Years afterwards, when time had taken the edge off his grief, Linford told me something of what happened. “She met me, looking very well and jolly, and we walked to the place you call the Bower. You may laugh at me, but I tell you I had a presentiment that something was going to happen, but I couldn’t be sure whether it was good or bad. … She looked all round the Glen and sighed happily, as if she had found something she liked very much. Then suddenly she gave a little cry and went very white. I caught her, and saw that she was all in a shiver. She was staring at the burn, and her eyes were round and frightened like a deer’s. Then she smiled again, and turned to me with a look—Oh, my God, I can never forget it! It was so kind and happy and … She must have cared for me all the time, and like a blind fool I didn’t know it. She put her arms round my neck and said, ‘My ain true love’—I suppose she was quoting from a Scotch song. And just as I was bursting with joy I felt that her cheek was cold. …”
Now it is a curious thing, but in the Scotichronicon of Hume of Calzeat—it is in manuscript, and I do not think anyone living has read it besides myself—there is a version of the story of Maid Marjory. And according to that version, when the lady confronted her father in the Green Glen, she put her arm around the Douglas’s neck, and said, “My ain true love.”
Endnotes
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This story was first published as “The Song of the Moor” in Macmillan’s Magazine, anthologized in Grey Weather as “The Moor-Song” and finally included in The Watcher by the Threshold with the current title. —S.E. Editor ↩
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The narrative of Mr. Graves was written in the year 1898. ↩
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In the light of subsequent events I have jotted down the materials to which I refer. The last authentic record of the Brownie is in the narrative of the shepherd of Clachlands, taken down towards the close of last century by the Reverend Mr. Gillespie, minister of Allerkirk, and included by him in his Songs and Legends of Glen Aller. The authorities on the strange carrying-away of children are to be found in a series of articles in a local paper, the Allerfoot Advertiser, September and October 1878, and a curious book published anonymously at Edinburgh in 1848, entitled The Weathergaw. The records of the unexplained murders in the same neighbourhood are all contained in Mr. Fordoun’s Theory of Expert Evidence, and an attack on the book in the Law Review for June 1881. The Carrickfey case has a pamphlet to itself—now extremely rare—a copy of which was recently obtained in a bookseller’s shop in Dumfries by a well-known antiquary, and presented to the library of the Supreme Court in Edinburgh. ↩
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I have identified the bust, which, when seen under other circumstances, had little power to affect me. It was a copy of the head of Justinian in the Tesci Museum at Venice, and several duplicates exist, dating apparently from the seventh century, and showing traces of Byzantine decadence in the scrollwork on the hair. It is engraved in M. Delacroix’s Byzantium, and, I think, in Windscheid’s Pandektenlehrbuch. ↩
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From the unpublished remains of the Reverend John Dennistoun, sometime minister of the Gospel in the parish of Caulds, and author of Satan’s Artifices Against the Elect. ↩
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Anglice—rats. ↩
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This extract from the unpublished papers of the Manorwater family has seemed to the Editor worth printing for its historical interest. The famous Lady Molly Carteron became Countess of Manorwater by her second marriage. She was a wit and a friend of wits, and her nephew, the Honourable Charles Hervey-Townshend (afterwards our Ambassador at The Hague), addressed to her a series of amusing letters while making, after the fashion of his contemporaries, the Grand Tour of Europe. Three letters, written at various places in the Eastern Alps and despatched from Venice, contain the following short narrative. ↩
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Short Fiction
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