Thrawn Janet

The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features, his eye was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity. Many young persons, coming to prepare themselves against the season of the Holy Communion, were dreadfully affected by his talk. He had a sermon on 1st Peter, v. and the 8th, “The devil as a roaring lion,” on the Sunday after every seventeenth of August, and he was accustomed to surpass himself upon that text both by the appalling nature of the matter and the terror of his bearing in the pulpit. The children were frightened into fits, and the old looked more than usually oracular, and were, all that day, full of those hints that Hamlet deprecated. The manse itself, where it stood by the water of Dule among some thick trees, with the Shaw overhanging it on the one side, and on the other many cold, moorish hilltops rising toward the sky, had begun, at a very early period of Mr. Soulis’s ministry, to be avoided in the dusk hours by all who valued themselves upon their prudence; and husbands sitting at the village alehouse shook their heads together at the thought of passing late by that uncanny neighbourhood. There was one spot, to be more particular, which was regarded with especial awe. The manse stood between the high road and the water of Dule, with a gable to each; its back was toward the church-town of Balweary, nearly half a mile away; in front of it, a bare garden, hedged with thorn, occupied the land between the river and the road. The house was two stories high, with two large rooms on each. It opened not directly on the garden, but on a causewayed path, or passage, giving on the road on the one hand, and closed on the other by the tall willows and elders that bordered on the stream. And it was this strip of causeway that enjoyed among the young parishioners of Balweary so infamous a reputation. The minister walked there often after dark, sometimes groaning aloud in the instancy of his unspoken prayers; and when he was from home, and the manse door was locked, the more daring schoolboys ventured, with beating hearts, to “follow my leader” across that legendary spot.

This atmosphere of terror, surrounding, as it did, a man of God of spotless character and orthodoxy, was a common cause of wonder and subject of inquiry among the few strangers who were led by chance or business into that unknown, outlying country. But many even of the people of the parish were ignorant of the strange events which had marked the first year of Mr. Soulis’s ministrations; and among those who were better informed, some were naturally reticent, and other shy of that particular topic. Now and again, only, one of the older folk would warm into courage over his third tumbler, and recount the cause of the minister’s strange looks and solitary life.

Fifty years ago, when Mr. Soulis came first into Balweary, he was still a young man—a boy, the folk said—full of book learning and grand at the exposition, but, as was natural in so young a man, with no living experience in religion. The younger sort were greatly taken with his gifts and his gab; but old, concerned, serious men and women were moved even to prayer for the young man, whom they took to be a self-deceiver, and for the parish that was like to be so ill-supplied. It was before the days of the moderates—weary fall them; but ill things are like good—they both come bit by bit, a little at a time; and there were folk even then that said the Lord had left the college professors to their own devices, and the lads that went to study with them would have done more and better by sitting in a peat-bog, like their forebears of the persecution, with a Bible under their armpit and a spirit of of prayer in their heart. There was no doubt, anyway, but that Mr. Soulis had been over long at the college. He was careful and troubled for many things besides the one thing needful. He had a haul of books with him—more than had ever been seen before in all that presbytery; and a sore work the carrier had with them, for they were all like to have smothered him in the Deil’s Hag between this and Kilmackerie. They were books of divinity, to be sure, or so they called them; but the serious were of the opinion that there was little service for so many books, when the whole of God’s Word would fit in the corner of a cloth. Then he would sit half the day, and half the night as well, which was scant decent—writing, no less; and at first, they were afraid he would read his sermons; and soon it proved he was writing a book himself, which was surely not fitting for one of his years and small experience.

Anyway it behoved him to get an old, decent wife to keep the manse for him and see to his little dinners; and he was recommended to an old jade—Janet McClour, they called her—and so far left him to himself as to be persuaded over. There were many who advised him to the contrary, for Janet was more than suspected by the best folk in Balweary. Long before that, she had born a child to a dragoon; she had not taken Communion for maybe thirty years; and children had seen her mumbling to herself up on Key’s Loan at dusk, which was a strange time and place for a God-fearing woman. However, it was the laird himself that had first told the minister of Janet; and in those days he would have done a great deal to pleasure the laird. When the folk told him that Janet was kin to the devil, it was a superstition by his way of it; and when they cast up the Bible to him and the witch of Endor, he would shove it down their throats that those days were long gone, and the devil was mercifully restrained.

Well, when it got about the village that Janet McClour was to be servant at the manse, the folk were fair mad with her and him both; and some of the goodwives had no better to do than get round her doorkeeps and charge her with all that was known against her, from the soldier’s baby to John Tamson’s two cows. She was no great speaker; folk usually let her go her own way, and she let them go theirs, with neither ‘good evening’ nor ‘good day’; but when she buckled to, she had a tongue to deafen the miller. Up she got, and there wasn’t an old story in Balweary but she forced somebody to jump for it that day; they couldn’t say one thing but she could say two for it; till, near the end, the goodwives up and caught hold of her, and clawed the coats off her back, and pulled her down the village to the water of Dule, to see if she were a witch or not, swim or drown. The hag shrieked till you could hear her at the Hanging Shaw, and she fought like ten; there was many a goodwife who bore the mark of her the next day and many a long day after; and just in the hottest of the fracas, who should come up (for his sins) but the new minister.

