Flemington And Tales From Angus. Violet Jacob

being surrounded by a rusty iron railing made of chains that hung in a double row, festooned between the uprights. Inside the enclosure there stood up such a nest of Irish yews that nothing could be seen but their close blackness; some leaned on their neighbours, thrust sideways by the east-coast wind, but all were cheek by jowl, a conspiracy of heavy shadows in the dull light of the pulseless afternoon.

      Bob disliked their look, suddenly, and for no reason; they were too much dilapidated to be imposing, and the stone which, presumably, they sheltered could not have the dignity of the one on which he was working, for the battered chains of the railing made a futile attempt at pomp that went ill with everything near it. Yet the atmosphere hanging about that enclosed place was not commonplace; it had some other and worse quality. A wave of repulsion, half spiritual, half physical, came over him, so that he was near to shuddering and he turned to go on with his cleaning; at least the scrubbing-brush was prosaic and therefore comfortable.

      While he worked he found that a small, fresh-faced, rather sly-looking old man with a rake over his shoulder was contemplating him from the other side of the low wall. He was smiling too, with a slightly interested and wholly curious smile that uncovered four teeth divided by enormous gaps.

      ‘Guid wurk,’ said he, with the amused patronage that he might have given to a child at play.

      ‘It’s harder than you think,’ said Bob.

      The old man clambered over the wall with deliberation, his heavy boots knocking against it, and stood by Bob. The brush had uncovered a coat of arms, several skulls and crossbones and a long Latin inscription.

      ‘Yon’s dandy,’ observed the new-comer, looking at him with approval, as though he were responsible for the whole.

      ‘It’s a pity they’re so smothered up in moss,’ said Bob. ‘I’ve no doubt there are plenty better than this one.’

      But the other was more interested in Bob than in antiquities.

      ‘Ye’ll be a scholar?’ he inquired, with the same suggestion of suppressed comedy.

      ‘Well – no; but I like these things.’

      The old man laughed soundlessly.

      ‘Graves doesna pleasure mony fowk owre muckle,’ said he.

      ‘There’s one over there that doesn’t pleasure me very much,’ returned Bob, pointing to the huddled company of Irish yews.

      His friend’s eye followed the direction of his finger; then his smile widened and his eyebrows went up. He seemed to take a persistently but sardonically jocose view of everything in this world.

      ‘Yon?’ said he, wagging his head, ‘fegs, there’s them that’ll agree fine wi’ ye there!’

      ‘Why, what do you think of it?’ asked Bob.

      ‘Heuch! what wad a’ be thinkin’?’ exclaimed the other, putting his rake over his shoulder again; ‘a’m just thinkin’ it’s fell near time a’ was awa’ hame.’

      He moved away with a nod which conveyed to Bob that he still took him for a semi-comic character.

      ‘But who’s buried there?’ cried the latter after him.

      ‘Just a lassie!’ called the old man as he went.

      When he had disappeared Bob went over to the yews. He would have laughed at the idea of being nervous, but there was that in him which made him keep his eye steadily on the enclosure as he approached it. He found that it was not, as he imagined, quite surrounded by trees, for the foot of the grave was clear and from it he could see into the darkness to where the plain, square stone sat, as though in hiding, like the inmate of a cave. He stepped over the chains and stood above the ‘lassie’ to read her name. There was no date, no text, not the baldest, barest record; only ‘ANNIE CARGILL.’

      The name lingered in his brain as he went home. It conveyed nothing, but he could not get it out of his head all that evening. The odd feeling that the surroundings of these two carved words had given him stamped them into his mind. Once or twice, as he sat after dinner with Sandy Lindsay and the red setter, he had almost opened his mouth to ask some question about them, but he did not do so. His godfather was the last man to whom he could speak of anything not perfectly obvious, and he guessed that he would not only think him a fool for the way in which he had spent his afternoon but call him one too. Bob always steered clear of conversational cross currents. It was one of the reasons that he was genuinely popular.

      He did not go back to the kirkyard for several days, but when the next opportunity came he departed secretly, for Sandy Lindsay had gone to a sale of cattle and the coast was clear for him to do as he would. He had come to accept his godfather’s disapproval of these excursions of his as certain – why he could not tell. Also, he hoped he should not meet the old man with the rake, for the subtle mixture of reticence and derisive patronage with which he had been treated did not promise much. He was beginning to be glad that he was leaving Pitriven in a few days, for he was a little tired of being out of real sympathy with anybody and he had not exchanged a word with a creature of his own age since he left Edinburgh.

      ‘I am pleased that you have managed to get on well with Lindsay,’ his father had written. ‘He is an odd being and I can understand something of your surprise at our friendship. As a matter of fact, I have seen very little of him for a number of years, but your mother’s people were under some obligation to him and she never forgot it, and since her death I have not let him quite slip out of my life. There were strange stories about him in his youth, I believe, but they were none of my business, nor did I ever hear what they were…’

      His father’s want of curiosity was tiresome, Bob thought.

      He hurried along, for he needed all the light he could get and he had started later than he intended. There were two stones close to the first one which he wanted to uncover and he stuck manfully to them till both were laid bare. He was interrupted by nobody, but when at last he took out his notebook to make a rough sketch of the complicated armorial bearings which made one of them a treasure, the light was beginning to fail. He scrawled and scribbled, then shut up the book with a sigh of relief. His fingers were chilly and he could hear the wheels of Lindsay’s dog-cart grinding up the avenue on the further side of the den. He would have one more look at Annie Cargill, and go. He had almost forgotten her sinister fascination as he worked.

      As he approached across the grass a small bird skimmed swiftly out of a tree, as though to light in one of the Irish yews, but turned within a yard of its goal, with a violent flutter of wings, and flew almost into Bob’s face. Another step took him to the foot of the grave, and there he stepped back as though he had been struck.

      A figure was sitting crouched in the very middle of the dank closeness inside the chains, and he knew that it was this that had made the bird change its course. He would have liked to do the same but he stood there petrified, his heart smiting against his ribs and a cold horror settling about him. He could not move for the swift dread that took him lest he should see the creature’s face; he could not make out whether the huddled shape was male or female, for the head was averted and it seemed to him in this desperate moment that, if it turned, his eyes would meet something so horrible that he could never get over it, never be the same again. He felt the drops break out under his hair as he stood, not daring to move for his insane fear of attracting attention.

      The dusk was not far advanced, but between the closed-in walls of the yews the outline of the figure was indefinite, muffled in some wrapping drawn about its head and shoulders. It might be an old woman – he thought it was – it might be a mere huddled lump of clothes, though why they should be in that place was beyond his struggling wits to imagine. He tried to take his eyes from the thing – for it had no other name to him – and as he did so, the head turned as quietly and as independently of the rest of the body as the head of an owl turns when some intruder peers into the hollow in which it is lodged. The young man saw a wisp of long hair and a mouth and chin; the upper part of the face was covered by the hood or cloak, or whatsoever garment was held close about the bodily part of the lurking presence between the yews. It was a woman.