"I heard your first sermon," I said.
"Ah," he replied. "I had not been long in Thrums before I discovered that if I took tea with any of my congregation and declined a second cup, they thought it a reflection on their brewing."
"You must not look upon my absence in that light," was all I could say. "There are reasons why I cannot come."
He did not press me further, thinking I meant that the distance was too great, though frailer folk than I walked twenty miles to hear him.
We might have parted thus had we not wandered by chance to the very spot where I had met him and Babbie. There is a seat there now for those who lose their breath on the climb up, and so I have two reasons nowadays for not pa.s.sing the place by.
We read each other"s thoughts, and Gavin said calmly, "I have not seen her since that night. She disappeared as into a grave."
How could I answer when I knew that Babbie was dying for want of him, not half a mile away?
"You seemed to understand everything that night," he went on; "or if you did not, your thoughts were very generous to me."
In my sorrow for him I did not notice that we were moving on again, this time in the direction of Windyghoul.
"She was only a gypsy girl," he said, abruptly, and I nodded. "But I hoped," he continued, "that she would be my wife."
"I understood that," I said.
"There was nothing monstrous to you," he asked, looking me in the face, "in a minister"s marrying a gypsy?"
I own that if I had loved a girl, however far below or above me in degree, I would have married her had she been willing to take me. But to Gavin I only answered, "These are matters a man must decide for himself."
"I had decided for myself," he said, emphatically.
"Yet," I said, wanting him to talk to me of Margaret, "in such a case one might have others to consider besides himself."
"A man"s marriage," he answered, "is his own affair, I would have brooked no interference from my congregation."
I thought, "There is some obstinacy left in him still;" but aloud I said, "It was of your mother I was thinking."
"She would have taken Babbie to her heart," he said, with the fond conviction of a lover.
I doubted it, but I only asked, "Your mother knows nothing of her?"
"Nothing," he rejoined. "It would be cruelty to tell my mother of her now that she is gone."
Gavin"s calmness had left him, and he was striding quickly nearer to Windyghoul. I was in dread lest he should see the Egyptian at Nanny"s door, yet to have turned him in another direction might have roused his suspicions. When we were within a hundred yards of the mudhouse, I knew that there was no Babbie in sight. We halved the distance and then I saw her at the open window. Gavin"s eyes were on the ground, but she saw him. I held my breath, fearing that she would run out to him.
"You have never seen her since that night?" Gavin asked me, without hope in his voice.
Had he been less hopeless he would have wondered why I did not reply immediately. I was looking covertly at the mudhouse, of which we were now within a few yards. Babbie"s face had gone from the window, and the door remained shut. That she could hear every word we uttered now, I could not doubt. But she was hiding from the man for whom her soul longed. She was sacrificing herself for him.
"Never," I answered, notwithstanding my pity of the brave girl, and then while I was shaking lest he should go in to visit Nanny, I heard the echo of the Auld Licht bell.
"That calls me to the meeting for rain," Gavin said, bidding me good-night. I had acted for Margaret, and yet I had hardly the effrontery to take his hand. I suppose he saw sympathy in my face, for suddenly the cry broke from him--
"If I could only know that nothing evil had befallen her!"
Babbie heard him and could not restrain a heart-breaking sob.
"What was that?" he said, starting.
A moment I waited, to let her show herself if she chose. But the mudhouse was silent again.
"It was some boy in the wood," I answered.
"Good-bye," he said, trying to smile.
Had I let him go, here would have been the end of his love story, but that piteous smile unmanned me, and I could not keep the words back.
"She is in Nanny"s house," I cried.
In another moment these two were together for weal or woe, and I had set off dizzily for the school-house, feeling now that I had been false to Margaret, and again exulting in what I had done. By and by the bell stopped, and Gavin and Babbie regarded it as little as I heeded the burns now crossing the glen road noisily at places that had been dry two hours before.
Chapter Twenty-Nine.
STORY OF THE EGYPTIAN.
G.o.d gives us more than, were we not overbold, we should dare to ask for, and yet how often (perhaps after saying "Thank G.o.d" so curtly that it is only a form of swearing) we are suppliants again within the hour. Gavin was to be satisfied if he were told that no evil had befallen her he loved, and all the way between the school-house and Windyghoul Babbie craved for no more than Gavin"s life. Now they had got their desires; but do you think they were content?
The Egyptian had gone on her knees when she heard Gavin speak of her.
It was her way of preventing herself from running to him. Then, when she thought him gone, he opened the door. She rose and shrank back, but first she had stepped toward him with a glad cry. His disappointed arms met on nothing.
"You, too, heard that I was dead?" he said, thinking her strangeness but grief too sharply turned to joy.
There were tears in the word with which she answered him, and he would have kissed her, but she defended her face with her hand.
"Babbie," he asked, beginning to fear that he had not sounded her deepest woe, "why have you left me all this time? You are not glad to see me now?"
"I was glad," she answered in a low voice, "to see you from the window, but I prayed to G.o.d not to let you see me."
She even pulled away her hand when he would have taken it. "No, no, I am to tell you everything now, and then----"
"Say that you love me first," he broke in, when a sob checked her speaking.
"No," she said, "I must tell you first what I have done, and then you will not ask me to say that. I am not a gypsy."
"What of that?" cried Gavin. "It was not because you were a gypsy that I loved you."
"That is the last time you will say you love me," said Babbie. "Mr.
Dishart, I am to be married to-morrow."