boat grounded on the pebbles, and the girl went to let down the hinged end. It had seemed a very brief passage to Gregory Jeffray. He stood still by his mare, as though he had much more to say.
The girl placed her cleek in the corner, and moved to leave the boat. It piqued the young man to find her so unresponsive. "Tell me what you mean by 'a cry across the Black Water,'" he said.
The girl pointed to the strip of sullen blackness that lay under the willows upon the southern shore.
"That is the Black Water of Dee," she said simply, "and the green point among the trees is the Rhonefoot. Whiles there's a cry from there. Then I go over in the boat, and set them across."
"Not in this boat?" he said, looking at the upturned deal table swinging upon its iron chain.
She smiled at his ignorance.
"That is the boat that goes across the Black Water of Dee," she said, pointing to a small boat which lay under the bank on the left.
"And do you never go anywhere else?" he asked, wondering how she came by her beauty and her manners.
"Only to the kirk on the Sabbaths," she said, "when I can get some one to watch the boat for me."
"I will watch the boat for you!" he said impulsively.
The girl looked distressed. This gay gentleman was making fun of her, assuredly. She did not answer. Would he never go away?
"That is your way," she said, pointing along the track in front. Indeed, there was but one way, and the information was superfluous.
The end of the white, rose-smothered boathouse was towards them. A tall, bowed woman's figure passed quickly round the gable.
"Is that your aunt?" he asked.
"That is my aunt Annie," said the girl; "my aunt Barbara is confined to her bed."
"And what is your name, if I may ask?"
The girl glanced at him. He was certainly not making fun of her now.
"My name is Grace Allen," she said.
They paced together up the path. The bridle rein slipped from his arm, but his hand instinctively caught it, and Eulalie cropped crisply at the grasses on the bank, unregarded of her master.
They did not shake hands when they parted, but their eyes followed each other a long way.
"Where is the money?" said Aunt Barbara from her bed as Grace Allen came in at the open door.
"Dear me!" said the girl, frightened: "I have forgotten to ask him for it!"
"Did I ever see sic a lassie! Rin after him an' get it; haste ye fast."
But Gregory was far out of reach by the time Grace got to the door. The sound of hoofs came from high up the wooded heights.
Gregory Jeffray reached the Barr in time for late breakfast. There was a large house company. The men were prowling discontentedly about, looking under covers or cutting slices from dishes on the sideboard; but the ladies were brightly curious, and eagerly welcomed Gregory. He at least did not rise with a headache and a bad temper every morning. They desired an account of his morning's ride. But on the way home he had changed his mind about telling of his adventure. He said that he had had a pleasant ride. It had been a beautiful morning.
"But have you nothing whatever to tell us?" they asked; for, indeed, they had a right to expect something.
Gregory said nothing. This was not usual, for at other times when he had nothing to tell, it did not cost him much to invent something interesting.
"You are very dull this morning, Sheriff," said the youngest daughter of the house, who, being the baby and pretty, had grown pettishly privileged in speech.
But deep within him Gregory was saying, "What a blessing that I forgot to pay the ferry!"
When he got outside he said to his host, "Is there such a place hereabouts as the Rhonefoot?"
"Why, yes, there is," said Laird Cunningham of Barr. "But why do you ask? I thought a Sheriff would know everything without asking—even an ornamental one on his way to the Premiership."
"Oh, I heard the name," said Gregory. "It struck me as a curious one."
So that evening there came over the river from the Waterfoot of the Rhone the sound of a voice calling. Grace Allen sat thoughtfully looking out of the rose-hung window of the boathouse. Her face was an oval of perfect curve, crowned with a mass of light brown hair, in which were red lights when the sun shone directly upon it. Her skin was clear, pale as ivory, and even exertion hardly brought the latent under-flush of red to the surface.
"There's somebody at the waterfit. Gang, lassie, an' dinna be lettin' them aff withoot their siller this time!" said her aunt Barbara from her bed. Annie Allen was accustomed to say nothing, and she did it now.
The boat to the Rhonefoot was seldom needed, and the oars were not kept in it. They leaned against the end of the cottage, and Grace Allen took them on her shoulder as she went down. She carried them as easily as another girl might carry a parasol.
Again there came the cry from the Rhonefoot, echoing joyously across the river.
