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Page 19
No such men as these--officers of her Majesty the Queen, Burgh
policemen, and learned doctors from the Royal Infirmary--had ever
been aware of Auld Jock, living. Dead, and no' needing them any
more, they stood guard over him, and inquired sternly as to the
manner in which he had died. There was a hysterical breath of
relief from the crowd of lodgers and tenants when the little pile
of coins was found on the Bible. There had been no foul play.
Auld Jock had died of heart failure, from pneumonia and worn-out
old age.
"There's eneugh," a Burgh policeman said when the money was
counted. He meant much the same thing Auld Jock himself had
meant. There was enough to save him from the last indignity a
life of useful labor can thrust upon the honest poor--pauper
burial. But when inquiries were made for the name and the friends
of this old man there appeared to be only "Auld Jock" to enter
into the record, and a little dog to follow the body to the
grave. It was a Bible reader who chanced to come in from the
Medical Mission in the Cowgate who thought to look in the
fly-leaf of Auld Jock's Bible.
"His name is John Gray."
He laid the worn little book on Auld Jock's breast and crossed
the work-scarred hands upon it. "It's something by the ordinar'
to find a gude auld country body in such a foul place." He
stooped and patted Bobby, and noted the bun, untouched, upon the
floor. Turning to a wild elf of a barefooted child in the crowd
he spoke to her. "Would you share your gude brose with the bit
dog, lassie?"
She darted down the stairs, and presently returned with her own
scanty bowl of breakfast porridge. Bobby refused the food, but he
looked at her so mournfully that the first tears of pity her
unchildlike eyes had ever shed welled up. She put out her hand
timidly and stroked him.
It was just before the report of the time-gun that two policemen
cleared the stairs, shrouded Auld Jock in his own greatcoat and
plaid, and carried him down to the court. There they laid him in
a plain box of white deal that stood on the pavement, closed it,
and went away down the wynd on a necessary errand. The Bible-
reader sat on an empty beer keg to guard the box, and Bobby
climbed on the top and stretched himself above his master. The
court was a well, more than a hundred feet deep. What sky might
have been visible above it was hidden by tier above tier of
dingy, tattered washings. The stairway filled again, and throngs
of outcasts of every sort went about their squalid businesses,
with only a curious glance or so at the pathetic group.
Presently the policemen returned from the Cowgate with a motley
assortment of pallbearers. There was a good-tempered Irish
laborer from a near-by brewery; a decayed gentleman, unsteady of
gait and blear-eyed, in greasy frock-coat and broken hat; a
flashily dressed bartender who found the task distasteful; a
stout, bent-backed fagot-carrier; a drunken fisherman from New
Haven, suddenly sobered by this uncanny duty, and a furtive,
gaol-bleached thief who feared a trap and tried to escape.
Tailed by scuffling gamins, the strange little procession moved
quickly down the wynd and turned into the roaring Cowgate. The
policemen went before to force a passage through the press.
The Bible-reader followed the box, and Bobby, head and tail down,
trotted unnoticed, beneath it. 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.
By a gesture the caretaker directed the bearers to the right,
past the church, and on down the crowded slope to the north, that
was circled about by the backs of the tenements in the
Grassmarket and Candlemakers Row. The box was lowered at once,
and the pall-bearers hastily departed to delayed dinners. The
policemen had urgent duties elsewhere. Only the Bible reader
remained to see the grave partly filled in, and to try to
persuade Bobby to go away with him. But the little dog
resisted with such piteous struggles that the man put him down
again. The grave digger leaned on his spade for a bit of
professional talk.
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