_Particulars concerning the end of Mistress Catherine Johnstone, late of
Givens, in Ayrshire; from a private relation made by the young woman
Kirstie Maclachlan to the Reverend James Souttar, A.M., Minister of the
Parish of Wyliebank, and by him put into writing._
I had been placed in my parish of Wyliebank about a twelvemonth before
making acquaintance with Mr. Johnstone, the minister at Givens, twelve
miles away. This would be in the year 1721, and from that until the date
of his death (which happened in the autumn of 1725) I saw him in all not
above a dozen times. To me he appeared a douce, quiet man, commonplace in
the pulpit and not over-learned, strict in his own behaviour, methodical
in his duties, averse from gossip of all kinds, having himself a great
capacity for silence, whereby he seemed perhaps wiser than he was, but not
(I think) more charitable. He had greatly advanced his fortunes by
marriage.
This marriage made him remarkable, who else had passed as quite ordinary;
but not for the money it brought him. Of his wife I knew no more than my
neighbours. She was a daughter of Sir John Telfair, of Balgarnock, a
gentleman of note in Renfrewshire; and the story ran concerning her that,
at the age of sixteen, having a spite against one of the maidservants, she
had pretended to be bewitched and persecuted by the devil, and upheld the
imposture so cleverly, with rigors, convulsions, foaming at the mouth and
spitting forth of straws, chips and cinders, pins and bent nails, that the
Presbytery ordained a public fast against witchcraft, and by warrant of
Privy Council a Commission visited Balgarnock to take evidence of her
condition. In the presence of these Commissioners, of whom the Lord
Blantyre was president, the young lady flatly accused one Janet Burns, her
mother's still-room maid, of tormenting her with aid of the black art, and
for witness showed her back and shoulders covered with wales, some blue
and others freshly bleeding; and further, in the midst of their
interrogatories cast herself into a trance, muttering and offering faint
combat to divers unseen spirits, and all in so lifelike a manner that,
notwithstanding they could discover no evident proof of guilt, these wise
gentry were overawed and did commit the woman Janet Burns to take her
trial for witchcraft at Paisley. There, poor soul, as she was escorted to
the prison, the town rabble met her with sticks and stones and closed the
case; for on her way a cobble cast by some unknown hand struck her upon
the temple, and falling into the arms of the guard, she never spoke after,
but breathed her last breath as they forced her through the mob to the
prison gates.
This was the tale told to me; and long before I heard it the reprobation
of the vulgar had swung back from Janet Burns and settled upon her
accuser. Certain it was that swiftly upon the woman's murder--as I may
well call it--Miss Catherine made a recovery, nor was thereafter troubled
with fits, swoons or ailments calling for public notice. Indeed, she was
shunned by all, and lived (as well as I could discover) in complete
seclusion for twenty years, until the minister of Givens sought her out
with an offer of marriage.
By this time she was near forty; a thin, hard-featured spinster,
dwelling alone with her mother the Lady Balgarnock. Her two younger
sisters had married early--the one to Captain Luce, of Dunragit in
Wigtownshire, the other to a Mr. Forbes, of whom I know nothing save that
his house was in Edinburgh: and as they had no great love for Miss
Catherine, so they neither sought her company nor were invited to
Balgarnock. Her father, Sir John, had deceased a few months before Mr.
Johnstone presented himself.
He made a short courtship of it. The common tongues accused him (as was
to be expected) of coming after her money; whereas she and her old mother
lived a cat-and-dog life together, and she besides was of an age when
women will often marry the first man that offers. But I now believe, and
(unless I mistake) the history will show, that the excuse vulgarly made
for her did not touch the real ground of her decision. At any rate, she
married him and lived from 1718 to 1725 in the manse at Givens, where I
made her acquaintance.