Standing well back in the boat, so as to throw up the bow, she pushed off. The water was deep where the boat lay, and it had been drawn half up on the bank. Where Grace dipped her oars into the silent water, the pool was so black that the blade of the oar was lost in the gloom before it got half-way down. Above there was a light wind moaning and rustling in the trees, but it did not stir even a ripple on the dark surface of the pool where the Black Water of Dee meets the brighter Ken.
Grace bent to her oars with a springing verve and force which made the tubby little boat draw towards the shore, the whispering lapse of water gliding under its sides all the while. Three lines of wake were marked behind—a vague white turbulence in the middle and two lines of bubbles on either side where the oars had dipped, which flashed a moment and then winked themselves out.
When she reached the Waterfoot, and the boat touched the shore, Grace Allen looked up to see Gregory Jeffray standing alone on the little copse-enclosed triangle of grass. He smiled pleasantly. She had not time to be surprised.
"What did you think of me this morning, running away without paying my fare?" he asked.
It seemed very natural now that he should come. She was glad that he had not brought his horse.
"I thought you would come by again," said Grace Allen, standing up, with one oar over the side ready to pull in or push off.
Gregory extended his hand as though to ask for hers to steady him as he came into the boat. Grace was surprised. No one ever did that at the Rhonefoot, but she thought it might be that he was a stranger and did not understand about boats. She held out her hand. Gregory leapt in beside her in a moment, but did not at once release the hand. She tried to pull it away.
"It is too little a hand to do so much hard work," he said.
Instantly Grace became conscious that it was rough and hard with rowing.
She had not thought of this before. He stooped and kissed it.
"Now," he said, "let me row across for you, and sit in front of me where I can see you. You made me forget all about everything else this morning, and now I must make up for it."
It was a long way across, and evidently Gregory Jeffray was not a good oarsman, for it was dark when Grace Allen went indoors to her aunts. Her heart was bounding within her. Her bosom rose and fell as she breathed quickly and silently through her parted red lips. There was a new thing in her eye.
Every evening thereafter, through all that glorious height of midsummer, there came a crying at the Waterfoot; and every evening Grace Allen went over to the edge of the Rhone wood to answer it. There the boat lay moored to a stone upon the turf, while Gregory and she walked upon the flowery forest carpet, and the dry leaves watched and clashed and muttered above them as the gloaming fell. These were days of rapture, each a doorway into yet fuller and more perfect joy.
Over at the Waterfoot the copses grew close. The green turf was velvet underfoot. The blackbirds fluted in the hazels there. None of them listened to the voice of Gregory Jeffray, or cared for what he said to Grace Allen when she went nightly to meet him over the Black Water.
She rowed back alone, the simple soul that was in her forwandered and mazed with excess of joy. As she set the boat to the shore and came up the bank bearing the oars which were her wings into the world of love under the green alders, the light in the west, lingering clear and pure and cold, shone upon her and added radiances to her eyes.
But Aunt Annie watched her with silent pain. Barbara from her bed spoke sharp and cruel words which Grace Allen listened to not at all.
For as soon as the morning shone bright over the hills and ran on tip-toe up the sparkling ripples of the loch, she looked across the Black Water to the hidden ways where in the evening her love should meet her.
As she went her daily rounds, and the gripper-iron slipped on the wet chain or grew hot in the sun, as she heard the clack of the wheel and the soft slow grind of the boat's broad lip on the pebbles, Grace Allen said over and over to herself, "It is so long, only so long, till he will come."
So all the days she waited in a sweet content. Barbara reproached her; Aunt Annie perilled her soul by lying to shield her; but Grace herself was shut out from shame or fear, from things past or things to come, by faith and joy that at last she had found one whom her soul loved.
And overhead the dry poplar leaves clashed and rustled, telling out to one another that love was a vain thing, and the thrush cried thrice, "Beware." But Grace Allen would not have believed had one risen to her from the dead.
So the great wasteful summer days went by, the glory of the passionate nights of July, the crisper blonde luxuriance of August. Every night there was the calling from the green plot across the Black Water. Every night Aunt Annie wandered, a withered grey ghost, along the hither side of the inky pool, looking for what she could not see and listening for that which she could not hear. Then she would go in to lie gratuitously to Barbara, who told her to her face that she did not believe her.