“Women,” said he (and he had a grand voice), “I charge you in the Lord’s name to let her go.”

Janet ran to him—she was fair wild with terror—and clung to him, and prayed him, for Christ’s sake, save her from her troubles; and they, for their part, told him all that was known, and maybe more.

“Woman,” says he to Janet, “is this true?”

“As the Lord sees me,” says she, “as the Lord made me, not a word of it. Before the baby,” says she, “I’ve been a decent woman all my days.”

“Will you,” says Mr. Soulis, “in the name of God, and before me, His unworthy minister, renounce the devil and his works?”

Well, it would appear that when he asked that, she gave a snarl that fairly frightened them that saw her, and they could hear her teeth scrape together in her jaws; but there was nothing for it but the one way or the other; and Janet lifted up her hand and renounced the devil before them all.

“And now,” says Mr. Soulis to the goodwives, “home with you, one and all, and pray to God for His forgiveness.”

And he gave Janet his arm, though she had little on her but a chemise, and took her up the village to her own door like a lady of the land; and her shrieking and laughing as was a scandal to be heard.

There were many grave folk long over their prayers that night; but when the morn came there was such a fear that fell upon all Balweary that the children hid themselves, and even the menfolk stood and peeped out from their doors. For there was Janet coming down the village—her or her likeness, none could tell—with her neck twisted, and her head on one side, like a body that has been hanged, and a snarl on her face like an unstretched corpse. By and by they got used to it, and even pried at her to know what was wrong; but from that day forth she couldn’t speak like a Christian woman, but slavered and played click with her teeth like a pair of shears; and from that day forth the name of God came never on her lips. Sometimes she would try to say it, but it mightn’t be. Those that knew best said least; but they never gave that Thing the name of Janet McClour; for the old Janet, by their way of it, was henceforth in hell that day. But the minister was neither to hold nor to bind; he preached about nothing but the folk’s cruelty that had given her a stroke of the palsy; he slapped the children that meddled her; and he had her up to the manse that same night, and dwelt there all alone with her under the Hanging Shaw.

Well, time went by: and the idler sort commenced to think more lightly of that black business. The minister was well thought of; he was very late at the writing, folk would see his candle down by the Dule water even after twelve; and he seemed pleased with himself and careless as at first, though everybody could see that he was wasting away. As for Janet she came and she went; if she didn’t speak much before, it was reason she should speak less then; she meddled nobody; but she was an eldritch thing to see, and none would have broken a deal with her for Balweary church land.

About the end of July there came a spell of weather, the like of it never was in that countryside; it was windless and hot and heartless; the herds couldn’t go up the Black Hill, the children were too weary to play; yet it was gusty too, with claps of hot wind that rumbled in the glens, and bits of showers that moistened nothing. We really thought it but to thunder on the morn; but the morn came, and the morn’s morning, and it was still the same uncanny weather, sore on folks and cattle. Of all that were the worst, none suffered like Mr. Soulis; he could neither sleep nor eat, he told his elders; and when he wasn’t writing at his paltry book, he would be roaming over all the countryside like a man possessed, when everybody else was content to keep cool inside the house.

Above Hanging Shaw, in the shelter of the Black Hill, there’s a small enclosed ground with an iron gate; and it seems, in the old days, that was the churchyard of Balweary, and consecrated by the Papists before the blessed light shone upon the kingdom. It was a favourite haunt of Mr. Soulis’s anyway; there he would sit and consider his sermons; and indeed it’s a cozy little space. Well, as he came over the west end of the Black Hill one day, he saw first two, and then four, and then seven crows flying round and round above the old churchyard. They flew low and heavy, and squawked to each other as they went; and it was clear to Mr. Soulis that something had put them from their ordinary. He wasn’t easily frightened off, and went straight up to the walls; and what should he find there but a man, or the appearance of a man, sitting in the inside upon a grave. He was of a great stature, and black as hell, and his eyes were singular to see.* Mr. Soulis had heard tell of black men, many times; but there was something strange about this black man that daunted him. Hot as he was, he took a kind of cold shudder in the marrow of his bones; but up he spoke for all that; and says he: “My friend are you a stranger in this place?” The black man answered never a word; he got upon his feet, and began to shuffle to the wall on the far side; but he ever looked at the minister; and the minister stood and looked back; till all in a minute the black man was over the wall and running for the shelter of the trees. Mr. Soulis, he hardly knew why, ran after him; but he was fair worn out with his walk and the hot, unwholesome weather; and ran as he liked, he got no more than a glimpse of the black man among the birches, till he wound down to the foot of the hillside, and there he saw him once more, gone, hop, step, and leap, over Dule water to the manse.

*It was a common belief in Scotland that the devil appeared as a black man. (While "black" in this sense is meant to be taken literally as the colour black, it could also be applied to a man with very dark skin that appears black.)