I had been warned what to expect. The parishioners of Givens seldom had
sight of her, and set it down to pride and contempt of her husband's
origin. (He had been a weaver's son from Falkirk, who either had won his
way to the Marischal College of Aberdeen by strength of will and in
defiance of natural dullness, or else had started with wits but blunted
them in carving his way thither.) She rarely set foot beyond the manse
garden, the most of her time being spent in a roomy garret under the
slates, where she spun a fine yarn and worked it into thread of the kind
which is yet known as "Balgarnock thread," and was invented by her or by
her mother--for accounts differ as to this. I have beside me an
advertisement clipped from one of the newspapers of twenty years ago,
which says: "The Lady Balgarnock and her eldest daughter having attained
to great perfection in making whitening and twisting of SEWING THREED
which is as cheap and white, and known by experience to be much stronger
than the Dutch, to prevent people's being imposed upon by other Threed
which may be sold under the name of Balgarnock Threed, the Papers in which
the Lady Balgarnock at Balgarnock, or Mrs. Johnstone her eldest daughter,
at Givens, do put up their Threed shall, for direction, have thereupon
their Coat of Arms, '_Azure_, a ram's head caboshed _or_.' Those who want
the said Threed, which is to be sold from fivepence to six shillings per
ounce, may write to the Lady Balgarnock at Balgarnock, or Mrs. Johnstone
at Givens, to the care of the Postmaster at Glasgow; and may call for the
same in Edinburgh at John Seton, Merchant, his shop in the Parliament
Close, where they will be served either in Wholesale or Retail, and will
be served in the same manner at Glasgow, by William Selkirk, Merchant, in
Trongate."
In this art, then, the woman spent most of her days, preparing the thread
with her own hands and bleaching her materials on a large slate raised
upon brackets in the window of her garret. And, if one may confess for
all, glad enough were Mr. Johnstone's guests when this wife of his rose
from the table and departed upstairs. For a colder, more taciturn and
discomfortable hostess could not be conceived. She would scarcely
exchange a word through the meal--no, not with her husband, though he
watched and seemed to forestall her wants with a tender officiousness.
To see her seated there in black (which was her only wear), with her back
to the window, her eyes on the board, and, as it seemed, the shadow of a
long-past guilt brooding about her continually, gave me a feeling as of
cold water dripping down the spine. And even the husband, though he
pretended to observe nothing, must have known my relief when she withdrew
and left us with the decanters.
Now I had tholed this penance, maybe, a dozen times, and could never win a
speech from Mrs. Johnstone, nor a look, to show that she regarded me while
present or remembered me after I had gone. So you may think I was
surprised one day when the minister came riding over with word that his
wife wanted a young girl for companion and to help her with the spinning,
and had thought of me as likely to show judgment in recommending one.
The girl must be sixteen, or thereabout, of decent behaviour and
tractable, no gadder or lover of finery, healthy, able to read, an early
riser, and, if possible, devout. For her parentage I need not trouble
myself, if I knew of a girl suitable in these other respects.
It happened that I had of late been contriving some odd work about the
manse for the girl Kirstie Maclachlan, not that the work needed doing, but
to help her old mother; for we had no assessment for the poor, and the
Session was often at its wits' end to provide relief, wherein as a man
without family cares I could better assist than some of my neighbours.
The girl's mother was a poor feckless creature who had left Wyliebank in
her youth to take service in Glasgow, and there, beguiled at first by some
villain, had gone from bad to worse through misguidance rather than
wantonness, and at last crept home to her native parish to starve, if by
starving she could save her child--then but an infant--from the city and
its paths of destruction. This, in part by her own courage, and in part
by the help of the charitable, she had managed to do, and lived to see
Kirstie grow to be a decent, religiously minded young woman. Nor did the
lass want for good looks in a sober way, nor for wit when it came to
reading books; but in speech she was shy beyond reason, and would turn red
and stammer if a stranger but addressed her. I think she could never
forget that her birth had been on the wrong side of the blanket, and,
supposing folks to be pitying her for it, sought to avoid them and their
kindness.
