Chapter One.   THE LOVE-LIGHT.
 Long ago, in the days when our caged blackbirds never saw a king’s soldier without whistling impudently, “Come ower the water to Charlie,” a minister of Thrums was to be married, but something happened, and he remained a bachelor. Then, when he was old, he passed in our square the lady who was to have been his wife, and her hair was white, but she, too, was still unmarried. The meeting had only one witness, a weaver, and he said solemnly afterwards, “They didna speak, but they just gave one another a look, and I saw the love-light in their een.” No more is remembered of these two, no being now living ever saw them, but the poetry that was in the soul of a battered weaver makes them human to us for ever.
 
It is of another minister I am to tell, but only to those who know that light when they see it. I am not bidding good-bye to many readers, for though it is true that some men, of whom Lord Rintoul was one, live to an old age without knowing love, few of us can have met them, and of women so incomplete I never heard.
 
Gavin Dishart was barely twenty-one when he and his mother came to Thrums, light-hearted like the traveller who knows not what awaits him at the bend of the 2 road. It was the time of year when the ground is carpeted beneath the firs with brown needles, when split-nuts patter all day from the beech, and children lay yellow corn on the dominie’s desk to remind him that now they are needed in the fields. The day was so silent that carts could be heard rumbling a mile away. All Thrums was out in its wynds and closes—a few of the weavers still in knee-breeches—to look at the new Auld Licht minister. I was there too, the dominie of Glen Quharity, which is four miles from Thrums; and heavy was my heart as I stood afar off so that Gavin’s mother might not have the pain of seeing me. I was the only one in the crowd who looked at her more than at her son.
 
Eighteen years had passed since we parted. Already her hair had lost the brightness of its youth, and she seemed to me smaller and more fragile; and the face that I loved when I was a hobbledehoy, and loved when I looked once more upon it in Thrums, and always shall love till I die, was soft and worn. Margaret was an old woman, and she was only forty-three; and I am the man who made her old. As Gavin put his eager boyish face out at the carriage window, many saw that he was holding her hand, but none could be glad at the sight as the dominie was glad, looking on at a happiness in which he dared not mingle. Margaret was crying because she was so proud of her boy. Women do that. Poor sons to be proud of, good mothers, but I would not have you dry those tears.
 
 
 
When the little minister looked out at the carriage window, many of the people drew back humbly, but a little boy in a red frock with black spots pressed forward and offered him a sticky parly, which Gavin accepted, though not without a tremor, for children were more terrible to him then than bearded men. The boy’s mother, trying not to look elated, bore him away, but her face said that he was made for life. With this little 3 incident Gavin’s career in Thrums began. I remembered it suddenly the other day when wading across the wynd where it took place. Many scenes in the little minister’s life come back to me in this way. The first time I ever thought of writing his love story as an old man’s gift to a little maid since grown tall, was one night while I sat alone in the school-house; on my knees a fiddle that has been my only living companion since I sold my hens. My mind had drifted back to the first time I saw Gavin and the Egyptian together, and what set it wandering to that midnight meeting was my garden gate shaking in the wind. At a gate on the hill I had first encountered these two. It rattled in his hand, and I looked up and saw them, and neither knew why I had such cause to start at the sight. Then the gate swung to. It had just such a click as mine.
 
These two figures on the hill are more real to me than things that happened yesterday, but I do not know that I can make them live to others. A ghost-show used to come yearly to Thrums on the merry Muckle Friday, in which the illusion was contrived by hanging a glass between the onlookers and the stage. I cannot deny that the comings and goings of the ghost were highly diverting, yet the farmer of T’nowhead only laughed because he had paid his money at the hole in the door like the rest of us. T’nowhead sat at the end of a form where he saw round the glass and so saw no ghost. I fear my public may be in the same predicament. I see the little minister as he was at one-and-twenty, and the little girl to whom this story is to belong sees him, though the things I have to tell happened before she came into the world. But there are reasons why she should see; and I do not know that I can provide the glass for others. If they see round it, they will neither laugh nor cry with Gavin and Babbie.
 
When Gavin came to Thrums he was as I am now, for the pages lay before him on which he was to write 4 his life. Yet he was not quite as I am. The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it. But the biographer sees the last chapter while he is still at the first, and I have only to write over with ink what Gavin has written in pencil.
 
How often is it a phantom woman who draws the man from the way he meant to go? So was man created, to hunger for the ideal that is above himself, until one day there is magic in the air, and the eyes of a girl rest upon him. He does not know that it is he himself who crowned her, and if the girl is as pure as he, their love is the one form of idolatry that is not quite ignoble. It is the joining of two souls on their way to God. But if the woman be bad, the test of the man is when he wakens from his dream. The nobler his ideal, the further will he have been hurried down the wrong way, for those who only run after little things will not go far. His love may now sink into passion, perhaps only to stain its wings and rise again, perhaps to drown.
 
Babbie, what shall I say of you who make me write these things? I am not your judge. Shall we not laugh at the student who chafes when between him and his book comes the song of the thrushes, with whom, on the mad night you danced into Gavin’s life, you had more in common than with Auld Licht ministers? The gladness of living was in your step, your voice was melody, and he was wondering what love might be.
 
You were the daughter of a summer night, born where all the birds are free, and the moon christened you with her soft light to dazzle the eyes of man. Not our little minister alone was stricken by you into his second childhood. To look upon you was to rejoice that so fair a thing could be; to think of you is still to be young. Even those who called you a little devil, of 5 whom I have been one, admitted that in the end you had a soul, though not that you had been born with one. They said you stole it, and so made a woman of yourself. But again I say I am not your judge, and when I picture you as Gavin saw you first, a bare-legged witch dancing up Windyghoul, rowan berries in your black hair, and on your finger a jewel the little minister could not have bought with five years of toil, the shadows on my pages lift, and I cannot wonder that Gavin loved you.
 
Often I say to myself that this is to be Gavin’s story, not mine. Yet must it be mine too, in a manner, and of myself I shall sometimes have to speak; not willingly, for it is time my little tragedy had died of old age. I have kept it to myself so long that now I would stand at its grave alone. It is true that when I heard who was to be the new minister I hoped for a day that the life broken in Harvie might be mended in Thrums, but two minutes’ talk with Gavin showed me that Margaret had kept from him the secret which was hers and mine, and so knocked the bottom out of my vain hopes. I did not blame her then, nor do I blame her now, nor shall any one who blames her ever be called friend by me; but it was bitter to look at the white manse among the trees and know that I must never enter it. For Margaret’s sake I had to keep aloof, yet this new trial came upon me like our parting at Harvie. I thought that in those eighteen years my passions had burned like a ship till they sank, but I suffered again as on that awful night when Adam Dishart came back, nearly killing Margaret and tearing up all my ambitions by the root in a single hour. I waited in Thrums until I had looked again on Margaret, who thought me dead, and Gavin, who had never heard of me, and then I trudged back to the school-house. Something I heard of them from time to time during the winter—for in the 6 gossip of Thrums I was well posted—but much of what is to be told here I only learned afterwards from those who knew it best. Gavin heard of me at times as the dominie in the glen who had ceased to attend the Auld Licht kirk, and Margaret did not even hear of me. It was all I could do for them.

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Chapter Two.   RUNS ALONGSIDE THE MAKING OF A MINISTER.
 On the east coast of Scotland, hidden, as if in a quarry, at the foot of cliffs that may one day fall forward, is a village called Harvie. So has it shrunk since the day when I skulked from it that I hear of a traveller’s asking lately at one of its doors how far he was from a village; yet Harvie throve once and was celebrated even in distant Thrums for its fish. Most of our weavers would have thought it as unnatural not to buy harvies in the square on the Muckle Friday, as to let Saturday night pass without laying in a sufficient stock of halfpennies to go round the family twice.
 
Gavin was born in Harvie, but left it at such an early age that he could only recall thatched houses with nets drying on the roofs, and a sandy shore in which coarse grass grew. In the picture he could not pick out the house of his birth, though he might have been able to go to it had he ever returned to the village. Soon he learned that his mother did not care to speak of Harvie, and perhaps he thought that she had forgotten it too, all save one scene to which his memory still guided him. When his mind wandered to Harvie, Gavin saw the door of his home open and a fisherman enter, who scratched his head and then said, “Your man’s drowned, missis.” Gavin seemed to see many women crying, and his mother staring at them with a face suddenly painted white, and next to hear a voice that was his own saying, “Never mind, mother; I’ll be a man to you now, and I’ll need breeks for the burial.” But 8 Adam required no funeral, for his body lay deep in the sea.
 
Gavin thought that this was the tragedy of his mother’s life, and the most memorable event of his own childhood. But it was neither. When Margaret, even after she came to Thrums, thought of Harvie, it was not at Adam’s death she shuddered, but at the recollection of me.
 
It would ill become me to take a late revenge on Adam Dishart now by saying what is not true of him. Though he died a fisherman he was a sailor for a great part of his life, and doubtless his recklessness was washed into him on the high seas, where in his time men made a crony of death, and drank merrily over dodging it for another night. To me his roars of laughter without cause were as repellent as a boy’s drum; yet many faces that were long in my company brightened at his coming, and women, with whom, despite my yearning, I was in no wise a favorite, ran to their doors to listen to him as readily as to the bell-man. Children scurried from him if his mood was savage, but to him at all other times, while me they merely disregarded. There was always a smell of the sea about him. He had a rolling gait, unless he was drunk, when he walked very straight, and before both sexes he boasted that any woman would take him for his beard alone. Of this beard he took prodigious care, though otherwise thinking little of his appearance, and I now see that he understood women better than I did, who had nevertheless reflected much about them. It cannot be said that he was vain, for though he thought he attracted women strangely, that, I maintain, is a weakness common to all men, and so no more to be marvelled at than a stake in a fence. Foreign oaths were the nails with which he held his talk together, yet I doubt not they were a curiosity gathered at sea, like his chains of shells, more for his own pleasure than for others’ pain. His friends 9 gave them no weight, and when he wanted to talk emphatically he kept them back, though they were then as troublesome to him as eggs to the bird-nesting boy who has to speak with his spoil in his mouth.
 
Adam was drowned on Gavin’s fourth birthday, a year after I had to leave Harvie. He was blown off his smack in a storm, and could not reach the rope his partner flung him. “It’s no go, lad,” he shouted; “so long, Jim,” and sank.
 
A month afterwards Margaret sold her share in the smack, which was all Adam left her, and the furniture of the house was rouped. She took Gavin to Glasgow, where her only brother needed a housekeeper, and there mother and son remained until Gavin got his call to Thrums. During those seventeen years I lost knowledge of them as completely as Margaret had lost knowledge of me. On hearing of Adam’s death I went back to Harvie to try to trace her, but she had feared this, and so told no one where she was going.
 
According to Margaret, Gavin’s genius showed itself while he was still a child. He was born with a brow whose nobility impressed her from the first. It was a minister’s brow, and though Margaret herself was no scholar, being as slow to read as she was quick at turning bannocks on the girdle, she decided, when his age was still counted by months, that the ministry had need of him. In those days the first question asked of a child was not, “Tell me your name,” but “What are you to be?” and one child in every family replied, “A minister.” He was set apart for the Church as doggedly as the shilling a week for the rent, and the rule held good though the family consisted of only one boy. From his earliest days Gavin thought he had been fashioned for the ministry as certainly as a spade for digging, and Margaret rejoiced and marvelled thereat, though she had made her own puzzle. An enthusiastic mother may bend her son’s mind as she chooses if she begins at 10 once; nay, she may do stranger things. I know a mother in Thrums who loves “features,” and had a child born with no chin to speak of. The neighbors expected this to bring her to the dust, but it only showed what a mother can do. In a few months that child had a chin with the best of them.
 
Margaret’s brother died, but she remained in his single room, and, ever with a picture of her son in a pulpit to repay her, contrived to keep Gavin at school. Everything a woman’s fingers can do Margaret’s did better than most, and among the wealthy people who employed her—would that I could have the teaching of the sons of such as were good to her in those hard days!—her gentle manner was spoken of. For though Margaret had no schooling, she was a lady at heart, moving and almost speaking as one even in Harvie, where they did not perhaps like her the better for it.
 
At six Gavin hit another boy hard for belonging to the Established Church, and at seven he could not lose himself in the Shorter Catechism. His mother expounded the Scriptures to him till he was eight, when he began to expound them to her. By this time he was studying the practical work of the pulpit as enthusiastically as ever medical student cut off a leg. From a front pew in the gallery Gavin watched the minister’s every movement, noting that the first thing to do on ascending the pulpit is to cover your face with your hands, as if the exalted position affected you like a strong light, and the second to move the big Bible slightly, to show that the kirk officer, not having had a university education, could not be expected to know the very spot on which it ought to lie. Gavin saw that the minister joined in the singing more like one countenancing a seemly thing than because he needed it himself, and that he only sang a mouthful now and again after the congregation was in full pursuit of the precentor. It was noteworthy that the first prayer lasted 11 longer than all the others, and that to read the intimations about the Bible-class and the collection elsewhere than immediately before the last Psalm would have been as sacrilegious as to insert the dedication to King James at the end of Revelation. Sitting under a minister justly honoured in his day, the boy was often some words in advance of him, not vainglorious of his memory, but fervent, eager, and regarding the preacher as hardly less sacred than the Book. Gavin was encouraged by his frightened yet admiring mother to saw the air from their pew as the minister sawed it in the pulpit, and two benedictions were pronounced twice a Sabbath in that church, in the same words, the same manner, and simultaneously.
 
There was a black year when the things of this world, especially its pastimes, took such a grip of Gavin that he said to Margaret he would rather be good at the high jump than the author of “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” That year passed, and Gavin came to his right mind. One afternoon Margaret was at home making a glengarry for him out of a piece of carpet, and giving it a tartan edging, when the boy bounded in from school, crying, “Come quick, mother, and you’ll see him.” Margaret reached the door in time to see a street musician flying from Gavin and his friends. “Did you take stock of him, mother?” the boy asked when he reappeared with the mark of a muddy stick on his back. “He’s a Papist!—a sore sight, mother, a sore sight. We stoned him for persecuting the noble Martyrs.”
 
When Gavin was twelve he went to the university, and also got a place in a shop as errand boy. He used to run through the streets between his work and his classes. Potatoes and salt fish, which could then be got at two pence the pound if bought by the half-hundred weight, were his food. There was not always a good meal for two, yet when Gavin reached home at night there was generally something ready for him, and 12 Margaret had supped “hours ago.” Gavin’s hunger urged him to fall to, but his love for his mother made him watchful.
 
“What did you have yourself, mother?” he would demand suspiciously.
 
“Oh, I had a fine supper, I assure you.”
 
“What had you?”
 
“I had potatoes, for one thing.”
 
“And dripping?”
 
“You may be sure.”
 
“Mother, you’re cheating me. The dripping hasn’t been touched since yesterday.”
 
“I dinna—don’t—care for dripping—no much.”
 
Then would Gavin stride the room fiercely, a queer little figure.
 
“Do you think I’ll stand this, mother? Will I let myself be pampered with dripping and every delicacy while you starve?”
 
“Gavin, I really dinna care for dripping.”
 
“Then I’ll give up my classes, and we can have butter.”
 
“I assure you I’m no hungry. It’s different wi’ a growing laddie.”
 
“I’m not a growing laddie,” Gavin would say, bitterly; “but, mother, I warn you that not another bite passes my throat till I see you eating too.”
 
So Margaret had to take her seat at the table, and when she said “I can eat no more,” Gavin retorted sternly, “Nor will I, for fine I see through you.”
 
These two were as one far more than most married people, and, just as Gavin in his childhood reflected his mother, she now reflected him. The people for whom she sewed thought it was contact with them that had rubbed the broad Scotch from her tongue, but she was only keeping pace with Gavin. When she was excited the Harvie words came back to her, as they come back to me. I have taught the English language all 13 my life, and I try to write it, but everything I say in this book I first think to myself in the Doric. This, too, I notice, that in talking to myself I am broader than when gossiping with the farmers of the glen, who send their children to me to learn English, and then jeer at them if they say “old lights” instead of “auld lichts.”
 
To Margaret it was happiness to sit through the long evenings sewing, and look over her work at Gavin as he read or wrote or recited to himself the learning of the schools. But she coughed every time the weather changed, and then Gavin would start.
 
“You must go to your bed, mother,” he would say, tearing himself from his books; or he would sit beside her and talk of the dream that was common to both—a dream of a manse where Margaret was mistress and Gavin was called the minister. Every night Gavin was at his mother’s bedside to wind her shawl round her feet, and while he did it Margaret smiled.
 
“Mother, this is the chaff pillow you’ve taken out of my bed, and given me your feather one.”
 
“Gavin, you needna change them. I winna have the feather pillow.”
 
“Do you dare to think I’ll let you sleep on chaff? Put up your head. Now, is that soft?”
 
“It’s fine. I dinna deny but what I sleep better on feathers. Do you mind, Gavin, you bought this pillow for me the moment you got your bursary money?”
 
The reserve that is a wall between many of the Scottish poor had been broken down by these two. When he saw his mother sleeping happily, Gavin went back to his work. To save the expense of a lamp, he would put his book almost beneath the dying fire, and, taking the place of the fender, read till he was shivering with cold.
 
“Gavin, it is near morning, and you not in your bed yet! What are you thinking about so hard?”
 
14
“Oh, mother, I was wondering if the time would ever come when I would be a minister, and you would have an egg for your breakfast every morning.”
 
So the years passed, and soon Gavin would be a minister. He had now sermons to prepare, and every one of them was first preached to Margaret. How solemn was his voice, how his eyes flashed, how stern were his admonitions.
 
“Gavin, such a sermon I never heard. The spirit of God is on you. I’m ashamed you should have me for a mother.”
 
“God grant, mother,” Gavin said, little thinking what was soon to happen, or he would have made this prayer on his knees, “that you may never be ashamed to have me for a son.”
 
“Ah, mother,” he would say wistfully, “it is not a great sermon, but do you think I’m preaching Christ? That is what I try, but I’m carried away and forget to watch myself.”
 
“The Lord has you by the hand, Gavin; and mind, I dinna say that because you’re my laddie.”
 
“Yes, you do, mother, and well I know it, and yet it does me good to hear you.”
 
That it did him good I, who would fain have shared those days with them, am very sure. The praise that comes of love does not make us vain, but humble rather. Knowing what we are, the pride that shines in our mother’s eyes as she looks at us is about the most pathetic thing a man has to face, but he would be a devil altogether if it did not burn some of the sin out of him.
 
Not long before Gavin preached for our kirk and got his call, a great event took place in the little room at Glasgow. The student appeared for the first time before his mother in his ministerial clothes. He wore the black silk hat, that was destined to become a terror to evil-doers in Thrums, and I dare say he was rather 15 puffed up about himself that day. You would probably have smiled at him.
 
“It’s a pity I’m so little, mother,” he said with a sigh.
 
“You’re no what I would call a particularly long man,” Margaret said, “but you’re just the height I like.”
 
Then Gavin went out in his grandeur, and Margaret cried for an hour. She was thinking of me as well as of Gavin, and as it happens, I know that I was thinking at the same time of her. Gavin kept a diary in those days, which I have seen, and by comparing it with mine, I discovered that while he was showing himself to his mother in his black clothes, I was on my way back from Tilliedrum, where I had gone to buy a sand-glass for the school. The one I bought was so like another Margaret had used at Harvie that it set me thinking of her again all the way home. This is a matter hardly worth mentioning, and yet it interests me.
 
Busy days followed the call to Thrums, and Gavin had difficulty in forcing himself to his sermons when there was always something more to tell his mother about the weaving town they were going to, or about the manse or the furniture that had been transferred to him by the retiring minister. The little room which had become so familiar that it seemed one of a family party of three had to be stripped, and many of its contents were sold. Among what were brought to Thrums was a little exercise book, in which Margaret had tried, unknown to Gavin, to teach herself writing and grammar, that she might be less unfit for a manse. He found it accidentally one day. It was full of “I am, thou art, he is,” and the like, written many times in a shaking hand. Gavin put his arms round his mother when he saw what she had been doing. The exercise book is in my desk now, and will be my little maid’s when I die.
 
16
“Gavin, Gavin,” Margaret said many times in those last days at Glasgow, “to think it has all come true!”
 
“Let the last word you say in the house be a prayer of thankfulness,” she whispered to him when they were taking a final glance at the old home.
 
In the bare room they called the house, the little minister and his mother went on their knees, but, as it chanced, their last word there was not addressed to God.
 
“Gavin,” Margaret whispered as he took her arm, “do you think this bonnet sets me?”
Chapter Three.   THE NIGHT-WATCHERS.
 What first struck Margaret in Thrums was the smell of the caddis. The town smells of caddis no longer, but whiffs of it may be got even now as one passes the houses of the old, where the lay still swings at little windows like a great ghost pendulum. To me it is a homely smell, which I draw in with a great breath, but it was as strange to Margaret as the weavers themselves, who, in their colored nightcaps and corduroys streaked with threads, gazed at her and Gavin. The little minister was trying to look severe and old, but twenty-one was in his eye.
 
“Look, mother, at that white house with the green roof. That is the manse.”
 
The manse stands high, with a sharp eye on all the town. Every back window in the Tenements has a glint of it, and so the back of the Tenements is always better behaved than the front. It was in the front that Jamie Don, a pitiful bachelor all his life because he thought the women proposed, kept his ferrets, and here, too, Beattie hanged himself, going straight to the clothes-posts for another rope when the first one broke, such was his determination. In the front Sanders Gilruth openly boasted (on Don’s potato-pit) that by having a seat in two churches he could lie in bed on Sabbath and get the credit of being at one or other. (Gavin made short work of him.) To the right-minded the Auld Licht manse was as a family Bible, ever lying open before them, but Beattie spoke for more than himself 18 when he said, “Dagone that manse! I never gie a swear but there it is glowering at me.”
 
The manse looks down on the town from the north-east, and is reached from the road that leaves Thrums behind it in another moment by a wide, straight path, so rough that to carry a fraught of water to the manse without spilling was to be superlatively good at one thing. Packages in a cart it set leaping like trout in a fishing-creel. Opposite the opening of the garden wall in the manse, where for many years there had been an intention of putting up a gate, were two big stones a yard apart, standing ready for the winter, when the path was often a rush of yellow water, and this the only bridge to the glebe dyke, down which the minister walked to church.
 
When Margaret entered the manse on Gavin’s arm, it was a whitewashed house of five rooms, with a garret in which the minister could sleep if he had guests, as during the Fast week. It stood with its garden within high walls, and the roof facing southward was carpeted with moss that shone in the sun in a dozen shades of green and yellow. Three firs guarded the house from west winds, but blasts from the north often tore down the steep fields and skirled through the manse, banging all its doors at once. A beech, growing on the east side, leant over the roof as if to gossip with the well in the courtyard. The garden was to the south, and was over full of gooseberry and currant bushes. It contained a summer seat, where strange things were soon to happen.
 
Margaret would not even take off her bonnet until she had seen through the manse and opened all the presses. The parlour and kitchen were downstairs, and of the three rooms above, the study was so small that Gavin’s predecessor could touch each of its walls without shifting his position. Every room save Margaret’s had long-lidded beds, which close as if with shutters, but hers 19 was coff-fronted, or comparatively open, with carving on the wood like the ornamentation of coffins. Where there were children in a house they liked to slope the boards of the closed-in bed against the dresser, and play at sliding down mountains on them.
 
But for many years there had been no children in the manse. He in whose ways Gavin was to attempt the heavy task of walking had been a widower three months after his marriage, a man narrow when he came to Thrums, but so large-hearted when he left it that I, who know there is good in all the world because of the lovable souls I have met in this corner of it, yet cannot hope that many are as near to God as he. The most gladsome thing in the world is that few of us fall very low; the saddest that, with such capabilities, we seldom rise high. Of those who stand perceptibly above their fellows I have known very few; only Mr. Carfrae and two or three women.
 
Gavin only saw a very frail old minister who shook as he walked, as if his feet were striking against stones. He was to depart on the morrow to the place of his birth, but he came to the manse to wish his successor God-speed. Strangers were so formidable to Margaret that she only saw him from her window.
 
“May you never lose sight of God, Mr. Dishart,” the old man said in the parlour. Then he added, as if he had asked too much, “May you never turn from Him as I often did when I was a lad like you.”
 
As this aged minister, with the beautiful face that God gives to all who love Him and follow His commandments, spoke of his youth, he looked wistfully around the faded parlour.
 
“It is like a dream,” he said. “The first time I entered this room the thought passed through me that I would cut down that cherry-tree, because it kept out the light, but, you see, it outlives me. I grew old while looking for the axe. Only yesterday I was the young 20 minister, Mr. Dishart, and to-morrow you will be the old one, bidding good-bye to your successor.”
 
His eyes came back to Gavin’s eager face.
 
“You are very young, Mr. Dishart?”
 
“Nearly twenty-one.”
 
“Twenty-one! Ah, my dear sir, you do not know how pathetic that sounds to me. Twenty-one! We are children for the second time at twenty-one, and again when we are grey and put all our burden on the Lord. The young talk generously of relieving the old of their burdens, but the anxious heart is to the old when they see a load on the back of the young. Let me tell you, Mr. Dishart, that I would condone many things in one-and-twenty now that I dealt hardly with at middle age. God Himself, I think, is very willing to give one-and-twenty a second chance.”
 
“I am afraid,” Gavin said anxiously, “that I look even younger.”
 
“I think,” Mr. Carfrae answered, smiling, “that your heart is as fresh as your face; and that is well. The useless men are those who never change with the years. Many views that I held to in my youth and long afterwards are a pain to me now, and I am carrying away from Thrums memories of errors into which I fell at every stage of my ministry. When you are older you will know that life is a long lesson in humility.”
 
He paused.
 
“I hope,” he said nervously, “that you don’t sing the Paraphrases?”
 
Mr. Carfrae had not grown out of all his prejudices, you see; indeed, if Gavin had been less bigoted than he on this question they might have parted stiffly. The old minister would rather have remained to die in his pulpit than surrender it to one who read his sermons. Others may blame him for this, but I must say here plainly that I never hear a minister reading without wishing to send him back to college.
 
21
“I cannot deny,” Mr. Carfrae said, “that I broke down more than once to-day. This forenoon I was in Tillyloss, for the last time, and it so happens that there is scarcely a house in it in which I have not had a marriage or prayed over a coffin. Ah, sir, these are the scenes that make the minister more than all his sermons. You must join the family, Mr. Dishart, or you are only a minister once a week. And remember this, if your call is from above, it is a call to stay. Many such partings in a lifetime as I have had to-day would be too heartrending.”
 
“And yet,” Gavin said, hesitatingly, “they told me in Glasgow that I had received a call from the mouth of hell.”
 
“Those were cruel words, but they only mean that people who are seldom more than a day’s work in advance of want sometimes rise in arms for food. Our weavers are passionately religious, and so independent that they dare any one to help them, but if their wages were lessened they could not live. And so at talk of reduction they catch fire. Change of any kind alarms them, and though they call themselves Whigs, they rose a few years ago over the paving of the streets and stoned the workmen, who were strangers, out of the town.”
 
“And though you may have thought the place quiet to-day, Mr. Dishart, there was an ugly outbreak only two months ago, when the weavers turned on the manufacturers for reducing the price of the web, made a bonfire of some of their doors, and terrified one of them into leaving Thrums. Under the command of some Chartists, the people next paraded the streets to the music of fife and drum, and six policemen who drove up from Tilliedrum in a light cart were sent back tied to the seats.”
 
“No one has been punished?”
 
