Fear sat down with her to her meat and fear lay down with her in her bed. The years passed on, but she was too ignorant to ken that the world changes with them and old things go out of mind. People wonder that she’s not like other folk; they wouldna wonder if they knew! She was feared that Gow, who had stood friend to her, would let out what he kent, and fail her. Poor foolish wife to think such a thing of Gow! And the man had forgotten her till he saw her, and then she had need to tell him before he remembered! But when she heard his playing again she was fairly demented.’
His face changed and he turned away. ‘Mea culpa,’ he faltered. He had little Latin, but he understood that much.
‘I fear the burden has shifted to you, my poor friend,’ said the Englishman gently.
IT WAS ON the forenoon of the morrow that Laidlaw, the beadle and the Englishman stood up to their middles in the broom. The pods were black in the green mist of stems. About their feet rabbits had riddled the earth. The outcrop of rock had broken open in the hill-side, to be roofed with the turf of the overhanging brae and swallowed by the sea of broom and whin and the ash-coloured blur of seeding thistles. Interlacing whin-roots lurked about the burrows, traps for human steps. When they had climbed to their goal the three men stopped to get breath, and turned to look at the kirkton below them. Westward, through the creek cut by the burn to the Isla, they could see the indigo-blue Sidlaws with such lights as seem only to fall on Angus bathing their undulating shoulders.
Each man carried a lantern, and when all were lighted they went crouching, one after another, into the cave. In a few paces they were able to stand up and look about them.
Both Laidlaw and the Englishman had gone late to sleep on the preceding night, and the latter, lying thinking in the dark hours, turning over in his mind all he had heard, had come to a definite conclusion. He told himself that no man with a serious body-wound, exhausted by days of wandering and ill enough to be shouting in delirium, could escape on foot from a place in which he had once lain down. A man may go till he drops, but when he falls he will not rise again in circumstances like these, far less escape unseen. But Moir could accomplish what was impossible to his companion.
‘I believe Musgrave to be lying up there in the hill-side,’ he had said to Laidlaw that morning.
‘But—’ began the minister.
‘Yes, sir, I know what you would say; I know that the village children play there, in the cave, at times. For all that, Moir left him there. But he left a dead man.’
The minister stared at him, incredulous.
‘But Phemie went next night. She would have lit a light there,’ said he.
‘She saw no one above ground. You said that when Neil Gow had stopped playing and she went home to her sister, all was quiet. Depend upon it, Musgrave died in the small hours, as sick men will; Moir buried him next day and escaped at dusk.’
‘But he had no tools,’ objected Laidlaw, unconvinced.
‘If the rock is hollowed deep and there is sand and loose earth choking much of it, he did it. A man in his case makes shift to use anything.’
‘He maybe had his dirk,’ suggested the minister, his doubts a little shaken.
‘He is there, sir; believe me, he is there.’
And now Laidlaw was sitting at a short distance from the cave on a bare patch in the tangle. He had come out of its heavy atmosphere to leave room for the Englishman and the beadle, who were working inside with the pick and shovel the latter had brought up from the kirkyard. The opening tunnelled some way into the hill, narrowing as it went, but in one place at which the rock fell back in an irregular recess they had resolved to make their experiment.
The shine from the lanterns had cast up the faint outline of a mound. This decided them, this and the belief that a man engaged in a work like Moir’s would get as far from the entrance as he might.
The minister looked a little less harassed. His shyness of the Englishman’s accent was gone. like many people whose days are spent in remote places, he was intensely surprised at seeing the human side of a stranger, and he still doubted that the outer world contained others of a similar sort. His face grew a little wistful as he remembered that they would go down the hill to part at its foot. The Englishman would ride to Stirling to meet the Edinburgh coach. He fell to musing. The early autumn sunshine, warm and very clear, and the healing quiet of the braes were pleasant to him. He could see his small world lying below like a plaything on the floor. In his vigil last night he had burnt his tallow till within a short time of daylight, for his sermon had been interrupted by the clamour that had arisen and he was fain to finish it. He was not much of a preacher and the task of writing it was a weekly load upon him. He had got up early too, and gone to Phemie’s cottage; for there was something he wanted to say to her and his self-distrust made him eager to put this also behind him, lest he should lose courage. But his visit was accomplished and he was now more at ease. His eyes closed wearily; they ached this morning from his midnight labours as his heart had ached last night from his own shortcomings. But now he forgot all these as he dozed among the broom and the fluffy thistledown …
He awoke to a touch on his shoulder. The Englishman was beside him. For a moment, bewildered, he could not recollect where he was, nor how he had come to such a place.
‘Look,’ said the other, who was holding out a little discoloured silver snuff-box, ‘his name is on it. We have found him.’
IN THE KIRKTON of Dalmain the two men bade each other good-bye, but said it as those do who are to meet again. The Englishman wished Musgrave to lie under the wall of its spectral kirk; and when the necessary steps should be taken to establish the dead man’s identity in the eyes of the law, his skeleton, clothed in the rags of his tattered uniform, would be carried from the bosom of the hill that had sheltered it for so long and committed by Laidlaw to the earth.
‘I believe you are less troubled than you were last night,’ said the Englishman, leaning from his horse as they parted. ‘I should be happy to know it.’
The minister’s plain face brightened.
‘I have seen Phemie already,’ he replied; ‘she is to come to me to take care of the manse – my serving lass is just a silly tawpie—’
The rider pulled up a little later upon the southern brae and turned to look back. On the northern one, two dark figures were doing the like. The taller of these, seeing him, took off his bonnet and stood holding it high in air. It was Neil Gow.
THE HOUSE of Hedderwick the grieve was a furlong east of the kirk, divided from it by a country road and a couple of ploughed fields. From its windows the sunset could be seen spreading, like a fire, behind the building, of which only the belfry was visible as it rose above the young larch plantation pressing up to the kirkyard gate. The belfry itself was a mere shelter, like a little bridge standing on the kirk roof, and the dark shape of its occupant showed strong against the sky, dead black when the flame of colour ran beyond the ascending skyline to the farm on the hill. This farm with its stacks and byres would then share importance with the bell, the two becoming the most marked objects against the light.
Hedderwick’s house was grey and square, with an upper storey and a way of staring impartially on the world. At the death of his wife, three years before the date of this history, it began to give signs, both within and without, of the