It was Kirstie, then, whom I ventured to commend to Mr. Johnstone for his
lady's requirements; and after some talk between us the good man sent for
her and was satisfied with her looks and the few answers which, in her
stammering way, she managed to return to his questions. When he set off
homeward it was on the understanding that she should follow him to Givens
on foot, which she did the next day with her stock of spare clothes in a
kerchief. Nor, although I twice visited Givens during her service there,
did I ever see her at the manse, but twice only before she returned to us
with the tale I am to set down--the first time at the burying of her
mother here in Wyliebank, and the second at Givens, when I was called
thither to inter her master who died very suddenly by the bursting of a
blood-vessel in the brain. After that she went to live with the widow in
lodgings in Edinburgh; and from her, some fifteen months later, I received
the news, in a letter most neatly indited, that Mrs. Johnstone had
perished by her own hand, and a request to impart it to all in this parish
whom it might concern. The main facts she told me then in writing, but
the circumstances (being ever a sensible girl) she kept to transmit to me
by word of mouth, rightly judging that the public enquiry had no business
with them.
It seems, then, that Kirstie's first introduction to Mrs. Johnstone was
none too cheerful; indeed, it came near to scaring her out of her senses.
She arrived duly at Givens shortly before five of the afternoon
(a warm day in June) and went straight to the manse, where the door was
opened to her by Mr. Johnstone, who had seen her from the parlour window.
He led the way back to the parlour, and, after a question or two upon her
journey, took her up the main stairs to the landing. Here he halted and
directed her up a narrow flight to her garret, which lay off to the right,
at the very top.
The door stood ajar, and facing it was another door, wide open,
through which a ray of the evening sun slanted across the stairhead.
Kirstie, with her bundle in one hand and the other upon the hasp, turned
to look down upon the minister, to make sure she was entering the right
chamber. He stood at the foot of the stairs, and his eyes were following
her (as she thought) with a very curious expression; but before he could
nod she happened to throw a glance into the room opposite, and very nearly
dropped her bundle.
Yet there was nothing to be scared at; merely the figure of an elderly
woman in black bent over her spinning-wheel there in the dim light.
It was Mrs. Johnstone, of course, seated at her work; but it came upon the
girl with suddenness, like an apparition, and the fright, instead of
passing, began to take hold of her as the uncanny woman neither spoke nor
looked up. The room about her was bare, save for some hanks of yarn
littered about the boards and a great pile of it drying on a tray by the
window. The one ray of sunlight seemed to pass over this without
searching the corners under the sloping roof, and fell at Kirstie's feet.
She has told me that she must have stood there for minutes with her heart
working like a pump. When she looked down the stair again the minister
was gone. She pulled her wits together, stepped quickly into her own
room, and, having closed the door behind her, sat down on the bed to
recover.
Being a lass of spirit, she quickly reasoned herself out of this
foolishness, rose, washed, changed her stockings, put off her shawl for
cap and apron, and--albeit in trepidation--presented herself once more at
the door of Mrs. Johnstone's garret.
"Please you, mistress," she managed to say, "I am Kirstie Maclachlan, the
new maid from Wyliebank."
Mrs. Johnstone looked up and fixed her with a pair of eyes that
(she declared) searched her through and through; but all she said was,
"The minister tells me you can read."
"Yes, mistress."
"What books have you brought?"
Kirstie, to be sure, had two books in her bundle--a Bible and John
Bunyan's _Grace Abounding_, the both of them gifts from me.
Mrs. Johnstone commanded her to fetch the second and start reading at
once; "for," she explained, not unkindly, "it will suit you best, belike,
to begin with something familiar; and if I find you read well and
pleasantly, we will get a book from the manse library."
So the girl found a stool in the corner, and, seating herself near the
window, began to read by the waning light. She had, indeed, an agreeable
voice, and I had taken pains to teach her. She read on and on, gathering
courage, yet uncertain if Mrs. Johnstone approved; who said no word,
but continued her spinning until darkness settled down on the garret and
blurred the print on the page.
At last she looked up, and, much to Kirstie's surprise, with a sigh.
"That will do, girl, you read very nicely. Run down and find your supper,
and after that the sooner you get to bed the better. We rise early in
this house. To-morrow I will put you in the way of your duties."
