On his next day’s journey, Saunders, instead of following his usual road, struck, on his return, across the fields in the direction of a wooded ravine, which, forming part of the pleasure-grounds of Cromarty House, bears the name of the Ladies’ Walk. The evening was cloudless and bright; and the sun had but just disappeared behind the hill, when he entered the wooded hollow and crossed the little stream which runs along its bottom. But on rising along the opposite acclivity, he found that the apparition of the dead miller, true to him as his shadow, was climbing the hill by his side; and where the path becomes so narrow—bounded on the one side by a steep descending bank, and on the other by a line of flowering shrubs—that two can hardly walk abreast, it glided onwards through the bushes as lightly as a column of smoke, not a leaf stirring as it passed. On reaching the broken wall which separates the pleasure-grounds from the old parish-churchyard, it stood, and, as Saunders was stepping over the fence, spoke for the first time. “Stop, Saunders,” it said, “I must speak to you.” “I have neither faith nor strength,” replied Saunders, hurrying away, “to speak to the like of you.”
The minister of the parish at the time was a gentleman of strong good sense and a liberal tone of mind; and when the old man waited on him in the course of the evening, and imparted to him his story, he questioned him regarding the state of his nerves and stomach, and gave him an advice which very considerably resembled the prescription of a physician. But though it might be the best possible in the circumstances, it wholly failed to satisfy Saunders; and so he unburdened his mind on the matter to one of the elders of the parish, a worthy sensible Udoll farmer, a high specimen of the class well known in the north country as “the Men,” who, considerably advanced in life, had formed his beliefs at an earlier period than his minister, and was not in the least disposed to treat the case medicinally. He arranged with Saunders a meeting for the following evening at the hill of Eathie, a few miles from his journey’s end; and at Eathie they accordingly met, and passed on through the Navity woods together. But though it was late and long ere they reached town, the details of what befell them by the way they never communicated to any one. Saunders Munro, however, did not again see the apparition, though he travelled for years after at all hours of the day and night. The elder, when rallied regarding the story by a town’s-man whom I well knew, and who related the circumstance to me, looked him full in the face, and, with an expression of severe gravity, “bade him never select that subject for a joke again.” “Young man,” he said, “it was no joking business!”
No one, however, evinced so deep an anxiety on the subject of the miller’s ghost, and its supposed interview with the elder, as the suspected tacksman. It is known that on one occasion he placed himself in the elder’s way when the latter was returning from a funeral, and solicited a few minutes’ private conversation with him; but was sternly repelled. “You can have but one business with me,” the elder said; “and, if your conscience be clear from blood, not one itself.” Whatever hand the tacksman may have had in the miller’s death, no one who knew him, or the circumstances in which he had parted on the fatal night from old Saunders, could regard him as a murderer; though few real murderers ever wore out life in greater apparent unhappiness than he. He never after held up his head, but went about his ordinary labours dejected and spiritless, and invincibly taciturn; and, some few years subsequent to the event, he fell into a lingering illness, of which he died. Were one making a ghost story, it would be no difficult matter to make a more satisfactory one. Never was there a ghost that appeared to less purpose than that of the miller, or was less fortunate in securing a publisher for its secret; but sure I am, never was there a ghost story more firmly believed in the immediate scene of it, or narrated with greater truth-like minuteness of detail, or with less suspicion of at least the honesty of the parties on whose testimony it rested. Nor was it without its effect in adding strength, within the sphere of its influence, to the fence set around the sacred tabernacle of the human soul. Where such stories are credited, the violent spilling of man’s life is never regarded as merely “the diverting of a little red puddle from its source.”
CHAPTER XXVI.
“Oh, many are the poets that are sown
By nature; men endow’d with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine,
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.”
—Wordsworth.
THE LITERATI OF CROMARTY.