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

o’clock.
    â€˜I know it was round nine o’clock,’ I assured them, ‘because when I went inside I put on the wireless and listened to the news.’ I did not know then that Neilly had been too ill to rise from his bed for three days before he died so it was natural that their reaction to my claim to have seen him at any time at all the previous evening should be one of mingled disbelief and consternation.
    â€˜If you didn’t see a ghost then who was it you saw?’ persisted Anna Vic, who would never have risked hurting my feelings by suggesting that I had been mistaken.
    I shook my head slowly. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Obviously it wasn’t Neilly but I’m blessed if I know who it was in that case.’
    â€˜Then it was someone mighty like,’ said Erchy.
    â€˜He must have been or I wouldn’t have made the mistake,’ I agreed.
    â€˜Ach, but maybe you were not mistaken at all,’ speculated Anna Vic.
    â€˜Aye, right enough I believe she might have had the second sight if she’d not been born in a town,’ said Erchy, scrutinizing me with much the same interest as a pathologist might scrutinize a specimen in a bottle.
    â€˜I certainly haven’t got second sight,’ I denied with a smile.
    Lachlan spoke ‘You say he was smokin’ a cigarette?’ he probed. I nodded and they thought for a while, murmuring interrogatively but not, I thought, so much interested in whether or not I had seen a ghost as Anna Vic wanted to surmise but in the more practical question as to who it could have been coming to visit me? Why would he be coming? Why had he changed his mind and gone away again? The obvious answer was that whoever it had been had wanted to borrow something but they could think of no one who was currently proposing to embark on any job for which he might need to borrow tools from me and of course it was unthinkable that it could have been anyone wanting to return something already borrowed. In Bruach when you lent anything you usually had to follow its track round from neighbour to neighbour when you wanted it back.
    â€˜What like of man would go that close to a place an’ then turn away without so much as a word?’ demanded Adam, the gamekeeper, in a puzzled voice. ‘Nobody from hereabouts surely?’
    â€˜Indeed no,’ endorsed Janet. ‘An’ there’s been no stranger here for weeks past.’
    â€˜It’s the cigarette that is the mystery,’ pronounced Lachlan. ‘Indeed I know of no man who could look like Neilly an’ be smokin’ a cigarette.’
    â€˜Well, I did mention that he threw it away,’ I reminded them but they ignored me and again fell to discussing the possible identity of the man I claimed to have seen. Each suggestion was rejected almost as quickly as it was offered.
    â€˜It’s strange if it was Neilly when you come to think of it,’ Janet pointed out. ‘It’s not as though you’ve ever had much to do with the man since you’ve been here.’
    â€˜That’s true,’ I agreed. I had had very little to do with Neilly. Like everyone else we commented politely on the weather by way of greeting whenever we met but since Neilly rarely dropped in at any of the ceilidhs and since he did not shop at the grocery van or join up with the peat cutting parties in spring there was really no common meeting place. The only time I had exchanged more than half a dozen consecutive words with him was one day when I had been coming back from an early morning wander on the moors. I had been picking my way around the peat bogs when I heard a shout and looking in the direction from which it came I saw Neilly’s wife, Barbac, sitting beside the road. She was clutching at her stomach and had obviously been vomiting but she insisted that she was all right except that when the vomiting struck her first she had fallen and twisted her knee so