Downstairs Kirstie met the minister who had been taking a late stroll in
the garden and now entered by the back-door. He halted under the lamp in
the passage. "Well," he asked, "what did she say?"
"She bade me get my supper and be early in the morning," Kirstie answered
simply.
For some reason this seemed to relieve him. He hung up his hat and stood
pulling at his fingers until the joints cracked, which was a trick with
him. "She needs to be soothed," he said. "If you read much with her, you
must come to me to choose the books; yet she must think she has chosen
them herself. We must manage that somehow. The great thing is to keep
her mind soothed."
Kirstie did not understand. A few minutes later as she went up the stairs
to her room the door opposite still remained open. All was dark within,
but whether or not Mrs. Johnstone sat there in the darkness she could not
tell.
The next morning she entered on her duties, which were light enough.
Indeed, she soon suspected that her mistress had sought a companion
rather than a servant, and at first had much to-do to find employment.
Soon, however, Mrs. Johnstone took her into confidence, and began to
impart the mysteries of whitening and twisting the famous Balgarnock
thread; and so by degrees, without much talk on either side, there grew a
strange affection betwixt them. Sure, Kirstie must have been the first of
her sex to whom the strange woman showed any softness; and on her part the
girl asserts that she was attracted from the first by a sort of pity,
without well knowing for what her pity was demanded. The minister went no
farther with his confidences: he could see that Kirstie suited, and seemed
resolved to let well alone. The wife never spoke of herself; and albeit,
if Kirstie's reading happened to touch on the sources of Christian
consolation, she showed some eagerness in discussing them, it was done
without any personal or particular reference. Yet, even in those days,
Kirstie grew to feel that terror was in some way the secret of her
mistress's strangeness; that for the present the poor woman knew herself
safe and protected from it, but also that there was ever a danger of that
barrier falling--whatever it might be--and leaving her exposed to some
enemy, from the thought of whom her soul shrank.
I do not know how Kirstie became convinced that, whoever or whatever the
enemy might be, Mr. Johnstone was the phylactery. She herself could give
no grounds for her conviction beyond his wife's anxiety for his health and
well-being. I myself never observed it in a woman, and if I had, should
have set it down to ordinary wifely concern. But Kirstie assures me,
first, that it was not ordinary, and, secondly, that it was not at all
wifely--that Mrs. Johnstone's care of her husband had less of the
ministering unselfishness of a woman in love than of the eager concern of
a gambler with his stake. The girl (I need not say) did not put it thus,
yet this in effect was her report. And she added that this anxiety was
fitful to a degree: at times the minister could hardly take a walk without
being fussed over and forced to change his socks on his return; at others,
and for days together, his wife would resign the care of him to
Providence, or at any rate to Fate, and trouble herself not at all about
his goings-out or his comings-in, nor whether he wore a great-coat or not,
nor if he returned wet to the skin and neglected to change his wear.
Well, the girl was right, as was proved on the afternoon when
Mr. Johnstone, taking his customary walk upon the Kilmarnock road, fell
and burst a blood-vessel, and was borne home to the manse on a gate.
The two women were seated in the garret as usual when the crowd entered
the garden; and with the first sound of the bearers' feet upon the path,
which was of smooth pebbles compacted in lime, Mrs. Johnstone rose up,
with a face of a sudden so grey and terrible that Kirstie dropped the book
from her knee.
"It has come!" said the poor lady under her breath, and put out a hand as
if feeling for some stick of furniture to lean against. "It has come!"
she repeated aloud, but still hoarsely; and with that she turned to the
lass with a most piteous look, and "Oh, Kirstie, girl," she cried,
"you won't leave me? I have been kind to you--say you won't leave me!"
Before Kirstie well understood, her mistress's arms were about her and the
gaunt woman clinging to her body and trembling like a child. "You will
save me, Kirstie? You will live here and not forsake me? There is nobody
now but you!" she kept crying over and over.
The girl held her firmly with a grasp above the elbows to steady her and
allay the trembling, and, albeit dazed herself, uttered what soothing
words came first to her tongue. "Why, mistress, who thinks of leaving
you? Not I, to be sure. But let me get you to bed, and in an hour you
will be better of this fancy, for fancy it must be."
