Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

THE GREEN LADY.

The wife of a Banffshire proprietor, of the minor class, had been about six months dead, when one of her husband’s ploughmen, returning on horseback from the smithy in the twilight of an autumn evening, was accosted, on the banks of a small stream, by a stranger lady, tall and slim, and wholly attired in green, with her face wrapped up in the hood of her mantle—who requested to be taken up behind him on the horse, and carried across. There was something in the tones of her voice that seemed to thrill through his very bones, and to insinuate itself in the form of a chill fluid between his skull and the scalp. The request, too, seemed a strange one; for the rivulet was small and low, and could present no serious bar to the progress of the most timid traveller. But the man, unwilling ungallantly to disoblige a lady, turned his horse to the bank, and she sprang up lightly behind him. She was, however, a personage that could be better seen than felt; and came in contact with the ploughman’s back, he said, as if she had been an ill-filled sack of wool. And when, on reaching the opposite side of the streamlet, she leaped down as lightly as she had mounted, and he turned fearfully round to catch a second glimpse of her, it was in the conviction that she was a creature considerably less earthly in her texture than himself. She opened with two pale, thin arms, the enveloping hood, exhibiting a face equally pale and thin, which seemed marked, however, by the roguish, half-humorous expression of one who had just succeeded in playing off a good joke. “My dead mistress!” exclaimed the ploughman. “Yes, John, your mistress,” replied the ghost. “But ride home, my bonny man, for it’s growing late; you and I will be better acquainted erelong.” John accordingly rode home, and told his story.

Next evening, about the same hour, as two of the laird’s servant-maids were engaged in washing in an out-house, there came a slight tap to the door. “Come in,” said one of the maids; and the lady entered, dressed, as on the previous night, in green. She swept past them to the inner part of the washing-room; and seating herself on a low bench, from which, ere her death, she used occasionally to superintend their employment, she began to question them, as if still in the body, about the progress of their work. The girls, however, were greatly too frightened to reply. She then visited an old woman who had nursed the laird, and to whom she used to show, ere her departure, considerably more kindness than her husband. And she now seemed as much interested in her welfare as ever. She inquired whether the laird was kind to her; and, looking round her little smoky cottage, regretted she should be so indifferently lodged, and that her cupboard, which was rather of the emptiest at the time, should not be more amply furnished. For nearly a twelvemonth after, scarce a day passed in which she was not seen by some of the domestics—never, however, except on one occasion, after the sun had risen, or before it had set. The maids could see her in the grey of the morning flitting like a shadow round their beds, or peering in upon them at night through the dark window-panes, or at half-open doors. In the evening she would glide into the kitchen or some of the out-houses—one of the most familiar and least dignified of her class that ever held intercourse with mankind—and inquire of the girls how they had been employed during the day; often, however, without obtaining an answer, though from a different cause from that which had at first tied their tongues. For they had become so regardless of her presence, viewing her simply as a troublesome mistress who had no longer any claim to be heeded, that when she entered, and they had dropped their conversation, under the impression that their visitor was a creature of flesh and blood like themselves, they would again resume it, remarking that the entrant was “only the green lady.” Though always cadaverously pale and miserable-looking, she affected a joyous disposition, and was frequently heard to laugh, even when invisible. At one time, when provoked by the studied silence of a servant girl, she flung a pillow at her head, which the girl caught up and returned; at another, she presented her first acquaintance, the ploughman, with what seemed to be a handful of silver coin, which he transferred to his pocket, but which, on hearing her laugh immediately after she had disappeared, he drew out again, and found to be merely a handful of slate-shivers. On yet another occasion, the man, when passing on horseback through a clump of wood, was repeatedly struck from behind the trees by little pellets of turf; and, on riding into the thicket, he found that his assailant was the green lady. To her husband she never appeared; but he frequently heard the tones of her voice echoing from the lower apartments, and the faint peal of her cold unnatural laugh.

One day at noon, a year after her first appearance, the old nurse was surprised to see her enter the cottage, as all her previous visits had been made early in the morning or late in the evening; whereas now, though the day was dark and lowering, and a storm of wind and rain had just broken out, still it was day. “Mammie!” she said, “I cannot open the heart of the laird, and I have nothing of my own to give you; but I think I can do something for you now. Go straight to the White House [that of a neighbouring proprietor], and tell the folk there to set out, with all the speed of man and horse, for the black rock at the foot of the crags, or they’ll rue it dearly to their dying day. Their bairns, foolish things, have gone out to the rock, and the sea has flowed round them; and if no help reach them soon, they’ll be all scattered like seaware on the shore ere the fall of the tide. But if you go and tell your story at the White House, mammie, the bairns will be safe for an hour to come; and there will be something done by their mother to better you, for the news.” The woman went as directed, and told her story; and the father of the children set out on horseback in hot haste for the rock—a low, insulated skerry, which, lying on a solitary part of the beach, far below the line of flood, was shut out from the view of the inhabited country by a wall of precipices, and covered every tide by several feet of water. On reaching the edge of the cliffs, he saw the black rock, as the woman had described, surrounded by the sea, and the children clinging to its higher crags. But, though the waves were fast rising, his attempts to ride out through the surf to the poor little things were frustrated by their cries, which so frightened his horse as to render it unmanageable; and so he had to gallop on to the nearest fishing village for a boat. So much time was unavoidably lost, in consequence, that nearly the whole beach was covered by the sea, and the surf had begun to lash the feet of the precipices behind; but, until the boat arrived, not a single wave dashed over the black rock; though immediately after the last of the children had been rescued, an immense wreath of foam rose twice a man’s height over its topmost pinnacle.