“Not yet, but nearly two years ago there was a similar 22 riot, and the sheriff took no action for months. Then one night the square suddenly filled with soldiers, and the ringleaders were seized in their beds. Mr. Dishart, the people are determined not to be caught in that way again, and ever since the rising a watch has been kept by night on every road that leads to Thrums. The signal that the soldiers are coming is to be the blowing of a horn. If you ever hear that horn, I implore you to hasten to the square.”
 
“The weavers would not fight?”
 
“You do not know how the Chartists have fired this part of the country. One misty day, a week ago, I was on the hill; I thought I had it to myself, when suddenly I heard a voice cry sharply, ‘Shoulder arms.’ I could see no one, and after a moment I put it down to a freak of the wind. Then all at once the mist before me blackened, and a body of men seemed to grow out of it. They were not shadows; they were Thrums weavers drilling, with pikes in their hands.
 
“They broke up,” Mr. Carfrae continued, after a pause, “at my entreaty, but they have met again since then.”
 
“And there were Auld Lichts among them?” Gavin asked. “I should have thought they would be frightened at our precentor, Lang Tammas, who seems to watch for backsliding in the congregation as if he had pleasure in discovering it.”
 
Gavin spoke with feeling, for the precentor had already put him through his catechism, and it was a stiff ordeal.
 
“The precentor!” said Mr. Carfrae. “Why, he was one of them.”
 
The old minister, once so brave a figure, tottered as he rose to go, and reeled in a dizziness until he had walked a few paces. Gavin went with him to the foot of the manse road; without his hat, as all Thrums knew before bedtime.
 
23
“I begin,” Gavin said, as they were parting, “where you leave off, and my prayer is that I may walk in your ways.”
 
“Ah, Mr. Dishart,” the white-haired minister said, with a sigh, “the world does not progress so quickly as a man grows old. You only begin where I began.”
 
He left Gavin, and then, as if the little minister’s last words had hurt him, turned and solemnly pointed his staff upward. Such men are the strong nails that keep the world together.
 
The twenty-one-years-old minister returned to the manse somewhat sadly, but when he saw his mother at the window of her bedroom, his heart leapt at the thought that she was with him and he had eighty pounds a year. Gaily he waved both his hands to her, and she answered with a smile, and then, in his boyishness, he jumped over a gooseberry bush. Immediately afterwards he reddened and tried to look venerable, for while in the air he had caught sight of two women and a man watching him from the dyke. He walked severely to the door, and, again forgetting himself, was bounding upstairs to Margaret, when Jean, the servant, stood scandalised in his way.
 
“I don’t think she caught me,” was Gavin’s reflection, and “The Lord preserve’s!” was Jean’s.
 
Gavin found his mother wondering how one should set about getting a cup of tea in a house that had a servant in it. He boldly rang the bell, and the willing Jean answered it so promptly (in a rush and jump) that Margaret was as much startled as Aladdin the first time he rubbed his lamp.
 
Manse servants of the most admired kind move softly, as if constant contact with a minister were goloshes to them; but Jean was new and raw, only having got her place because her father might be an elder any day. She had already conceived a romantic affection for her master; but to say “sir” to him—as she thirsted to do—would 24 have been as difficult to her as to swallow oysters. So anxious was she to please that when Gavin rang she fired herself at the bedroom, but bells were novelties to her as well as to Margaret, and she cried, excitedly, “What is ’t?” thinking the house must be on fire.
 
“There’s a curran folk at the back door,” Jean announced later, “and their respects to you, and would you gie them some water out o’ the well? It has been a drouth this aucht days, and the pumps is locked. Na,” she said, as Gavin made a too liberal offer, “that would toom the well, and there’s jimply enough for oursels. I should tell you, too, that three o’ them is no Auld Lichts.”
 
“Let that make no difference,” Gavin said grandly, but Jean changed his message to: “A bowlful apiece to Auld Lichts; all other denominations one cupful.”
 
“Ay, ay,” said Snecky Hobart, letting down the bucket, “and we’ll include atheists among other denominations.” The conversation came to Gavin and Margaret through the kitchen doorway.
 
“Dinna class Jo Cruickshanks wi’ me,” said Sam’l Langlands the U. P.
 
“Na, na,” said Cruickshanks the atheist, “I’m ower independent to be religious. I dinna gang to the kirk to cry, ‘Oh, Lord, gie, gie, gie.’”
 
“Take tent o’ yoursel’, my man,” said Lang Tammas sternly, “or you’ll soon be whaur you would neifer the warld for a cup o’ that cauld water.”
 
“Maybe you’ve ower keen an interest in the devil, Tammas,” retorted the atheist; “but, ony way, if it’s heaven for climate, it’s hell for company.”
 
“Lads,” said Snecky, sitting down on the bucket, “we’ll send Mr. Dishart to Jo. He’ll make another Rob Dow o’ him.”
 
“Speak mair reverently o’ your minister,” said the precentor. “He has the gift.”
 
25
“I hinna naturally your solemn rasping word, Tammas, but in the heart I speak in all reverence. Lads, the minister has a word! I tell you he prays near like one giving orders.”
 
“At first,” Snecky continued, “I thocht yon lang candidate was the earnestest o’ them a’, and I dinna deny but when I saw him wi’ his head bowed-like in prayer during the singing I says to mysel’, ‘Thou art the man.’ Ay, but Betsy wraxed up her head, and he wasna praying. He was combing his hair wi’ his fingers on the sly.”
 
“You ken fine, Sneck,” said Cruickshanks, “that you said, ‘Thou art the man’ to ilka ane o’ them, and just voted for Mr. Dishart because he preached hinmost.”
 
“I didna say it to Mr. Urquhart, the ane that preached second,” Sneck said. “That was the lad that gaed through ither.”
 
“Ay,” said Susy Tibbits, nicknamed by Haggart “the Timidest Woman” because she once said she was too young to marry, “but I was fell sorry for him, just being over anxious. He began bonny, flinging himself, like ane inspired, at the pulpit door, but after Hendry Munn pointed at it and cried out, ‘Be cautious, the sneck’s loose,’ he a’ gaed to bits. What a coolness Hendry has, though I suppose it was his duty, him being kirk-officer.”
 
“We didna want a man,” Lang Tammas said, “that could be put out by sic a sma’ thing as that. Mr. Urquhart was in sic a ravel after it that when he gies out the first line o’ the hunder and nineteenth psalm for singing, says he, ‘And so on to the end.’ Ay, that finished his chance.”
 
“The noblest o’ them to look at,” said Tibbie Birse, “was that ane frae Aberdeen, him that had sic a saft side to Jacob.”
 
“Ay,” said Snecky, “and I speired at Dr. McQueen if I should vote for him. ‘Looks like a genius, does 26 he?’ says the Doctor. ‘Weel, then,’ says he, ‘dinna vote for him, for my experience is that there’s no folk sic idiots as them that looks like geniuses.’”
 
“Sal,” Susy said, “it’s a guid thing we’ve settled, for I enjoyed sitting like a judge upon them so muckle that I sair doubt it was a kind o’ sport to me.”
 
“It was no sport to them, Susy, I’se uphaud, but it is a blessing we’ve settled, and ondoubtedly we’ve got the pick o’ them. The only thing Mr. Dishart did that made me oneasy was his saying the word Cæsar as if it began wi’ a k.”
 
“He’ll startle you mair afore you’re done wi’ him,” the atheist said maliciously. “I ken the ways o’ thae ministers preaching for kirks. Oh, they’re cunning. You was a’ pleased that Mr. Dishart spoke about looms and webs, but, lathies, it was a trick. Ilka ane o’ thae young ministers has a sermon about looms for weaving congregations, and a second about beating swords into ploughshares for country places, and another on the great catch of fishes for fishing villages. That’s their stock-in-trade; and just you wait and see if you dinna get the ploughshares and the fishes afore the month’s out. A minister preaching for a kirk is one thing, but a minister placed in’t may be a very different berry.”
 
“Joseph Cruickshanks,” cried the precentor, passionately, “none o’ your d——d blasphemy!”
 
They all looked at Whamond, and he dug his teeth into his lips in shame.
 
“Wha’s swearing now?” said the atheist.
 
But Whamond was quick.
 
“Matthew, twelve and thirty-one,” he said.
 
“Dagont, Tammas,” exclaimed the baffled Cruickshanks, “you’re aye quoting Scripture. How do you no quote Feargus O’Connor?”
 
“Lads,” said Snecky, “Jo hasna heard Mr. Dishart’s sermons. Ay, we get it scalding when he comes to the 27 sermon. I canna thole a minister that preaches as if heaven was round the corner.”
 
“If you’re hitting at our minister, Snecky,” said James Cochrane, “let me tell you he’s a better man than yours.”
 
“A better curler, I dare say.”
 
“A better prayer.”
 
“Ay, he can pray for a black frost as if it was ane o’ the Royal Family. I ken his prayers, ‘O Lord, let it haud for anither day, and keep the snaw awa’.’ Will you pretend, Jeames, that Mr. Duthie could make onything o’ Rob Dow?”
 
“I admit that Rob’s awakening was an extraordinary thing, and sufficient to gie Mr. Dishart a name. But Mr. Carfrae was baffled wi’ Rob too.”
 
“Jeames, if you had been in our kirk that day Mr. Dishart preached for’t you would be wearying the now for Sabbath, to be back in’t again. As you ken, that wicked man there, Jo Cruickshanks, got Rob Dow, drucken, cursing, poaching Rob Dow, to come to the kirk to annoy the minister. Ay, he hadna been at that work for ten minutes when Mr. Dishart stopped in his first prayer and ga’e Rob a look. I couldna see the look, being in the precentor’s box, but as sure as death I felt it boring through me. Rob is hard wood, though, and soon he was at his tricks again. Weel, the minister stopped a second time in the sermon, and so awful was the silence that a heap o’ the congregation couldna keep their seats. I heard Rob breathing quick and strong. Mr. Dishart had his arm pointed at him a’ this time, and at last he says sternly, ‘Come forward.’ Listen, Joseph Cruickshanks, and tremble. Rob gripped the board to keep himsel’ frae obeying, and again Mr. Dishart says, ‘Come forward,’ and syne Rob rose shaking, and tottered to the pulpit stair like a man suddenly shot into the Day of Judgment. ‘You hulking man of sin,’ cries Mr. Dishart, not a tick fleid, though Rob’s as 28 big as three o’ him, ‘sit down on the stair and attend to me, or I’ll step doun frae the pulpit and run you out of the house of God.’”
 
“And since that day,” said Hobart, “Rob has worshipped Mr. Dishart as a man that has stepped out o’ the Bible. When the carriage passed this day we was discussing the minister, and Sam’l Dickie wasna sure but what Mr. Dishart wore his hat rather far back on his head. You should have seen Rob. ‘My certie,’ he roars, ‘there’s the shine frae Heaven on that little minister’s face, and them as says there’s no has me to fecht.’”
 
“Ay, weel,” said the U. P., rising, “we’ll see how Rob wears—and how your minister wears too. I wouldna like to sit in a kirk whaur they daurna sing a paraphrase.”
 
“The Psalms of David,” retorted Whamond, “mount straight to heaven, but your paraphrases sticks to the ceiling o’ the kirk.”
 
“You’re a bigoted set, Tammas Whamond, but I tell you this, and it’s my last words to you the nicht, the day’ll come when you’ll hae Mr. Duthie, ay, and even the U. P. minister, preaching in the Auld Licht kirk.”
 
“And let this be my last words to you,” replied the precentor, furiously; “that rather than see a U. P. preaching in the Auld Licht kirk I would burn in hell fire for ever!”
 
This gossip increased Gavin’s knowledge of the grim men with whom he had now to deal. But as he sat beside Margaret after she had gone to bed, their talk was pleasant.
 
“You remember, mother,” Gavin said, “how I almost prayed for the manse that was to give you an egg every morning. I have been telling Jean never to forget the egg.”
 
“Ah, Gavin, things have come about so much as we 29 wanted that I’m a kind o’ troubled. It’s hardly natural, and I hope nothing terrible is to happen now.”
 
Gavin arranged her pillows as she liked them, and when he next stole into the room in his stocking soles to look at her, he thought she was asleep. But she was not. I dare say she saw at that moment Gavin in his first frock, and Gavin in knickerbockers, and Gavin as he used to walk into the Glasgow room from college, all still as real to her as the Gavin who had a kirk.
 
The little minister took away the lamp to his own room, shaking his fist at himself for allowing his mother’s door to creak. He pulled up his blind. The town lay as still as salt. But a steady light showed in the south, and on pressing his face against the window he saw another in the west. Mr. Carfrae’s words about the night-watch came back to him. Perhaps it had been on such a silent night as this that the soldiers marched into Thrums. Would they come again?
 
Chapter Four.   FIRST COMING OF THE EGYPTIAN WOMAN.
 A learned man says in a book, otherwise beautiful with truth, that villages are family groups. To him Thrums would only be a village, though town is the word we have ever used, and this is not true of it. Doubtless we have interests in common, from which a place so near (but the road is heavy) as Tilliedrum is shut out, and we have an individuality of our own too, as if, like our red houses, we came from a quarry that supplies no other place. But we are not one family. In the old days, those of us who were of the Tenements seldom wandered to the Croft head, and if we did go there we saw men to whom we could not always give a name. To flit from the Tanage brae to Haggart’s road was to change one’s friends. A kirk-wynd weaver might kill his swine and Tillyloss not know of it until boys ran westward hitting each other with the bladders. Only the voice of the dulsemen could be heard all over Thrums at once. Thus even in a small place but a few outstanding persons are known to everybody.
 
In eight days Gavin’s figure was more familiar in Thrums than many that had grown bent in it. He had already been twice to the cemetery, for a minister only reaches his new charge in time to attend a funeral. Though short of stature he cast a great shadow. He was so full of his duties, Jean said, that though he pulled to the door as he left the manse, he had passed the currant bushes before it snecked. He darted through courts, and invented ways into awkward houses. If 31 you did not look up quickly he was round the corner. His visiting exhausted him only less than his zeal in the pulpit, from which, according to report, he staggered damp with perspiration to the vestry, where Hendry Munn wrung him like a wet cloth. A deaf lady, celebrated for giving out her washing, compelled him to hold her trumpet until she had peered into all his crannies, with the Shorter Catechism for a lantern. Janet Dundas told him, in answer to his knock, that she could not abide him, but she changed her mind when he said her garden was quite a show. The wives who expected a visit scrubbed their floors for him, cleaned out their presses for him, put diamond socks on their bairns for him, rubbed their hearthstones blue for him, and even tidied up the garret for him, and triumphed over the neighbours whose houses he passed by. For Gavin blundered occasionally by inadvertence, as when he gave dear old Betty Davie occasion to say bitterly—
 
“Ou ay, you can sail by my door and gang to Easie’s, but I’m thinking you would stop at mine too if I had a brass handle on’t.”
 
So passed the first four weeks, and then came the fateful night of the seventeenth of October, and with it the strange woman. Family worship at the manse was over and Gavin was talking to his mother, who never crossed the threshold save to go to church (though her activity at home was among the marvels Jean sometimes slipped down to the Tenements to announce), when Wearyworld the policeman came to the door “with Rob Dow’s compliments, and if you’re no wi’ me by ten o’clock I’m to break out again.” Gavin knew what this meant, and at once set off for Rob’s.
 
“You’ll let me gang a bit wi’ you,” the policeman entreated, “for till Rob sent me on this errand not a soul has spoken to me the day; ay, mony a ane hae I spoken to, but not a man, woman, nor bairn would fling me a word.”
 
32
“I often meant to ask you,” Gavin said as they went along the Tenements, which smelled at that hour of roasted potatoes, “why you are so unpopular.”
 
“It’s because I’m police. I’m the first ane that has ever been in Thrums, and the very folk that appointed me at a crown a week looks upon me as a disgraced man for accepting. It’s Gospel that my ain wife is short wi’ me when I’ve on my uniform, though weel she kens that I would rather hae stuck to the loom if I hadna ha’en sic a queer richt leg. Nobody feels the shame o’ my position as I do mysel’, but this is a town without pity.”
 
“It should be a consolation to you that you are discharging useful duties.”
 
“But I’m no. I’m doing harm. There’s Charles Dickson says that the very sicht o’ my uniform rouses his dander so muckle that it makes him break windows, though a peaceably-disposed man till I was appointed. And what’s the use o’ their haeing a policeman when they winna come to the lock-up after I lay hands on them?”
 
“Do they say they won’t come?”
 
“Say? Catch them saying onything! They just gie me a wap into the gutters. If they would speak I wouldna complain, for I’m nat’rally the sociablest man in Thrums.”
 
“Rob, however, had spoken to you.”
 
“Because he had need o’ me. That was ay Rob’s way, converted or no converted. When he was blind drunk he would order me to see him safe hame, but would he crack wi’ me? Na, na.”
 
Wearyworld, who was so called because of his forlorn way of muttering, “It’s a weary warld, and nobody bides in’t,” as he went his melancholy rounds, sighed like one about to cry, and Gavin changed the subject.
 
“Is the watch for the soldiers still kept up?” he asked.
 
“It is, but the watchers winna let me in aside them. 33 I’ll let you see that for yoursel’ at the head o’ the Roods, for they watch there in the auld windmill.”
 
Most of the Thrums lights were already out, and that in the windmill disappeared as footsteps were heard.
 
“You’re desperate characters,” the policeman cried, but got no answer. He changed his tactics.
 
“A fine nicht for the time o’ year,” he cried. No answer.
 
“But I wouldna wonder,” he shouted, “though we had rain afore morning.” No answer.
 
“Surely you could gie me a word frae ahint the door. You’re doing an onlawful thing, but I dinna ken wha you are.”
 
“You’ll swear to that?” some one asked gruffly.
 
“I swear to it, Peter.”
 
Wearyworld tried another six remarks in vain.
 
“Ay,” he said to the minister, “that’s what it is to be an onpopular man. And now I’ll hae to turn back, for the very anes that winna let me join them would be the first to complain if I gaed out o’ bounds.”
 
Gavin found Dow at New Zealand, a hamlet of mud houses, whose tenants could be seen on any Sabbath morning washing themselves in the burn that trickled hard by. Rob’s son, Micah, was asleep at the door, but he brightened when he saw who was shaking him.
 
“My father put me out,” he explained, “because he’s daft for the drink, and was fleid he would curse me. He hasna cursed me,” Micah added, proudly, “for an aught days come Sabbath. Hearken to him at his loom. He daurna take his feet off the treadles for fear o’ running straucht to the drink.”
 
Gavin went in. The loom, and two stools, the one four-footed and the other a buffet, were Rob’s most conspicuous furniture. A shaving-strap hung on the wall. The fire was out, but the trunk of a tree, charred at one end, showed how he heated his house. He made a fire of peat, and on it placed one end of a tree trunk 34 that might be six feet long. As the tree burned away it was pushed further into the fireplace, and a roaring fire could always be got by kicking pieces of the smouldering wood and blowing them into flame with the bellows. When Rob saw the minister he groaned relief and left his loom. He had been weaving, his teeth clenched, his eyes on fire, for seven hours.
 
“I wasna fleid,” little Micah said to the neighbours afterwards, “to gang in wi’ the minister. He’s a fine man that. He didna ca’ my father names. Na, he said, ‘You’re a brave fellow, Rob,’ and he took my father’s hand, he did. My father was shaking after his fecht wi’ the drink, and, says he, ‘Mr. Dishart,’ he says, ‘if you’ll let me break out nows and nans, I could bide straucht atween times, but I canna keep sober if I hinna a drink to look forrit to.’ Ay, my father prigged sair to get one fou day in the month, and he said, ‘Syne if I die sudden, there’s thirty chances to one that I gang to heaven, so it’s worth risking.’ But Mr. Dishart wouldna hear o’t, and he cries, ‘No, by God,’ he cries, ‘we’ll wrestle wi’ the devil till we throttle him,’ and down him and my father gaed on their knees.
 
“The minister prayed a lang time till my father said his hunger for the drink was gone, ‘but’, he says, ‘it swells up in me o’ a sudden aye, and it may be back afore you’re hame.’ ‘Then come to me at once,’ says Mr. Dishart; but my father says, ‘Na, for it would haul me into the public-house as if it had me at the end o’ a rope, but I’ll send the laddie.’
 
“You saw my father crying the minister back? It was to gie him twa pound, and, says my father, ‘God helping me,’ he says, ‘I’ll droon mysel in the dam rather than let the drink master me, but in case it should get haud o’ me and I should die drunk, it would be a michty gratification to me to ken that you had the siller to bury me respectable without ony help frae the poor’s rates.’ The minister wasna for taking it at first, 35 but he took it when he saw how earnest my father was. Ay, he’s a noble man. After he gaed awa my father made me learn the names o’ the apostles frae Luke sixth, and he says to me, ‘Miss out Bartholomew,’ he says, ‘for he did little, and put Gavin Dishart in his place.’”
 
Feeling as old as he sometimes tried to look, Gavin turned homeward. Margaret was already listening for him. You may be sure she knew his step. I think our steps vary as much as the human face. My bookshelves were made by a blind man who could identify by their steps nearly all who passed his window. Yet he has admitted to me that he could not tell wherein my steps differed from others; and this I believe, though rejecting his boast that he could distinguish a minister’s step from a doctor’s, and even tell to which denomination the minister belonged.
 
I have sometimes asked myself what would have been Gavin’s future had he gone straight home that night from Dow’s. He would doubtless have seen the Egyptian before morning broke, but she would not have come upon him like a witch. There are, I dare say, many lovers who would never have been drawn to each other had they met for the first time, as, say, they met the second time. But such dreaming is to no purpose. Gavin met Sanders Webster, the mole-catcher, and was persuaded by him to go home by Caddam Wood.
 
Gavin took the path to Caddam, because Sanders told him the Wild Lindsays were there, a gypsy family that threatened the farmers by day and danced devilishly, it was said, at night. The little minister knew them by repute as a race of giants, and that not many persons would have cared to face them alone at midnight; but he was feeling as one wound up to heavy duties, and meant to admonish them severely.
 
Sanders, an old man who lived with his sister Nanny on the edge of the wood, went with him, and for a 36 time both were silent. But Sanders had something to say.
 
“Was you ever at the Spittal, Mr. Dishart?” he asked.
 
“Lord Rintoul’s house at the top of Glen Quharity? No.”
 
“Hae you ever looked on a lord?”
 
“No.”
 
“Or on an auld lord’s young leddyship? I have.”
 
“What is she?”
 
“You surely ken that Rintoul’s auld, and is to be married on a young leddyship. She’s no’ a leddyship yet, but they’re to be married soon, so I may say I’ve seen a leddyship. Ay, an impressive sicht. It was yestreen.”
 
“Is there a great difference in their ages?”
 
“As muckle as atween auld Peter Spens and his wife, wha was saxteen when he was saxty, and she was playing at dumps in the street when her man was waiting for her to make his porridge. Ay, sic a differ doesna suit wi’ common folk, but of course earls can please themsels. Rintoul’s so fond o’ the leddyship ’at is to be, that when she was at the school in Edinbury he wrote to her ilka day. Kaytherine Crummie telled me that, and she says aince you’re used to it, writing letters is as easy as skinning moles. I dinna ken what they can write sic a heap about, but I daur say he gies her his views on the Chartist agitation and the potato disease, and she’ll write back about the romantic sichts o’ Edinbury and the sermons o’ the grand preachers she hears. Sal, though, thae grand folk has no religion to speak o’, for they’re a’ English kirk. You’re no’ speiring what her leddyship said to me?”
 
“What did she say?”
 
“Weel, you see, there was a dancing ball on, and Kaytherine Crummie took me to a window whaur I could stand on a flower-pot and watch the critturs whirling round in the ball like teetotums. What’s mair, she 37 pointed out the leddyship that’s to be to me, and I just glowered at her, for thinks I, ‘Take your fill, Sanders, and whaur there’s lords and leddyships, dinna waste a minute on colonels and honourable misses and sic like dirt.’ Ay, but what wi’ my een blinking at the blaze o’ candles, I lost sicht o’ her till all at aince somebody says at my lug, ‘Well, my man, and who is the prettiest lady in the room?’ Mr. Dishart, it was her leddyship. She looked like a star.”
 
“And what did you do?”
 
“The first thing I did was to fall aff the flower-pot; but syne I came to, and says I, wi’ a polite smirk, ‘I’m thinking your leddyship,’ says I, ‘as you’re the bonniest yourself.’”
 
“I see you are a cute man, Sanders.”
 
“Ay, but that’s no’ a’. She lauched in a pleased way and tapped me wi’ her fan, and says she, ‘Why do you think me the prettiest?’ I dinna deny but what that staggered me, but I thocht a minute, and took a look at the other dancers again, and syne I says, michty sly like, ‘The other leddies,’ I says, ‘has sic sma’ feet.’”
 
Sanders stopped here and looked doubtingly at Gavin.
 
“I canna make up my mind,” he said, “whether she liked that, for she rapped my knuckles wi’ her fan fell sair, and aff she gaed. Ay, I consulted Tammas Haggart about it, and he says, ‘The flirty crittur,’ he says. What would you say, Mr. Dishart?”
 
Gavin managed to escape without giving an answer, for here their roads separated. He did not find the Wild Lindsays, however. Children of whim, of prodigious strength while in the open, but destined to wither quickly in the hot air of towns, they had gone from Caddam, leaving nothing of themselves behind but a black mark burned by their fires into the ground. Thus they branded the earth through many counties until some hour when the spirit of wandering again fell 38 on them, and they forsook their hearths with as little compunction as the bird leaves its nest.
 
Gavin had walked quickly, and he now stood silently in the wood, his hat in his hand. In the moonlight the grass seemed tipped with hoar frost. Most of the beeches were already bare, but the shoots, clustering round them, like children at their mother’s skirts, still retained their leaves red and brown. Among the pines these leaves were as incongruous as a wedding-dress at a funeral. Gavin was standing on grass, but there were patches of heather within sight, and broom, and the leaf of the blaeberry. Where the beeches had drawn up the earth with them as they grew, their roots ran this way and that, slippery to the feet and looking like disinterred bones. A squirrel appeared suddenly on the charred ground, looked doubtfully at Gavin to see if he was growing there, and then glided up a tree, where it sat eyeing him, and forgetting to conceal its shadow. Caddam was very still. At long intervals came from far away the whack of an axe on wood. Gavin was in a world by himself, and this might be some one breaking into it.
 
The mystery of woods by moonlight thrilled the little minister. His eyes rested on the shining roots, and he remembered what had been told him of the legend of Caddam, how once on a time it was a mighty wood, and a maiden most beautiful stood on its confines, panting and afraid, for a wicked man pursued her; how he drew near, and she ran a little way into the wood, and he followed her, and she still ran, and still he followed, until both were for ever lost, and the bones of her pursuer lie beneath a beech, but the lady may still be heard singing in the woods if the night be fine, for then she is a glad spirit, but weeping when there is wild wind, for then she is but a mortal seeking a way out of the wood.
 
 
 
The squirrel slid down the fir and was gone. The 39 axe’s blows ceased. Nothing that moved was in sight. The wind that has its nest in trees was circling around with many voices, that never rose above a whisper, and were often but the echo of a sigh.
 
Gavin was in the Caddam of past days, where the beautiful maiden wanders ever, waiting for him who is so pure that he may find her. He will wander over the tree-tops looking for her, with the moon for his lamp, and some night he will hear her singing. The little minister drew a deep breath, and his foot snapped a brittle twig. Then he remembered who and where he was, and stooped to pick up his staff. But he did not pick it up, for as his fingers were closing on it the lady began to sing.
 
For perhaps a minute Gavin stood stock still, like an intruder. Then he ran towards the singing, which seemed to come from Windyghoul, a straight road through Caddam that farmers use in summer, but leave in the back end of the year to leaves and pools. In Windyghoul there is either no wind or so much that it rushes down the sieve like an army, entering with a shriek of terror, and escaping with a derisive howl. The moon was crossing the avenue. But Gavin only saw the singer.
 