"He is dead, I tell you," Mrs. Johnstone insisted, "and they are bringing
him home. Hark to the door--that was never your master's knock--and the
voices!"
She was still clinging about Kirstie when the cook came panting up the
stairs and into the room with a white face; for it was true, and the
minister had breathed his last between the garden gate and his house door.
As I have said, I rode over from Wyliebank four days later to read the
burial service. The widow was not to be seen, and of Kirstie, who ever
hid herself from the sight of strangers, I caught but a glimpse.
She did not follow the coffin, but remained upstairs (as I suppose)
comforting her mistress. The other poor distracted servants, between
tears and ignorance, made but a sorry business of entertaining the
company, so that but half a dozen at most cared to return to the house, of
whom I was not one.
The manse had to be vacated, and within a week or two I heard that Mrs.
Johnstone had sold a great part of her furniture, dismissed all her
household but Kirstie, and retired to a small cottage a little further up
the street and scarcely a stone's-throw from the manse.
"She made," says Kirstie, "little show of mourning for her husband, nor
for months afterwards did she return to the terror she had shown that day
in the garret, yet I am sure that from the hour of his death she never
knew peace of mind. She had fitted up a room in the cottage with her
wheel and bleaching boards, and we spent all our time in reading or
thread-making. At night my cot would be strewn in her bedroom, and we
slept with a candle burning on the table between us; but once or twice I
woke to see her laid on her side, or resting on her elbow, with her face
towards me and her eyes fixed upon mine across the light. This used to
frighten me, and she must have seen it, for always she would stammer that
I need not be alarmed, and beg me to go to sleep again like a good child.
I soon came to see that, whatever her own terror might be, she had the
utmost dread of my catching it, and that her hope lay in keeping me
cheerful. Since I had nothing on my mind at that time, and knew of no
cause for fear, I used to sleep soundly enough; but I begin to think that
my mistress slept scarcely at all. I cannot remember once waking without
finding her awake and her eyes watching me as I say.
"She herself would not set foot outside the cottage for weeks together,
and if by chance we did take a walk it would be towards sunset, when the
fields were empty and the folk mostly gathered on the green at the far end
of the village. There was a footpath led across these fields at the back
of the cottage, and here at such an hour she would sometimes consent to
take the air, leaning on my arm; but if any wayfarer happened to come
along the path I used to draw her aside into the field, where we made
believe to be gathering of wild flowers. She had a dislike of meeting
strangers and a horror of being followed; the sound of footsteps on the
path behind us would drive her near crazy."
I think 'twas this frequent pretence of theirs to be searching for wild
flowers which brought the suspicion of witchcraft upon them among the
population of Givens. The story of the woman's youth was remembered
against her, if obscurely. Folks knew that she had once been afflicted or
possessed by an evil spirit, and from this 'twas a short step to accuse
her of gathering herbs at nightfall for the instruction of Kirstie in the
black art. In the end the rumour drove them from Givens, and in this
manner.
Though the widow so seldom showed herself abroad, in her care for
Kirstie's cheerfulness she persuaded the girl to take a short walk every
morning through the village. In truth Kirstie hated it. More and more as
her mistress clung to her she grew to cling to her mistress; it seemed as
if they two were in partnership against the world, and the part of
protector which she played so watchfully and courageously for her years
took its revenge upon her. For what makes a child so engaging as his
trust in the fellow-creatures he meets and his willingness to expect the
best of them? To Kirstie, yet but a little way past childhood, all men
and women were possible enemies, to be suspected and shunned. She took
her walk dutifully because Mrs. Johnstone commanded it, and because shops
must be visited and groceries purchased; but it was penance to her, and
she would walk a mile about to avoid a knot of gossips or to wile the time
away until a shop emptied.