But in the first chill of mid-September, swift as the dividing of the blue-black thunder-cloud by the winking flame, fell the sword of God, smiting and shattering. It seemed hard that it should fall on the weaker and the more innocent. But then God has plenty of time.
One chilly gloaming there was no calling at the Rhonefoot. Nevertheless Grace rowed over and waited, imagining that all evil had befallen her lover. Within, her aunt Barbara fretted and murmured at her absence, driving her silent sister into involved refuges of lies to shield young Grace Allen, whom her soul loved.
The next day went by as the night had passed, with an awful constriction about her heart, a numbness over all her body; yet Grace did her work as one who dares not stop.
Two serving-men crossed in the ferry-boat, unconcernedly talking over the country news as men do when they meet.
"Did ye hear aboot young Jeffray?" asked the herd from the Mains.
"Whatna Jeffray?" asked, without much show of interest, the ploughman from Drumglass.
"Wi' man, the young lad that the daft folk in Enbra sent here for
Sheriff."
"I didna ken he was hereawa'," said the Mains, with a purely perfunctory surprise.
"Ou ay, he has been a feck ower by at the Barr. They say he's gaun to get marriet to the youngest dochter. She's hae a gye fat stockin'-fit, I'se warrant."
"Ye may say sae, or a lawyer wadna come speerin' her," returned him from
Drumglass as the boat reached the farther side.
"Guid-e'en to ye, Grace," said they both as they put their pennies down on the little tin plate in the corner.
"She's an awesome still lassie, that," said the Mains, as he took the road down to Parton Raw, where he had trysted with a maid of another sort. "Did ye notice she never said a word to us, neyther 'Thank ye,' nor yet 'Guid-day'? Her een were fair stelled in her head."
"Na, I didna observe," said Drumglass cotman indifferently.
"Some fowk are like swine. They notice nocht that's no pitten intil the trough afore them!" said the Mains indignantly.
So they parted, each to his own errand.
Day swayed and swirled into a strange night of shooting stars and intensest darkness. The soul of Grace Allen wandered in blackest night. Sometimes the earth appeared ready to open and swallow her up. Sometimes she seemed to be wandering by the side of the great pool of the Black Water with her hands full of flowers. There were roses blush-red, like what he had said her cheeks were sometimes. There were velvety pansies, and flowers of strange intoxicating perfume, the like of which she had never seen. But at every few yards she felt that she must fling them all into the black water and fare forth into the darkness to gather more.
Then in her bed she would start up, hearing the hail of a dear voice calling to her from the Rhonefoot. Once she put on her clothes in haste and would have gone forth; but her aunt Annie, waking and startled, a tall, gaunt apparition, came to her.
"Grace Allen," she said, "where are you gangin' at this time o' the nicht?"
"There's somebody at the boat," she said, "waiting. Let me gang, Aunt Annie: they want me; I hear them cry. O Annie, I hear them crying as a bairn cries!"
"Lie doon on yer bed like a clever lass," said her aunt gently. "There's naebody there."
"Or gin there be," said Aunt Barbara from her bed, "e'en let them cry.
Is this a time for decent fowk to be gaun play-actin' aboot?"
So the daylight came, and the evening and the morning were the second day. And Grace Allen went about her work with clack of gripper-iron and dip of oar.
Late on in the gloaming of the third day following, Aunt Annie went down to the broad flat boat that lay so still at the water's edge. Something black was knocking dully against it.
Grace had been gone four hours, and it was weary work watching along the shore or going within out of the chill wind to endure Barbara's bitter tongue.
The black thing that knocked was the small boat, broken loose from her moorings and floating helplessly. Annie Allen took a boathook and pulled it to the shore. Except that the boat was half full of flowers, there was nothing and no one inside.
But the world span round and the stars went out when the finder saw the flowers.
When Aunt Annie Allen came to herself, she found the water was rising rapidly. It was up to her ankles. She went indoors and asked for Grace.
"Save us, Ann!" said Barbara; "I thocht she was wi' you. Where hae ye been till this time o' nicht? An' your feet's dreepin' wat. Haud aff the clean floor!"
"But Gracie! Oor lassie Grade! What's come o' Gracie?" wailed the elder woman.