She was still fifty yards away, sometimes singing gleefully, and again letting her body sway lightly as she came dancing up Windyghoul. Soon she was within a few feet of the little minister, to whom singing, except when out of tune, was a suspicious thing, and dancing a device of the devil. His arm went out wrathfully, and his intention was to pronounce sentence on this woman.
 
But she passed, unconscious of his presence, and he had not moved nor spoken. Though really of the average height, she was a little thing to the eyes of Gavin, who always felt tall and stout except when he looked down. The grace of her swaying figure was a new 40 thing in the world to him. Only while she passed did he see her as a gleam of colour, a gypsy elf poorly clad, her bare feet flashing beneath a short green skirt, a twig of rowan berries stuck carelessly into her black hair. Her face was pale. She had an angel’s loveliness. Gavin shook.
 
Still she danced onwards, but she was very human, for when she came to muddy water she let her feet linger in it, and flung up her arms, dancing more wantonly than before. A diamond on her finger shot a thread of fire over the pool. Undoubtedly she was the devil.
 
Gavin leaped into the avenue, and she heard him and looked behind. He tried to cry “Woman!” sternly, but lost the word, for now she saw him, and laughed with her shoulders, and beckoned to him, so that he shook his fist at her. She tripped on, but often turning her head beckoned and mocked him, and he forgot his dignity and his pulpit and all other things, and ran after her. Up Windyghoul did he pursue her, and it was well that the precentor was not there to see. She reached the mouth of the avenue, and kissing her hand to Gavin, so that the ring gleamed again, was gone.
 
The minister’s one thought was to find her, but he searched in vain. She might be crossing the hill on her way to Thrums, or perhaps she was still laughing at him from behind a tree. After a longer time than he was aware of, Gavin realised that his boots were chirping and his trousers streaked with mud. Then he abandoned the search and hastened homewards in a rage.
 
From the hill to the manse the nearest way is down two fields, and the little minister descended them rapidly. Thrums, which is red in daylight, was grey and still as the cemetery. He had glimpses of several of its deserted streets. To the south the watch-light showed brightly, but no other was visible. So it seemed to Gavin, and then—suddenly—he lost the power to 41 move. He had heard the horn. Thrice it sounded, and thrice it struck him to the heart. He looked again and saw a shadow stealing along the Tenements, then another, then half-a-dozen. He remembered Mr. Carfrae’s words, “If you ever hear that horn, I implore you to hasten to the square,” and in another minute he had reached the Tenements.
 
Now again he saw the gypsy. She ran past him, half-a-score of men, armed with staves and pikes, at her heels. At first he thought they were chasing her, but they were following her as a leader. Her eyes sparkled as she waved them to the square with her arms.
 
“The soldiers, the soldiers!” was the universal cry.
 
“Who is that woman?” demanded Gavin, catching hold of a frightened old man.
 
“Curse the Egyptian limmer,” the man answered, “she’s egging my laddie on to fecht.”
 
“Bless her rather,” the son cried, “for warning us that the sojers is coming. Put your ear to the ground, Mr. Dishart, and you’ll hear the dirl o’ their feet.”
 
The young man rushed away to the square, flinging his father from him. Gavin followed. As he turned into the school wynd, the town drum began to beat, windows were thrown open, and sullen men ran out of closes where women were screaming and trying to hold them back. At the foot of the wynd Gavin passed Sanders Webster.
 
“Mr. Dishart,” the mole-catcher cried, “hae you seen that Egyptian? May I be struck dead if it’s no’ her little leddyship.”
 
But Gavin did not hear him.
Chapter Five.   A WARLIKE CHAPTER, CULMINATING IN THE FLOUTING OF THE MINISTER BY THE WOMAN.
 “Mr. Dishart!”
 
Jean had clutched at Gavin in Bank Street. Her hair was streaming, and her wrapper but half buttoned.
 
“Oh, Mr. Dishart, look at the mistress! I couldna keep her in the manse.”
 
Gavin saw his mother beside him, bare-headed, trembling.
 
“How could I sit still, Gavin, and the town full o’ the skirls of women and bairns? Oh, Gavin, what can I do for them? They will suffer most this night.”
 
As Gavin took her hand he knew that Margaret felt for the people more than he.
 
“But you must go home, mother,” he said, “and leave me to do my duty. I will take you myself if you will not go with Jean. Be careful of her, Jean.”
 
“Ay, will I,” Jean answered, then burst into tears. “Mr. Dishart,” she cried, “if they take my father they’d best take my mither too.”
 
The two women went back to the manse, where Jean relit the fire, having nothing else to do, and boiled the kettle, while Margaret wandered in anguish from room to room.
 
Men nearly naked ran past Gavin, seeking to escape from Thrums by the fields he had descended. When he shouted to them they only ran faster. A Tillyloss weaver whom he tried to stop struck him savagely and sped past to the square. In Bank Street, which was full 43 of people at one moment and empty the next, the minister stumbled over old Charles Yuill.
 
“Take me and welcome,” Yuill cried, mistaking Gavin for the enemy. He had only one arm through the sleeve of his jacket, and his feet were bare.
 
“I am Mr. Dishart. Are the soldiers already in the square, Yuill?”
 
“They’ll be there in a minute.”
 
The man was so weak that Gavin had to hold him.
 
“Be a man, Charles. You have nothing to fear. It is not such as you the soldiers have come for. If need be, I can swear that you had not the strength, even if you had the will, to join in the weavers’ riot.”
 
“For Godsake, Mr. Dishart,” Yuill cried, his hands chattering on Gavin’s coat, “dinna swear that. My laddie was in the thick o’ the riot; and if he’s ta’en there’s the poor’s-house gaping for Kitty and me, for I couldna weave half a web a week. If there’s a warrant agin onybody o’ the name of Yuill, swear it’s me; swear I’m a desperate character, swear I’m michty strong for all I look palsied; and if when they take me, my courage breaks down, swear the mair, swear I confessed my guilt to you on the Book.”
 
As Yuill spoke the quick rub-a-dub of a drum was heard.
 
“The soldiers!” Gavin let go his hold of the old man, who hastened away to give himself up.
 
“That’s no the sojers,” said a woman; “it’s the folk gathering in the square. This’ll be a watery Sabbath in Thrums.”
 
“Rob Dow,” shouted Gavin, as Dow flung past with a scythe in his hand, “lay down that scythe.”
 
“To hell wi’ religion!” Rob retorted, fiercely; “it spoils a’ thing.”
 
“Lay down that scythe; I command you.”
 
Rob stopped undecidedly, then cast the scythe from 44 him, but its rattle on the stones was more than he could bear.
 
“I winna,” he cried, and, picking it up, ran to the square.
 
An upper window in Bank Street opened, and Dr. McQueen put out his head. He was smoking as usual.
 
“Mr. Dishart,” he said, “you will return home at once if you are a wise man; or, better still, come in here. You can do nothing with these people to-night.”
 
“I can stop their fighting.”
 
“You will only make black blood between them and you.”
 
“Dinna heed him, Mr. Dishart,” cried some women.
 
“You had better heed him,” cried a man.
 
“I will not desert my people,” Gavin said.
 
“Listen, then, to my prescription,” the doctor replied. “Drive that gypsy lassie out of the town before the soldiers reach it. She is firing the men to a red-heat through sheer devilry.”
 
“She brocht the news, or we would have been nipped in our beds,” some people cried.
 
“Does any one know who she is?” Gavin demanded, but all shook their heads. The Egyptian, as they called her, had never been seen in these parts before.
 
“Has any other person seen the soldiers?” he asked. “Perhaps this is a false alarm.”
 
“Several have seen them within the last few minutes,” the doctor answered. “They came from Tilliedrum, and were advancing on us from the south, but when they heard that we had got the alarm they stopped at the top of the brae, near T’nowhead’s farm. Man, you would take these things more coolly if you smoked.”
 
“Show me this woman,” Gavin said sternly to those who had been listening. Then a stream of people carried him into the square.
 
The square has altered little, even in these days of enterprise, when Tillyloss has become Newton Bank, 45 and the Craft Head Croft Terrace, with enamelled labels on them for the guidance of slow people, who forget their address and have to run to the end of the street and look up every time they write a letter. The stones on which the butter-wives sat have disappeared, and with them the clay walls and the outside stairs. Gone, too, is the stair of the town-house, from the top of which the drummer roared the gossip of the week on Sabbaths to country folk, to the scandal of all who knew that the proper thing on that day is to keep your blinds down; but the town-house itself, round and red, still makes exit to the south troublesome. Wherever streets meet the square there is a house in the centre of them, and thus the heart of Thrums is a box, in which the stranger finds himself suddenly, wondering at first how he is to get out, and presently how he got in.
 
To Gavin, who never before had seen a score of people in the square at once, here was a sight strange and terrible. Andrew Struthers, an old soldier, stood on the outside stair of the town-house, shouting words of command to some fifty weavers, many of them scantily clad, but all armed with pikes and poles. Most were known to the little minister, but they wore faces that were new to him. Newcomers joined the body every moment. If the drill was clumsy the men were fierce. Hundreds of people gathered around, some screaming, some shaking their fists at the old soldier, many trying to pluck their relatives out of danger. Gavin could not see the Egyptian. Women and old men, fighting for the possession of his ear, implored him to disperse the armed band. He ran up the town-house stair, and in a moment it had become a pulpit.
 
“Dinna dare to interfere, Mr. Dishart,” Struthers said savagely.
 
“Andrew Struthers,” said Gavin solemnly, “in the name of God I order you to leave me alone. If you don’t,” he added ferociously, “I’ll fling you over the stair.”
 
46
“Dinna heed him, Andrew,” some one shouted, and another cried, “He canna understand our sufferings; he has dinner ilka day.”
 
Struthers faltered, however, and Gavin cast his eye over the armed men.
 
“Rob Dow,” he said, “William Carmichael, Thomas Whamond, William Munn, Alexander Hobart, Henders Haggart, step forward.”
 
These were Auld Lichts, and when they found that the minister would not take his eyes off them, they obeyed, all save Rob Dow.
 
“Never mind him, Rob,” said the atheist, Cruickshanks, “it’s better playing cards in hell than singing psalms in heaven.”
 
“Joseph Cruickshanks,” responded Gavin grimly, “you will find no cards down there.”
 
Then Rob also came to the foot of the stair. There was some angry muttering from the crowd, and young Charles Yuill exclaimed, “Curse you, would you lord it ower us on week-days as weel as on Sabbaths?”
 
“Lay down your weapons,” Gavin said to the six men.
 
They looked at each other. Hobart slipped his pike behind his back.
 
“I hae no weapon,” he said slily.
 
“Let me hae my fling this nicht,” Dow entreated, “and I’ll promise to bide sober for a twelvemonth.”
 
“Oh, Rob, Rob!” the minister said bitterly, “are you the man I prayed with a few hours ago?”
 
The scythe fell from Rob’s hands.
 
“Down wi’ your pikes,” he roared to his companions, “or I’ll brain you wi’ them.”
 
“Ay, lay them down,” the precentor whispered, “but keep your feet on them.”
 
Then the minister, who was shaking with excitement, though he did not know it, stretched forth his arms for silence, and it came so suddenly as to frighten the people in the neighboring streets.
 
47
“If he prays we’re done for,” cried young Charles Yuill, but even in that hour many of the people were unbonneted.
 
“Oh, Thou who art the Lord of hosts,” Gavin prayed, “we are in Thy hands this night. These are Thy people, and they have sinned; but Thou art a merciful God, and they were sore tried, and knew not what they did. To Thee, our God, we turn for deliverance, for without Thee we are lost.”
 
The little minister’s prayer was heard all round the square, and many weapons were dropped as an Amen to it.
 
“If you fight,” cried Gavin, brightening as he heard the clatter of the iron on the stones, “your wives and children may be shot in the streets. These soldiers have come for a dozen of you; will you be benefited if they take away a hundred?”
 
“Oh, hearken to him,” cried many women.
 
“I winna,” answered a man, “for I’m ane o’ the dozen. Whaur’s the Egyptian?”
 
“Here.”
 
Gavin saw the crowd open, and the woman of Windyghoul come out of it, and, while he should have denounced her, he only blinked, for once more her loveliness struck him full in the eyes. She was beside him on the stair before he became a minister again.
 
“How dare you, woman?” he cried; but she flung a rowan berry at him.
 
“If I were a man,” she exclaimed, addressing the people, “I wouldna let myself be catched like a mouse in a trap.”
 
“We winna,” some answered.
 
“What kind o’ women are you,” cried the Egyptian, her face gleaming as she turned to her own sex, “that bid your men folk gang to gaol when a bold front would lead them to safety? Do you want to be husbandless and hameless?”
 
48
“Disperse, I command you!” cried Gavin. “This abandoned woman is inciting you to riot.”
 
“Dinna heed this little man,” the Egyptian retorted.
 
It is curious to know that even at that anxious moment Gavin winced because she called him little.
 
“She has the face of a mischief-maker,” he shouted, “and her words are evil.”
 
“You men and women o’ Thrums,” she responded, “ken that I wish you weel by the service I hae done you this nicht. Wha telled you the sojers was coming?”
 
“It was you; it was you!”
 
“Ay, and mony a mile I ran to bring the news. Listen, and I’ll tell you mair.”
 
“She has a false tongue,” Gavin cried; “listen not to the brazen woman.”
 
“What I have to tell,” she said, “is as true as what I’ve telled already, and how true that is you a’ ken. You’re wondering how the sojers has come to a stop at the tap o’ the brae instead o’ marching on the town. Here’s the reason. They agreed to march straucht to the square if the alarm wasna given, but if it was they were to break into small bodies and surround the town so that you couldna get out. That’s what they’re doing now.”
 
At this the screams were redoubled, and many men lifted the weapons they had dropped.
 
“Believe her not,” cried Gavin. “How could a wandering gypsy know all this?”
 
“Ay, how can you ken?” some demanded.
 
“It’s enough that I do ken,” the Egyptian answered. “And this mair I ken, that the captain of the soldiers is confident he’ll nab every one o’ you that’s wanted unless you do one thing.”
 
“What is ’t?”
 
“If you a’ run different ways you’re lost, but if you keep thegither you’ll be able to force a road into the 49 country, whaur you can scatter. That’s what he’s fleid you’ll do.”
 
“Then it’s what we will do.”
 
“It is what you will not do,” Gavin said passionately. “The truth is not in this wicked woman.”
 
But scarcely had he spoken when he knew that startling news had reached the square. A murmur arose on the skirts of the mob, and swept with the roar of the sea towards the town-house. A detachment of the soldiers were marching down the Roods from the north.
 
“There’s some coming frae the east-town end,” was the next intelligence; “and they’ve gripped Sanders Webster, and auld Charles Yuill has given himsel’ up.”
 
“You see, you see,” the gypsy said, flashing triumph at Gavin.
 
“Lay down your weapons,” Gavin cried, but his power over the people had gone.
 
“The Egyptian spoke true,” they shouted; “dinna heed the minister.”
 
Gavin tried to seize the gypsy by the shoulders, but she slipped past him down the stair, and crying “Follow me!” ran round the town-house and down the brae.
 
“Woman!” he shouted after her, but she only waved her arms scornfully. The people followed her, many of the men still grasping their weapons, but all in disorder. Within a minute after Gavin saw the gleam of the ring on her finger, as she waved her hands, he and Dow were alone in the square.
 
“She’s an awfu’ woman that,” Rob said. “I saw her lauching.”
 
Gavin ground his teeth.
 
“Rob Dow,” he said, slowly, “if I had not found Christ I would have throttled that woman. You saw how she flouted me?”
Chapter Six.   IN WHICH THE SOLDIERS MEET THE AMAZONS OF THRUMS.
 Dow looked shamefacedly at the minister, and then set off up the square.
 
“Where are you going, Rob?”
 
“To gie myself up. I maun do something to let you see there’s one man in Thrums that has mair faith in you than in a fliskmahoy.”
 
“And only one, Rob. But I don’t know that they want to arrest you.”
 
“Ay, I had a hand in tying the polissman to the——”
 
“I want to hear nothing about that,” Gavin said, quickly.
 
“Will I hide, then?”
 
“I dare not advise you to do that. It would be wrong.”
 
Half a score of fugitives tore past the town-house, and were out of sight without a cry. There was a tread of heavier feet, and a dozen soldiers, with several policemen and two prisoners, appeared suddenly on the north side of the square.
 
“Rob,” cried the minister in desperation, “run!”
 
When the soldiers reached the town-house, where they locked up their prisoners, Dow was skulking eastward, and Gavin running down the brae.
 
“They’re fechting,” he was told, “they’re fechting on the brae, the sojers is firing, a man’s killed!”
 
But this was an exaggeration.
 
The brae, though short, is very steep. There is a hedge on one side of it, from which the land falls away, and on the other side a hillock. Gavin reached the 51 scene to see the soldiers marching down the brae, guarding a small body of policemen. The armed weavers were retreating before them. A hundred women or more were on the hillock, shrieking and gesticulating. Gavin joined them, calling on them not to fling the stones they had begun to gather.
 
The armed men broke into a rabble, flung down their weapons, and fled back towards the town-house. Here they almost ran against the soldiers in the square, who again forced them into the brae. Finding themselves about to be wedged between the two forces, some crawled through the hedge, where they were instantly seized by policemen. Others sought to climb up the hillock and then escape into the country. The policemen clambered after them. The men were too frightened to fight, but a woman seized a policeman by the waist and flung him head foremost among the soldiers. One of these shouted “Fire!” but the captain cried “No.” Then came showers of missiles from the women. They stood their ground and defended the retreat of the scared men.
 
Who flung the first stone is not known, but it is believed to have been the Egyptian. The policemen were recalled, and the whole body ordered to advance down the brae. Thus the weavers who had not escaped at once were driven before them, and soon hemmed in between the two bodies of soldiers, when they were easily captured. But for two minutes there was a thick shower of stones and clods of earth.
 
It was ever afterwards painful to Gavin to recall this scene, but less on account of the shower of stones than because of the flight of one divit in it. He had been watching the handsome young captain, Halliwell, riding with his men; admiring him, too, for his coolness. This coolness exasperated the gypsy, who twice flung at Halliwell and missed him. He rode on smiling contemptuously.
 
52
“Oh, if I could only fling straight!” the Egyptian moaned.
 
Then she saw the minister by her side, and in the tick of a clock something happened that can never be explained. For the moment Gavin was so lost in misery over the probable effect of the night’s rioting that he had forgotten where he was. Suddenly the Egyptian’s beautiful face was close to his, and she pressed a divit into his hand, at the same time pointing at the officer, and whispering “Hit him.”
 
Gavin flung the clod of earth, and hit Halliwell on the head.
 
I say I cannot explain this. I tell what happened, and add with thankfulness that only the Egyptian witnessed the deed. Gavin, I suppose, had flung the divit before he could stay his hand. Then he shrank in horror.
 
“Woman!” he cried again.
 
“You are a dear,” she said, and vanished.
 
By the time Gavin was breathing freely again the lock-up was crammed with prisoners, and the Riot Act had been read from the town-house stair. It is still remembered that the baron-bailie, to whom this duty fell, had got no further than, “Victoria, by the Grace of God,” when the paper was struck out of his hands.
 
When a stirring event occurs up here we smack our lips over it for months, and so I could still write a history of that memorable night in Thrums. I could tell how the doctor, a man whose shoulders often looked as if they had been caught in a shower of tobacco ash, brought me the news to the school-house, and now, when I crossed the fields to dumfounder Waster Lunny with it, I found Birse, the post, reeling off the story to him as fast as a fisher could let out line. I know who was the first woman on the Marywell brae to hear the horn, and how she woke her husband, and who heard it first at the Denhead and the Tenements, with what they 53 immediately said and did. I had from Dite Deuchar’s own lips the curious story of his sleeping placidly throughout the whole disturbance, and on wakening in the morning yoking to his loom as usual; and also his statement that such ill-luck was enough to shake a man’s faith in religion. The police had knowledge that enabled them to go straight to the houses of the weavers wanted, but they sometimes brought away the wrong man, for such of the people as did not escape from the town had swopped houses for the night—a trick that served them better than all their drilling on the hill. Old Yuill’s son escaped by burying himself in a peat-rick, and Snecky Hobart by pretending that he was a sack of potatoes. Less fortunate was Sanders Webster, the mole-catcher already mentioned. Sanders was really an innocent man. He had not even been in Thrums on the night of the rising against the manufacturers, but thinking that the outbreak was to be left unpunished, he wanted his share in the glory of it. So he had boasted of being a ringleader until many believed him, including the authorities. His braggadocio undid him. He was run to earth in a pig-sty, and got nine months. With the other arrests I need not concern myself, for they have no part in the story of the little minister.
 
While Gavin was with the families whose breadwinners were now in the lock-up, a cell that was usually crammed on fair nights and empty for the rest of the year, the sheriff and Halliwell were in the round-room of the town-house, not in a good temper. They spoke loudly, and some of their words sank into the cell below.
 
“The whole thing has been a fiasco,” the sheriff was heard saying, “owing to our failing to take them by surprise. Why, three-fourths of those taken will have to be liberated, and we have let the worst offenders slip through our hands.”
 
54
“Well,” answered Halliwell, who was wearing a heavy cloak, “I have brought your policemen into the place, and that is all I undertook to do.”
 
“You brought them, but at the expense of alarming the countryside. I wish we had come without you.”
 
“Nonsense! My men advanced like ghosts. Could your police have come down that brae alone to-night?”
 
“Yes, because it would have been deserted. Your soldiers, I tell you, have done the mischief. This woman, who, so many of our prisoners admit, brought the news of our coming, must either have got it from one of your men or have seen them on the march.”
 
“The men did not know their destination. True, she might have seen us despite our precautions, but you forget that she told them how we were to act in the event of our being seen. That is what perplexes me.”
 
“Yes, and me too, for it was a close secret between you and me and Lord Rintoul and not half-a-dozen others.”
 
“Well, find the woman, and we shall get the explanation. If she is still in the town she cannot escape, for my men are everywhere.”
 
“She was seen ten minutes ago.”
 
“Then she is ours. I say, Riach, if I were you I would set all my prisoners free and take away a cart-load of their wives instead. I have only seen the backs of the men of Thrums, but, on my word, I very nearly ran away from the women. Hallo! I believe one of your police has caught our virago single-handed.”
 
So Halliwell exclaimed, hearing some one shout, “This is the rascal!” But it was not the Egyptian who was then thrust into the round-room. It was John Dunwoodie, looking very sly. Probably there was not, even in Thrums, a cannier man than Dunwoodie. His religious views were those of Cruickshanks, but he went regularly to church “on the off-chance of there being a God after all; so I’m safe, whatever side may be wrong.”
 
55
“This is the man,” explained a policeman, “who brought the alarm. He admits himself having been in Tilliedrum just before we started.”
 
“Your name, my man?” the sheriff demanded.
 
“It micht be John Dunwoodie,” the tinsmith answered cautiously.
 
“But is it?”
 
“I dinna say it’s no.”
 
“You were in Tilliedrum this evening?”
 
“I micht hae been.”
 
“Were you?”
 
“I’ll swear to nothing.”
 
“Why not?”
 
“Because I’m a canny man.”
 
“Into the cell with him,” Halliwell cried, losing patience.
 
“Leave him to me,” said the sheriff. “I understand the sort of man. Now, Dunwoodie, what were you doing in Tilliedrum?”
 
“I was taking my laddie down to be prenticed to a writer there,” answered Dunwoodie, falling into the sheriff’s net.
 
“What are you yourself?”
 
“I micht be a tinsmith to trade.”
 
“And you, a mere tinsmith, dare to tell me that a lawyer was willing to take your son into his office? Be cautious, Dunwoodie.”
 
“Weel, then, the laddie’s highly edicated and I hae siller, and that’s how the writer was to take him and make a gentleman o’ him.”
 
“I learn from the neighbours,” the policeman explained, “that this is partly true, but what makes us suspect him is this. He left the laddie at Tilliedrum, and yet when he came home the first person he sees at the fireside is the laddie himself. The laddie had run home, and the reason plainly was that he had heard of our preparations and wanted to alarm the town.”
 
56
“There seems something in this, Dunwoodie,” the sheriff said, “and if you cannot explain it I must keep you in custody.”
 
“I’ll make a clean breast o’t,” Dunwoodie replied, seeing that in this matter truth was best. “The laddie was terrible against being made a gentleman, and when he saw the kind o’ life he would hae to lead, clean hands, clean dickies, and no gutters on his breeks, his heart took mair scunner at genteelity than ever, and he ran hame. Ay, I was mad when I saw him at the fireside, but he says to me, ‘How would you like to be a gentleman yoursel’, father?’ he says, and that so affected me ’at I’m to gie him his ain way.”
 
Another prisoner, Dave Langlands, was confronted with Dunwoodie.
 
“John Dunwoodie’s as innocent as I am mysel,” Dave said, “and I’m most michty innocent. It wasna John but the Egyptian that gave the alarm. I tell you what, sheriff, if it’ll make me innocenter-like I’ll picture the Egyptian to you just as I saw her, and syne you’ll be able to catch her easier.”
 
“You are an honest fellow,” said the sheriff.
 
“I only wish I had the whipping of him,” growled Halliwell, who was of a generous nature.
 
“For what business had she,” continued Dave righteously, “to meddle in other folks’ business? She’s no a Thrums lassie, and so I say, ‘Let the law take its course on her.’”
 
“Will you listen to such a cur, Riach?” asked Halliwell.
 
“Certainly. Speak out, Langlands.”
 
“Weel, then, I was in the windmill the nicht.”
 
“You were a watcher?”
 
“I happened to be in the windmill wi’ another man,” Dave went on, avoiding the officer’s question.
 
“What was his name?” demanded Halliwell.
 
57
“It was the Egyptian I was to tell you about,” Dave said, looking to the sheriff.
 
“Ah, yes, you only tell tales about women,” said Halliwell.
 
“Strange women,” corrected Dave. “Weel, we was there, and it would maybe be twal o’clock, and we was speaking (but about lawful things) when we heard some ane running yont the road. I keeked through a hole in the door, and I saw it was an Egyptian lassie ’at I had never clapped een on afore. She saw the licht in the window, and she cried, ‘Hie, you billies in the windmill, the sojers is coming!’ I fell in a fricht, but the other man opened the door, and again she cries, ‘The sojers is coming; quick, or you’ll be ta’en.’ At that the other man up wi’ his bonnet and ran, but I didna make off so smart.”
 
“You had to pick yourself up first,” suggested the officer.
 
“Sal, it was the lassie picked me up; ay, and she picked up a horn at the same time.”
 
“‘Blaw on that,’ she cried, ‘and alarm the town.’ But, sheriff, I didna do’t. Na, I had ower muckle respect for the law.”
 
“In other words,” said Halliwell, “you also bolted, and left the gypsy to blow the horn herself.”
 
“I dinna deny but what I made my feet my friend, but it wasna her that blew the horn. I ken that, for I looked back and saw her trying to do’t, but she couldna, she didna ken the way.”
 
“Then who did blow it?”
 
“The first man she met, I suppose. We a’ kent that the horn was to be the signal except Wearywarld. He’s police, so we kept it frae him.”
 
“That is all you saw of the woman?”
 
“Ay, for I ran straucht to my garret, and there your men took me. Can I gae hame now, sheriff?”
 
“No, you cannot. Describe the woman’s appearance.”
 
58
“She had a heap o’ rowan berries stuck in her hair, and, I think, she had on a green wrapper and a red shawl. She had a most extraordinary face. I canna exact describe it, for she would be lauchin’ one second and syne solemn the next. I tell you her face changed as quick as you could turn the pages o’ a book. Ay, here comes Wearywarld to speak up for me.”
 
