The Little Minister

“You love him, too!”

I trudged to the school house with these words for company, and it was less her discovery than her confession that tortured me. How much I slept that night you may guess.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

CONTAINS A BIRTH, WHICH IS SUFFICIENT FOR ONE CHAPTER

“The kirk bell will soon be ringing,” Nanny said on the following morning, as she placed herself carefully on a stool, one hand holding her Bible and the other wandering complacently over her aged merino gown. “Ay, lassie, though you’re only an Egyptian I would hae ta’en you wi’ me to hear Mr. Duthie, but it’s speiring ower muckle o’ a woman to expect her to gang to the kirk in her ilka day claethes.”

The Babbie of yesterday would have laughed at this, but the new Babbie sighed.

“I wonder you don’t go to Mr. Dishart’s church now, Nanny,” she said, gently. “I am sure you prefer him.”

“Babbie, Babbie,” exclaimed Nanny, with spirit, “may I never be so far left to mysel’ as to change my kirk just because I like another minister better! It’s easy seen, lassie, that you ken little o’ religious questions.”

“Very little,” Babbie admitted, sadly.

“But dinna be so waeful about it,” the old woman continued, kindly, “for that’s no nane like you. Ay, and if you see muckle mair o’ Mr. Dishart he’ll soon cure your ignorance.”

“I shall not see much more of him,” Babbie answered, with averted head.

“The like o’ you couldna expect it,” Nanny said, simply, whereupon Babbie went to the window. “I had better be stepping,” Nanny said, rising, “for I am 206 aye late unless I’m on the hill by the time the bell begins. Ay, Babbie, I’m doubting my merino’s no sair in the fashion?”

She looked down at her dress half despondently, and yet with some pride.

“It was fowerpence the yard, and no less,” she went on, fondling the worn merino, “when we bocht it at Sam’l Curr’s. Ay, but it has been turned sax times since syne.”

She sighed, and Babbie came to her and put her arms round her, saying, “Nanny, you are a dear.”

“I’m a gey auld-farrant-looking dear, I doubt,” said Nanny, ruefully.

“Now, Nanny,” rejoined Babbie, “you are just wanting me to flatter you. You know the merino looks very nice.”

“It’s a guid merino yet,” admitted the old woman, “but, oh, Babbie, what does the material matter if the cut isna fashionable? It’s fine, isn’t it, to be in the fashion?”

She spoke so wistfully that, instead of smiling, Babbie kissed her.

“I am afraid to lay hand on the merino, Nanny, but give me off your bonnet and I’ll make it ten years younger in as many minutes.”

“Could you?” asked Nanny, eagerly, unloosening her bonnet-strings. “Mercy on me!” she had to add; “to think about altering bonnets on the Sabbath-day! Lassie, how could you propose sic a thing?”

“Forgive me, Nanny,” Babbie replied, so meekly that the old woman looked at her curiously.

“I dinna understand what has come ower you,” she said. “There’s an unca difference in you since last nicht. I used to think you were mair like a bird than a lassie, but you’ve lost a’ your daft capers o’ singing and lauching, and I take ill wi’t. Twa or three times I’ve catched you greeting. Babbie, what has come ower you?”

“Nothing, Nanny. I think I hear the bell.”

Down in Thrums two kirk-officers had let their bells loose, waking echoes in Windyghoul as one dog in country parts sets all the others barking, but Nanny did not hurry off to church. Such a surprising notion had filled her head suddenly that she even forgot to hold her dress off the floor.

“Babbie,” she cried, in consternation, “dinna tell me you’ve gotten ower fond o’ Mr. Dishart.”

“The like of me, Nanny!” the gypsy answered, with affected raillery, but there was a tear in her eye.

“It would be a wild, presumptious thing,” Nanny said, “and him a grand minister, but – ”

Babbie tried to look her in the face, but failed, and then all at once there came back to Nanny the days when she and her lover wandered the hill together.

“Ah, my dawtie,” she cried, so tenderly, “what does it matter wha he is when you canna help it!”

Two frail arms went round the Egyptian, and Babbie rested her head on the old woman’s breast. But do you think it could have happened had not Nanny loved a weaver two-score years before?

And now Nanny has set off for church and Babbie is alone in the mud house. Some will pity her not at all, this girl who was a dozen women in the hour, and all made of impulses that would scarce stand still to be photographed. To attempt to picture her at any time until now would have been like chasing a spirit that changes to something else as your arms clasp it; yet she has always seemed a pathetic little figure to me. If I understand Babbie at all, it is, I think, because I loved Margaret, the only woman I have ever known well, and one whose nature was not, like the Egyptian’s, complex, but most simple, as if God had told her only to be good. Throughout my life since she came into it she has been to me a glass in which many things are revealed that I could not have learned save through 208 her, and something of all womankind, even of bewildering Babbie, I seem to know because I knew Margaret.

No woman is so bad but we may rejoice when her heart thrills to love, for then God has her by the hand. There is no love but this. She may dream of what love is, but it is only of a sudden that she knows. Babbie, who was without a guide from her baby days, had dreamed but little of it, hearing its name given to another thing. She had been born wild and known no home; no one had touched her heart except to strike it, she had been educated, but never tamed; her life had been thrown strangely among those who were great in the world’s possessions, but she was not of them. Her soul was in such darkness that she had never seen it; she would have danced away cynically from the belief that there is such a thing, and now all at once she had passed from disbelief to knowledge. Is not love God’s doing? To Gavin He had given something of Himself, and the moment she saw it the flash lit her own soul.