But one day in the long main street she was fairly caught by a mob of boys
hunting and hooting after a negro man. They paid no heed to Kirstie, who
shrank into a doorway as he passed down the causeway--a seaman, belike,
trudging to Irvine or Saltcoats. He seemed by his gait to be more than
half drunk, and by the way he shook his stick back at the boys and cursed
them; but they would not be shaken off, and in the end he took refuge in
the "Leaping Fish," where his tormentors gathered about the doorway and
continued their booing until the landlord came forth and dispersed them.
By this time Kirstie had bolted from the doorway and run home.
She said nothing of her adventure to Mrs. Johnstone; but in the dusk of
the evening a riot began in the street a little way below the cottage.
The black seaman had been drinking all day, and on leaving the
"Leaping Fish," had fallen into a savage quarrel with a drover.
Two or three decent fellows stopped the fight and pulled him off; but they
had done better by following up their kindness and seeing him out of the
village, for he was now planted with his back to a railing, brandishing
his stick and furiously challenging the whole mob. So far as concerned
him the mischief ended by his overbalancing to aim a vicious blow at an
urchin, and crashing down upon the kerb, where he lay and groaned, while
the blood flowed from an ugly cut across the eyebrow.
For a while the crowd stood about him in some dismay. A few were for
carrying him back to the public-house; but at some evil prompting a voice
cried out, "Take him to the widow Johnstone's! A witch should know how to
deal with her sib, the black man." I believe so godless a jest would
never have been played, had not the cottage stood handy and (as one may
say) closer than their better thoughts. But certain it is that they
hoisted the poor creature and bore him into Mrs. Johnstone's garden, and
began to fling handfuls of gravel at the upper windows, where a light was
burning.
At the noise of it against the pane Mrs. Johnstone, who was bending over
the bedroom fire and heating milk for her supper, let the pan fall from
her hand. For the moment Kirstie thought she would swoon. But helping
her to a seat in the armchair, the brave lass bade her be comforted--it
could be naught but some roystering drunkard--and herself went downstairs
and unbarred the door. At the sight of her--so frail a girl--quietly
confronting them with a demand to know their business, the crowd fell back
a step or two, and in that space of time by God's providence arrived Peter
Lawler, the constable, a very religious man, who gave the ringleaders some
advice and warning they were not likely to forget. Being by this made
heartily ashamed of themselves, they obeyed his order to pick up the man
from the doorstep, where he lay at Kirstie's feet, and carry him back to
the "Leaping Fish;" and so slunk out of the garden.
When all were gone Kirstie closed and bolted the door and returned
upstairs to her mistress, whom she found sitting in her chair and
listening intently.
"Who was it?" she demanded.
"Oh, nothing to trouble us, ma'am; but just a poor wandering blackamoor I
met in the street to-day. The people, it seems, were bringing him here by
mistake."
"A blackamoor!" cried Mrs. Johnstone, gasping. "A blackamoor!"
Now Kirstie was for running downstairs again to fetch some milk in place
of what was spilt, but at the sound of the woman's voice she faced about.
"Pick together the silver, Kirstie, and fetch me my bonnet!" At first
Mrs. Johnstone began to totter about the room without aim, but presently
fell to choosing this and that of her small possessions and tossing them
into the seat of the armchair in a nervous hurry which seemed to gather
with her strength. "Quick, lass! Did he see you? . . . ah, but that
would not tell him. What like was he?" She pulled herself together and
her voice quavered across the room. "Lass, lass, you will not forsake me?
Do not speir now, but do all that I say. You promised--you did promise!"
All this while she was working in a fever of haste, pulling even the quilt
from the bed and anon tossing it aside as too burdensome. She was past
all control. "Do not speir of me," she kept repeating.
"What, ma'am? Are we leaving?" Kirstie stammered once; but the strong
will of the woman--mad though she might be--was upon her, and by-and-by
the girl began packing in no less haste than her mistress. "But will you
not tell me, ma'am?" she entreated between her labours.
"Not here! not here!" Mrs. Johnstone insisted. "Help me to get away from
here!"