Wearyworld entered cheerfully.
 
“This is the local policeman,” a Tilliedrum officer said; “we have been searching for him everywhere, and only found him now.”
 
“Where have you been?” asked the sheriff, wrathfully.
 
“Whaur maist honest men is at this hour,” replied Wearyworld; “in my bed.”
 
“How dared you ignore your duty at such a time?”
 
“It’s a long story,” the policeman answered, pleasantly, in anticipation of a talk at last.
 
“Answer me in a word.”
 
“In a word!” cried the policeman, quite crestfallen. “It canna be done. You’ll need to cross-examine me, too. It’s my lawful richt.”
 
“I’ll take you to the Tilliedrum gaol for your share in this night’s work if you do not speak to the purpose. Why did you not hasten to our assistance?”
 
“As sure as death I never kent you was here. I was up the Roods on my rounds when I heard an awfu’ din down in the square, and thinks I, there’s rough characters about, and the place for honest folk is their bed. So to my bed I gaed, and I was in’t when your men gripped me.”
 
“We must see into this before we leave. In the meantime you will act as a guide to my searchers. Stop! Do you know anything of this Egyptian?”
 
“What Egyptian? Is’t a lassie wi’ rowans in her hair?”
 
“The same. Have you seen her?”
 
59
“That I have. There’s nothing agin her, is there? Whatever it is, I’ll uphaud she didna do’t, for a simpler, franker-spoken crittur couldna be.”
 
“Never mind what I want her for. When did you see her?”
 
“It would be about twal o’clock,” began Wearyworld unctuously, “when I was in the Roods, ay, no lang afore I heard the disturbance in the square. I was standing in the middle o’ the road, wondering how the door o’ the windmill was swinging open, when she came up to me.
 
“‘A fine nicht for the time o’ year,’ I says to her, for nobody but the minister had spoken to me a’ day.
 
“‘A very fine nicht,’ says she, very frank, though she was breathing quick like as if she had been running. ‘You’ll be police?’ says she.
 
“‘I am,’ says I, ‘and wha be you?’
 
“‘I’m just a puir gypsy lassie,’ she says.
 
“‘And what’s that in your hand?’ says I.
 
“‘It’s a horn I found in the wood,’ says she, ‘but it’s rusty and winna blaw.’
 
“I laughed at her ignorance, and says I, ‘I warrant I could blaw it.’
 
“‘I dinna believe you,’ says she.
 
“‘Gie me haud o’t,’ says I, and she gae it to me, and I blew some bonny blasts on’t. Ay, you see she didna ken the way o’t. ‘Thank you kindly,’ says she, and she ran awa without even minding to take the horn back again.”
 
“You incredible idiot!” cried the sheriff. “Then it was you who gave the alarm?”
 
“What hae I done to madden you?” honest Wearyworld asked in perplexity.
 
“Get out of my sight, sir!” roared the sheriff.
 
But the captain laughed.
 
“I like your doughty policeman, Riach,” he said. “Hie, obliging friend, let us hear how this gypsy struck you. How was she dressed?”
 
60
“She was snod, but no unca snod,” replied Wearyworld, stiffly.
 
“I don’t understand you.”
 
“I mean she was couthie, but no sair in order.”
 
“What on earth is that?”
 
“Weel, a tasty stocky, but gey orra put on.”
 
“What language are you speaking, you enigma?”
 
“I’m saying she was naturally a bonny bit kimmer rather than happit up to the nines.”
 
“Oh, go away,” cried Halliwell; whereupon Wearyworld descended the stair haughtily, declaring that the sheriff was an unreasonable man, and that he was a queer captain who did not understand the English language.
 
“Can I gae hame now, sheriff?” asked Langlands, hopefully.
 
“Take this fellow back to his cell,” Riach directed shortly, “and whatever else you do, see that you capture this woman. Halliwell, I am going out to look for her myself. Confound it, what are you laughing at?”
 
“At the way this vixen has slipped through your fingers.”
 
“Not quite that, sir, not quite that. She is in Thrums still, and I swear I’ll have her before day breaks. See to it, Halliwell, that if she is brought here in my absence she does not slip through your fingers.”
 
“If she is brought here,” said Halliwell, mocking him, “you must return and protect me. It would be cruelty to leave a poor soldier in the hands of a woman of Thrums.”
 
“She is not a Thrums woman. You have been told so a dozen times.”
 
“Then I am not afraid.”
 
In the round-room (which is oblong) there is a throne on which the bailie sits when he dispenses justice. It 61 is swathed in red cloths that give it the appearance of a pulpit. Left to himself, Halliwell flung off his cloak and taking a chair near this dais rested his legs on the bare wooden table, one on each side of the lamp. He was still in this position when the door opened, and two policemen thrust the Egyptian into the room.
 
“The same. Have you seen her?”
 
59
“That I have. There’s nothing agin her, is there? Whatever it is, I’ll uphaud she didna do’t, for a simpler, franker-spoken crittur couldna be.”
 
“Never mind what I want her for. When did you see her?”
 
“It would be about twal o’clock,” began Wearyworld unctuously, “when I was in the Roods, ay, no lang afore I heard the disturbance in the square. I was standing in the middle o’ the road, wondering how the door o’ the windmill was swinging open, when she came up to me.
 
“‘A fine nicht for the time o’ year,’ I says to her, for nobody but the minister had spoken to me a’ day.
 
“‘A very fine nicht,’ says she, very frank, though she was breathing quick like as if she had been running. ‘You’ll be police?’ says she.
 
“‘I am,’ says I, ‘and wha be you?’
 
“‘I’m just a puir gypsy lassie,’ she says.
 
“‘And what’s that in your hand?’ says I.
 
“‘It’s a horn I found in the wood,’ says she, ‘but it’s rusty and winna blaw.’
 
“I laughed at her ignorance, and says I, ‘I warrant I could blaw it.’
 
“‘I dinna believe you,’ says she.
 
“‘Gie me haud o’t,’ says I, and she gae it to me, and I blew some bonny blasts on’t. Ay, you see she didna ken the way o’t. ‘Thank you kindly,’ says she, and she ran awa without even minding to take the horn back again.”
 
“You incredible idiot!” cried the sheriff. “Then it was you who gave the alarm?”
 
“What hae I done to madden you?” honest Wearyworld asked in perplexity.
 
“Get out of my sight, sir!” roared the sheriff.
 
But the captain laughed.
 
“I like your doughty policeman, Riach,” he said. “Hie, obliging friend, let us hear how this gypsy struck you. How was she dressed?”
 
60
“She was snod, but no unca snod,” replied Wearyworld, stiffly.
 
“I don’t understand you.”
 
“I mean she was couthie, but no sair in order.”
 
“What on earth is that?”
 
“Weel, a tasty stocky, but gey orra put on.”
 
“What language are you speaking, you enigma?”
 
“I’m saying she was naturally a bonny bit kimmer rather than happit up to the nines.”
 
“Oh, go away,” cried Halliwell; whereupon Wearyworld descended the stair haughtily, declaring that the sheriff was an unreasonable man, and that he was a queer captain who did not understand the English language.
 
“Can I gae hame now, sheriff?” asked Langlands, hopefully.
 
“Take this fellow back to his cell,” Riach directed shortly, “and whatever else you do, see that you capture this woman. Halliwell, I am going out to look for her myself. Confound it, what are you laughing at?”
 
“At the way this vixen has slipped through your fingers.”
 
“Not quite that, sir, not quite that. She is in Thrums still, and I swear I’ll have her before day breaks. See to it, Halliwell, that if she is brought here in my absence she does not slip through your fingers.”
 
“If she is brought here,” said Halliwell, mocking him, “you must return and protect me. It would be cruelty to leave a poor soldier in the hands of a woman of Thrums.”
 
“She is not a Thrums woman. You have been told so a dozen times.”
 
“Then I am not afraid.”
 
In the round-room (which is oblong) there is a throne on which the bailie sits when he dispenses justice. It 61 is swathed in red cloths that give it the appearance of a pulpit. Left to himself, Halliwell flung off his cloak and taking a chair near this dais rested his legs on the bare wooden table, one on each side of the lamp. He was still in this position when the door opened, and two policemen thrust the Egyptian into the room.

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Chapter Seven.   HAS THE FOLLY OF LOOKING INTO A WOMAN’S EYES BY WAY OF TEXT.
 “This is the woman, captain,” one of the policemen said in triumph; “and, begging your pardon, will you keep a grip of her till the sheriff comes back?”
 
Halliwell did not turn his head.
 
“You can leave her here,” he said carelessly. “Three of us are not needed to guard a woman.”
 
“But she’s a slippery customer.”
 
“You can go,” said Halliwell; and the policemen withdrew slowly, eyeing their prisoner doubtfully until the door closed. Then the officer wheeled round languidly, expecting to find the Egyptian gaunt and muscular.
 
“Now then,” he drawled, “why——By Jove!”
 
The gallant soldier was as much taken aback as if he had turned to find a pistol at his ear. He took his feet off the table. Yet he only saw the gypsy’s girlish figure in its red and green, for she had covered her face with her hands. She was looking at him intently between her fingers, but he did not know this. All he did want to know just then was what was behind the hands.
 
Before he spoke again she had perhaps made up her mind about him, for she began to sob bitterly. At the same time she slipped a finger over her ring.
 
“Why don’t you look at me?” asked Halliwell, selfishly.
 
“I daurna.”
 
63
“Am I so fearsome?”
 
“You’re a sojer, and you would shoot me like a craw.”
 
Halliwell laughed, and taking her wrists in his hands, uncovered her face.
 
“Oh, by Jove!” he said again, but this time to himself.
 
As for the Egyptian, she slid the ring into her pocket, and fell back before the officer’s magnificence.
 
“Oh,” she cried, “is all sojers like you?”
 
There was such admiration in her eyes that it would have been self-contempt to doubt her. Yet having smiled complacently, Halliwell became uneasy.
 
“Who on earth are you?” he asked, finding it wise not to look her in the face. “Why do you not answer me more quickly?”
 
“Dinna be angry at that, captain,” the Egyptian implored. “I promised my mither aye to count twenty afore I spoke, because she thocht I was ower glib. Captain, how is’t that you’re so fleid to look at me?”
 
Thus put on his mettle, Halliwell again faced her, with the result that his question changed to “Where did you get those eyes?” Then was he indignant with himself.
 
“What I want to know,” he explained severely, “is how you were able to acquaint the Thrums people with our movements? That you must tell me at once, for the sheriff blames my soldiers. Come now, no counting twenty!”
 
He was pacing the room now, and she had her face to herself. It said several things, among them that the officer evidently did not like this charge against his men.
 
“Does the shirra blame the sojers?” exclaimed this quick-witted Egyptian. “Weel, that cows, for he has nane to blame but himsel’.”
 
“What!” cried Halliwell, delighted. “It was the 64 sheriff who told tales? Answer me. You are counting a hundred this time.”
 
Perhaps the gypsy had two reasons for withholding her answer. If so, one of them was that as the sheriff had told nothing, she had a story to make up. The other was that she wanted to strike a bargain with the officer.
 
“If I tell you,” she said eagerly, “will you set me free?”
 
“I may ask the sheriff to do so.”
 
“But he mauna see me,” the Egyptian said in distress. “There’s reasons, captain.”
 
“Why, surely you have not been before him on other occasions,” said Halliwell, surprised.
 
“No in the way you mean,” muttered the gypsy, and for the moment her eyes twinkled. But the light in them went out when she remembered that the sheriff was near, and she looked desperately at the window as if ready to fling herself from it. She had very good reasons for not wishing to be seen by Riach, though fear that he would put her in gaol was not one of them.
 
Halliwell thought it was the one cause of her woe, and great was his desire to turn the tables on the sheriff.
 
“Tell me the truth,” he said, “and I promise to befriend you.”
 
“Weel, then,” the gypsy said, hoping still to soften his heart, and making up her story as she told it, “yestreen I met the shirra, and he telled me a’ I hae telled the Thrums folk this nicht.”
 
“You can scarcely expect me to believe that. Where did you meet him?”
 
“In Glen Quharity. He was riding on a horse.”
 
“Well, I allow he was there yesterday, and on horseback. He was on his way back to Tilliedrum from Lord Rintoul’s place. But don’t tell me that he took a gypsy girl into his confidence.”
 
“Ay, he did, without kenning. He was gieing his 65 horse a drink when I met him, and he let me tell him his fortune. He said he would gaol me for an impostor if I didna tell him true, so I gaed about it cautiously, and after a minute or twa I telled him he was coming to Thrums the nicht to nab the rioters.”
 
“You are trifling with me,” interposed the indignant soldier. “You promised to tell me not what you said to the sheriff, but how he disclosed our movements to you.”
 
“And that’s just what I am telling you, only you hinna the rumelgumption to see it. How do you think fortunes is telled? First we get out o’ the man, without his seeing what we’re after, a’ about himsel’, and syne we repeat it to him. That’s what I did wi’ the shirra.”
 
“You drew the whole thing out of him without his knowing?”
 
“’Deed I did, and he rode awa’ saying I was a witch.”
 
The soldier heard with the delight of a schoolboy.
 
“Now if the sheriff does not liberate you at my request,” he said, “I will never let him hear the end of this story. He was right; you are a witch. You deceived the sheriff; yes, undoubtedly you are a witch.”
 
He looked at her with fun in his face, but the fun disappeared, and a wondering admiration took its place.
 
“By Jove!” he said, “I don’t wonder you bewitched the sheriff. I must take care or you will bewitch the captain, too.”
 
At this notion he smiled, but he also ceased looking at her. Suddenly the Egyptian again began to cry.
 
“You’re angry wi’ me,” she sobbed. “I wish I had never set een on you.”
 
“Why do you wish that?” Halliwell asked.
 
“Fine you ken,” she answered, and again covered her face with her hands.
 
He looked at her undecidedly.
 
“I am not angry with you,” he said, gently. “You are an extraordinary girl.”
 
66
Had he really made a conquest of this beautiful creature? Her words said so, but had he? The captain could not make up his mind. He gnawed his moustache in doubt.
 
There was silence, save for the Egyptian’s sobs. Halliwell’s heart was touched, and he drew nearer her.
 
“My poor girl——”
 
He stopped. Was she crying? Was she not laughing at him rather? He became red.
 
The gypsy peeped at him between her fingers, and saw that he was of two minds. She let her hands fall from her face, and undoubtedly there were tears on her cheeks.
 
“If you’re no angry wi’ me,” she said, sadly, “how will you no look at me?”
 
“I am looking at you now.”
 
He was very close to her, and staring into her wonderful eyes. I am older than the Captain, and those eyes have dazzled me.
 
“Captain dear.”
 
She put her hand in his. His chest rose. He knew she was seeking to beguile him, but he could not take his eyes off hers. He was in a worse plight than a woman listening to the first whisper of love.
 
Now she was further from him, but the spell held. She reached the door, without taking her eyes from his face. For several seconds he had been as a man mesmerised.
 
Just in time he came to. It was when she turned from him to find the handle of the door. She was turning it when his hand fell on hers so suddenly that she screamed. He twisted her round.
 
 
 
“Sit down there,” he said hoarsely, pointing to the chair upon which he had flung his cloak. She dared not disobey. Then he leant against the door, his back to her, for just then he wanted no one to see his face. The gypsy sat very still and a little frightened.
 
67
Halliwell opened the door presently, and called to the soldier on duty below.
 
“Davidson, see if you can find the sheriff. I want him. And Davidson——”
 
The captain paused.
 
“Yes,” he muttered, and the old soldier marvelled at his words, “it is better. Davidson, lock this door on the outside.”
 
Davidson did as he was ordered, and again the Egyptian was left alone with Halliwell.
 
“Afraid of a woman!” she said, contemptuously, though her heart sank when she heard the key turn in the lock.
 
“I admit it,” he answered, calmly.
 
He walked up and down the room, and she sat silently watching him.
 
“That story of yours about the sheriff was not true,” he said at last.
 
“I suspect it wasna,” answered the Egyptian coolly. “Hae you been thinking about it a’ this time? Captain, I could tell you what you’re thinking now. You’re wishing it had been true, so that the ane o’ you couldna lauch at the other.”
 
“Silence!” said the captain, and not another word would he speak until he heard the sheriff coming up the stair. The Egyptian trembled at his step, and rose in desperation.
 
“Why is the door locked?” cried the sheriff, shaking it.
 
“All right,” answered Halliwell; “the key is on your side.”
 
At that moment the Egyptian knocked the lamp off the table, and the room was at once in darkness. The officer sprang at her, and, catching her by the skirt, held on.
 
“Why are you in darkness?” asked the sheriff, as he entered.
 
68
“Shut the door,” cried Halliwell. “Put your back to it.”
 
“Don’t tell me the woman has escaped?”
 
“I have her, I have her! She capsized the lamp, the little jade. Shut the door.”
 
Still keeping firm hold of her, as he thought, the captain relit the lamp with his other hand. It showed an extraordinary scene. The door was shut, and the sheriff was guarding it. Halliwell was clutching the cloth of the bailie’s seat. There was no Egyptian.
 
A moment passed before either man found his tongue.
 
“Open the door. After her!” cried Halliwell.
 
But the door would not open. The Egyptian had fled and locked it behind her.
 
What the two men said to each other, it would not be fitting to tell. When Davidson, who had been gossiping at the corner of the town-house, released his captain and the sheriff, the gypsy had been gone for some minutes.
 
“But she shan’t escape us,” Riach cried, and hastened out to assist in the pursuit.
 
Halliwell was in such a furious temper that he called up Davidson and admonished him for neglect of duty.
Chapter Eight.   3 A.M.—MONSTROUS AUDACITY OF THE WOMAN.
 Not till the stroke of three did Gavin turn homeward, with the legs of a ploughman, and eyes rebelling against over-work. Seeking to comfort his dejected people, whose courage lay spilt on the brae, he had been in as many houses as the policemen. The soldiers marching through the wynds came frequently upon him, and found it hard to believe that he was always the same one. They told afterwards that Thrums was remarkable for the ferocity of its women, and the number of its little ministers. The morning was nipping cold, and the streets were deserted, for the people had been ordered within doors. As he crossed the Roods, Gavin saw a gleam of red-coats. In the back wynd he heard a bugle blown. A stir in the Banker’s close spoke of another seizure. At the top of the school wynd two policeman, of whom one was Wearyworld, stopped the minister with the flash of a lantern.
 
“We dauredna let you pass, sir,” the Tilliedrum man said, “without a good look at you. That’s the orders.”
 
“I hereby swear,” said Wearyworld, authoritatively, “that this is no the Egyptian. Signed, Peter Spens, policeman, called by the vulgar, Wearyworld. Mr. Dishart, you can pass, unless you’ll bide a wee and gie us your crack.”
 
“You have not found the gypsy, then?” Gavin asked.
 
“No,” the other policeman said, “but we ken she’s within cry o’ this very spot, and escape she canna.”
 
“What mortal man can do,” Wearyworld said, “we’re 70 doing: ay, and mair, but she’s auld wecht, and may find bilbie in queer places. Mr. Dishart, my official opinion is that this Egyptian is fearsomely like my snuff-spoon. I’ve kent me drap that spoon on the fender, and be beat to find it in an hour. And yet, a’ the time I was sure it was there. This is a gey mysterious world, and women’s the uncanniest things in’t. It’s hardly mous to think how uncanny they are.”
 
“This one deserves to be punished,” Gavin said, firmly; “she incited the people to riot.”
 
“She did,” agreed Wearyworld, who was supping ravenously on sociability; “ay, she even tried her tricks on me, so that them that kens no better thinks she fooled me. But she’s cracky. To gie her her due, she’s cracky, and as for her being a cuttie, you’ve said yoursel, Mr. Dishart, that we’re all desperately wicked. But we’re sair tried. Has it ever struck you that the trouts bites best on the Sabbath? God’s critturs tempting decent men.”
 
“Come alang,” cried the Tilliedrum man, impatiently.
 
“I’m coming, but I maun give Mr. Dishart permission to pass first. Hae you heard, Mr. Dishart,” Wearyworld whispered, “that the Egyptian diddled baith the captain and the shirra? It’s my official opinion that she’s no better than a roasted onion, the which, if you grip it firm, jumps out o’ sicht, leaving its coat in your fingers. Mr. Dishart, you can pass.”
 
The policeman turned down the school wynd, and Gavin, who had already heard exaggerated accounts of the strange woman’s escape from the town-house, proceeded along the Tenements. He walked in the black shadows of the houses, though across the way there was the morning light.
 
In talking of the gypsy, the little minister had, as it were, put on the black cap; but now, even though he shook his head angrily with every thought of her, the scene in Windyghoul glimmered before his eyes. 71 Sometimes when he meant to frown he only sighed, and then having sighed he shook himself. He was unpleasantly conscious of his right hand, which had flung the divit. Ah, she was shameless, and it would be a bright day for Thrums that saw the last of her. He hoped the policemen would succeed in——. It was the gladsomeness of innocence that he had seen dancing in the moonlight. A mere woman could not be like that. How soft——. And she had derided him; he, the Auld Licht minister of Thrums, had been flouted before his people by a hussy. She was without reverence, she knew no difference between an Auld Licht minister, whose duty it was to speak and hers to listen, and herself. This woman deserved to be——. And the look she cast behind her as she danced and sang! It was sweet, so wistful; the presence of purity had silenced him. Purity! Who had made him fling that divit? He would think no more of her. Let it suffice that he knew what she was. He would put her from his thoughts. Was it a ring on her finger?
 
Fifty yards in front of him Gavin saw the road end in a wall of soldiers. They were between him and the manse, and he was still in darkness. No sound reached him, save the echo of his own feet. But was it an echo? He stopped, and turned round sharply. Now he heard nothing, he saw nothing. Yet was not that a human figure standing motionless in the shadow behind?
 
He walked on, and again heard the sound. Again he looked behind, but this time without stopping. The figure was following him. He stopped. So did it. He turned back, but it did not move. It was the Egyptian!
 
Gavin knew her, despite the lane of darkness, despite the long cloak that now concealed even her feet, despite the hood over her head. She was looking quite respectable, but he knew her.
 
He neither advanced to her nor retreated. Could 72 the unhappy girl not see that she was walking into the arms of the soldiers? But doubtless she had been driven from all her hiding-places. For a moment Gavin had it in his heart to warn her. But it was only for a moment. The next a sudden horror shot through him. She was stealing toward him, so softly that he had not seen her start. The woman had designs on him! Gavin turned from her. He walked so quickly that judges would have said he ran.
 
The soldiers, I have said, stood in the dim light. Gavin had almost reached them, when a little hand touched his arm.
 
“Stop,” cried the sergeant, hearing some one approaching, and then Gavin stepped out of the darkness with the gypsy on his arm.
 
“It is you, Mr. Dishart,” said the sergeant, “and your lady?”
 
“I——,” said Gavin.
 
His lady pinched his arm.
 
“Yes,” she answered, in an elegant English voice that made Gavin stare at her, “but, indeed, I am sorry I ventured into the streets to-night. I thought I might be able to comfort some of these unhappy people, captain, but I could do little, sadly little.”
 
“It is no scene for a lady, ma’am, but your husband has——. Did you speak, Mr. Dishart?”
 
“Yes, I must inf——”
 
“My dear,” said the Egyptian, “I quite agree with you, so we need not detain the captain.”
 
“I’m only a sergeant, ma’am.”
 
“Indeed!” said the Egyptian, raising her pretty eyebrows, “and how long are you to remain in Thrums, sergeant?”
 
“Only for a few hours, Mrs. Dishart. If this gypsy lassie had not given us so much trouble, we might have been gone by now.”
 
 
 
“Ah, yes, I hope you will catch her, sergeant.”
 
73
“Sergeant,” said Gavin, firmly, “I must——”
 
“You must, indeed, dear,” said the Egyptian, “for you are sadly tired. Good-night, sergeant.”
 
“Your servant, Mrs. Dishart. Your servant, sir.”
 
“But——,” cried Gavin.
 
“Come, love,” said the Egyptian, and she walked the distracted minister through the soldiers and up the manse road.
 
The soldiers left behind, Gavin flung her arm from him, and, standing still, shook his fist in her face.
 
“You—you—woman!” he said.
 
This, I think, was the last time he called her a woman.
 
But she was clapping her hands merrily.
 
“It was beautiful!” she exclaimed.
 
“It was iniquitous!” he answered. “And I a minister!”
 
“You can’t help that,” said the Egyptian, who pitied all ministers heartily.
 
“No,” Gavin said, misunderstanding her, “I could not help it. No blame attaches to me.”
 
“I meant that you could not help being a minister. You could have helped saving me, and I thank you so much.”
 
“Do not dare to thank me. I forbid you to say that I saved you. I did my best to hand you over to the authorities.”
 
“Then why did you not hand me over?”
 
Gavin groaned.
 
“All you had to say,” continued the merciless Egyptian, “was, ‘This is the person you are in search of.’ I did not have my hand over your mouth. Why did you not say it?”
 
“Forbear!” said Gavin, woefully.
 
“It must have been,” the gypsy said, “because you really wanted to help me.”
 
“Then it was against my better judgment,” said Gavin.
 
74
“I am glad of that,” said the gypsy. “Mr. Dishart, I do believe you like me all the time.”
 
“Can a man like a woman against his will?” Gavin blurted out.
 
“Of course he can,” said the Egyptian, speaking as one who knew. “That is the very nicest way to be liked.”
 
Seeing how agitated Gavin was, remorse filled her, and she said in a wheedling voice—
 
“It is all over, and no one will know.”
 
Passion sat on the minister’s brow, but he said nothing, for the gypsy’s face had changed with her voice, and the audacious woman was become a child.
 
“I am very sorry,” she said, as if he had caught her stealing jam. The hood had fallen back, and she looked pleadingly at him. She had the appearance of one who was entirely in his hands.
 
There was a torrent of words in Gavin, but only these trickled forth—
 
“I don’t understand you.”
 
“You are not angry any more?” pleaded the Egyptian.
 
“Angry!” he cried, with the righteous rage of one who when his leg is being sawn off is asked gently if it hurts him.
 
“I know you are,” she sighed, and the sigh meant that men are strange.
 
“Have you no respect for law and order?” demanded Gavin.
 
“Not much,” she answered, honestly.
 
He looked down the road to where the red-coats were still visible, and his face became hard. She read his thoughts.
 
“No,” she said, becoming a woman again, “It is not yet too late. Why don’t you shout to them?”
 
She was holding herself like a queen, but there was no stiffness in her. They might have been a pair of lovers, and she the wronged one. Again she looked 75 timidly at him, and became beautiful in a new way. Her eyes said that he was very cruel, and she was only keeping back her tears till he had gone. More dangerous than her face was her manner, which gave Gavin the privilege of making her unhappy; it permitted him to argue with her; it never implied that though he raged at her he must stand afar off; it called him a bully, but did not end the conversation.
 
Now (but perhaps I should not tell this) unless she is his wife a man is shot with a thrill of exultation every time a pretty woman allows him to upbraid her.
 
“I do not understand you,” Gavin repeated weakly, and the gypsy bent her head under this terrible charge.
 
“Only a few hours ago,” he continued, “you were a gypsy girl in a fantastic dress, barefooted——”
 
The Egyptian’s bare foot at once peeped out mischievously from beneath the cloak, then again retired into hiding.
 
“You spoke as broadly,” complained the minister, somewhat taken aback by this apparition, “as any woman in Thrums, and now you fling a cloak over your shoulders, and immediately become a fine lady. Who are you?”
 
“Perhaps,” answered the Egyptian, “it is the cloak that has bewitched me.” She slipped out of it. “Ay, ay, ou losh!” she said, as if surprised, “it was just the cloak that did it, for now I’m a puir ignorant bit lassie again. My, certie, but claithes does make a differ to a woman!”
 
