FullReads

But the world span round and the stars went out when the finder saw the flowers.

When Aunt Annie Allen came to herself, she found the water was rising rapidly. It was up to her ankles. She went indoors and asked for Grace.

“Save us, Ann!” said Barbara; “I thocht she was wi’ you. Where hae ye been till this time o’ nicht? An’ your feet’s dreepin’ wat. Haud aff the clean floor!”

“But Gracie! Oor lassie Grade! What’s come o’ Gracie?” wailed the elder woman.

At that instant there came so thrilling a cry from over the dark waters out of the night that the women turned to one another and instinctively caught at each other’s hands.

“Leave me, I maun gang,” said Aunt Annie. “That’s surely Grace.”

Her sister gripped her tight.

“Let me gang–let me gang. She’s my ain lassie, no yours!” Annie said fiercely, endeavouring to thrust off Barbara’s hands as they clutched her like birds’ talons from the bed.

“Help me to get up,” said Barbara; “I canna be left here. I’ll come wi’ ye.”

So she that had been sick for twelve years arose, like a ghost from the tomb, and with her sister went out to seek for the girl they had lost. They found their way to the boat, reeling together like drunken men. Annie almost lifted her sister in, and then fell herself among the drenched and waterlogged flowers.

With the instinct of old habitude they fell to the oars, Barbara rowing the better and the stronger. They felt the oily swirl of the Dee rising beneath them, and knew that there had been a mighty rain upon the hills.

“The Lord save us!” cried Barbara suddenly. “Look!”

She pointed up the long pool of the Black Water. What she saw no man knows, for Aunt Annie had fainted, and Barbara was never herself after that hour.

Aunt Annie lay like a log across her thwart. But, with the strength of another world, Barbara unshipped the oar of her sister and slipped it upon the thole-pin opposite to her own. Then she turned the head of the boat up the pool of the Black Watery Something white floated dancingly alongside, upborne for a moment on the boiling swirls of the rising water. Barbara dropped her oars, and snatched at it. She held on to some light wet fabric by one hand; with the other she shook her sister.

“Here’s oor wee Gracie,” she said: “Ann, help me hame wi’ her!”

So they brought her home, and laid her all in dripping white upon her white bed. Barbara sat at the bed-head and crooned, having lost her wits. Aunt Annie moved all in a piece, as though she were about to fall headlong.

“White floo’ers for the angels, where Gracie’s ga’en to! Annie, woman, dinna ye see them by her body–four great angels, at ilka corner yin?”

Barbara’s voice rose and fell, wayward and querulous. There was no other sound in the house, only the water sobbing against the edge of the ferry-boat.

“And the first is like a lion,” she went on, in a more even recitative, “and the second is like an ox, and the third has a face like a man, and the fourth is like a flying eagle. An’ they’re sittin’ on ilka bedpost; and they hae sax wings, that meet owre my Gracie, an’ they cry withoot ceasing, ‘Holy! holy! holy! Woe unto him that causeth one of these little ones to perish! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were cast into the deeps o’ the Black Water!'”

But the neighbours paid no attention to her–for, of course, she was mad.

Then the wise folk came and explained how it had all happened. Here she had been gathering flowers; here she had slipped; and here, again, she had fallen. Nothing could be clearer. There were the flowers. There was the dangerous pool on the Black Water. And there was the body of Grace Allen, a young thing dead in the flower of her days.