The old nurse, on her return to the cottage, found the green lady sitting beside the fire. “Mammie,” she said, “you have made friends to yourself to-day, who will be kinder to you than your foster-son. I must now leave you: my time is out, and you’ll be all left to yourselves; but I’ll have no rest, mammie, for many a twelvemonth to come. Ten years ago a travelling pedlar broke into our garden in the fruit season, and I sent out our old ploughman, who is now in Ireland, to drive him away. It was on a Sunday, and everybody else was in church. The men struggled and fought, and the pedlar was killed. But though I at first thought of bringing the case before the laird, when I saw the dead man’s pack with its silks and its velvets, and this unhappy piece of green satin (shaking her dress), my foolish heart beguiled me, and I bade the ploughman bury the pedlar’s body under our ash-tree, in the corner of our garden, and we divided his goods and money between us. You must bid the laird raise his bones, and carry them to the churchyard; and the gold, which you will find in the little bole under the tapestry in my room, must be sent to a poor old widow, the pedlar’s mother, who lives on the shore of Leith. I must now away to Ireland to the ploughman; and I’ll be e’en less welcome to him, mammie, than at the laird’s; but the hungry blood cries loud against us both—him and me—and we must suffer together. Take care you look not after me till I have passed the knowe.” She glided away as she spoke in a gleam of light; and when the old woman had withdrawn her hand from her eyes, dazzled by the sudden brightness, she saw only a large black greyhound crossing the moor. And the green lady was never afterwards seen in Scotland. But the little hoard of gold pieces, stored in a concealed recess of her former apartment, and the mouldering remains of the pedlar under the ash-tree, gave evidence to the truth of her narrative.

MUNRO THE POST.

I shall present the reader with one other story under this head—a ghost story of the more frightful class; which, though not at all inexplicable on natural principles, has as many marks of authenticity about it as any of the kind I am acquainted with. For many years the Cromarty Post-office, which, from the peninsular situation of the place, lies considerably out of the line of the mail, was connected with Inverness by a brace of pedestrian postmen, who divided the road between them into two stages; the last, or Cromarty stage, commencing at Fortrose. The post who, about half a century ago, travelled over this terminal stage six times every week was an elderly Highlander of the clan Munro—a staid, grave-featured man, somewhat tinged, it was said, by the constitutional melancholy of his country-folk, and not a little influenced by their peculiar beliefs. He had set out for Fortrose on his way home one evening, when he was overtaken by two acquaintances—the one a miller of Resolis, the other a tacksman of the parish of Cromarty—both considerably in liquor, and loud and angry in dispute. One of the Fortrose fairs had been held that day; and they had quarrelled in driving a bargain. Saunders Munro strove to pacify them, but to little purpose—they bickered idly on with drunken pertinacity; and it was with no little anxiety that, as they reached the Burn of Rosemarkie, where the White-bog and Scarfs-craig roads part company, he saw them pause for a moment, as if to determine their route homewards. The miller was a tall athletic Highlander; the tacksman a compact, nervous man, not above the middle size, but resolute and strongly built. He could scarce, however, be deemed a full match for the Highlander; and under some such impression, old Saunders, unluckily as it proved, laid hold of him as he stood hesitating. “You must not go by that White-bog road,” he said; “it is the near road for the miller, but not for you; you must come with me by the Scarfs-craig.” “No, Saunders,” said the tacksman; “I know what you mean; you do not like that I should cross the Maolbuie moor with the miller; but, big as he is, he’ll be bigger yet or he daunt me; and I’ll just go by the White-bog road to show him that.” “Hoot, man,” replied Saunders, “I’m no thinking o’ that at all; I’m just no very weel to-night, and would be the better for your company; and so ye’ll come hame this way with me.” “Not a foot,” doggedly rejoined the tacksman; and, shaking off the old man, he took the White-bog road with the miller. Saunders stood gazing anxiously after them as they descended the precipitous sides of the burn, until a jutting crag hid them from his sight. And for the rest of the evening, when pursuing his journey homewards, he felt burdened by an overpowering anxiety, which, disproportioned as it seemed to the occasion, he could not shake off.