This was sheer levity, and Gavin walked scornfully away from it.
 
“Yet, if you will not tell me who you are,” he said, looking over his shoulder, “tell me where you got the cloak.”
 
“Na faags,” replied the gypsy out of the cloak. “Really, Mr. Dishart, you had better not ask,” she added, replacing it over her.
 
76
She followed him, meaning to gain the open by the fields to the north of the manse.
 
“Good-bye,” she said, holding out her hand, “if you are not to give me up.”
 
“I am not a policeman,” replied Gavin, but he would not take her hand.
 
“Surely, we part friends, then?” said the Egyptian, sweetly.
 
“No,” Gavin answered. “I hope never to see your face again.”
 
“I cannot help,” the Egyptian said, with dignity, “your not liking my face.” Then, with less dignity, she added, “There is a splotch of mud on your own, little minister; it came off the divit you flung at the captain.”
 
With this parting shot she tripped past him, and Gavin would not let his eyes follow her. It was not the mud on his face that distressed him, nor even the hand that had flung the divit. It was the word “little.” Though even Margaret was not aware of it, Gavin’s shortness had grieved him all his life. There had been times when he tried to keep the secret from himself. In his boyhood he had sought a remedy by getting his larger comrades to stretch him. In the company of tall men he was always self-conscious. In the pulpit he looked darkly at his congregation when he asked them who, by taking thought, could add a cubit to his stature. When standing on a hearthrug his heels were frequently on the fender. In his bedroom he has stood on a footstool and surveyed himself in the mirror. Once he fastened high heels to his boots, being ashamed to ask Hendry Munn to do it for him; but this dishonesty shamed him, and he tore them off. So the Egyptian had put a needle into his pride, and he walked to the manse gloomily.
 
Margaret was at her window, looking for him, and he saw her though she did not see him. He was stepping 77 into the middle of the road to wave his hand to her, when some sudden weakness made him look towards the fields instead. The Egyptian saw him and nodded thanks for his interest in her, but he scowled and pretended to be studying the sky. Next moment he saw her running back to him.
 
“There are soldiers at the top of the field,” she cried. “I cannot escape that way.”
 
“There is no other way,” Gavin answered.
 
“Will you not help me again?” she entreated.
 
She should not have said “again.” Gavin shook his head, but pulled her closer to the manse dyke, for his mother was still in sight.
 
“Why do you do that?” the girl asked, quickly, looking round to see if she were pursued. “Oh, I see,” she said, as her eyes fell on the figure at the window.
 
“It is my mother,” Gavin said, though he need not have explained, unless he wanted the gypsy to know that he was a bachelor.
 
“Only your mother?”
 
“Only! Let me tell you she may suffer more than you for your behaviour to-night!”
 
“How can she?”
 
“If you are caught, will it not be discovered that I helped you to escape?”
 
“But you said you did not.”
 
“Yes, I helped you,” Gavin admitted. “My God! what would my congregation say if they knew I had let you pass yourself off as—as my wife?”
 
He struck his brow, and the Egyptian had the propriety to blush.
 
“It is not the punishment from men I am afraid of,” Gavin said, bitterly, “but from my conscience. No, that is not true. I do fear exposure, but for my mother’s sake. Look at her; she is happy, because she thinks me good and true; she has had such trials as you cannot know of, and now, when at last I seemed 78 able to do something for her, you destroy her happiness. You have her life in your hands.”
 
The Egyptian turned her back upon him, and one of her feet tapped angrily on the dry ground. Then, child of impulse as she always was, she flashed an indignant glance at him, and walked quickly down the road.
 
“Where are you going?” he cried.
 
“To give myself up. You need not be alarmed; I will clear you.”
 
There was not a shake in her voice, and she spoke without looking back.
 
“Stop!” Gavin called, but she would not, until his hand touched her shoulder.
 
“What do you want?” she asked.
 
“Why—” whispered Gavin, giddily, “why—why do you not hide in the manse garden?—No one will look for you there.”
 
There were genuine tears in the gypsy’s eyes now.
 
“You are a good man,” she said; “I like you.”
 
“Don’t say that,” Gavin cried in horror. “There is a summer-seat in the garden.”
 
Then he hurried from her, and without looking to see if she took his advice, hastened to the manse. Once inside, he snibbed the door.
Chapter Nine.   THE WOMAN CONSIDERED IN ABSENCE—ADVENTURES OF A MILITARY CLOAK.
 About six o’clock Margaret sat up suddenly in bed, with the conviction that she had slept in. To her this was to ravel the day: a dire thing. The last time it happened Gavin, softened by her distress, had condensed morning worship into a sentence that she might make up on the clock.
 
Her part on waking was merely to ring her bell, and so rouse Jean, for Margaret had given Gavin a promise to breakfast in bed, and remain there till her fire was lit. Accustomed all her life, however, to early rising, her feet were usually on the floor before she remembered her vow, and then it was but a step to the window to survey the morning. To Margaret, who seldom went out, the weather was not of great moment, while it mattered much to Gavin, yet she always thought of it the first thing, and he not at all until he had to decide whether his companion should be an umbrella or a staff.
 
On this morning Margaret only noticed that there had been rain since Gavin came in. Forgetting that the water obscuring the outlook was on the other side of the panes, she tried to brush it away with her fist. It was of the soldiers she was thinking. They might have been awaiting her appearance at the window as their signal to depart, for hardly had she raised the blind when they began their march out of Thrums. From the manse she could not see them, but she heard them, and she saw some people at the Tenements run 80 to their houses at sound of the drum. Other persons, less timid, followed the enemy with execrations halfway to Tilliedrum. Margaret, the only person, as it happened, then awake in the manse, stood listening for some time. In the summer-seat of the garden, however, there was another listener protected from her sight by thin spars.
 
Despite the lateness of the hour Margaret was too soft-hearted to rouse Jean, who had lain down in her clothes, trembling for her father. She went instead into Gavin’s room to look admiringly at him as he slept. Often Gavin woke to find that his mother had slipped in to save him the enormous trouble of opening a drawer for a clean collar, or of pouring the water into the basin with his own hand. Sometimes he caught her in the act of putting thick socks in the place of thin ones, and it must be admitted that her passion for keeping his belongings in boxes, and the boxes in secret places, and the secret places at the back of drawers, occasionally led to their being lost when wanted. “They are safe, at any rate, for I put them away some gait,” was then Margaret’s comfort, but less soothing to Gavin. Yet if he upbraided her in his hurry, it was to repent bitterly his temper the next instant, and to feel its effects more than she, temper being a weapon that we hold by the blade. When he awoke and saw her in his room he would pretend, unless he felt called upon to rage at her for self-neglect, to be still asleep, and then be filled with tenderness for her. A great writer has spoken sadly of the shock it would be to a mother to know her boy as he really is, but I think she often knows him better than he is known to cynical friends. We should be slower to think that the man at his worst is the real man, and certain that the better we are ourselves the less likely is he to be at his worst in our company. Every time he talks away his own character before us he is signifying contempt for ours.
 
81
On this morning Margaret only opened Gavin’s door to stand and look, for she was fearful of awakening him after his heavy night. Even before she saw that he still slept she noticed with surprise that, for the first time since he came to Thrums, he had put on his shutters. She concluded that he had done this lest the light should rouse him. He was not sleeping pleasantly, for now he put his open hand before his face, as if to guard himself, and again he frowned and seemed to draw back from something. He pointed his finger sternly to the north, ordering the weavers, his mother thought, to return to their homes, and then he muttered to himself so that she heard the words, “And if thy right hand offend thee cut it off, and cast it from thee, for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” Then suddenly he bent forward, his eyes open and fixed on the window. Thus he sat, for the space of half a minute, like one listening with painful intentness. When he lay back Margaret slipped away. She knew he was living the night over again, but not of the divit his right hand had cast, nor of the woman in the garden.
 
Gavin was roused presently by the sound of voices from Margaret’s room, where Jean, who had now gathered much news, was giving it to her mistress. Jean’s cheerfulness would have told him that her father was safe had he not wakened to thoughts of the Egyptian. I suppose he was at the window in an instant, unsnibbing the shutters and looking out as cautiously as a burglar might have looked in. The Egyptian was gone from the summer-seat. He drew a great breath.
 
But his troubles were not over. He had just lifted his ewer of water when these words from the kitchen capsized it:—
 
“Ay, an Egyptian. That’s what the auld folk call a gypsy. Weel, Mrs. Dishart, she led police and sojers sic a dance through Thrums as would baffle description, 82 though I kent the fits and fors o’t as I dinna. Ay, but they gripped her in the end, and the queer thing is——”
 
Gavin listened to no more. He suddenly sat down. The queer thing, of course, was that she had been caught in his garden. Yes, and doubtless queerer things about this hussy and her “husband” were being bawled from door to door. To the girl’s probable sufferings he gave no heed. What kind of man had he been a few hours ago to yield to the machinations of a woman who was so obviously the devil? Now he saw his folly in the face.
 
The tray in Jean’s hands clattered against the dresser, and Gavin sprang from his chair. He thought it was his elders at the front door.
 
In the parlour he found Margaret sorrowing for those whose mates had been torn from them, and Jean with a face flushed by talk. On ordinary occasions the majesty of the minister still cowed Jean, so that she could only gaze at him without shaking when in church, and then because she wore a veil. In the manse he was for taking a glance at sideways and then going away comforted, as a respectable woman may once or twice in a day look at her brooch in the pasteboard box as a means of helping her with her work. But with such a to-do in Thrums, and she the possessor of exclusive information, Jean’s reverence for Gavin only took her to-day as far as the door, where she lingered half in the parlour and half in the lobby, her eyes turned politely from the minister, but her ears his entirely.
 
“I thought I heard Jean telling you about the capture of the—of an Egyptian woman,” Gavin said to his mother, nervously.
 
“Did you cry to me?” Jean asked, turning round longingly. “But maybe the mistress will tell you about the Egyptian hersel.”
 
“Has she been taken to Tilliedrum?” Gavin asked in a hollow voice.
 
83
“Sup up your porridge, Gavin,” Margaret said. “I’ll have no speaking about this terrible night till you’ve eaten something.”
 
“I have no appetite,” the minister replied, pushing his plate from him. “Jean, answer me.”
 
“’Deed, then,” said Jean willingly, “they hinna ta’en her to Tilliedrum.”
 
“For what reason?” asked Gavin, his dread increasing.
 
“For the reason that they couldna catch her,” Jean answered. “She spirited hersel awa’, the magerful crittur.”
 
“What! But I heard you say——”
 
“Ay, they had her aince, but they couldna keep her. It’s like a witch story. They had her safe in the town-house, and baith shirra and captain guarding her, and syne in a clink she wasna there. A’ nicht they looked for her, but she hadna left so muckle as a foot-print ahint her, and in the tail of the day they had to up wi’ their tap in their lap and march awa without her.”
 
Gavin’s appetite returned.
 
“Has she been seen since the soldiers went away?” he asked, laying down his spoon with a new fear. “Where is she now?”
 
“No human eye has seen her,” Jean answered impressively. “Whaur is she now? Whaur does the flies vanish to in winter? We ken they’re some gait, but whaur?”
 
“But what are the people saying about her?”
 
“Daft things,” said Jean. “Old Charles Yuill gangs the length o’ hinting that she’s dead and buried.”
 
“She could not have buried herself, Jean,” Margaret said, mildly.
 
“I dinna ken. Charles says she’s even capable o’ that.”
 
Then Jean retired reluctantly (but leaving the door ajar) and Gavin fell to on his porridge. He was now so cheerful that Margaret wondered.
 
84
“If half the stories about this gypsy be true,” she said, “she must be more than a mere woman.”
 
“Less, you mean, mother,” Gavin said, with conviction. “She is a woman, and a sinful one.”
 
“Did you see her, Gavin?”
 
“I saw her. Mother, she flouted me!”
 
“The daring tawpie!” exclaimed Margaret.
 
“She is all that,” said the minister.
 
“Was she dressed just like an ordinary gypsy body? But you don’t notice clothes much, Gavin.”
 
“I noticed hers,” Gavin said, slowly, “she was in a green and red, I think, and barefooted.”
 
“Ay,” shouted Jean from the kitchen, startling both of them; “but she had a lang grey-like cloak too. She was seen jouking up closes in’t.”
 
Gavin rose, considerably annoyed, and shut the parlour door.
 
“Was she as bonny as folks say?” asked Margaret. “Jean says they speak of her beauty as unearthly.”
 
“Beauty of her kind,” Gavin explained learnedly, “is neither earthly nor heavenly.” He was seeing things as they are very clearly now. “What,” he said, “is mere physical beauty? Pooh!”
 
“And yet,” said Margaret, “the soul surely does speak through the face to some extent.”
 
“Do you really think so, mother?” Gavin asked, a little uneasily.
 
“I have always noticed it,” Margaret said, and then her son sighed.
 
“But I would let no face influence me a jot,” he said, recovering.
 
“Ah, Gavin, I’m thinking I’m the reason you pay so little regard to women’s faces. It’s no natural.”
 
“You’ve spoilt me, you see, mother, for ever caring for another woman. I would compare her to you, and then where would she be?”
 
85
“Sometime,” Margaret said, “you’ll think differently.”
 
“Never,” answered Gavin, with a violence that ended the conversation.
 
Soon afterwards he set off for the town, and in passing down the garden walk cast a guilty glance at the summer-seat. Something black was lying in one corner of it. He stopped irresolutely, for his mother was nodding to him from her window. Then he disappeared into the little arbour. What had caught his eye was a Bible. On the previous day, as he now remembered, he had been called away while studying in the garden, and had left his Bible on the summer-seat, a pencil between its pages. Not often probably had the Egyptian passed a night in such company.
 
But what was this? Gavin had not to ask himself the question. The gypsy’s cloak was lying neatly folded at the other end of the seat. Why had the woman not taken it with her? Hardly had he put this question when another stood in front of it. What was to be done with the cloak? He dared not leave it there for Jean to discover. He could not take it into the manse in daylight. Beneath the seat was a tool-chest without a lid, and into this he crammed the cloak. Then, having turned the box face downwards, he went about his duties. But many a time during the day he shivered to the marrow, reflecting suddenly that at this very moment Jean might be carrying the accursed thing (at arms’ length, like a dog in disgrace) to his mother.
 
Now let those who think that Gavin has not yet paid toll for taking the road with the Egyptian, follow the adventures of the cloak. Shortly after gloaming fell that night Jean encountered her master in the lobby of the manse. He was carrying something, and when he saw her he slipped it behind his back. Had he passed her openly she would have suspected nothing, but this made her look at him.
 
86
“Why do you stare so, Jean?” Gavin asked, conscience-stricken, and he stood with his back to the wall until she had retired in bewilderment.
 
“I have noticed her watching me sharply all day,” he said to himself, though it was only he who had been watching her.
 
Gavin carried the cloak to his bedroom, thinking to lock it away in his chest, but it looked so wicked lying there that he seemed to see it after the lid was shut.
 
The garret was the best place for it. He took it out of the chest and was opening his door gently, when there was Jean again. She had been employed very innocently in his mother’s room, but he said tartly—
 
“Jean, I really cannot have this,” which sent Jean to the kitchen with her apron at her eyes.
 
Gavin stowed the cloak beneath the garret bed, and an hour afterwards was engaged on his sermon, when he distinctly heard some one in the garret. He ran up the ladder with a terrible brow for Jean, but it was not Jean; it was Margaret.
 
“Mother,” he said in alarm, “what are you doing here?”
 
“I am only tidying up the garret, Gavin.”
 
“Yes, but—it is too cold for you. Did Jean—did Jean ask you to come up here?”
 
“Jean? She knows her place better.”
 
Gavin took Margaret down to the parlour, but his confidence in the garret had gone. He stole up the ladder again, dragged the cloak from its lurking place, and took it into the garden. He very nearly met Jean in the lobby again, but hearing him coming she fled precipitately, which he thought very suspicious.
 
In the garden he dug a hole, and there buried the cloak, but even now he was not done with it. He was wakened early by a noise of scraping in the garden, and his first thought was “Jean!” But peering from the 87 window, he saw that the resurrectionist was a dog, which already had its teeth in the cloak.
 
That forenoon Gavin left the manse unostentatiously carrying a brown-paper parcel. He proceeded to the hill, and having dropped the parcel there, retired hurriedly. On his way home, nevertheless, he was over-taken by D. Fittis, who had been cutting down whins. Fittis had seen the parcel fall, and running after Gavin, returned it to him. Gavin thanked D. Fittis, and then sat down gloomily on the cemetery dyke. Half an hour afterwards he flung the parcel into a Tillyloss garden.
 
In the evening Margaret had news for him, got from Jean.
 
“Do you remember, Gavin, that the Egyptian every one is still speaking of, wore a long cloak? Well, would you believe it, the cloak was Captain Halliwell’s, and she took it from the town-house when she escaped. She is supposed to have worn it inside out. He did not discover that it was gone until he was leaving Thrums.”
 
“Mother, is this possible?” Gavin said.
 
“The policeman, Wearyworld, has told it. He was ordered, it seems, to look for the cloak quietly, and to take any one into custody in whose possession it was found.”
 
“Has it been found?”
 
“No.”
 
The minister walked out of the parlour, for he could not trust his face. What was to be done now? The cloak was lying in mason Baxter’s garden, and Baxter was therefore, in all probability, within four-and-twenty hours of the Tilliedrum gaol.
 
“Does Mr. Dishart ever wear a cap at nichts?” Femie Wilkie asked Sam’l Fairweather three hours later.
 
“Na, na, he has ower muckle respect for his lum 88 hat,” answered Sam’l; “and richtly, for it’s the crowning stone o’ the edifice.”
 
“Then it couldna hae been him I met at the back o’ Tillyloss the now,” said Femie, “though like him it was. He joukit back when he saw me.”
 
While Femie was telling her story in the Tenements, mason Baxter, standing at the window which looked into his garden, was shouting, “Wha’s that in my yard?” There was no answer, and Baxter closed his window, under the impression that he had been speaking to a cat. The man in the cap then emerged from the corner where he had been crouching, and stealthily felt for something among the cabbages and pea sticks. It was no longer there, however, and by-and-by he retired empty-handed.
 
“The Egyptian’s cloak has been found,” Margaret was able to tell Gavin next day. “Mason Baxter found it yesterday afternoon.”
 
“In his garden?” Gavin asked hurriedly.
 
“No; in the quarry, he says, but according to Jean he is known not to have been at the quarry to-day. Some seem to think that the gypsy gave him the cloak for helping her to escape, and that he has delivered it up lest he should get into difficulties.”
 
“Whom has he given it to, mother?” Gavin asked.
 
“To the policeman.”
 
“And has Wearyworld sent it back to Halliwell?”
 
“Yes. He told Jean he sent it off at once, with the information that the masons had found it in the quarry.”
 
The next day was Sabbath, when a new trial, now to be told, awaited Gavin in the pulpit; but it had nothing to do with the cloak, of which I may here record the end. Wearyworld had not forwarded it to its owner; Meggy, his wife, took care of that. It made its reappearance in Thrums, several months after the riot, as two pairs of Sabbath breeks for her sons, James and Andrew.
Chapter Ten.   FIRST SERMON AGAINST WOMEN.
 On the afternoon of the following Sabbath, as I have said, something strange happened in the Auld Licht pulpit. The congregation, despite their troubles, turned it over and peered at it for days, but had they seen into the inside of it they would have weaved few webs until the session had sat on the minister. The affair baffled me at the time, and for the Egyptian’s sake I would avoid mentioning it now, were it not one of Gavin’s milestones. It includes the first of his memorable sermons against Woman.
 
I was not in the Auld Licht church that day, but I heard of the sermon before night, and this, I think, is as good an opportunity as another for showing how the gossip about Gavin reached me up here in the Glen school-house. Since Margaret and her son came to the manse I had kept the vow made to myself and avoided Thrums. Only once had I ventured to the kirk, and then, instead of taking my old seat, the fourth from the pulpit, I sat down near the plate, where I could look at Margaret without her seeing me. To spare her that agony I even stole away as the last word of the benediction was pronounced, and my haste scandalised many, for with Auld Lichts it is not customary to retire quickly from the church after the manner of the godless U. P.’s (and the Free Kirk is little better), who have their hats in their hand when they rise for the benediction, so that they may at once pour out like a burst dam. We resume our seats, look straight before us, clear our throats and stretch out our hands for our 90 womenfolk to put our hats into them. In time we do get out, but I am never sure how.
 
One may gossip in a glen on Sabbaths, though not in a town, without losing his character, and I used to await the return of my neighbour, the farmer of Waster Lunny, and of Silva Birse, the Glen Quharity post, at the end of the school-house path. Waster Lunny was a man whose care in his leisure hours was to keep from his wife his great pride in her. His horse, Catlaw, on the other hand, he told outright what he thought of it, praising it to its face and blackguarding it as it deserved, and I have seen him when completely baffled by the brute, sit down before it on a stone and thus harangue: “You think you’re clever, Catlaw, my lass, but you’re mista’en. You’re a thrawn limmer, that’s what you are. You think you have blood in you. You hae blood! Gae away, and dinna blether. I tell you what, Catlaw, I met a man yestreen that kent your mither, and he says she was a feikie fushionless besom. What do you say to that?”
 
As for the post, I will say no more of him than that his bitter topic was the unreasonableness of humanity, which treated him graciously when he had a letter for it, but scowled at him when he had none, “aye implying that I hae a letter, but keep it back.”
 
On the Sabbath evening after the riot, I stood at the usual place awaiting my friends, and saw before they reached me that they had something untoward to tell. The farmer, his wife and three children, holding each other’s hands, stretched across the road. Birse was a little behind, but a conversation was being kept up by shouting. All were walking the Sabbath pace, and the family having started half a minute in advance, the post had not yet made up on them.
 
“It’s sitting to snaw,” Waster Lunny said, drawing near, and just as I was to reply, “It is so,” Silva slipped in the words before me.
 
91
“You wasna at the kirk,” was Elspeth’s salutation. I had been at the Glen church, but did not contradict her, for it is Established, and so neither here nor there. I was anxious, too, to know what their long faces meant, and so asked at once—
 
“Was Mr. Dishart on the riot?”
 
“Forenoon, ay; afternoon, no,” replied Waster Lunny, walking round his wife to get nearer me. “Dominie, a queery thing happened in the kirk this day, sic as——”
 
“Waster Lunny,” interrupted Elspeth sharply; “have you on your Sabbath shoon or have you no on your Sabbath shoon?”
 
“Guid care you took I should hae the dagont oncanny things on,” retorted the farmer.
 
“Keep out o’ the gutter, then,” said Elspeth, “on the Lord’s day.”
 
“Him,” said her man, “that is forced by a foolish woman to wear genteel ’lastic-sided boots canna forget them till he takes them aff. Whaur’s the extra reverence in wearing shoon twa sizes ower sma?”
 
“It mayna be mair reverent,” suggested Birse, to whom Elspeth’s kitchen was a pleasant place, “but it’s grand, and you canna expect to be baith grand and comfortable.”
 
I reminded them that they were speaking of Mr. Dishart.
 
“We was saying,” began the post briskly, “that——”
 
“It was me that was saying it,” said Waster Lunny. “So, dominie——”
 
“Haud your gabs, baith o’ you,” interrupted Elspeth. “You’ve been roaring the story to ane another till you’re hoarse.”
 
“In the forenoon,” Waster Lunny went on determinedly, “Mr. Dishart preached on the riot, and fine he was. Oh, dominie, you should hae heard him ladling it on to Lang Tammas, no by name but in sic a way 92 that there was no mistaking wha he was preaching at, Sal! oh losh! Tammas got it strong.”
 
“But he’s dull in the uptake,” broke in the post, “by what I expected. I spoke to him after the sermon, and I says, just to see if he was properly humbled, ‘Ay, Tammas,’ I says, ‘them that discourse was preached against, winna think themselves seven feet men for a while again.’ ‘Ay, Birse,’ he answers, ‘and glad I am to hear you admit it, for he had you in his eye.’ I was fair scunnered at Tammas the day.”
 
“Mr. Dishart was preaching at the whole clanjamfray o’ you,” said Elspeth.
 
“Maybe he was,” said her husband, leering; “but you needna cast it at us, for, my certie, if the men got it frae him in the forenoon, the women got it in the afternoon.”
 
“He redd them up most michty,” said the post. “Thae was his very words or something like them. ‘Adam,’ says he, ‘was an erring man, but aside Eve he was respectable.’”
 
“Ay, but it wasna a’ women he meant,” Elspeth explained, “for when he said that, he pointed his finger direct at T’nowhead’s lassie, and I hope it’ll do her good.”
 
“But I wonder,” I said, “that Mr. Dishart chose such a subject to-day. I thought he would be on the riot at both services.”
 
“You’ll wonder mair,” said Elspeth, “when you hear what happened afore he began the afternoon sermon. But I canna get in a word wi’ that man o’ mine.”
 
“We’ve been speaking about it,” said Birse, “ever since we left the kirk door. Tod, we’ve been sawing it like seed a’ alang the glen.”
 
“And we meant to tell you about it at once,” said Waster Lunny; “but there’s aye so muckle to say about a minister. Dagont, to hae ane keeps a body out o’ langour. Ay, but this breaks the drum. Dominie, 93 either Mr. Dishart wasna weel, or he was in the devil’s grip.”
 
This startled me, for the farmer was looking serious.
 
“He was weel eneuch,” said Birse, “for a heap o’ fowk speired at Jean if he had ta’en his porridge as usual, and she admitted he had. But the lassie was skeered hersel’, and said it was a mercy Mrs. Dishart wasna in the kirk.”
 
“Why was she not there?” I asked anxiously.
 
“Oh, he winna let her out in sic weather.”
 
“I wish you would tell me what happened,” I said to Elspeth.
 
“So I will,” she answered, “if Waster Lunny would haud his wheesht for a minute. You see the afternoon diet began in the ordinary way, and a’ was richt until we came to the sermon. ‘You will find my text,’ he says, in his piercing voice, ‘in the eighth chapter of Ezra.’”
 
“And at thae words,” said Waster Lunny, “my heart gae a loup, for Ezra is an unca ill book to find; ay, and so is Ruth.”
 
“I kent the books o’ the Bible by heart,” said Elspeth, scornfully, “when I was a sax year auld.”
 
“So did I,” said Waster Lunny, “and I ken them yet, except when I’m hurried. When Mr. Dishart gave out Ezra he a sort o’ keeked round the kirk to find out if he had puzzled onybody, and so there was a kind o’ a competition among the congregation wha would lay hand on it first. That was what doited me. Ay, there was Ruth when she wasna wanted, but Ezra, dagont, it looked as if Ezra had jumped clean out o’ the Bible.”
 
“You wasna the only distressed crittur,” said his wife. “I was ashamed to see Eppie McLaren looking up the order o’ the books at the beginning o’ the Bible.”
 
“Tibbie Birse was even mair brazen,” said the post, “for the sly cuttie opened at Kings and pretended it was Ezra.”
 
94
“None o’ thae things would I do,” said Waster Lunny, “and sal, I dauredna, for Davit Lunan was glowering over my shuther. Ay, you may scrowl at me, Elspeth Proctor, but as far back as I can mind, Ezra has done me. Mony a time afore I start for the kirk I take my Bible to a quiet place and look Ezra up. In the very pew I says canny to mysel’, ‘Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job,’ the which should be a help, but the moment the minister gi’es out that awfu’ book, away goes Ezra like the Egyptian.”
 
“And you after her,” said Elspeth, “like the weavers that wouldna fecht. You make a windmill of your Bible.”
 
“Oh, I winna admit I’m beat. Never mind, there’s queer things in the world forby Ezra. How is cripples aye so puffed up mair than other folk? How does flour-bread aye fall on the buttered side?”
 
