The 7th Ghost Story Read online

“You are very dull this morning, Fiscal,” said the youngest daughter of the house, who, being the baby and pretty, was pettishly privileged in speech.

  But within him Gregory was saying, “What a blessing 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 Fiscal should 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 curious.”

  * * * *

  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. Her face was an oval of perfect curve, crowned with a great mass of light brown hair, in which were red lights when the sun shone directly upon it. Her skin was clear, pale 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 tippens (two pence) 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 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 would carry a parasol.

  Again there came the cry from the Rhonefoot.

  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 just been drawn half up on the bank. As 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 great pool of the Black Water of Dee.

  Grace bent to her oars with a springing verve and force which made the tubby little boat draw towards the shore, with the whispering laps of water gliding under its sides. Three lines of wake were marked behind—a vague white turbulence in the middle and two winking lines of bubbles on either side where the oars had dipped.

  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 that he should come. She was glad that he had not his horse.

  “I thought you would come back 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 her 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 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, and 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 was a cry 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 great stone upon the turf, while Gregory and she walked upon the flowery forest carpet, and the dry leaves clashed and muttered above them as the gloaming fell. These were days of rapture, each like a doorway into a yet fuller 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 amazed 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, seemed to promise the dawn of yet brighter days.

  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.

  Then, when the morning shone bright over the hills and shimmered 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 and grew hot in the sun, as she heard the clack of the wheel and the soft, slow grind of the flat 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 day 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 a 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 what 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 thundercloud 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 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 Grace Allen.

  The next day passed, as the night had passed, with an awful constriction about her heart and a numbness over all her body, yet Grace did her work as one who dares not stop.

  Two men crossed in the ferry-boat, 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 has been here helpin’ his uncle MacDiarmid the Fiscal.”

  “I didna ken he was here,” 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 hae her,” returned him from Drumglass as the boat reached the farther side.

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p; “Guide’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 ‘Guid-day’? Her een were fair stelled i’ her heid.”

  “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 on 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 seemed 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 must fling them all into the black water, and go forth into the darkness and gather more.

  Then from 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 gaun at this time o’ the nicht?”

  “There’s somebody at the boat,” she said, “waiting. Let me gang, Aunt Annie: they want me.”

  “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 morning 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 day following, Aunt Annie went down to the broad flat boat that lay so still at the water’s edge. Something black was knocking against it.

  Grace had been gone four hours, and it was weary work watching along the shore or going in 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 spun round, and the stars went out when the finder saw the flowers.

  When Aunt Annie Allen came to herself, she found the water had risen. 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’ yer feet’s dreepin’ wat. Haud aff the clean floor!”

  “But Gracie! Poor lassie Gracie! 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 both the women turned to each other and instinctively caught one another by the hands.

  “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, endeavoring to thrust off Barbara’s hands as they clutched her like 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 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 habit, 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 great rain upon the hills.

  “The Lord save us!” cried Barbara suddenly. “Look!”

  She pointed up the great 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 detached 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 great pool of the Black Water. 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 Grade,” she said: “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 Grade’s ga’en to! Annie, woman, dinna ye see them by her body—fower great angels, at ilka corner yin?”

  Barbara’s voice rose and fell, wayward and sharp. There was no other sound in the house but 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 owrer 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 aboot his neck, and he were cast into the depths 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 great pool on the Black Water; and there was the dead 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 Fiscal come 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 do it 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 took evidence, and in due course departed.

  But within an inner pocket he had a letter that was not filed in the documents, which might have shed clearer light upon how and why Grace Allen slipped and fell, when she was gathering flowers at night above the great pool of the Black Water.

  “There shall be set up a throne in the heavens,” chanted mad Barbara Allen as Gregory went out, “and Yin that sits upon it—and my Gracie’s there, clothed in white robes an’ a palm in her hand; an’ you’ll be there, young man,” she cried after him, “and I’ll be there. There’s a cry comin’ ower the Black Water for you, like the yin that raised me oot o’ my bed yestreen; an’ ye’ll hear it—ye’ll hear it, an’ rise up and answer.”

  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 flow
ers.

  The days went by, and when added together, one at a time, they made the years. And the years grew into one decade, and lengthened out towards another.

  Aunt Annie was long dead, and a white stone over her; but there was no stone over Grace Allen.

  Sir Gregory Jeffray came that way. He was a great law officer of the Crown, and first heir to the next vacant judgeship. This, however, he was thinking of refusing.

  He had come to shoot at the Barr, and his baggage was at Barmark station. How strange it would be to see the old places again in the gloom of a September evening! Gregory still loved a new sensation. All was so long past. The old boathouse passed into other hands, and railways came to carry the traffic beyond the ferry.

  As Sir Gregory Jeffray walked down from the late train which had deposited him at the station, he felt curiously at peace. The times of Long Ago came back not all unpleasantly to his mind. There had been much pleasure in them. He even thought kindly of the girl with whom he had walked in the glory of a forgotten summer along the hidden ways of the woods. Her last letter, long since destroyed, was not disagreeable to him when he thought of the secret which had been laid to rest so quietly in the long pool of the Black Water.

  He came to the water’s edge. He sent his voice, stronger now than of yore, but without the old ring of boyish hopefulness, across the loch. A moment’s silence, and then from the gloom of the farther side there came an answering hail—low, clear and penetrating.

  “I am in luck to find them out of bed,” said Gregory Jeffray to himself.

  He waited and listened. The wind blew chill from the south athwart the ferry. He shivered, and drew his great fur-lined travelling coat about him. He could hear the water lapping against the mighty piers of the railway viaduct which, with its great iron spans, like bows bent to send arrows into the heavens, dimly towered between him and the skies.

  “It is not so pleasant now as it used to be,” he said, with a slight thrill of disappointment. “Ah, some one is at the boat now,” he said, listening.

  He could hear the oars planted in the iron pins, the push off the shore, and then the measured dip of oars coming towards him.