It was but little of his Master that was in Gavin, but far smaller things have changed the current of human lives; the spider’s thread that strikes our brow on a country road may do that. Yet this I will say, though I have no wish to cast the little minister on my pages larger than he was, that he had some heroic hours in Thrums, of which one was when Babbie learned to love him. Until the moment when he kissed her she had only conceived him a quaint fellow whose life was a string of Sundays, but behold what she saw in him now. Evidently to his noble mind her mystery was only some misfortune, not of her making, and his was to be the part of leading her away from it into the happiness of the open life. He did not doubt her, for he loved, and to doubt is to dip love in the mire. She had been given to him by God, and he was so rich in her possession that the responsibility attached to the gift was not grievous. She was his, and no mortal man 209 could part them. Those who looked askance at her were looking askance at him; in so far as she was wayward and wild, he was those things; so long as she remained strange to religion, the blame lay on him.

All this Babbie read in the Gavin of the past night, and to her it was the book of love. What things she had known, said and done in that holy name! How shamefully have we all besmirched it! She had only known it as the most selfish of the passions, a brittle image that men consulted because it could only answer in the words they gave it to say. But here was a man to whom love was something better than his own desires leering on a pedestal. Such love as Babbie had seen hitherto made strong men weak, but this was a love that made a weak man strong. All her life, strength had been her idol, and the weakness that bent to her cajolery her scorn. But only now was it revealed to her that strength, instead of being the lusty child of passions, grows by grappling with and throwing them.

So Babbie loved the little minister for the best that she had ever seen in man. I shall be told that she thought far more of him than he deserved, forgetting the mean in the worthy: but who that has had a glimpse of heaven will care to let his mind dwell henceforth on earth? Love, it is said, is blind, but love is not blind. It is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard. To see the best is to see most clearly, and it is the lover’s privilege.

Down in the Auld Licht kirk that forenoon Gavin preached a sermon in praise of Woman, and up in the mudhouse in Windyghoul Babbie sat alone. But it was the Sabbath day to her: the first Sabbath in her life. Her discovery had frozen her mind for a time, so that she could only stare at it with eyes that would not shut; but that had been in the night. Already her love seemed a thing of years, for it was as old as herself, as old as the new Babbie. It was such a dear delight that 210 she clasped it to her, and exulted over it because it was hers, and then she cried over it because she must give it up.

For Babbie must only look at this love and then turn from it. My heart aches for the little Egyptian, but the Promised Land would have remained invisible to her had she not realized that it was only for others. That was the condition of her seeing.

Chapter Twenty-Four.

THE NEW WORLD, AND THE WOMAN WHO MAY NOT DWELL THEREIN

Up here in the glen school-house after my pupils have straggled home, there comes to me at times, and so sudden that it may be while I am infusing my tea, a hot desire to write great books. Perhaps an hour afterwards I rise, beaten, from my desk, flinging all I have written into the fire (yet rescuing some of it on second thought), and curse myself as an ingle-nook man, for I see that one can only paint what he himself has felt, and in my passion I wish to have all the vices, even to being an impious man, that I may describe them better. For this may I be pardoned. It comes to nothing in the end, save that my tea is brackish.

Yet though my solitary life in the glen is cheating me of many experiences, more helpful to a writer than to a Christian, it has not been so tame but that I can understand why Babbie cried when she went into Nanny’s garden and saw the new world. Let no one who loves be called altogether unhappy. Even love unreturned has its rainbow, and Babbie knew that Gavin loved her. Yet she stood in woe among the stiff berry bushes, as one who stretches forth her hands to Love and sees him looking for her, and knows she must shrink from the arms she would lie in, and only call to him in a voice he cannot hear. This is not a love that is always bitter. It grows sweet with age. But could that dry the tears of the little Egyptian, who had only been a woman for a day?

Much was still dark to her. Of one obstacle that must keep her and Gavin ever apart she knew, and he did not; but had it been removed she would have given herself to him humbly, not in her own longing, but because he wanted her. “Behold what I am,” she could have said to him then, and left the rest to him, believing that her unworthiness would not drag him down, it would lose itself so readily in his strength. That Thrums could rise against such a man if he defied it, she did not believe; but she was to learn the truth presently from a child.

To most of us, I suppose, has come some shock that was to make us different men from that hour, and yet, how many days elapsed before something of the man we had been leapt up in us? Babbie thought she had buried her old impulsiveness, and then remembering that from the top of the field she might see Gavin returning from church, she hastened to the hill to look upon him from a distance. Before she reached the gate where I had met her and him, however, she stopped, distressed at her selfishness, and asked bitterly, “Why am I so different from other women; why should what is so easy to them be so hard to me?”

“Gavin, my beloved!” the Egyptian cried in her agony, and the wind caught her words and flung them in the air, making sport of her.

She wandered westward over the bleak hill, and by-and-by came to a great slab called the Standing Stone, on which children often sit and muse until they see gay ladies riding by on palfreys – a kind of horse – and knights in glittering armour, and goblins, and fiery dragons, and other wonders now extinct, of which bare-legged laddies dream, as well as boys in socks. The Standing Stone is in the dyke that separates the hill from a fir wood, and it is the fairy-book of Thrums. If you would be a knight yourself, you must sit on it and whisper to it your desire.

Babbie came to the Standing Stone, and there was a little boy astride it. His hair stood up through holes in his bonnet, and he was very ragged and miserable.

“Why are you crying, little boy?” Babbie asked him, gently; but he did not look up, and the tongue was strange to him.

“How are you greeting so sair?” she asked.

“I’m no greeting very sair,” he answered, turning his head from her that a woman might not see his tears. “I’m no greeting so sair but what I grat sairer when my mither died.”