“I will mind,” Elspeth said, “for I was terrified the minister would admonish you frae the pulpit.”
 
“He couldna hae done that, for was he no baffled to find Ezra himsel’?”
 
“Him no find Ezra!” cried Elspeth. “I hae telled you a dozen times he found it as easy as you could yoke a horse.”
 
“The thing can be explained in no other way,” said her husband, doggedly, “if he was weel and in sound mind.”
 
“Maybe the dominie can clear it up,” suggested the post, “him being a scholar.”
 
“Then tell me what happened,” I asked.
 
“Godsake, hae we no telled you?” Birse said. “I thocht we had.”
 
“It was a terrible scene,” said Elspeth, giving her husband a shove. “As I said, Mr. Dishart gave out Ezra eighth. Weel, I turned it up in a jiffy, and syne looked cautiously to see how Eppie McLaren was getting on. Just at that minute I heard a groan frae the 95 pulpit. It didna stop short o’ a groan. Ay, you may be sure I looked quick at the minister, and there I saw a sicht that would hae made the grandest gape. His face was as white as a baker’s, and he had a sort of fallen against the back o’ the pulpit, staring demented-like at his open Bible.”
 
“And I saw him,” said Birse, “put up his hand atween him and the Book, as if he thocht it was to jump at him.”
 
“Twice,” said Elspeth, “he tried to speak, and twice he let the words fall.”
 
“That,” says Waster Lunny, “the whole congregation admits, but I didna see it mysel’, for a’ this time you may picture me hunting savage-like for Ezra. I thocht the minister was waiting till I found it.”
 
“Hendry Munn,” said Birse, “stood upon one leg, wondering whether he should run to the session-house for a glass of water.”
 
“But by that time,” said Elspeth, “the fit had left Mr. Dishart, or rather it had ta’en a new turn. He grew red, and it’s gospel that he stamped his foot.”
 
“He had the face of one using bad words,” said the post. “He didna swear, of course, but that was the face he had on.”
 
“I missed it,” said Waster Lunny, “for I was in full cry after Ezra, with the sweat running down my face.”
 
“But the most astounding thing has yet to be telled,” went on Elspeth. “The minister shook himsel’ like one wakening frae a nasty dream, and he cries in a voice of thunder, just as if he was shaking his fist at somebody——”
 
“He cries,” Birse interposed, cleverly, “he cries, ‘You will find the text in Genesis, chapter three, verse six.’”
 
“Yes,” said Elspeth, “first he gave out one text, and then he gave out another, being the most amazing thing to my mind that ever happened in the town of Thrums. 96 What will our children’s children think o’t? I wouldna hae missed it for a pound note.”
 
“Nor me,” said Waster Lunny, “though I only got the tail o’t. Dominie, no sooner had he said Genesis third and sixth, than I laid my finger on Ezra. Was it no provoking? Onybody can turn up Genesis, but it needs an able-bodied man to find Ezra.”
 
“He preached on the Fall,” Elspeth said, “for an hour and twenty-five minutes, but powerful though he was I would rather he had telled us what made him gie the go-by to Ezra.”
 
“All I can say,” said Waster Lunny, “is that I never heard him mair awe-inspiring. Whaur has he got sic a knowledge of women? He riddled them, he fair riddled them, till I was ashamed o’ being married.”
 
“It’s easy kent whaur he got his knowledge of women,” Birse explained, “it’s a’ in the original Hebrew. You can howk ony mortal thing out o’ the original Hebrew, the which all ministers hae at their finger ends. What else makes them ken to jump a verse now and then when giving out a psalm?”
 
“It wasna women like me he denounced,” Elspeth insisted, “but young lassies that leads men astray wi’ their abominable wheedling ways.”
 
“Tod,” said her husband, “if they try their hands on Mr. Dishart they’ll meet their match.”
 
“They will,” chuckled the post. “The Hebrew’s a grand thing, though teuch, I’m telled, michty teuch.”
 
“His sublimest burst,” Waster Lunny came back to tell me, “was about the beauty o’ the soul being everything and the beauty o’ the face no worth a snuff. What a scorn he has for bonny faces and toom souls! I dinna deny but what a bonny face fell takes me, but Mr. Dishart wouldna gie a blade o’ grass for’t. Ay, and I used to think that in their foolishness about women there was dagont little differ atween the unlearned and the highly edicated.”
 
97
The gossip about Gavin brought hitherto to the school-house had been as bread to me, but this I did not like. For a minister to behave thus was as unsettling to us as a change of Government to Londoners, and I decided to give my scholars a holiday on the morrow and tramp into the town for fuller news. But all through the night it snowed, and next day, and then intermittently for many days, and every fall took the school miles farther away from Thrums. Birse and the crows had now the glen road to themselves, and even Birse had twice or thrice to bed with me. At these times had he not been so interested in describing his progress through the snow, maintaining that the crying want of our glen road was palings for postmen to kick their feet against, he must have wondered why I always turned the talk to the Auld Licht minister.
 
“Ony explanation o’ his sudden change o’ texts?” Birse said, repeating my question. “Tod, and there is and to spare, for I hear tell there’s saxteen explanations in the Tenements alone. As Tammas Haggart says, that’s a blessing, for if there had just been twa explanations the kirk micht hae split on them.”
 
“Ay,” he said at another time, “twa or three even dared to question the minister, but I’m thinking they made nothing o’t. The majority agrees that he was just inspired to change his text. But Lang Tammas is dour. Tammas telled the session a queer thing. He says that after the diet o’ worship on that eventful afternoon Mr. Dishart carried the Bible out o’ the pulpit instead o’ leaving that duty as usual to the kirk-officer. Weel, Tammas, being precentor, has a richt, as you ken, to leave the kirk by the session-house door, just like the minister himsel’. He did so that afternoon, and what, think you, did he see? He saw Mr. Dishart tearing a page out o’ the Bible, and flinging it savagely into the session-house fire. You dinna credit it? Weel, it’s staggering, but there’s Hendry Munn’s evidence 98 too. Hendry took his first chance o’ looking up Ezra in the minister’s Bible, and, behold, the page wi’ the eighth chapter was gone. Them that thinks Tammas wasna blind wi’ excitement hauds it had been Ezra eighth that gaed into the fire. Onyway, there’s no doubt about the page’s being missing, for whatever excitement Tammas was in, Hendry was as cool as ever.”
 
A week later Birse told me that the congregation had decided to regard the incident as adding lustre to their kirk. This was largely, I fear, because it could then be used to belittle the Established minister. That fervent Auld Licht, Snecky Hobart, feeling that Gavin’s action was unsound, had gone on the following Sabbath to the parish kirk and sat under Mr. Duthie. But Mr. Duthie was a close reader, so that Snecky flung himself about in his pew in misery. The minister concluded his sermon with these words: “But on this subject I will say no more at present.” “Because you canna,” Snecky roared, and strutted out of the church. Comparing the two scenes, it is obvious that the Auld Lichts had won a victory. After preaching impromptu for an hour and twenty-five minutes, it could never be said of Gavin that he needed to read. He became more popular than ever. Yet the change of texts was not forgotten. If in the future any other indictments were brought against him, it would certainly be pinned to them.
 
I marvelled long over Gavin’s jump from Ezra to Genesis, and at this his first philippic against Woman, but I have known the cause for many a year. The Bible was the one that had lain on the summer-seat while the Egyptian hid there. It was the great pulpit Bible which remains in the church as a rule, but Gavin had taken it home the previous day to make some of its loose pages secure with paste. He had studied from it on the day preceding the riot, but had used a small Bible during the rest of the week. When he turned in the pulpit to Ezra, where he had left the large Bible 99 open in the summer-seat, he found this scrawled across chapter eight:—
 
“I will never tell who flung the clod at Captain Halliwell. But why did you fling it? I will never tell that you allowed me to be called Mrs. Dishart before witnesses. But is not this a Scotch marriage? Signed, Babbie the Egyptian.”
 
Chapter Eleven.   TELLS IN A WHISPER OF MAN’S FALL DURING THE CURLING SEASON.
 No snow could be seen in Thrums by the beginning of the year, though clods of it lay in Waster Lunny’s fields, where his hens wandered all day as if looking for something they had dropped. A black frost had set in, and one walking on the glen road could imagine that through the cracks in it he saw a loch glistening. From my door I could hear the roar of curling stones at Rashie-bog, which is almost four miles nearer Thrums. On the day I am recalling, I see that I only made one entry in my diary, “At last bought Waster Lunny’s bantams.” Well do I remember the transaction, and no wonder, for I had all but bought the bantams every day for a six months.
 
About noon the doctor’s dogcart was observed by all the Tenements standing at the Auld Licht manse. The various surmises were wrong. Margaret had not been suddenly taken ill; Jean had not swallowed a darning-needle; the minister had not walked out at his study window in a moment of sublime thought. Gavin stepped into the dogcart, which at once drove off in the direction of Rashie-bog, but equally in error were those who said that the doctor was making a curler of him.
 
There was, however, ground for gossip; for Thrums folk seldom called in a doctor until it was too late to cure them, and McQueen was not the man to pay social visits. Of his skill we knew fearsome stories, as that, by looking at Archie Allardyce, who had come to 101 broken bones on a ladder, he discovered which rung Archie fell from. When he entered a stuffy room he would poke his staff through the window to let in fresh air, and then fling down a shilling to pay for the breakage. He was deaf in the right ear, and therefore usually took the left side of prosy people, thus, as he explained, making a blessing of an affliction. “A pity I don’t hear better?” I have heard him say. “Not at all. If my misfortune, as you call it, were to be removed, you can’t conceive how I should miss my deaf ear.” He was a fine fellow, though brusque, and I never saw him without his pipe until two days before we buried him, which was five-and-twenty years ago come Martinmas.
 
“We’re all quite weel,” Jean said apprehensively as she answered his knock on the manse door, and she tried to be pleasant, too, for well she knew that, if a doctor willed it, she could have fever in five minutes.
 
“Ay, Jean, I’ll soon alter that,” he replied ferociously. “Is the master in?”
 
“He’s at his sermon,” Jean said with importance.
 
To interrupt the minister at such a moment seemed sacrilege to her, for her up-bringing had been good. Her mother had once fainted in the church, but though the family’s distress was great, they neither bore her out, nor signed to the kirk-officer to bring water. They propped her up in the pew in a respectful attitude, joining in the singing meanwhile, and she recovered in time to look up 2nd Chronicles, 21st and 7th.
 
“Tell him I want to speak to him at the door,” said the doctor fiercely, “or I’ll bleed you this minute.”
 
McQueen would not enter, because his horse might have seized the opportunity to return stablewards. At the houses where it was accustomed to stop, it drew up of its own accord, knowing where the Doctor’s “cases” were as well as himself, but it resented new patients.
 
“You like misery, I think, Mr. Dishart,” McQueen said when Gavin came to him, “at least I am always 102 finding you in the thick of it, and that is why I am here now. I have a rare job for you if you will jump into the machine. You know Nanny Webster, who lives on the edge of Windyghoul? No, you don’t, for she belongs to the other kirk. Well, at all events, you knew her brother, Sanders, the mole-catcher?”
 
“I remember him. You mean the man who boasted so much about seeing a ball at Lord Rintoul’s place?”
 
“The same, and, as you may know, his boasting about maltreating policemen whom he never saw led to his being sentenced to nine months in gaol lately.”
 
“That is the man,” said Gavin. “I never liked him.”
 
“No, but his sister did,” McQueen answered, drily, “and with reason, for he was her breadwinner, and now she is starving.”
 
“Anything I can give her——”
 
“Would be too little, sir.”
 
“But the neighbours——”
 
“She has few near her, and though the Thrums poor help each other bravely, they are at present nigh as needy as herself. Nanny is coming to the poorhouse, Mr. Dishart.”
 
“God help her!” exclaimed Gavin.
 
“Nonsense,” said the doctor, trying to make himself a hard man. “She will be properly looked after there, and—and in time she will like it.”
 
“Don’t let my mother hear you speaking of taking an old woman to that place,” Gavin said, looking anxiously up the stair. I cannot pretend that Margaret never listened.
 
“You all speak as if the poorhouse was a gaol,” the doctor said testily. “But so far as Nanny is concerned, everything is arranged. I promised to drive her to the poorhouse to-day, and she is waiting for me now. Don’t look at me as if I was a brute. She is to take some of her things with her to the poorhouse and the 103 rest is to be left until Sanders’s return, when she may rejoin him. At least we said that to her to comfort her.”
 
“You want me to go with you?”
 
“Yes, though I warn you it may be a distressing scene; indeed, the truth is that I am loth to face Nanny alone to-day. Mr. Duthie should have accompanied me, for the Websters are Established Kirk; ay, and so he would if Rashie-bog had not been bearing. A terrible snare this curling, Mr. Dishart”—here the doctor sighed—“I have known Mr. Duthie wait until midnight struck on Sabbath and then be off to Rashie-bog with a torch.”
 
“I will go with you,” Gavin said, putting on his coat.
 
“Jump in then. You won’t smoke? I never see a respectable man not smoking, sir, but I feel indignant with him for such sheer waste of time.”
 
Gavin smiled at this, and Snecky Hobart, who happened to be keeking over the manse dyke, bore the news to the Tenements.
 
“I’ll no sleep the nicht,” Snecky said, “for wondering what made the minister lauch. Ay, it would be no trifle.”
 
A minister, it is certain, who wore a smile on his face would never have been called to the Auld Licht kirk, for life is a wrestle with the devil, and only the frivolous think to throw him without taking off their coats. Yet, though Gavin’s zeal was what the congregation reverenced, many loved him privately for his boyishness. He could unbend at marriages, of which he had six on the last day of the year, and at every one of them he joked (the same joke) like a layman. Some did not approve of his playing at the teetotum for ten minutes with Kitty Dundas’s invalid son, but the way Kitty boasted about it would have disgusted anybody. At the present day there are probably a score of Gavins in Thrums, all called after the little minister, and there is one Gavinia, whom he hesitated to christen. He 104 made humorous remarks (the same remark) about all these children, and his smile as he patted their heads was for thinking over when one’s work was done for the day.
 
The doctor’s horse clattered up the Backwynd noisily, as if a minister behind made no difference to it. Instead of climbing the Roods, however, the nearest way to Nanny’s, it went westward, which Gavin, in a reverie, did not notice. The truth must be told. The Egyptian was again in his head.
 
“Have I fallen deaf in the left ear, too?” said the doctor. “I see your lips moving, but I don’t catch a syllable.”
 
Gavin started, coloured, and flung the gypsy out of the trap.
 
“Why are we not going up the Roods?” he asked.
 
“Well,” said the doctor slowly, “at the top of the Roods there is a stance for circuses, and this old beast of mine won’t pass it. You know, unless you are behind in the clashes and clavers of Thrums, that I bought her from the manager of a travelling show. She was the horse (‘Lightning’ they called her) that galloped round the ring at a mile an hour, and so at the top of the Roods she is still unmanageable. She once dragged me to the scene of her former triumphs, and went revolving round it, dragging the machine after her.”
 
“If you had not explained that,” said Gavin, “I might have thought that you wanted to pass by Rashie-bog.”
 
The doctor, indeed, was already standing up to catch a first glimpse of the curlers.
 
“Well,” he admitted, “I might have managed to pass the circus ring, though what I have told you is true. However, I have not come this way merely to see how the match is going. I want to shame Mr. Duthie for neglecting his duty. It will help me to do mine, for the Lord knows I am finding it hard, with the music of these stones in my ears.”
 
105
“I never saw it played before,” Gavin said, standing up in his turn. “What a din they make! McQueen, I believe they are fighting!”
 
“No, no,” said the excited doctor, “they are just a bit daft. That’s the proper spirit for the game. Look, that’s the baron-bailie near standing on his head, and there’s Mr. Duthie off his head a’ thegither. Yon’s twa weavers and a mason cursing the laird, and the man wi’ the besom is the Master of Crumnathie.”
 
“A democracy, at all events,” said Gavin.
 
“By no means,” said the doctor, “it’s an aristocracy of intellect. Gee up, Lightning, or the frost will be gone before we are there.”
 
“It is my opinion, doctor,” said Gavin, “that you will have bones to set before that game is finished. I can see nothing but legs now.”
 
“Don’t say a word against curling, sir, to me,” said McQueen, whom the sight of a game in which he must not play had turned crusty. “Dangerous! It’s the best medicine I know of. Look at that man coming across the field. It is Jo Strachan. Well, sir, curling saved Jo’s life after I had given him up. You don’t believe me? Hie, Jo, Jo Strachan, come here and tell the minister how curling put you on your legs again.”
 
Strachan came forward, a tough, little, wizened man, with red flannel round his ears to keep out the cold.
 
“It’s gospel what the doctor says, Mr. Dishart,” he declared. “Me and my brither Sandy was baith ill, and in the same bed, and the doctor had hopes o’ Sandy, but nane o’ me. Ay, weel, when I heard that, I thocht I micht as weel die on the ice as in my bed, so I up and on wi’ my claethes. Sandy was mad at me, for he was no curler, and he says, ‘Jo Strachan, if you gang to Rashie-bog you’ll assuredly be brocht hame a corp.’ I didna heed him, though, and off I gaed.”
 
“And I see you did not die,” said Gavin.
 
106
“Not me,” answered the fish cadger, with a grin. “Na, but the joke o’t is, it was Sandy that died.”
 
“Not the joke, Jo,” corrected the doctor, “the moral.”
 
“Ay, the moral; I’m aye forgetting the word.”
 
McQueen, enjoying Gavin’s discomfiture, turned Lightning down the Rashie-bog road, which would be impassable as soon as the thaw came. In summer Rashie-bog is several fields in which a cart does not sink unless it stands still, but in winter it is a loch with here and there a spring where dead men are said to lie. There are no rushes at its east end, and here the dogcart drew up near the curlers, a crowd of men dancing, screaming, shaking their fists and sweeping, while half a hundred onlookers got in their way, gesticulating and advising.
 
“Hold me tight,” the doctor whispered to Gavin, “or I’ll be leaving you to drive Nanny to the poorhouse by yourself.”
 
He had no sooner said this than he tried to jump out of the trap.
 
“You donnert fule, John Robbie,” he shouted to a player, “soop her up, man, soop her up; no, no, dinna, dinna; leave her alane. Bailie, leave her alane, you blazing idiot. Mr. Dishart, let me go; what do you mean, sir, by hanging on to my coat tails? Dang it all, Duthie’s winning. He has it, he has it!”
 
“You’re to play, doctor?” some cried, running to the dogcart. “We hae missed you sair.”
 
“Jeames, I—I—. No, I daurna.”
 
“Then we get our licks. I never saw the minister in sic form. We can do nothing against him.”
 
“Then,” cried McQueen, “I’ll play. Come what will, I’ll play. Let go my tails, Mr. Dishart, or I’ll cut them off. Duty? Fiddlesticks!”
 
“Shame on you, sir,” said Gavin; “yes, and on you others who would entice him from his duty.”
 
“Shame!” the doctor cried. “Look at Mr. Duthie. 107 Is he ashamed? And yet that man has been reproving me for a twelvemonths because I’ve refused to become one of his elders. Duthie,” he shouted, “think shame of yourself for curling this day.”
 
Mr. Duthie had carefully turned his back to the trap, for Gavin’s presence in it annoyed him. We seldom care to be reminded of our duty by seeing another do it. Now, however, he advanced to the dogcart, taking the far side of Gavin.
 
“Put on your coat, Mr. Duthie,” said the doctor, “and come with me to Nanny Webster’s. You promised.”
 
Mr. Duthie looked quizzically at Gavin, and then at the sky.
 
“The thaw may come at any moment,” he said.
 
“I think the frost is to hold,” said Gavin.
 
“It may hold over to-morrow,” Mr. Duthie admitted; “but to-morrow’s the Sabbath, and so a lost day.”
 
“A what?” exclaimed Gavin, horrified.
 
“I only mean,” Mr. Duthie answered, colouring, “that we can’t curl on the Lord’s day. As for what it may be like on Monday, no one can say. No, doctor, I won’t risk it. We’re in the middle of a game, man.”
 
Gavin looked very grave.
 
“I see what you are thinking, Mr. Dishart,” the old minister said doggedly; “but then, you don’t curl. You are very wise. I have forbidden my sons to curl.”
 
“Then you openly snap your fingers at your duty, Mr. Duthie?” said the doctor, loftily. (“You can let go my tails now, Mr. Dishart, for the madness has passed.”)
 
“None of your virtuous airs, McQueen,” said Mr. Duthie, hotly. “What was the name of the doctor that warned women never to have bairns while it was hauding?”
 
108
“And what,” retorted McQueen, “was the name of the minister that told his session he would neither preach nor pray while the black frost lasted?”
 
“Hoots, doctor,” said Duthie, “don’t lose your temper because I’m in such form.”
 
“Don’t lose yours, Duthie, because I aye beat you.”
 
“You beat me, McQueen! Go home, sir, and don’t talk havers. Who beat you at——”
 
“Who made you sing small at——”
 
“Who won——”
 
“Who——”
 
“Who——”
 
“I’ll play you on Monday for whatever you like!” shrieked the doctor.
 
“If it holds,” cried the minister, “I’ll be here the whole day. Name the stakes yourself. A stone?”
 
“No,” the doctor said, “but I’ll tell you what we’ll play for. You’ve been dinging me doited about that eldership, and we’ll play for’t. If you win I accept office.”
 
“Done,” said the minister, recklessly.
 
The dogcart was now turned toward Windyghoul, its driver once more good-humoured, but Gavin silent.
 
“You would have been the better of my deaf ear just now, Mr. Dishart,” McQueen said after the loch had been left behind. “Aye, and I’m thinking my pipe would soothe you. But don’t take it so much to heart, man. I’ll lick him easily. He’s a decent man, the minister, but vain of his play, ridiculously vain. However, I think the sight of you, in the place that should have been his, has broken his nerve for this day, and our side may win yet.”
 
“I believe,” Gavin said, with sudden enlightenment, “that you brought me here for that purpose.”
 
“Maybe,” chuckled the doctor; “maybe.” Then he 109 changed the subject suddenly. “Mr. Dishart,” he asked, “were you ever in love?”
 
“Never!” answered Gavin violently.
 
“Well, well,” said the doctor, “don’t terrify the horse. I have been in love myself. It’s bad, but it’s nothing to curling.”
Chapter Twelve.   TRAGEDY OF A MUD HOUSE.
 The dogcart bumped between the trees of Caddam, flinging Gavin and the doctor at each other as a wheel rose on some beech-root or sank for a moment in a pool. I suppose the wood was a pretty sight that day, the pines only white where they had met the snow, as if the numbed painter had left his work unfinished, the brittle twigs snapping overhead, the water as black as tar. But it matters little what the wood was like. Within a squirrel’s leap of it an old woman was standing at the door of a mud house listening for the approach of the trap that was to take her to the poorhouse. Can you think of the beauty of the day now?
 
Nanny was not crying. She had redd up her house for the last time and put on her black merino. Her mouth was wide open while she listened. If you had addressed her you would have thought her polite and stupid. Look at her. A flabby-faced woman she is now, with a swollen body, and no one has heeded her much these thirty years. I can tell you something; it is almost droll. Nanny Webster was once a gay flirt, and in Airlie Square there is a weaver with an unsteady head who thought all the earth of her. His loom has taken a foot from his stature, and gone are Nanny’s raven locks on which he used to place his adoring hand. Down in Airlie Square he is weaving for his life, and here is Nanny, ripe for the poorhouse, and between them is the hill where they were lovers. That is all the story save that when Nanny heard the dogcart she screamed.
 
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No neighbour was with her. If you think this hard, it is because you do not understand. Perhaps Nanny had never been very lovable except to one man, and him, it is said, she lost through her own vanity; but there was much in her to like. The neighbours, of whom there were two not a hundred yards away, would have been with her now but they feared to hurt her feelings. No heart opens to sympathy without letting in delicacy, and these poor people knew that Nanny would not like them to see her being taken away. For a week they had been aware of what was coming, and they had been most kind to her, but that hideous word, the poorhouse, they had not uttered. Poorhouse is not to be spoken in Thrums, though it is nothing to tell a man that you see death in his face. Did Nanny think they knew where she was going? was a question they whispered to each other, and her suffering eyes cut scars on their hearts. So now that the hour had come they called their children into their houses and pulled down their blinds.
 
“If you would like to see her by yourself,” the doctor said eagerly to Gavin, as the horse drew up at Nanny’s gate, “I’ll wait with the horse. Not,” he added, hastily, “that I feel sorry for her. We are doing her a kindness.”
 
They dismounted together, however, and Nanny, who had run from the trap into the house, watched them from her window.
 
McQueen saw her and said glumly, “I should have come alone, for if you pray she is sure to break down. Mr. Dishart, could you not pray cheerfully?”
 
“You don’t look very cheerful yourself,” Gavin said sadly.
 
“Nonsense,” answered the doctor. “I have no patience with this false sentiment. Stand still, Lightning, and be thankful you are not your master to-day.”
 
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The door stood open, and Nanny was crouching against the opposite wall of the room, such a poor, dull kitchen, that you would have thought the furniture had still to be brought into it. The blanket and the piece of old carpet that was Nanny’s coverlet were already packed in her box. The plate rack was empty. Only the round table and the two chairs, and the stools and some pans were being left behind.
 
“Well, Nanny,” the doctor said, trying to bluster, “I have come, and you see Mr. Dishart is with me.”
 
Nanny rose bravely. She knew the doctor was good to her, and she wanted to thank him. I have not seen a great deal of the world myself, but often the sweet politeness of the aged poor has struck me as beautiful. Nanny dropped a curtesy, an ungainly one maybe, but it was an old woman giving the best she had.
 
“Thank you kindly, sirs,” she said; and then two pairs of eyes dropped before hers.
 
“Please to take a chair,” she added timidly. It is strange to know that at that awful moment, for let none tell me it was less than awful, the old woman was the one who could speak.
 
Both men sat down, for they would have hurt Nanny by remaining standing. Some ministers would have known the right thing to say to her, but Gavin dared not let himself speak. I have again to remind you that he was only one-and-twenty.
 
“I’m drouthy, Nanny,” the doctor said, to give her something to do, “and I would be obliged for a drink of water.”
 
Nanny hastened to the pan that stood behind her door, but stopped before she reached it.
 
“It’s toom,” she said. “I—I didna think I needed to fill it this morning.” She caught the doctor’s eye, and could only half restrain a sob. “I couldna help that,” she said, apologetically. “I’m richt angry at myself for being so ungrateful like.”
 
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The doctor thought it best that they should depart at once. He rose.
 
“Oh, no, doctor,” cried Nanny in alarm.
 
“But you are ready?”
 
“Ay,” she said, “I have been ready this twa hours, but you micht wait a minute. Hendry Munn and Andrew Allardyce is coming yont the road, and they would see me.”
 
“Wait, doctor,” Gavin said.
 
“Thank you kindly, sir,” answered Nanny.
 
“But Nanny,” the doctor said, “you must remember what I told you about the poo—, about the place you are going to. It is a fine house, and you will be very happy in it.”
 
“Ay, I’ll be happy in’t,” Nanny faltered, “but, doctor, if I could just hae bidden on here though I wasna happy!”
 
“Think of the food you will get; broth nearly every day.”
 
“It—it’ll be terrible enjoyable,” Nanny said.
 
“And there will be pleasant company for you always,” continued the doctor, “and a nice room to sit in. Why, after you have been there a week, you won’t be the same woman.”
 
“That’s it!” cried Nanny with sudden passion. “Na, na; I’ll be a woman on the poor’s rates. Oh, mither, mither, you little thocht when you bore me that I would come to this!”
 
“Nanny,” the doctor said, rising again, “I am ashamed of you.”
 
