The Weeping Lass at the
Dancing Place

OUTSIDE many a Scottish village, where the crossroads meet, there will be a level bit of ground lying in one of the triangles made by the intersection of the roads. In the old days folk would be calling such a spot the dancing place, because it was the custom of the young lads and lasses of the neighborhood to gather there, to dance away the hours of a moonlit night. Generations of lively young feet trod down and packed the soil in these places, until the surface was as hard and smooth as stone. No fine laird and his lady could ever have found a grander floor to dance upon than a dancing place.

It was once in the summer twilight, a long, long time ago, that a company of young folk gathered at such a dancing place to foot it gaily, by the light of the moon.

They came from all directions; those from the village on foot, and those who lived farther away on crofts or farmsteads, riding upon their shaggy wee Highland ponies or upon their workaday mares. Some of the lads came riding with their lasses perched on their saddles behind them, and some of them came walking with their sweethearts on their arms. Their gay voices rose sweetly on the fresh breeze of the summer evening, and the sound of talk and laughter filled the air as the young folk met.

Those who came alone soon found partners, except for one lass who came stealing along from the village, at the end of the merry line. She did not join the others but sat herself down in the shadows cast by a hedge along the road.

The voices of the dancers provided the music for their dancing. Having neither pipe nor fiddle to mark the measures, they moved to the tunes of the songs they sang, and if the breath of some of them failed in the exertion of the dance, there were always enough of the singers to keep the song going until the laggards could take up the tune again.

The lass who sat under the hedge made no move to join in the fun. Word had been brought to her in the early springtime, some months before, that her lover had been drowned in the sea during the herring fishing, and she had made a vow never to sing or dance again all her whole life long.

From the day they told her of her true love’s death she had spent all her time lamenting and weeping. Even in her sleep she dreamed of her loss, and the tears ran down her cheeks while she slept.

It was the grief of her life that she could not sit and mourn beside the grave of her dead lover, but the seaside village to which he had gone for the fishing was at a distance from his own home. When his body was washed ashore, the villagers had carried it to their own graveyard and buried it there.

Now the lass sat by herself in the shadow of the hedge, near the dancing place where she and her love had once been happy together, and watched and listened and wept.

While the dancers were merrymaking a man came cantering along the road on a great black horse. He pulled up his steed at sight of the merry throng, and swinging himself from its back, he hurried to join their sport. The dancers, intent upon their own amusement, paid him little heed, but opened their ranks to let him in. He, for his part, threw himself into the dance with a will. No voice laughed louder or sang more gaily, no foot moved more fleetly than that of the stranger in their midst.

So the night wore on, and many a reel and strathspey and jig was footed by the young folk, and many a gay lilt was sung. But all good things must come to an end. As the hour grew late, the dancers, tiring, began to steal away for home. One or two at a time they went at first, then in larger numbers, until the last stragglers in a body hurried away. No one was left then at the dancing place but the stranger who had ridden there upon his black horse and the lass who sat weeping under the hedge.

He strode up to the lass and stood looking down upon her.

“You were once a bonnie, bonnie lass,” said he. “And you’d be bonnie again if your face were not so raddled with weeping and your eyes not so swollen red.”

She buried her face in her hands and wept harder. “Why would I not be weeping?” said she. “The tears I’m shedding are for my true love who is dead.”

“Greeting and grieving will not bring the dead back to life again,” the stranger said roughly. “So much mourning serves no purpose but to make it so the dead cannot rest easy in their graves. Come, lass, dry your tears and hush your lament, and tread a measure with me!”

She looked up at him but could not see his face because of the tears in her eyes. She shook her head. “I will not dance,” said she.

But he reached down and took her wrist in his hand, and pulling her to her feet, he drew her toward the dancing place. She held back and struggled with all her might, but he was stronger than she and he would not let her go. Against her will she found her feet were moving in the figures of the dance, while he whistled softly to mark the time of their steps.

“I will not!” she protested and tried to free herself.

“Aye, but you will!” said he, and she could not stop, because he whirled her so madly and held her so fast.

Then, she looked up at the face that bent above her. A shaft of the cold moonlight lay white upon it, and she cried out. The face she saw was that of the lover whom she had mourned so long! Her heart leaped for joy and she called him by name. “They told me you were dead!” she cried.

“Is that what they told you?” he asked.

“They said you were dead and long buried,” said she.

“Did they say so?” he asked, and whirled her faster and faster in the dance.

“You will never leave me again?” she begged him.

“I must be on my way from here, lass,” he told her. “Long before the break of dawn.”

“Then I shall go too,” the lass cried out. “Take me with you wherever you go!”

“My dwelling place is small and low,” he told her. “I doubt you’d like it o’ermuch. The walls are damp and it is dark, and there is little more than room enough for me.”

“With me to help we’ll soon earn a better,” the lass insisted stoutly. “I’ll help with my hands and share your toil each day.”