It was two in the morning when the women unlatched the door of the cottage
and crept forth across the threshold--and across the stain of blood which
lay thereon, only they could not see it. They took the footpath, each
with a heavy bundle beneath her arm, and turning their backs on Givens
walked resolutely forward for three miles to the cross-roads where the
Glasgow coach would be due to pass in the dawn. Upon the green there
beside the sign-post Kirstie believes that she slept while Mrs. Johnstone
kept guard over the bundles; but she remembers little until she found
herself, as if by magic, on the coach-top and dozing on a seat behind the
driver.
From Glasgow, after a day's halt, they took another coach to Edinburgh,
and there found lodgings in a pair of attics high aloft in one of the
great houses, or lands, which lie off Parliament Square to the north.
The building--a warren you might call it--had six stories fronting the
square, the uppermost far overhanging, and Kirstie affirms that her
window, pierced in the very eaves, stood higher than the roof of St.
Giles' Church.
Hither in due course a carrier's cart conveyed Mrs. Johnstone's sticks of
furniture, and here for fifteen months the two women lay as close as two
needles in a bottle of hay. The house stood upon a ridge, and at the back
of it a dozen double flights of stairs dived into courts and cellars far
below the level of the front. It was by these--a journey in themselves--
that Kirstie sometimes made exit and entrance when she had business at the
shops, and she has counted up to me a list, which seemed without end, of
the offices, workshops, and tenements she passed on her way, beginning
with a wine store in the basement, mounting to _perruquiers'_ and
law-stationers' shops, and so up past bookbinders', felt-maker's,
painters', die-sinkers', milliners' workrooms, to landings on which, as
the roof was neared, the tenants herded closer and yet closer in meaner
and yet meaner poverty.
The most of Kirstie's business was with Mr. John Seton, the agent, to whom
she carried the thread spun by her mistress in the attic, and from whom
she received the moneys and accounts of profits. Once or twice, at their
first coming, Mrs. Johnstone had descended for a walk in the streets; but
by this time the unhappy lady had it fixed in her mind that she was being
watched and followed, and shook with apprehension at every corner.
So pitiable indeed were the glances she flung behind her, and so frantic
the precautions she used to shake off her supposed pursuers and return by
circuitous ways, that Kirstie pressed her to no more such expeditions.
To the girl, still ignorant of the cause of this terror, her mistress was
evidently mad. But mad or no, she grew daily weaker in health and her
handiwork began to worsen in quality, until Kirstie was forced to use
deceit and sell only her own thread to Mr. Seton, though she pretended to
dispose of Mrs. Johnstone's, and accounted for the falling off in profit
by a feigned tale of brisker competition among their Dutch rivals--an
imposture in which the agent helped her, telling the same story in
writing; for Mrs. Johnstone, whose eye for a bargain continued as sharp as
ever, had actually begun to suspect the lass of robbing her.
About this time as Kirstie passed down the stairs she took notice that a
new tradesman had set up business on the landing below. At first she
wondered that a barber--for this was his trade--should task his customers
to climb so many flights from the street; but it seemed that the fellow
knew what he was about, for after the first week she never descended
without meeting a customer or two mounting to his door or being followed
down by one with his wig powdered and chin freshly scraped. The barber
himself she never saw, though once, when the door stood ajar, she caught a
glimpse of his white jacket and apron.
She believed that he entered into occupation at Michaelmas; at any rate,
he had been plying his trade for close on two months, when on November
17th, 1739, and at a quarter to three in the afternoon, Kirstie went down
to the Parliament Close to carry a packet of thread to Mr. Seton.
The packet was smaller than usual, for Mrs. Johnstone had not been able to
finish her weekly quantity; but this did not matter, since for a month
past she had made none that was saleworthy.
Now this Mr. Seton was a pleasant man, in age almost threescore, and full
of interest in Mrs. Johnstone, having done business for her and her
mother, the Lady Balgarnock, pretty well all his life. And so it often
happened that, while weighing the thread and making out his receipt for
it, he would invite Kirstie to his office, in the rear of the shop, and
discuss her mistress's health or some late news of the city, or advise her
upon any small difficulty touching which she made bold to consult him--as,
for instance, this pious deception in the matter of the thread.
