In the house adjoining the one in which he resided, there lived a stout little man, a shoemaker, famous in the village for his great wit and his very considerable knavery. His jokes were mostly practical, and some of the best of them exceedingly akin to felonies. Poor Wood could not understand his wit, but, in his simplicity of heart, he deemed him honest, and would fain have prevailed on the neighbours to think so too. He knew it, he said, by his very look. Their gardens, like their houses, lay contiguous, and were separated from each other, not by a fence, but by four undressed stones laid in a line. Year after year was the garden of Wood becoming less productive; and he had a strange misgiving, but the thing was too absurd to be spoken of, that it was growing smaller every season by the breadth of a whole row of cabbages. On the one side, however, were the back walls of his own and his neighbour’s tenements; the four large stones stretched along the other; and nothing, surely, could be less likely than that either the stones or the houses should take it into their heads to rob him of his property. But the more he strove to exclude the idea the more it pressed upon him. He measured and remeasured to convince himself that it was a false one, and found that he had fallen on just the means of establishing its truth. The garden was actually growing smaller. But how? Just because it was bewitched! It was shrinking into itself under the force of some potent enchantment, like a piece of plaiding in the fulling-mill. No hypothesis could be more congenial; and he would have held by it, perhaps, until his dying day, had it not been struck down by one of those chance discoveries which destroy so many beautiful systems and spoil so much ingenious philosophy, quite in the way that Newton’s apple struck down the vortices of Descartes.
He was lying a-bed one morning in spring, about daybreak, when his attention was excited by a strange noise which seemed to proceed from the garden. Had he heard it two hours earlier, he would have wrapped up his head in the bedclothes and lain still; but now that the cock had crown, it could not, he concluded, be other than natural. Hastily throwing on part of his clothes, he stole warily to a back window, and saw, between him and the faint light that was beginning to peep out in the east, the figure of a man, armed with a lever, tugging at the stones. Two had already been shifted a full yard nearer the houses, and the figure was straining over a third. Wood crept stealthily out at the window, crawled on all fours to the intruder, and, tripping up his heels, laid him across his lever. It was his knavish neighbour the shoemaker. A scene of noisy contention ensued; groups of half-dressed town’s-folk, looming horrible in their shirts and nightcaps through the grey of morning, came issuing through the lanes and the closes; and the combatants were dragged asunder. And well was it for the shoemaker that it happened so; for Wood, though in his sixtieth year, was strong enough, and more than angry enough, to have torn him to pieces. Now, however, that the warfare had to be carried on by words, the case was quite reversed.
“Neebours,” said the shoemaker, who had the double advantage of being exceedingly plausible, and decidedly in the wrong, “I’m desperately ill-used this morning—desperately ill-used;—he would baith rob and murder me. I lang jaloused, ye see, that my wee bit o’ a yard was growing littler and littler ilka season; and, though no very ready to suspect folk, I just thought I would keep watch, and see wha was shifting the mark-stanes. Weel, and I did;—late and early did I watch for mair now than a fortnight; and wha did I see this morning through the back winnock but auld Sandy Wood there in his verra sark—Oh, it’s no him that has ony thought o’ his end!—poking the stones wi’ a lang kebar, intil the very heart o’ my grun’? See,” said he, pointing to the one that had not yet been moved, “see if he hasna shifted it a lang ell; and only notice the craft o’ the bodie in tirring up the yird about the lave, as if they had been a’ moved frae my side. Weel, I came out and challenged him, as wha widna?—says I, Sawney my man, that’s no honest; I’ll no bear that; and nae mair had I time to say, when up he flew at me like a wull-cat, and if it wasna for yoursels I daresay he would hae throttled me. Look how I am bleedin’;—and only look till him—look till the cankart deceitful bodie, if he has one word to put in for himsel’.”
There was truth in, at least, this last assertion; for poor Wood, mute with rage and astonishment, stood listening, in utter helplessness, to the astounding charge of the shoemaker,—almost the very charge he himself had to prefer. Twice did he spring forward to grapple with him, but the neighbours held him back, and every time he essayed to speak, his words—massed and tangled together, like wreaths of sea-weed in a hurricane—stuck in his throat. He continued to rage for three days after, and when the eruption had at length subsided, all his former resentments were found to be swallowed up, like the lesser craters of a volcano, in the gulf of one immense hatred.
His house, as has been said, lay contiguous to the house of the shoemaker, and he could not avoid seeing him, every time he went out and came in—a circumstance which he at first deemed rather gratifying than otherwise. It prevented his hatred from becoming vapid by setting it a-working at least ten times a day, as a musket would a barrel of ale if discharged into the bunghole. Its frequency, however, at length sickened him, and he had employed a mason to build a stone wall, which, by stretching from side to side of the close, was to shut up the view, when he sickened in right earnest, and at the end of a few days found himself a-dying. Still, however, he was possessed by his one engrossing resentment. It mingled with all his thoughts of the past and the future; and not only was he to carry it with him to the world to which he was going, but also to leave it behind him as a legacy to his children. Among his many other beliefs, there was a superstition, handed down from the times of the monks, that at the day of final doom all the people of the sheriffdom were to be judged on the moor of Navity; and both the judgment and the scene of it he had indissolubly associated with the shoemaker and the four stones. Experience had taught him the importance of securing a first hearing for his story; for was his neighbour, he concluded, to be beforehand with him, he would have as slight a chance of being righted at Navity as in his own garden. After brooding over the matter for a whole day, he called his friends and children round his bed, and raised himself on his elbow to address them.
“I’m wearing awa, bairns and neebours,” he said, “and it vexes me sair that that wretched bodie should see me going afore him. Mind, Jock, that ye’ll build the dike, and make it heigh, heigh, and stobbie on the top; and oh! keep him out o’ my lykewake, for should he but step in at the door, I’ll rise, Jock, frae the verra straiking-board, and do murder! Dinna let him so muckle as look on my coffin. I have been pondering a’ this day about the meeting at Navity, and the march-stanes; and I’ll tell you, Jock, how we’ll match him. Bury me ayont the saint’s dike on the Navity side, and dinna lay me deep. Ye ken the bonny green hillock, spreckled o’er wi’ gowans and puddock-flowers—bury me there, Jock; and yoursel’, and the auld wife, may just, when your hour comes, tak up your places beside me. We’ll a’ get up at the first tout—the ane helping the other; and I’se wad a I’m worth i’ the warld, we’ll be half-way up at Navity afore the shochlan, short-legged bodie wins o’er the dike.” Such was the dying injunction of Sandy Wood: and his tombstone still remains to testify that it was religiously attended to. An Englishman who came to reside in the parish, nearly an age after, and to whom the story must have been imparted in a rather imperfect manner, was shocked by what he deemed his unfair policy. The litigants, he said, should start together; he was certain it would be so in England where a fair field was all that would be given to St. Dunstan himself though he fought with the devil. And that it might be so here, he buried the tombstone of Wood in an immense heap of clay and gravel. It would keep him down, he said, until the little fellow would have clambered over the wall. The town’s-folk, however, who were better acquainted with the merits of the case, shovelled the heap aside; and it now forms two little hillocks which overtop the stone, and which, from the nature of the soil, are still more scantily covered with verdure than any part of the surrounding bank.
CHAPTER XV.
“Oh! I do ponder with most strange delight
On the calm slumbers of the dead-man’s night.”
Henry K. White.