“I humbly speir your forgiveness, sir,” she said, “and you micht bide just a wee yet. I’ve been ready to gang these twa hours, but now that the machine is at the gate, I dinna ken how it is, but I’m terrible sweer to come awa’. Oh, Mr. Dishart, it’s richt true what the doctor says about the—the place, but I canna just take it in. I’m—I’m gey auld.”
 
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“You will often get out to see your friends,” was all Gavin could say.
 
“Na, na, na,” she cried, “dinna say that; I’ll gang, but you mauna bid me ever come out, except in a hearse. Dinna let onybody in Thrums look on my face again.”
 
“We must go,” said the doctor firmly. “Put on your mutch, Nanny.”
 
“I dinna need to put on a mutch,” she answered, with a faint flush of pride. “I have a bonnet.”
 
She took the bonnet from her bed, and put it on slowly.
 
“Are you sure there’s naebody looking?” she asked.
 
The doctor glanced at the minister, and Gavin rose.
 
“Let us pray,” he said, and the three went down on their knees.
 
It was not the custom of Auld Licht ministers to leave any house without offering up a prayer in it, and to us it always seemed that when Gavin prayed, he was at the knees of God. The little minister pouring himself out in prayer in a humble room, with awed people around him who knew much more of the world than he, his voice at times thick and again a squeal, and his hands clasped not gracefully, may have been only a comic figure, but we were old-fashioned, and he seemed to make us better men. If I only knew the way, I would draw him as he was, and not fear to make him too mean a man for you to read about. He had not been long in Thrums before he knew that we talked much of his prayers, and that doubtless puffed him up a little. Sometimes, I daresay, he rose from his knees feeling that he had prayed well to-day, which is a dreadful charge to bring against any one. But it was not always so, nor was it so now.
 
I am not speaking harshly of this man, whom I have loved beyond all others, when I say that Nanny came 115 between him and his prayer. Had he been of God’s own image, unstained, he would have forgotten all else in his Maker’s presence, but Nanny was speaking too, and her words choked his. At first she only whispered, but soon what was eating her heart burst out painfully, and she did not know that the minister had stopped.
 
They were such moans as these that brought him back to earth:—
 
“I’ll hae to gang.... I’m a base woman no’ to be mair thankfu’ to them that is so good to me.... I dinna like to prig wi’ them to take a roundabout road, and I’m sair fleid a’ the Roods will see me.... If it could just be said to poor Sanders when he comes back that I died hurriedly, syne he would be able to haud up his head.... Oh, mither!... I wish terrible they had come and ta’en me at nicht.... It’s a dogcart, and I was praying it micht be a cart, so that they could cover me wi’ straw.”
 
“This is more than I can stand,” the doctor cried.
 
Nanny rose frightened.
 
“I’ve tried you, sair,” she said, “but, oh, I’m grateful, and I’m ready now.”
 
They all advanced toward the door without another word, and Nanny even tried to smile. But in the middle of the floor something came over her, and she stood there. Gavin took her hand, and it was cold. She looked from one to the other, her mouth opening and shutting.
 
“I canna help it,” she said.
 
“It’s cruel hard,” muttered the doctor. “I knew this woman when she was a lassie.”
 
The little minister stretched out his hands.
 
“Have pity on her, O God!” he prayed, with the presumptuousness of youth.
 
Nanny heard the words.
 
“Oh, God,” she cried, “you micht!”
 
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God needs no minister to tell Him what to do, but it was His will that the poorhouse should not have this woman. He made use of a strange instrument, no other than the Egyptian, who now opened the mudhouse door.
 
Chapter Thirteen.   SECOND COMING OF THE EGYPTIAN WOMAN.
 The gypsy had been passing the house, perhaps on her way to Thrums for gossip, and it was only curiosity, born suddenly of Gavin’s cry, that made her enter. On finding herself in unexpected company she retained hold of the door, and to the amazed minister she seemed for a moment to have stepped into the mud house from his garden. Her eyes danced, however, as they recognised him, and then he hardened. “This is no place for you,” he was saying fiercely, when Nanny, too distraught to think, fell crying at the Egyptian’s feet.
 
“They are taking me to the poorhouse,” she sobbed; “dinna let them, dinna let them.”
 
The Egyptian’s arms clasped her, and the Egyptian kissed a sallow cheek that had once been as fair as yours, madam, who may read this story. No one had caressed Nanny for many years, but do you think she was too poor and old to care for these young arms around her neck? There are those who say that women cannot love each other, but it is not true. Woman is not undeveloped man, but something better, and Gavin and the doctor knew it as they saw Nanny clinging to her protector. When the gypsy turned with flashing eyes to the two men she might have been a mother guarding her child.
 
“How dare you!” she cried, stamping her foot; and they quaked like malefactors.
 
“You don’t see——” Gavin began, but her indignation stopped him.
 
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“You coward!” she said.
 
Even the doctor had been impressed, so that he now addressed the gypsy respectfully.
 
“This is all very well,” he said, “but a woman’s sympathy——”
 
“A woman!—ah, if I could be a man for only five minutes!”
 
She clenched her little fists, and again turned to Nanny.
 
“You poor dear,” she said tenderly, “I won’t let them take you away.”
 
She looked triumphantly at both minister and doctor, as one who had foiled them in their cruel designs.
 
“Go!” she said, pointing grandly to the door.
 
“Is this the Egyptian of the riots,” the doctor said in a low voice to Gavin, “or is she a queen? Hoots, man, don’t look so shamefaced. We are not criminals. Say something.”
 
Then to the Egyptian Gavin said firmly—
 
“You mean well, but you are doing this poor woman a cruelty in holding out hopes to her that cannot be realised. Sympathy is not meal and bedclothes, and these are what she needs.”
 
“And you who live in luxury,” retorted the girl, “would send her to the poorhouse for them. I thought better of you!”
 
“Tuts!” said the doctor, losing patience, “Mr. Dishart gives more than any other man in Thrums to the poor, and he is not to be preached to by a gypsy. We are waiting for you, Nanny.”
 
“Ay, I’m coming,” said Nanny, leaving the Egyptian. “I’ll hae to gang, lassie. Dinna greet for me.”
 
But the Egyptian said, “No, you are not going. It is these men who are going. Go, sirs, and leave us.”
 
“And you will provide for Nanny?” asked the doctor contemptuously.
 
“Yes.”
 
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“And where is the siller to come from?”
 
“That is my affair, and Nanny’s. Begone, both of you. She shall never want again. See how the very mention of your going brings back life to her face.”
 
“I won’t begone,” the doctor said roughly, “till I see the colour of your siller.”
 
“Oh, the money,” said the Egyptian scornfully. She put her hand into her pocket confidently, as if used to well-filled purses, but could only draw out two silver pieces.
 
“I had forgotten,” she said aloud, though speaking to herself.
 
“I thought so,” said the cynical doctor. “Come, Nanny.”
 
“You presume to doubt me!” the Egyptian said, blocking his way to the door.
 
“How could I presume to believe you?” he answered. “You are a beggar by profession, and yet talk as if——pooh, nonsense.”
 
“I would live on terrible little,” Nanny whispered, “and Sanders will be out again in August month.”
 
“Seven shillings a week,” rapped out the doctor.
 
“Is that all?” the Egyptian asked. “She shall have it.”
 
“When?”
 
“At once. No, it is not possible to-night, but to-morrow I will bring five pounds; no, I will send it; no, you must come for it.”
 
“And where, O daughter of Dives, do you reside?” the doctor asked.
 
No doubt the Egyptian could have found a ready answer had her pity for Nanny been less sincere; as it was, she hesitated, wanting to propitiate the doctor, while holding her secret fast.
 
“I only asked,” McQueen said, eyeing her curiously, “because when I make an appointment I like to know where it is to be held. But I suppose you are suddenly 120 to rise out of the ground as you have done to-day, and did six weeks ago.”
 
“Whether I rise out of the ground or not,” the gypsy said, keeping her temper with an effort, “there will be a five-pound note in my hand. You will meet me to-morrow about this hour at—say the Kaims of Cushie?”
 
“No,” said the doctor after a moment’s pause; “I won’t. Even if I went to the Kaims I should not find you there. Why can you not come to me?”
 
“Why do you carry a woman’s hair,” replied the Egyptian, “in that locket on your chain?”
 
Whether she was speaking of what she knew, or this was only a chance shot, I cannot tell, but the doctor stepped back from her hastily, and could not help looking down at the locket.
 
“Yes,” said the Egyptian calmly, “it is still shut; but why do you sometimes open it at nights?”
 
“Lassie,” the old doctor cried, “are you a witch?”
 
“Perhaps,” she said; “but I ask for no answer to my questions. If you have your secrets, why may I not have mine? Now will you meet me at the Kaims?”
 
“No; I distrust you more than ever. Even if you came, it would be to play with me as you have done already. How can a vagrant have five pounds in her pocket when she does not have five shillings on her back?”
 
“You are a cruel, hard man,” the Egyptian said, beginning to lose hope. “But, see,” she cried, brightening, “look at this ring. Do you know its value?”
 
She held up her finger, but the stone would not live in the dull light.
 
“I see it is gold,” the doctor said cautiously, and she smiled at the ignorance that made him look only at the frame.
 
“Certainly, it is gold,” said Gavin, equally stupid.
 
“Mercy on us!” Nanny cried; “I believe it’s what they call a diamond.”
 
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“How did you come by it?” the doctor asked suspiciously.
 
“I thought we had agreed not to ask each other questions,” the Egyptian answered drily. “But, see, I will give it to you to hold in hostage. If I am not at the Kaims to get it back you can keep it.”
 
The doctor took the ring in his hand and examined it curiously.
 
“There is a quirk in this,” he said at last, “that I don’t like. Take back your ring, lassie. Mr. Dishart, give Nanny your arm, and I’ll carry her box to the machine.”
 
Now all this time Gavin had been in the dire distress of a man possessed of two minds, of which one said, “This is a true woman,” and the other, “Remember the seventeenth of October.” They were at war within him, and he knew that he must take a side, yet no sooner had he cast one out than he invited it back. He did not answer the doctor.
 
“Unless,” McQueen said, nettled by his hesitation, “you trust this woman’s word.”
 
Gavin tried honestly to weigh those two minds against each other, but could not prevent impulse jumping into one of the scales.
 
“You do trust me,” the Egyptian said, with wet eyes; and now that he looked on her again—
 
“Yes,” he said firmly, “I trust you,” and the words that had been so difficult to say were the right words. He had no more doubt of it.
 
“Just think a moment first,” the doctor warned him. “I decline to have anything to do with this matter. You will go to the Kaims for the siller?”
 
“If it is necessary,” said Gavin.
 
“It is necessary,” the Egyptian said.
 
“Then I will go.”
 
Nanny took his hand timidly, and would have kissed it had he been less than a minister.
 
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“You dare not, man,” the doctor said gruffly, “make an appointment with this gypsy. Think of what will be said in Thrums.”
 
I honour Gavin for the way in which he took this warning. For him, who was watched from the rising of his congregation to their lying down, whose every movement was expected to be a text to Thrums, it was no small thing that he had promised. This he knew, but he only reddened because the doctor had implied an offensive thing in a woman’s presence.
 
“You forget yourself, doctor,” he said sharply.
 
“Send some one in your place,” advised the doctor, who liked the little minister.
 
“He must come himself and alone,” said the Egyptian. “You must both give me your promise not to mention who is Nanny’s friend, and she must promise too.”
 
“Well,” said the doctor, buttoning up his coat, “I cannot keep my horse freezing any longer. Remember, Mr. Dishart, you take the sole responsibility of this.”
 
“I do,” said Gavin, “and with the utmost confidence.”
 
“Give him the ring then, lassie,” said McQueen.
 
She handed the minister the ring, but he would not take it.
 
“I have your word,” he said; “that is sufficient.”
 
Then the Egyptian gave him the first look that he could think of afterwards without misgivings.
 
“So be it,” said the doctor. “Get the money, and I will say nothing about it, unless I have reason to think that it has been dishonestly come by. Don’t look so frightened at me, Nanny. I hope for your sake that her stocking-foot is full of gold.”
 
“Surely it’s worth risking,” Nanny said, not very brightly, “when the minister’s on her side.”
 
“Ay, but on whose side, Nanny?” asked the doctor. “Lassie, I bear you no grudge; will you not tell me who you are?”
 
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“Only a puir gypsy, your honour,” said the girl, becoming mischievous now that she had gained her point; “only a wandering hallen-shaker, and will I tell you your fortune, my pretty gentleman?”
 
“No, you shan’t,” replied the doctor, plunging his hands so hastily into his pockets that Gavin laughed.
 
“I don’t need to look at your hand,” said the gypsy, “I can read your fortune in your face.”
 
She looked at him fixedly, so that he fidgeted.
 
“I see you,” said the Egyptian in a sepulchral voice, and speaking slowly, “become very frail. Your eyesight has almost gone. You are sitting alone in a cauld room, cooking your ain dinner ower a feeble fire. The soot is falling down the lum. Your bearish manners towards women have driven the servant lassie frae your house, and your wife beats you.”
 
“Ay, you spoil your prophecy there,” the doctor said, considerably relieved, “for I’m not married; my pipe’s the only wife I ever had.”
 
“You will be married by that time,” continued the Egyptian, frowning at this interruption, “for I see your wife. She is a shrew. She marries you in your dotage. She lauchs at you in company. She doesna allow you to smoke.”
 
“Away with you, you jade,” cried the doctor in a fury, and feeling nervously for his pipe. “Mr. Dishart, you had better stay and arrange this matter as you choose, but I want a word with you outside.”
 
“And you’re no angry wi’ me, doctor, are you?” asked Nanny wistfully. “You’ve been richt good to me, but I canna thole the thocht o’ that place. And, oh, doctor, you winna tell naebody that I was so near taen to it?”
 
In the garden McQueen said to Gavin:—
 
“You may be right, Mr. Dishart, in this matter, for there is this in our favour, that the woman can gain nothing by tricking us. She did seem to feel for 124 Nanny. But who can she be? You saw she could put on and off the Scotch tongue as easily as if it were a cap.”
 
“She is as much a mystery to me as to you,” Gavin answered, “but she will give me the money, and that is all I ask of her.”
 
“Ay, that remains to be seen. But take care of yourself; a man’s second childhood begins when a woman gets hold of him.”
 
“Don’t alarm yourself about me, doctor. I daresay she is only one of those gypsies from the South. They are said to be wealthy, many of them, and even, when they like, to have a grand manner. The Thrums people had no doubt but that she was what she seemed to be.”
 
“Ay, but what does she seem to be? Even that puzzles me. And then there is this mystery about her which she admits herself, though perhaps only to play with us.”
 
“Perhaps,” said Gavin, “she is only taking precautions against her discovery by the police. You must remember her part in the riots.”
 
“Yes, but we never learned how she was able to play that part. Besides, there is no fear in her, or she would not have ventured back to Thrums. However, good luck attend you. But be wary. You saw how she kept her feet among her shalls and wills? Never trust a Scotch man or woman who does not come to grief among them.”
 
The doctor took his seat in the dogcart.
 
“And, Mr. Dishart,” he called out, “that was all nonsense about the locket.”

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Chapter Fourteen.   THE MINISTER DANCES TO THE WOMAN’S PIPING.
 Gavin let the doctor’s warnings fall in the grass. In his joy over Nanny’s deliverance he jumped the garden gate, whose hinges were of yarn, and cleverly caught his hat as it was leaving his head in protest. He then re-entered the mud house staidly. Pleasant was the change. Nanny’s home was as a clock that had been run out, and is set going again. Already the old woman was unpacking her box, to increase the distance between herself and the poorhouse. But Gavin only saw her in the background, for the Egyptian, singing at her work, had become the heart of the house. She had flung her shawl over Nanny’s shoulders, and was at the fireplace breaking peats with the leg of a stool. She turned merrily to the minister to ask him to chop up his staff for firewood, and he would have answered wittily but could not. Then, as often, the beauty of the Egyptian surprised him into silence. I could never get used to her face myself in the after-days. It has always held me wondering, like my own Glen Quharity on a summer day, when the sun is lingering and the clouds are on the march, and the glen is never the same for two minutes, but always so beautiful as to make me sad. Never will I attempt to picture the Egyptian as she seemed to Gavin while she bent over Nanny’s fire, never will I describe my glen. Yet a hundred times have I hankered after trying to picture both.
 
An older minister, believing that Nanny’s anguish was ended, might have gone on his knees and finished 126 the interrupted prayer, but now Gavin was only doing this girl’s bidding.
 
“Nanny and I are to have a dish of tea, as soon as we have set things to rights,” she told him. “Do you think we should invite the minister, Nanny?”
 
“We couldna dare,” Nanny answered quickly. “You’ll excuse her, Mr. Dishart, for the presumption?”
 
“Presumption!” said the Egyptian, making a face.
 
“Lassie,” Nanny said, fearful to offend her new friend, yet horrified at this affront to the minister, “I ken you mean weel, but Mr. Dishart’ll think you’re putting yoursel’ on an equality wi’ him.” She added in a whisper, “Dinna be so free; he’s the Auld Licht minister.”
 
The gypsy bowed with mock awe, but Gavin let it pass. He had, indeed, forgotten that he was anybody in particular, and was anxious to stay to tea.
 
“But there is no water,” he remembered, “and is there any tea?”
 
“I am going out for them and for some other things,” the Egyptian explained. “But no,” she continued, reflectively, “if I go for the tea, you must go for the water.”
 
“Lassie,” cried Nanny, “mind wha you’re speaking to. To send a minister to the well!”
 
“I will go,” said Gavin, recklessly lifting the pitcher. “The well is in the wood, I think?”
 
“Gie me the pitcher, Mr. Dishart,” said Nanny, in distress. “What a town there would be if you was seen wi’t!”
 
“Then he must remain here and keep the house till we come back,” said the Egyptian, and thereupon departed, with a friendly wave of her hand to the minister.
 
“She’s an awfu’ lassie,” Nanny said, apologetically, “but it’ll just be the way she has been brought up.”
 
“She has been very good to you, Nanny.”
 
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“She has; leastwise, she promises to be. Mr. Dishart, she’s awa’; what if she doesna come back?”
 
Nanny spoke nervously, and Gavin drew a long face.
 
“I think she will,” he said faintly. “I am confident of it,” he added in the same voice.
 
“And has she the siller?”
 
“I believe in her,” said Gavin, so doggedly that his own words reassured him. “She has an excellent heart.”
 
“Ay,” said Nanny, to whom the minister’s faith was more than the Egyptian’s promise, “and that’s hardly natural in a gaen-aboot body. Yet a gypsy she maun be, for naebody would pretend to be ane that wasna. Tod, she proved she was an Egyptian by dauring to send you to the well.”
 
This conclusive argument brought her prospective dower so close to Nanny’s eyes that it hid the poorhouse.
 
“I suppose she’ll gie you the money,” she said, “and syne you’ll gie me the seven shillings a week?”
 
“That seems the best plan,” Gavin answered.
 
“And what will you gie it me in?” Nanny asked, with something on her mind. “I would be terrible obliged if you gae it to me in saxpences.”
 
“Do the smaller coins go farther?” Gavin asked, curiously.
 
“Na, it’s no that. But I’ve heard tell o’ folk giving away half-crowns by mistake for twa-shilling bits; ay, and there’s something dizzying in ha’en fower-and-twenty pennies in one piece; it has sic terrible little bulk. Sanders had aince a gold sovereign, and he looked at it so often that it seemed to grow smaller and smaller in his hand till he was feared it micht just be a half after all.”
 
Her mind relieved on this matter, the old woman set off for the well. A minute afterwards Gavin went to the door to look for the gypsy, and, behold, Nanny was no further than the gate. Have you who read ever 128 been sick near to death, and then so far recovered that you could once again stand at your window? If so, you have not forgotten how the beauty of the world struck you afresh, so that you looked long and said many times, “How fair a world it is!” like one who had made a discovery. It was such a look that Nanny gave to the hill and Caddam while she stood at her garden gate.
 
Gavin returned to the fire and watched a girl in it in an officer’s cloak playing at hide and seek with soldiers. After a time he sighed, then looked round sharply to see who had sighed, then, absent-mindedly, lifted the empty kettle and placed it on the glowing peats. He was standing glaring at the kettle, his arms folded, when Nanny returned from the well.
 
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, “o’ something that proves the lassie to be just an Egyptian. Ay, I noticed she wasna nane awed when I said you was the Auld Licht minister. Weel, I’se uphaud that came frae her living ower muckle in the open air. Is there no’ a smell o’ burning in the house?”
 
“I have noticed it,” Gavin answered, sniffing, “since you came in. I was busy until then, putting on the kettle. The smell is becoming worse.”
 
Nanny had seen the empty kettle on the fire as he began to speak, and so solved the mystery. Her first thought was to snatch the kettle out of the blaze, but remembering who had put it there, she dared not. She sidled toward the hearth instead, and saying craftily, “Ay, here it is; it’s a clout among the peats,” softly laid the kettle on the earthen floor. It was still red with sparks, however, when the gypsy reappeared.
 
“Who burned the kettle?” she asked, ignoring Nanny’s signs.
 
“Lassie,” Nanny said, “it was me;” but Gavin, flushing, confessed his guilt.
 
“Oh, you stupid!” exclaimed the Egyptian, shaking 129 her two ounces of tea (which then cost six shillings the pound) in his face.
 
At this Nanny wrung her hands, crying, “That’s waur than swearing.”
 
“If men,” said the gypsy, severely, “would keep their hands in their pockets all day, the world’s affairs would be more easily managed.”
 
“Wheesht!” cried Nanny, “if Mr. Dishart cared to set his mind to it, he could make the kettle boil quicker than you or me. But his thochts is on higher things.”
 
“No higher than this,” retorted the gypsy, holding her hand level with her brow. “Confess, Mr. Dishart, that this is the exact height of what you were thinking about. See, Nanny, he is blushing as if I meant that he had been thinking about me. He cannot answer, Nanny: we have found him out.”
 
“And kindly of him it is no to answer,” said Nanny, who had been examining the gypsy’s various purchases; “for what could he answer, except that he would need to be sure o’ living a thousand years afore he could spare five minutes on you or me? Of course it would be different if we sat under him.”
 
“And yet,” said the Egyptian, with great solemnity, “he is to drink tea at that very table. I hope you are sensible of the honour, Nanny.”
 
“Am I no?” said Nanny, whose education had not included sarcasm. “I’m trying to keep frae thinking o’t till he’s gone, in case I should let the teapot fall.”
 
“You have nothing to thank me for, Nanny,” said Gavin, “but much for which to thank this—this——”
 
“This haggarty-taggarty Egyptian,” suggested the girl. Then, looking at Gavin curiously, she said, “But my name is Babbie.”
 
“That’s short for Barbara,” said Nanny; “but Babbie what?”
 
“Yes, Babbie Watt,” replied the gypsy, as if one name were as good as another.
 
130
“Weel, then, lift the lid off the kettle, Babbie,” said Nanny, “for it’s boiling ower.”
 
Gavin looked at Nanny with admiration and envy, for she had said Babbie as coolly as if it was the name of a pepper-box.
 
Babbie tucked up her sleeves to wash Nanny’s cups and saucers, which even in the most prosperous days of the mud house had only been in use once a week, and Gavin was so eager to help that he bumped his head on the plate-rack.
 
“Sit there,” said Babbie, authoritatively, pointing, with a cup in her hand, to a stool, “and don’t rise till I give you permission.”
 
To Nanny’s amazement, he did as he was bid.
 
“I got the things in the little shop you told me of,” the Egyptian continued, addressing the mistress of the house, “but the horrid man would not give them to me until he had seen my money.”
 
“Enoch would be suspicious o’ you,” Nanny explained, “you being an Egyptian.”
 
“Ah,” said Babbie, with a side-glance at the minister, “I am only an Egyptian. Is that why you dislike me, Mr. Dishart?”
 
Gavin hesitated foolishly over his answer, and the Egyptian, with a towel round her waist, made a pretty gesture of despair.
 
“He neither likes you nor dislikes you,” Nanny explained; “you forget he’s a minister.”
 
“That is what I cannot endure,” said Babbie, putting the towel to her eyes, “to be neither liked nor disliked. Please hate me, Mr. Dishart, if you cannot lo—ove me.”
 
Her face was behind the towel, and Gavin could not decide whether it was the face or the towel that shook with agitation. He gave Nanny a look that asked, “Is she really crying?” and Nanny telegraphed back, “I question it.”
 
131
“Come, come,” said the minister, gallantly, “I did not say that I disliked you.”
 
Even this desperate compliment had not the desired effect, for the gypsy continued to sob behind her screen.
 
“I can honestly say,” went on Gavin, as solemnly as if he were making a statement in a court of justice, “that I like you.”
 
Then the Egyptian let drop her towel, and replied with equal solemnity:
 
“Oh, tank oo! Nanny, the minister says me is a dood ’ittle dirl.”
 
“He didna gang that length,” said Nanny, sharply, to cover Gavin’s confusion. “Set the things, Babbie, and I’ll make the tea.”
 
The Egyptian obeyed demurely, pretending to wipe her eyes every time Gavin looked at her. He frowned at this, and then she affected to be too overcome to go on with her work.
 
“Tell me, Nanny,” she asked presently, “what sort of man this Enoch is, from whom I bought the things?”
 
“He is not very regular, I fear,” answered Gavin, who felt that he had sat silent and self-conscious on his stool too long.
 
“Do you mean that he drinks?” asked Babbie.
 
“No, I mean regular in his attendance.”
 
The Egyptian’s face showed no enlightenment.
 
“His attendance at church,” Gavin explained.
 
“He’s far frae it,” said Nanny, “and as a body kens, Joe Cruickshanks, the atheist, has the wite o’ that. The scoundrel telled Enoch that the great ministers in Edinbury and London believed in no hell except sic as your ain conscience made for you, and ever since syne Enoch has been careless about the future state.”
 
“Ah,” said Babbie, waving the Church aside, “what I want to know is whether he is a single man.”
 
“He is not,” Gavin replied; “but why do you want to know that?”
 
132
“Because single men are such gossips. I am sorry he is not single, as I want him to repeat to everybody what I told him.”
 
“Trust him to tell Susy,” said Nanny, “and Susy to tell the town.”
 
“His wife is a gossip?”
 
“Ay, she’s aye tonguing, especially about her teeth. They’re folk wi’ siller, and she has a set o’ false teeth. It’s fair scumfishing to hear her blawing about thae teeth, she’s so fleid we dinna ken that they’re false.”
 
Nanny had spoken jealously, but suddenly she trembled with apprehension.
 
“Babbie,” she cried, “you didna speak about the poorhouse to Enoch?”
 
The Egyptian shook her head, though of the poorhouse she had been forced to speak, for Enoch, having seen the doctor going home alone, insisted on knowing why.
 
“But I knew,” the gypsy said, “that the Thrums people would be very unhappy until they discovered where you get the money I am to give you, and as that is a secret, I hinted to Enoch that your benefactor is Mr. Dishart.”
 
“You should not have said that,” interposed Gavin. “I cannot foster such a deception.”
 
“They will foster it without your help,” the Egyptian said. “Besides, if you choose, you can say you get the money from a friend.”
 
“Ay, you can say that,” Nanny entreated with such eagerness that Babbie remarked a little bitterly:
 
“There is no fear of Nanny’s telling any one that the friend is a gypsy girl.”
 
“Na, na,” agreed Nanny, again losing Babbie’s sarcasm. “I winna let on. It’s so queer to be befriended by an Egyptian.”
 
“It is scarcely respectable,” Babbie said.
 
133
“It’s no,” answered simple Nanny.
 
