Beautiful Just! by Lillian Beckwith Read Free Book Online Page A

rising moon. She turned away, shrugging her shoulders. Oh well, she told herself. There’ll come another season. Another whelk gathering.

The Lonely Ghost
    â€˜I’m not claiming I saw a ghost,’ I insisted. ‘All I am saying is that I saw a man coming to my house three hours after you say he was dead.’
    My assertion brought tolerant grunts from the men and whispers of disquiet from the women who were assembled at the evening ceilidh. Lachlan solemnly knocked out his pipe on the bars of the grate and Ian, with equal solemnity, spat into the fire. We all stared with varying degrees of interest at the glob of spittle shrivelling on the glowing peat.
    â€˜He was dead, right enough,’ maintained Erchy.
    â€˜Indeed that’s true,’ asseverated Morag. ‘Wasn’t myself there with Barbac and Murdoch waitin’ beside the bed for the last wind to go out of him just. An’ didn’t Murdoch lean over the bed to say somethin’ when his teeths fell out an’ slid off the bed down on to the floor. I bent down to get a hold of them before anyone would put a foot on them an’ I’d scarce raised myself again when Neilly was gone.’
    â€˜Why had Murdoch got his teeths in?’ interrupted Johnny.
    â€˜Ach, to see Neilly off just,’ explained Morag. ‘An’ the nurse was there straightenin’ him out before nine o’clock,’ she concluded with emphasis.
    â€˜There now!’ said Janet, summing up the evidence. ‘Whoever it was you saw last night it couldn’t have been Neilly himself.’
    â€˜It was a ghost you saw, surely,’ said Anna Vic.
    Of course I hadn’t seen a ghost. The man I had seen was flesh and blood and I would have sworn to that. But then I would also have sworn that the man I had seen the previous evening was none other than the dead Neilly. It had been coming up to nine o’clock and a damp chill dusk was beginning to soak into the evening. I had been over to the henhouse to ensure my broody hen was back on her nest and to close up the hens for the night and I was just about to go inside my cottage when I caught sight of Neilly coming along the path. I had no doubts that it was Neilly: Bruach’s population was small enough for each inhabitant to be easily recognizable even at considerable distances and Neilly was no more than fifty yards away. I knew him by his gait; by his size and shape; by the peaked yachtsman’s cap he always wore and by the fact that he was smoking a cigarette. Though most of the young men in Bruach smoked cigarettes all the old men remained pipe addicts; all that is except Neilly who was the only man of his generation to have acquired the habit of cigarette smoking. As I waited by the open door I saw his cigarette glow bright as if he had taken a strong puff at it and then the next moment he had thrown it aside. In the dusk I saw the red ash scatter over the grass and I was about to call out to him when he had turned abruptly and gone away. After a moment of surprise I had shrugged my shoulders and thought no more of the incident. Neilly had not previously ventured near my cottage except once to bring me a telegram and I assumed that having seen that I was alone he had suddenly changed his mind about coming to see me. Consequently the next morning when Erchy had called out to me in passing that Neilly was dead I was genuinely shocked.
    â€˜That’s very sudden!’ I exclaimed.
    â€˜Aye, sudden enough,’ agreed Erchy. He was on his way to lift his lobster creels at the time so I did not delay him with questions. Nor did I mention that I had seen Neilly only the previous evening so when, at the ceilidh that night, someone mentioned his having died ‘at the back of six’ I had immediately disputed the time, explaining that it was impossible for Neilly to have been dead at six o’clock when I had seen him, presumably still hale and hearty, at nine