But to-day in the midst of their discourse Kirstie felt a sudden
uneasiness. Explain it she could not. Yet there came to her a sense,
almost amounting to certainty, that Mrs. Johnstone was in trouble and had
instant need of her. She had left her but a few minutes, and in ordinary
health; there was no reason to be given for this apprehension.
Nevertheless, as I say, she felt it as urgent as though her mistress's own
voice were calling. Mr. Seton observed her change of colour, and broke
off his chat to ask what was amiss. She knew that if she stayed to
explain he would laugh at her for a silly fancy; and if it were more than
a fancy, why then to explain would be a loss of precious time.
Pleading, therefore, some forgotten duty, she left the good man hurriedly,
and hastening out through the shop ran across Parliament Close and up the
great staircase as fast as her legs could take her.
By the time she reached the fourth flight of stairs she began to feel
ashamed of the impulse which brought her, and to argue with herself
against it; but at the same time her ears were open and listening for any
unusual sound in the rooms above. There was no such sound until she had
mounted half-way up the sixth flight, when she heard a light footstep
cross the landing, and, looking up, saw the barber's door very gently
closing and shutting out a glimpse of his white jacket.
For the moment she thought little of this. The latch had scarcely clicked
before she reached the landing outside, from which the last flight ran
straight up to her mistress's door. It stood open, though she had closed
it less than a quarter of an hour before. This was the first time she had
found it open on her return.
She caught at the stair-rail. Through the door and over the line of the
topmost stair she could just see the upper panes of the window at the back
of Mrs. Johnstone's room. A heavy beam crossed the ceiling in front of
the window, and from it, from a hook she had used that morning for
twisting her yarn, depended a black bundle.
The bundle--it was big and shapeless--swayed ever so slightly between her
and the yellow light sifted through the window. She tottered up, her
knees shaking, and flung herself into the room with a scream.
While she fumbled, still screaming, at the bundle hanging from the beam,
a step came swiftly up the stair, and the barber stood in the doorway.
She recognised him by his white suit, and on the instant saw his face for
the first time. He was a negro.
He laid a finger on his lips. Somehow the light showed them to her
blood-red, although the rest of his features, barring the whites of his
eyes, were all but indiscernible in the dusk. And somehow Kirstie felt a
silence imposed on her by this gesture. He stepped across the boards
swiftly and silently as a cat, found a stool, and set it under the beam.
In the act of mounting it he signalled to Kirstie to run downstairs for
help.
Silent as he, Kirstie slipped out at the door: on the threshold she
glanced over her shoulder and saw him upon the stool fumbling with one
hand at the yarn-rope, and with the other searching his apron pocket for a
knife or razor. She ran down the garret stairs, down the next
flight. . . .
Here, on the landing, she paused. She had not screamed since the black
man first appeared in the doorway. She was not screaming now; she felt
that she could not even raise the faintest cry. But a suspicion fastened
like a hand on the back of her neck and held her.
She hesitated for a short while, and began to climb the stairs again.
From the landing she looked up into the room. The black man was still on
the stool, his hand still on the rope. He had not cut the bundle down--
was no longer even searching for a knife.
She had been deceived. The man, whoever he was, had dismissed her when
every moment was precious, and was himself not even trying to help.
Nay, it might be . . .
She fought down the horror of it and rushed up the stair to fight the
thing, man or devil, and save her mistress. On her way she fumbled for
the scissors in her pocket. As she broke into the garret the barber,
leaving the bundle to swing from its rope, stepped off the stool and,
darting to a corner of the room, seemed to stand at bay there.
Kirstie sprang toward the stool and hacked at the rope. As the body
dropped she faced around on the man's corner, meaning to kill or be
killed.
But there was no man in the corner. Her eyes searched into its dusk, and
met only the shadow of the sloping attic. He had gone without a sound.
There had been no sound in the room but the thud of Mrs. Johnstone's body,
and this thud seemed to Kirstie to be taken up and echoed by the blow of
her own forehead upon the boards as she fell across the feet of her
mistress.