“You’d do better to find yourself a new love,” he said.

“You shall not go without me,” said she.

“Come then, if you must!” he said.

Then he took her up behind him on his great black horse, and off they galloped up the road the way he had come.

“Hold fast!” he bade her. “The time is short. We have a long way to go and I must be home before the break of day.”

The black horse spurned the stones of the road with his hoofs until sparks flew out at either side. The wind came tearing after them, but never caught up with them as they sped by.

“Hold fast!” the lass’s lover called to her over his shoulder, and at his command, she caught his belt in both her hands and held it tight.

Then a chill came over her. She felt so cold that she thought she could not bear it. She wondered that a summer night should freeze one to the bone like one of winter, but laid it to the speed at which they rode.

Her lover’s garments whipped back against her. She wondered, as they touched her, why they felt so damp when no rain had fallen all along the way.

“Why is your cloak so wet?” she asked, but he made no reply at all.

The black horse raced faster and faster, through clachan and village, and over hill and down.

“Will we not soon be there?” the lass cried out in despair.

But her lover whipped his steed on through the night without an answering word.

Then, of a sudden, her shawl flew up into her face. She had to take one hand from his belt to pull the shawl down and wrap it about herself. When she reached to take hold of the belt again she grasped, instead, a handful of his linen shirt. The cloth was icy cold and heavy with moisture. “Why are your clothes so dripping wet!” she exclaimed. “Och, a body’d think you’d been riding through a storm, but no rain at all has fallen. See then, my own clothes are dry.”

Just at that moment they came to the gate of a kirkyard where the kirk stood tall and dark with its graves on either side.

Her lover slowed his black horse down, and turned it in at the gate, bringing it to a stop among the graves at one side of the kirk.

“This is my dwelling place,” he told her, as he alighted from his horse. “You gave me no rest in my grave. The sound of your voice lamenting kept me awake night and day. And if my clothes are wet, ’tis little wonder, for the tears you have shed have gathered and run down into the place where I lay. Now you shall cease your weeping and lie beside me in my grave, and I shall have peace at last.”

The lass looked down at the face that was turned up to her own. She saw, with horror, that it was not a face at all, but a bony skull, and under the clothes that clung so wetly there was no warm living flesh, but only whitened bones. Then she knew that her lover was dead indeed, and it was his ghost that had brought her here.

“Come!” he said, and reached up to pull her down from the back of the horse.

But she cried, “Nay!” and slipped to the ground on the other side. She gathered up her skirts and ran away from him, faster than she’d ever run in all her life before.

He came after her, his bony hands outstretched to catch her. She felt his fingers take hold of the border of her shawl. But she cast off the shawl and ran on. She ran out from among the graves and down the path in front of the kirk, and through the gate of the kirkyard into the road. She was growing too short of breath to keep on running. She glanced over her shoulder to see how close he followed at her feet. But just at the moment she looked, the dawn broke in the eastern sky, and on every side the cocks began to crow to greet the morn.

Like a puff of mist dissolving, ghost and horse disappeared, and the lass saw naught behind her but the kirk and the kirkyard with its graves, peaceful in the first gray morning light.

The shock of relief at finding her pursuer gone was too great for the lass to bear. She lost her senses and fell to the road, and there she lay.

A milkmaid on her way to milk her cows found the lass lying there in the middle of the road, and ran to the village close by to fetch help. Men came and carried her to a house where kind hands took her in and cared for her, until she came to herself again.

They were curious to know what had happened to her, and when she told her story they were amazed. They might have thought that she had dreamed it all, or even that she was daft, if it had not been for the shawl.

She had told them of casting her shawl away, when the specter grasped it in his hand. And it was true she wore no shawl when she was found. It was two or three days later that one of the villagers went to the kirkyard to tidy the graves, and saw upon one of them what looked to be a bit of tartan cloth with fringe at the edge. He went to pick it up, wondering how it had come to lie there, but found that it was buried deep in the mound of the grave. Pull as he might, he could not get it out. Then he remembered the strange lassie’s shawl, and hurried to tell his neighbors what he had found. They all ran to the kirkyard, and brought the lass with them.

“’Tis my shawl,” she told them. “I’ve had it many a year. I would not like to lose it.”

But it was so firmly fixed in the soil that the strongest man in the village could not pull the shawl out. In the end they had to fetch shovels and dig it out. They dug all the way down to the coffin but still they could not pull the shawl away. It was not until the minister said that they might open the coffin lid to release the end of the shawl, that they found out what held it so fast.

There, inside the coffin, was the corner of the shawl, held tight in the bony fingers of the man who was buried there. It was the grave of the lass’s lover whose drowned body had been washed ashore and buried by the villagers.

When the lass recovered from the fright of that terrible journey she went back to her own village again. But she wept no longer for her dead lover, since she had no wish to disturb him, lest he come and carry her off again.