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The deed was done amid breathless apprehensions, but nothing disturbed the silence of the May noon except the lark that sprang at their feet and soared singing into the blue. It was Sandy who presently whistled like a blackbird to attract the attention of Bobby. There were no blackbirds in the kirkyard, and Bobby understood the signal.
Sometimes a candle was held up a little star of love, glimmering for a moment on the dark; but always there was a small face peering into the melancholy kirkyard. In midsummer, and at other seasons if the moon rose full and early and the sky was clear, Bobby could be seen on the grave. And when he recovered from these hurts he trotted about, making the circuit below the windows.
The humble funeral train passed under a bridge arch into the empty Grassmarket, and went up Candlemakers Row to the kirkyard gate. Such as Auld Jock, now, by unnumbered thousands, were coming to lie among the grand and great, laird and leddy, poet and prophet, persecutor and martyr, in the piled-up, historic burying-ground of old Greyfriars.
There was only one drift on the road between his cottage and the kirkyard, and it had been cut early that morning. Before daybreak Saunders had roused the lads in the bothy, and they had set to work by the light of lanterns with such good will that, when Drumsheugh came down to engineer a circuit for the funeral, there was a fair passage, with walls of snow twelve feet high on either side.
Among the wives she was esteemed a poor body whose infant did not see the inside of the kirk within a fortnight of its birth. Forty years ago it was an accepted superstition in Thrums that the ghosts of children who had died before they were baptized went wailing and wringing their hands round the kirkyard at nights, and that they would continue to do this until the crack of doom.
They wore their blacks at a funeral, refusing to cover them with anything, out of respect to the deceased, and standing longest in the kirkyard when the north wind was blowing across a hundred miles of snow.
"A year, a wee year, and she lay like a white flower, still and cold, and all my love could not make her hear. "And I sat by her silent spinning-wheel and waited till she should come back night by night; I forgot the old kirkyard, for how would the earth be keeping my love from coming to me, and as I sat came my old mother, and she was wise and gentle to her lame son.
He was notified, however, of the funeral ceremony, which was set for the Sabbath following her death, and Andrew was sure he would at least come for one last look at the wife whom he had loved so much and wronged so deeply. He did not do so. Shrouded in white, her hands full of white asters, Sophy was laid to rest in the little wind blown kirkyard of Pittendurie.
The dog is no' with me more than a couple of hours out of the twenty-four. I understand that most of his time is spent in the kirkyard, in weel-behaving, usefu' ways, but I could no' be sure." "But why have you fed him for so many years? Was his master a friend?" "Nae, just a customer, your Honor; a simple auld shepherd who ate his market-day dinner in my place.
This is what I thought as I stood in Ecclefechan kirkyard, and as I lingered I almost doubted if Carlyle COULD be dead. Was it possible that such as he could altogether die? Some touch, some turn, I could not tell what or how, seemed all that was necessary to enable me to see and to hear him.
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