“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 flowers.
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.
“How do they know, I wonder, that I want to be taken to the Rhonefoot? They are bringing the small boat.”
The skiff shot out of the gloom. It was a woman who was rowing. He stood transfixed, thrown cold in a moment by a memory. But he was far beyond all superstitious and sentimental considerations. It was always women who looked after ferry-boats in Galloway.
The boat grounded stern on. Gregory Jeffray stepped in and settled himself on the seat.
“What rubbish is this?” he said angrily, clearing a great armful of flowers off the seat and throwing them among his feet.
The oars dipped, and without sound the boat glided out upon the lapping waves of the loch towards the Black Water, on whose oily depths the oars fall silently, and where the water does not lap about the prow. The night grew suddenly very cold. Somewhere in the darkness over the Black Water Gregory Jeffray heard someone call his name.
It was noted as a strange thing that, on the same night on which Sir Gregory Jeffray was lost, the last of the Allens of the old ferry-house died in the Crichton Asylum. Barbara Allen was mad to the end, for the burden of her latest cry was, “He kens noo! He kens noo! The Lord our God is a jealous God. Now let Thy servant depart in peace.”
But Gregory Jeffray was never seen again by water or on shore. He had heard the cry from over the Black Water.
A FRIENDLY EXORCISE,
by Talmage Powell
I was putting up the traverse rods for the living room draperies when Judy let out a screech. She sounded like a woman who’d had the world’s biggest mouse scurry between her feet.
The sound lifted me off the hassock where I’d been standing to add height to my somewhat bony six-one. I jetted toward the source of the sound, skidding off the hallway into the empty bedroom.
Judy, the delectable, hadn’t been frightened by a mouse. Instead, the culprit was a sweatsock. That’s right, an ordinary white woolen sweatsock, misshapen and slightly bedraggled from having been laundered many times. It lay in the middle of the bare floor, and it had to be the source of her trouble. Besides Judy there was nothing else in the room. She stood pressed against the wall, elfin face pale, blue eyes round. Pointing at the sock, she tried to talk, getting hung up on the “J” in my name.