The tacksman reached his home in less than two hours after he had parted from old Saunders; but two full days elapsed ere any one heard of the miller. In the evening of the second day, two young girls, the miller’s sisters, who, after many fruitless inquiries regarding him, had at length come to learn in whose company he had quitted the fair, called at the farmhouse, and found the tacksman sitting moodily beside the fire. He started up, however, as one of them addressed him, and seemed strangely confused on being asked where he had parted from their brother. “I do not remember,” he said, “being with your brother at all; and yet, now that I think of it, we must surely have left Rosemarkie together. The truth is, we had both rather too much drink in our heads. But I have some remembrance of passing the Grey Cairn in his company; and—and;—but—I must surely have left him at the Grey Cairn.” “It must be ill with my brother,” exclaimed one of the girls, “if he be still at the Grey Cairn!” “In truth,” replied the tacksman, “I cannot well say where we parted, or whether I did not leave him at Rosemarkie with old Saunders Munro the post.”

The evening was by this time merging into night, but the two terrified girls set out for the cairn; and the tacksman, taking down his bonnet, seemed as if he purposed accompanying them. On reaching, however, the outer wall of his yard, he stood for a few seconds as if undecided, and then, turning fairly round, left them to proceed alone. They entered one of the blind pathways that go winding in every direction through the long heath of the Maolbuie—a bleak, desolate, tumulus-mottled moor—the scene in some remote age of a battle unrecorded by the historian; and its grey cairn, a vast accumulation of lichened stone, is said to cover, as I have already stated in an early chapter, the grave of a Pictish monarch, who, with half his army, perished in the fray. They reached the cairn; but all was silent, save that a chill breeze was moaning through the interstices of the shapeless pile, and sullenly waving the few fir seedlings that skirt its base; and they had turned to leave the spot, when they were startled by the howling of a dog a few hundred yards away. There was a dolorous wildness blent with an ominous familiarity in the sounds, that smote upon their hearts; and they struck out into the moor in the direction whence they proceeded, convinced that they were at length to learn the worst. On coming up to the animal, they found it standing beside the dead body of its master, their brother. The corpse was examined next morning by some of the neighbouring farmers; but nothing could be conclusively determined respecting the manner in which the unfortunate man had met his death. The neckcloth seemed straitened, and the folds somewhat compressed, as if it had been grasped by the hand; but then the throat and neck were scarce at all discoloured, nor were the features more distorted than if the death had been a natural one. The heath and mosses, too, in which the body had half sunk, rose as unbroken on every side of it as if they had never been pressed by the foot. There was no interference of the magistrate in the case, nor examination of parties. The body was conveyed to the churchyard and buried; and a little pile of moor-stones, erected by the herd-boys who tend their cattle on the moor, continued to mark, when I last passed the way, the spot where it had been found.

One evening, a few weeks after the interment, as old Saunders the postman was coming slowly down upon the town of Cromarty through the dark Navity woods, his eye caught a tall figure coming up behind him, and mistaking it in the uncertain light for an acquaintance, a farmer, he paused for a moment by the wayside, and placed his hand almost mechanically on the ready snuff-box. What, however, was his horror and astonishment to find, that what he had mistaken for his acquaintance the farmer was the dead miller of Resolis, attired, as was the wont of the deceased when in holiday trim, in the Highland costume. He could see, scarce less distinctly than when he had parted from him at the Burn of Rosemarkie, the chequers of the tartan and the scarlet of the gay hose garter, and—a circumstance I have never known omitted in any edition of the story—the glimmer of the large brass pin which fastened the kilt at the waist. For an instant Saunders felt as if rooted to the spot; and then starting forward he hurried homewards, half beside himself with a terror that seemed to obliterate every idea of space and time, but collected enough to remark that the spectre kept close beside him, taking step for step with him as he went, until, at the gate of a burying-ground immediately over the town, it disappeared. On the following evening, when again passing through the Navity woods, nervous with the recollection of the previous night’s adventure, he was startled by a rustling in the bushes; a shadowy figure came gliding out from among them to the middle of the road, and he found himself a second time in the presence of the spectre, which accompanied him, as before, to the gate of the burying-ground. He contrived on the day after to leave Fortrose at so early an hour, that he had reached the outer skirts of the town of Cromarty as the sun was setting; but on crossing the street to his own house, the spectre started up beside him in the clear twilight, and, regarding him with an expression of grieved anxiety, disappeared as he entered the door. An aunt of the writer, who had occasion to call at his house on this evening, found him in bed in a corner of the sitting-room of his domicile, and on inquiring whether he was ill, was informed by his wife, who sat beside him, the cause of his indisposition.