At that instant there came so thrilling a cry from over the dark waters out of the night that the women turned to one another and instinctively caught at each other's hands.
"Leave me, I maun gang," said Aunt Annie. "That's surely Grace."
Her sister gripped her tight.
"Let me gang—let me gang. She's my ain lassie, no yours!" Annie said fiercely, endeavouring to thrust off Barbara's hands as they clutched her like birds' talons from the bed.
"Help me to get up," said Barbara; "I canna be left here. I'll come wi' ye."
So she that had been sick for twelve years arose, like a ghost from the tomb, and with her sister went out to seek for the girl they had lost. They found their way to the boat, reeling together like drunken men. Annie almost lifted her sister in, and then fell herself among the drenched and waterlogged flowers.
With the instinct of old habitude they fell to the oars, Barbara rowing the better and the stronger. They felt the oily swirl of the Dee rising beneath them, and knew that there had been a mighty rain upon the hills.
"The Lord save us!" cried Barbara suddenly. "Look!"
She pointed up the long pool of the Black Water. What she saw no man knows, for Aunt Annie had fainted, and Barbara was never herself after that hour.
Aunt Annie lay like a log across her thwart. But, with the strength of another world, Barbara unshipped the oar of her sister and slipped it upon the thole-pin opposite to her own. Then she turned the head of the boat up the pool of the Black Watery Something white floated dancingly alongside, upborne for a moment on the boiling swirls of the rising water. Barbara dropped her oars, and snatched at it. She held on to some light wet fabric by one hand; with the other she shook her sister.
"Here's oor wee Gracie," she said: "Ann, help me hame wi' her!"
So they brought her home, and laid her all in dripping white upon her white bed. Barbara sat at the bed-head and crooned, having lost her wits. Aunt Annie moved all in a piece, as though she were about to fall headlong.
"White floo'ers for the angels, where Gracie's ga'en to! Annie, woman, dinna ye see them by her body—four great angels, at ilka corner yin?"
Barbara's voice rose and fell, wayward and querulous. There was no other sound in the house, only the water sobbing against the edge of the ferry-boat.
"And the first is like a lion," she went on, in a more even recitative, "and the second is like an ox, and the third has a face like a man, and the fourth is like a flying eagle. An' they're sittin' on ilka bedpost; and they hae sax wings, that meet owre my Gracie, an' they cry withoot ceasing, 'Holy! holy! holy! Woe unto him that causeth one of these little ones to perish! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were cast into the deeps o' the Black Water!'"
But the neighbours paid no attention to her—for, of course, she was mad.
Then the wise folk came and explained how it had all happened. Here she had been gathering flowers; here she had slipped; and here, again, she had fallen. Nothing could be clearer. There were the flowers. There was the dangerous pool on the Black Water. And there was the body of Grace Allen, a young thing dead in the flower of her days.
"I see them! I see them!" cried Barbara, fixing her eyes on the bed, her voice like a shriek; "they are full of eyes, behind and before, and they see into the heart of man. Their faces are full of anger, and their mouths are open to devour—"
"Wheesh, wheesh, woman! Here's the young Sheriff come doon frae the Barr wi' the Fiscal to tak' evidence."
And Barbara Allen was silent as Gregory Jeffray came in.
To do him justice, when he wrote her the letter that killed—concerning the necessities of his position and career—he had tried to break the parting gently. How should he know all that she knew? It was clearly an ill turn that fate had played him. Indeed, he felt ill-used. So he listened to the Fiscal taking evidence, and in due course departed.
But within an inner pocket he had a letter that was not filed with the documents, but which might have shed clearer light upon when and how Grace Allen slipped and fell, gathering flowers at night above the great pool of the Black Water.
"There is set up a throne in the heavens," chanted mad Barbara Allen as Gregory went out; "and One sits upon it—and my Gracie's there, clothed in white robes, an' a palm in her hand. And you'll be there, young man," she cried after him, "and I'll be there. There's a cry comin' owre the Black Water for you, like the cry that raised me oot o' my bed yestreen. An' ye'll hear it—ye'll hear it, braw young man; ay—and rise up and answer, too!"
But they paid no heed to her—for, of course, she was mad. Neither did Gregory Jeffray hear aught as he went out, but the water lapping against the little boat that was still half full of flowers.