I suppose Nanny’s unintentional cruelty did hurt Babbie as much as Gavin thought. She winced, and her face had two expressions, the one cynical, the other pained. Her mouth curled as if to tell the minister that gratitude was nothing to her, but her eyes had to struggle to keep back a tear. Gavin was touched, and she saw it, and for a moment they were two people who understood each other.
 
“I, at least,” Gavin said in a low voice, “will know who is the benefactress, and think none the worse of her because she is a gypsy.”
 
At this Babbie smiled gratefully to him, and then both laughed, for they had heard Nanny remarking to the kettle, “But I wouldna hae been nane angry if she had telled Enoch that the minister was to take his tea here. Susy’ll no believe’t though I tell her, as tell her I will.”
 
To Nanny the table now presented a rich appearance, for besides the teapot there were butter and loaf-bread and cheesies: a biscuit of which only Thrums knows the secret.
 
“Draw in your chair, Mr. Dishart,” she said, in suppressed excitement.
 
“Yes,” said Babbie, “you take this chair, Mr. Dishart, and Nanny will have that one, and I can sit humbly on the stool.”
 
But Nanny held up her hands in horror.
 
“Keep us a’!” she exclaimed; “the lassie thinks her and me is to sit down wi’ the minister! We’re no to gang that length, Babbie; we’re just to stand and serve him, and syne we’ll sit down when he has risen.”
 
“Delightful!” said Babbie, clapping her hands. “Nanny, you kneel on that side of him, and I will kneel on this. You will hold the butter and I the biscuits.”
 
134
But Gavin, as this girl was always forgetting, was a lord of creation.
 
“Sit down both of you at once!” he thundered, “I command you.”
 
Then the two women fell into their seats; Nanny in terror, Babbie affecting it.
Chapter Fifteen.   THE MINISTER BEWITCHED—SECOND SERMON AGAINST WOMEN.
 To Nanny it was a dizzying experience to sit at the head of her own table, and, with assumed calmness, invite the minister not to spare the loaf-bread. Babbie’s prattle, and even Gavin’s answers, were but an indistinct noise to her, to be as little regarded, in the excitement of watching whether Mr. Dishart noticed that there was a knife for the butter, as the music of the river by a man who is catching trout. Every time Gavin’s cup went to his lips Nanny calculated (correctly) how much he had drunk, and yet, when the right moment arrived, she asked in the English voice that is fashionable at ceremonies, “if his cup was toom.”
 
Perhaps it was well that Nanny had these matters to engross her, for though Gavin spoke freely, he was saying nothing of lasting value, and some of his remarks to the Egyptian, if preserved for the calmer contemplation of the morrow, might have seemed frivolous to himself. Usually his observations were scrambled for, like ha’pence at a wedding, but to-day they were only for one person. Infected by the Egyptian’s high spirits, Gavin had laid aside the minister with his hat, and what was left was only a young man. He who had stamped his feet at thought of a soldier’s cloak now wanted to be reminded of it. The little minister, who used to address himself in terms of scorn every time he wasted an hour, was at present dallying with a teaspoon. He even laughed boisterously, flinging back his head, and 136 little knew that behind Nanny’s smiling face was a terrible dread, because his chair had once given way before.
 
Even though our thoughts are not with our company, the mention of our name is a bell to which we usually answer. Hearing hers Nanny started.
 
“You can tell me, Nanny,” the Egyptian had said, with an arch look at the minister. “Oh, Nanny, for shame! How can you expect to follow our conversation when you only listen to Mr. Dishart?”
 
“She is saying, Nanny,” Gavin broke in, almost gaily for a minister, “that she saw me recently wearing a cloak. You know I have no such thing.”
 
“Na,” Nanny answered artlessly, “you have just the thin brown coat wi’ the braid round it, forby the ane you have on the now.”
 
“You see,” Gavin said to Babbie, “I could not have a new neckcloth, not to speak of a cloak, without everybody in Thrums knowing about it. I dare say Nanny knows all about the braid, and even what it cost.”
 
“Three bawbees the yard at Kyowowy’s shop,” replied Nanny, promptly, “and your mother sewed it on. Sam’l Fairweather has the marrows o’t on his top coat. No that it has the same look on him.”
 
“Nevertheless,” Babbie persisted, “I am sure the minister has a cloak; but perhaps he is ashamed of it. No doubt it is hidden away in the garret.”
 
“Na, we would hae kent o’t if it was there,” said Nanny.
 
“But it may be in a chest, and the chest may be locked,” the Egyptian suggested.
 
“Ay, but the kist in the garret isna locked,” Nanny answered.
 
“How do you get to know all these things, Nanny?” asked Gavin, sighing.
 
“Your congregation tells me. Naebody would lay by news about a minister.”
 
137
“But how do they know?”
 
“I dinna ken. They just find out, because they’re so fond o’ you.”
 
“I hope they will never become so fond of me as that,” said Babbie. “Still, Nanny, the minister’s cloak is hidden somewhere.”
 
“Losh, what would make him hod it?” demanded the old woman. “Folk that has cloaks doesna bury them in boxes.”
 
At the word “bury” Gavin’s hand fell on the table, and he returned to Nanny apprehensively.
 
“That would depend on how the cloak was got,” said the cruel Egyptian. “If it was not his own——”
 
“Lassie,” cried Nanny, “behave yoursel’.”
 
“Or if he found it in his possession against his will?” suggested Gavin, slyly. “He might have got it from some one who picked it up cheap.”
 
“From his wife, for instance,” said Babbie, whereupon Gavin suddenly became interested in the floor.
 
“Ay, ay, the minister was hitting at you there, Babbie,” Nanny explained, “for the way you made off wi’ the captain’s cloak. The Thrums folk wondered less at your taking it than at your no keeping it. It’s said to be michty grand.”
 
“It was rather like the one the minister’s wife gave him,” said Babbie.
 
“The minister has neither a wife nor a cloak,” retorted Nanny.
 
“He isn’t married?” asked Babbie, the picture of incredulity.
 
Nanny gathered from the minister’s face that he deputed to her the task of enlightening this ignorant girl, so she replied with emphasis, “Na, they hinna got him yet, and I’m cheated if it doesna tak them all their time.”
 
Thus do the best of women sell their sex for nothing.
 
“I did wonder,” said the Egyptian, gravely, “at any mere woman’s daring to marry such a minister.”
 
138
“Ay,” replied Nanny, spiritedly, “but there’s dauring limmers wherever there’s a single man.”
 
“So I have often suspected,” said Babbie, duly shocked. “But, Nanny, I was told the minister had a wife, by one who said he saw her.”
 
“He lied, then,” answered Nanny turning to Gavin for further instructions.
 
“But, see, the minister does not deny the horrid charge himself.”
 
“No, and for the reason he didna deny the cloak: because it’s no worth his while. I’ll tell you wha your friend had seen. It would be somebody that would like to be Mrs. Dishart. There’s a hantle o’ that kind. Ay, lassie, but wishing winna land a woman in a manse.”
 
“It was one of the soldiers,” Babbie said, “who told me about her. He said Mr. Dishart introduced her to him.”
 
“Sojers!” cried Nanny. “I could never thole the name o’ them. Sanders in his young days hankered after joining them, and so he would, if it hadna been for the fechting. Ay, and now they’ve ta’en him awa to the gaol, and sworn lies about him. Dinna put any faith in sojers, lassie.”
 
“I was told,” Babbie went on, “that the minister’s wife was rather like me.”
 
“Heaven forbid!” ejaculated Nanny, so fervently that all three suddenly sat back from the table.
 
“I’m no meaning,” Nanny continued hurriedly, fearing to offend her benefactress, “but what you’re the bonniest tid I ever saw out o’ an almanack. But you would ken Mr. Dishart’s contempt for bonny faces if you had heard his sermon against them. I didna hear it mysel’, for I’m no Auld Licht, but it did the work o’ the town for an aucht days.”
 
If Nanny had not taken her eyes off Gavin for the moment she would have known that he was now anxious to change the topic. Babbie saw it, and became suspicious.
 
139
“When did he preach against the wiles of women, Nanny?”
 
“It was long ago,” said Gavin, hastily.
 
“No so very lang syne,” corrected Nanny. “It was the Sabbath after the sojers was in Thrums; the day you changed your text so hurriedly. Some thocht you wasna weel, but Lang Tammas——”
 
“Thomas Whamond is too officious,” Gavin said with dignity. “I forbid you, Nanny, to repeat his story.”
 
“But what made you change your text?” asked Babbie.
 
“You see he winna tell,” Nanny said, wistfully. “Ay, I dinna deny but what I would like richt to ken. But the session’s as puzzled as yoursel’, Babbie.”
 
“Perhaps more puzzled,” answered the Egyptian, with a smile that challenged Gavin’s frowns to combat and overthrow them. “What surprises me, Mr. Dishart, is that such a great man can stoop to see whether women are pretty or not. It was very good of you to remember me to-day. I suppose you recognized me by my frock?”
 
“By your face,” he replied, boldly; “by your eyes.”
 
“Nanny,” exclaimed the Egyptian, “did you hear what the minister said?”
 
“Woe is me,” answered Nanny, “I missed it.”
 
“He says he would know me anywhere by my eyes.”
 
“So would I mysel’,” said Nanny.
 
“Then what colour are they, Mr. Dishart?” demanded Babbie. “Don’t speak, Nanny, for I want to expose him.”
 
She closed her eyes tightly. Gavin was in a quandary. I suppose he had looked at her eyes too long to know much about them.
 
“Blue,” he guessed at last.
 
“Na, they’re black,” said Nanny, who had doubtless known this for an hour. I am always marvelling over the cleverness of women, as every one must see who reads this story.
 
140
“No but what they micht be blue in some lichts,” Nanny added, out of respect to the minister.
 
“Oh, don’t defend him, Nanny,” said Babbie, looking reproachfully at Gavin. “I don’t see that any minister has a right to denounce women when he is so ignorant of his subject. I will say it, Nanny, and you need not kick me beneath the table.”
 
Was not all this intoxicating to the little minister, who had never till now met a girl on equal terms? At twenty-one a man is a musical instrument given to the other sex, but it is not as instruments learned at school, for when She sits down to it she cannot tell what tune she is about to play. That is because she has no notion of what the instrument is capable. Babbie’s kind-heartedness, her gaiety, her coquetry, her moments of sadness, had been a witch’s fingers, and Gavin was still trembling under their touch. Even in being taken to task by her there was a charm, for every pout of her mouth, every shake of her head, said, “You like me, and therefore you have given me the right to tease you.” Men sign these agreements without reading them. But, indeed, man is a stupid animal at the best, and thinks all his life that he did not propose until he blurted out, “I love you.”
 
It was later than it should have been when the minister left the mud house, and even then he only put on his hat because Babbie said that she must go.
 
“But not your way,” she added. “I go into the wood and vanish. You know, Nanny, I live up a tree.”
 
“Dinna say that,” said Nanny, anxiously, “or I’ll be fleid about the siller.”
 
“Don’t fear about it. Mr. Dishart will get some of it to-morrow at the Kaims. I would bring it here, but I cannot come so far to-morrow.”

“Then I’ll hae peace to the end o’ my days,” said the old woman, “and, Babbie, I wish the same to you wi’ all my heart.”
 
141
“Ah,” Babbie replied, mournfully, “I have read my fortune, Nanny, and there is not much happiness in it.”
 
“I hope that is not true,” Gavin said, simply.
 
They were standing at the door, and she was looking toward the hill, perhaps without seeing it. All at once it came to Gavin that this fragile girl might have a history far sadder and more turbulent than his.
 
“Do you really care?” she asked, without looking at him.
 
“Yes,” he said stoutly, “I care.”
 
“Because you do not know me,” she said.
 
“Because I do know you,” he answered.
 
Now she did look at him.
 
“I believe,” she said, making a discovery, “that you misunderstand me less than those who have known me longer.”
 
This was a perilous confidence, for it at once made Gavin say “Babbie.”
 
“Ah,” she answered, frankly, “I am glad to hear that. I thought you did not really like me, because you never called me by my name.”
 
Gavin drew a great breath.
 
“That was not the reason,” he said.
 
The reason was now unmistakable.
 
“I was wrong,” said the Egyptian, a little alarmed; “you do not understand me at all.”
 
She returned to Nanny, and Gavin set off, holding his head high, his brain in a whirl. Five minutes afterwards, when Nanny was at the fire, the diamond ring on her little finger, he came back, looking like one who had just seen sudden death.
 
“I had forgotten,” he said, with a fierceness aimed at himself, “that to-morrow is the Sabbath.”
 
“Need that make any difference?” asked the gypsy.
 
“At this hour on Monday,” said Gavin, hoarsely, “I will be at the Kaims.”
 
He went away without another word, and Babbie 142 watched him from the window. Nanny had not looked up from the ring.
 
“What a pity he is a minister!” the girl said, reflectively. “Nanny, you are not listening.”
 
The old woman was making the ring flash by the light of the fire.
 
“Nanny, do you hear me? Did you see Mr. Dishart come back?”
 
“I heard the door open,” Nanny answered, without taking her greedy eyes off the ring. “Was it him? Whaur did you get this, lassie?”
 
“Give it me back, Nanny, I am going now.”
 
But Nanny did not give it back; she put her other hand over it to guard it, and there she crouched, warming herself not at the fire, but at the ring.
 
“Give it me, Nanny.”
 
“It winna come off my finger.” She gloated over it, nursed it, kissed it.
 
“I must have it, Nanny.”
 
The Egyptian put her hand lightly on the old woman’s shoulder, and Nanny jumped up, pressing the ring to her bosom. Her face had become cunning and ugly; she retreated into a corner.
 
“Nanny, give me back my ring or I will take it from you.”
 
The cruel light of the diamond was in Nanny’s eyes for a moment, and then, shuddering, she said, “Tak your ring awa, tak it out o’ my sicht.”
 
In the meantime Gavin was trudging home gloomily composing his second sermon against women. I have already given the entry in my own diary for that day: this is his:—“Notes on Jonah. Exchanged vol. xliii., ‘European Magazine,’ for Owen’s ‘Justification’ (per flying stationer). Began Second Samuel. Visited Nanny Webster.” There is no mention of the Egyptian.

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Chapter Sixteen.   CONTINUED MISBEHAVIOUR OF THE EGYPTIAN WOMAN.
 By the following Monday it was known at many looms that something sat heavily on the Auld Licht minister’s mind. On the previous day he had preached his second sermon of warning to susceptible young men, and his first mention of the word “woman” had blown even the sleepy heads upright. Now he had salt fish for breakfast, and on clearing the table Jean noticed that his knife and fork were uncrossed. He was observed walking into a gooseberry bush by Susy Linn, who possessed the pioneer spring-bed of Thrums, and always knew when her man jumped into it by suddenly finding herself shot to the ceiling. Lunan, the tinsmith, and two women, who had the luck to be in the street at the time, saw him stopping at Dr. McQueen’s door, as if about to knock, and then turning smartly away. His hat blew off in the school wynd, where a wind wanders ever, looking for hats, and he chased it so passionately that Lang Tammas went into Allardyce’s smiddy to say—
 
“I dinna like it. Of course he couldna afford to lose his hat, but he should hae run after it mair reverently.”
 
Gavin, indeed, was troubled. He had avoided speaking of the Egyptian to his mother. He had gone to McQueen’s house to ask the doctor to accompany him to the Kaims, but with the knocker in his hand he changed his mind, and now he was at the place of meeting alone. It was a day of thaw, nothing to be heard from a distance but the swish of curling-stones through 144 water on Rashie-bog, where the match for the eldership was going on. Around him, Gavin saw only dejected firs with drops of water falling listlessly from them, clods of snow, and grass that rustled as if animals were crawling through it. All the roads were slack.
 
I suppose no young man to whom society has not become a cheap thing can be in Gavin’s position, awaiting the coming of an attractive girl, without giving thought to what he should say to her. When in the pulpit or visiting the sick, words came in a rush to the little minister, but he had to set his teeth to determine what to say to the Egyptian.
 
This was because he had not yet decided which of two women she was. Hardly had he started on one line of thought when she crossed his vision in a new light, and drew him after her.
 
Her “Need that make any difference?” sang in his ear like another divit, cast this time at religion itself, and now he spoke aloud, pointing his finger at a fir: “I said at the mud house that I believed you because I knew you. To my shame be it said that I spoke falsely. How dared you bewitch me? In your presence I flung away the precious hours in frivolity; I even forgot the Sabbath. For this I have myself to blame. I am an unworthy preacher of the Word. I sinned far more than you who have been brought up godlessly from your cradle. Nevertheless, whoever you are, I call upon you, before we part never to meet again, to repent of your——”
 
And then it was no mocker of the Sabbath he was addressing, but a woman with a child’s face, and there were tears in her eyes. “Do you care?” she was saying, and again he answered, “Yes, I care.” This girl’s name was not Woman, but Babbie.
 
Now Gavin made an heroic attempt to look upon both these women at once. “Yes, I believe in you,” he said to them, “but henceforth you must send your money to 145 Nanny by another messenger. You are a gypsy and I am a minister; and that must part us. I refuse to see you again. I am not angry with you, but as a minister——”
 
It was not the disappearance of one of the women that clipped this argument short; it was Babbie singing—
 
“It fell on a day, on a bonny summer day,
 
When the corn grew green and yellow,
 
That there fell out a great dispute
 
Between Argyle and Airly.
 
“The Duke of Montrose has written to Argyle
 
To come in the morning early,
 
An’ lead in his men by the back o’ Dunkeld
 
To plunder the bonny house o’ Airly.”
 
“Where are you?” cried Gavin in bewilderment.
 
“I am watching you from my window so high,” answered the Egyptian; and then the minister, looking up, saw her peering at him from a fir.
 
“How did you get up there?” he asked in amazement.
 
“On my broomstick,” Babbie replied, and sang on—
 
“The lady looked o’er her window sae high,
 
And oh! but she looked weary,
 
And there she espied the great Argyle
 
Come to plunder the bonny house o’ Airly.”
 
“What are you doing there?” Gavin said, wrathfully.
 
“This is my home,” she answered. “I told you I lived in a tree.”
 
“Come down at once,” ordered Gavin. To which the singer responded—
 
“‘Come down, come down, Lady Margaret,’ he says;
 
‘Come down and kiss me fairly
 
Or before the morning clear day light
 
I’ll no leave a standing stane in Airly.’”
 
“If you do not come down this instant,” Gavin said in a rage, “and give me what I was so foolish as to come for, I——”
 
146
The Egyptian broke in—
 
“‘I wouldna kiss thee, great Argyle,
 
I wouldna kiss thee fairly;
 
I wouldna kiss thee, great Argyle,
 
Gin you shouldna leave a standing stane in Airly.’”
 
“You have deceived Nanny,” Gavin cried, hotly, “and you have brought me here to deride me. I will have no more to do with you.”
 
He walked away quickly, but she called after him, “I am coming down. I have the money,” and next moment a snowball hit his hat.
 
“That is for being cross,” she explained, appearing so unexpectedly at his elbow that he was taken aback. “I had to come close up to you before I flung it, or it would have fallen over my shoulder. Why are you so nasty to-day? and, oh, do you know you were speaking to yourself?”
 
“You are mistaken,” said Gavin, severely. “I was speaking to you.”
 
“You didn’t see me till I began to sing, did you?”
 
“Nevertheless I was speaking to you, or rather, I was saying to myself what——”
 
“What you had decided to say to me?” said the delighted gypsy. “Do you prepare your talk like sermons? I hope you have prepared something nice for me. If it is very nice I may give you this bunch of holly.”
 
She was dressed as he had seen her previously, but for a cluster of holly berries at her breast.
 
“I don’t know that you will think it nice,” the minister answered, slowly, “but my duty——”
 
“If it is about duty,” entreated Babbie, “don’t say it. Don’t, and I will give you the berries.”
 
She took the berries from her dress, smiling triumphantly the while like one who had discovered a cure for duty; and instead of pointing the finger of wrath at her, Gavin stood expectant.
 
147
“But no,” he said, remembering who he was, and pushing the gift from him, “I will not be bribed. I must tell you——”
 
“Now,” said the Egyptian, sadly, “I see you are angry with me. Is it because I said I lived in a tree? Do forgive me for that dreadful lie.”
 
She had gone on her knees before he could stop her, and was gazing imploringly at him, with her hands clasped.
 
“You are mocking me again,” said Gavin, “but I am not angry with you. Only you must understand——”
 
She jumped up and put her fingers to her ears.
 
“You see I can hear nothing,” she said.
 
“Listen while I tell you——”
 
“I don’t hear a word. Why do you scold me when I have kept my promise? If I dared to take my fingers from my ears I would give you the money for Nanny. And, Mr. Dishart, I must be gone in five minutes.”
 
“In five minutes!” echoed Gavin, with such a dismal face that Babbie heard the words with her eyes, and dropped her hands.
 
“Why are you in such haste?” he asked, taking the five pounds mechanically, and forgetting all that he had meant to say.
 
“Because they require me at home,” she answered, with a sly glance at her fir. “And, remember, when I run away you must not follow me.”
 
“I won’t,” said Gavin, so promptly that she was piqued.
 
“Why not?” she asked. “But of course you only came here for the money. Well, you have got it. Good-bye.”
 
“You know that was not what I meant,” said Gavin, stepping after her. “I have told you already that whatever other people say, I trust you. I believe in you, Babbie.”
 
“Was that what you were saying to the tree?” asked 148 the Egyptian, demurely. Then, perhaps thinking it wisest not to press this point, she continued irrelevantly, “It seems such a pity that you are a minister.”
 
“A pity to be a minister!” exclaimed Gavin, indignantly. “Why, why, you—why, Babbie, how have you been brought up?”
 
“In a curious way,” Babbie answered, shortly, “but I can’t tell you about that just now. Would you like to hear all about me?” Suddenly she seemed to have become confidential.
 
“Do you really think me a gypsy?” she asked.
 
“I have tried not to ask myself that question.”
 
“Why?”
 
“Because it seems like doubting your word.”
 
“I don’t see how you can think of me at all without wondering who I am.”
 
“No, and so I try not to think of you at all.”
 
“Oh, I don’t know that you need do that.”
 
“I have not quite succeeded.”
 
The Egyptian’s pique had vanished, but she may have thought that the conversation was becoming dangerous, for she said abruptly—
 
“Well, I sometimes think about you.”
 
“Do you?” said Gavin, absurdly gratified. “What do you think about me?”
 
“I wonder,” answered the Egyptian, pleasantly, “which of us is the taller.”
 
Gavin’s fingers twitched with mortification, and not only his fingers but his toes.
 
“Let us measure,” she said, sweetly, putting her back to his. “You are not stretching your neck, are you?”
 
But the minister broke away from her.
 
“There is one subject,” he said, with great dignity, “that I allow no one to speak of in my presence, and that is my—my height.”
 
His face was as white as his cravat when the surprised Egyptian next looked at him, and he was panting 149 like one who has run a mile. She was ashamed of herself, and said so.
 
“It is a topic I would rather not speak about,” Gavin answered, dejectedly, “especially to you.”
 
He meant that he would rather be a tall man in her company than in any other, and possibly she knew this, though all she answered was—
 
“You wanted to know if I am really a gypsy. Well, I am.”
 
“An ordinary gypsy?”
 
“Do you think me ordinary?”
 
“I wish I knew what to think of you.”
 
“Ah, well, that is my forbidden topic. But we have a good many ideas in common after all, have we not, though you are only a minis—I mean, though I am only a gypsy?”
 
There fell between them a silence that gave Babbie time to remember she must go.
 
“I have already stayed too long,” she said. “Give my love to Nanny, and say that I am coming to see her soon, perhaps on Monday. I don’t suppose you will be there on Monday, Mr. Dishart?”
 
“I—I cannot say.”
 
“No, you will be too busy. Are you to take the holly berries?”
 
“I had better not,” said Gavin, dolefully.
 
“Oh, if you don’t want them——”
 
“Give them to me,” he said, and as he took them his hand shook.
 
“I know why you are looking so troubled,” said the Egyptian, archly. “You think I am to ask you the colour of my eyes, and you have forgotten again.”
 
He would have answered, but she checked him.
 
“Make no pretence,” she said, severely; “I know you think they are blue.”
 
She came close to him until her face almost touched his.
 
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“Look hard at them,” she said, solemnly, “and after this you may remember that they are black, black, black!”
 
At each repetition of the word she shook her head in his face. She was adorable. Gavin’s arms—but they met on nothing. She had run away.
 
When the little minister had gone, a man came from behind a tree and shook his fist in the direction taken by the gypsy. It was Rob Dow, black with passion.
 
“It’s the Egyptian!” he cried. “You limmer, wha are you that hae got haud o’ the minister?”
 
He pursued her, but she vanished as from Gavin in Windyghoul.
 
“A common Egyptian!” he muttered when he had to give up the search. “But take care, you little devil,” he called aloud; “take care; if I catch you playing pranks wi’ that man again I’ll wring your neck like a hen’s!”
Chapter Seventeen.   INTRUSION OF HAGGART INTO THESE PAGES AGAINST THE AUTHOR’S WISH.
 Margaret having heard the doctor say that one may catch cold in the back, had decided instantly to line Gavin’s waistcoat with flannel. She was thus engaged, with pins in her mouth and the scissors hiding from her every time she wanted them, when Jean, red and flurried, abruptly entered the room.
 
“There! I forgot to knock at the door again,” Jean exclaimed, pausing contritely.
 
“Never mind. Is it Rob Dow wanting the minister?” asked Margaret, who had seen Rob pass the manse dyke.
 
“Na, he wasna wanting to see the minister.”
 
“Ah, then, he came to see you, Jean,” said Margaret, archly.
 
“A widow man!” cried Jean, tossing her head. “But Rob Dow was in no condition to be friendly wi’ onybody the now.”
 
“Jean, you don’t mean that he has been drinking again?”
 
“I canna say he was drunk.”
 
“Then what condition was he in?”
 
“He was in a—a swearing condition,” Jean answered, guardedly. “But what I want to speir at you is, can I gang down to the Tenements for a minute? I’ll run there and back.”
 
“Certainly you can go, Jean, but you must not run. You are always running. Did Dow bring you word that you were wanted in the Tenements?”
 
152
“No exactly, but I—I want to consult Tammas Haggart about—about something.”
 
“About Dow, I believe, Jean?”
 
“Na, but about something he has done. Oh, ma’am, you surely dinna think I would take a widow man?”
 
It was the day after Gavin’s meeting with the Egyptian at the Kaims, and here is Jean’s real reason for wishing to consult Haggart. Half an hour before she hurried to the parlour she had been at the kitchen door wondering whether she should spread out her washing in the garret or risk hanging it in the courtyard. She had just decided on the garret when she saw Rob Dow morosely regarding her from the gateway.
 
“Whaur is he?” growled Rob.
 
“He’s out, but it’s no for me to say whaur he is,” replied Jean, whose weakness was to be considered a church official. “No that I ken,” truthfulness compelled her to add, for she had an ambition to be everything she thought Gavin would like a woman to be.
 
Rob seized her wrists viciously and glowered into her face.
 
“You’re ane o’ them,” he said.
 
“Let me go. Ane o’ what?”
 
“Ane o’ thae limmers called women.”
 
“Sal,” retorted Jean with spirit, “you’re ane o’ thae brutes called men. You’re drunk, Rob Dow.”
 
“In the legs maybe, but no higher. I haud a heap.”
 
“Drunk again, after all your promises to the minister! And you said yoursel’ that he had pulled you out o’ hell by the root.”
 
“It’s himsel’ that has flung me back again,” Rob said, wildly. “Jean Baxter, what does it mean when a minister carries flowers in his pouch; ay, and takes them out to look at them ilka minute?”
 
“How do you ken about the holly?” asked Jean, off her guard.
 
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“You limmer,” said Dow, “you’ve been in his pouches.”
 
“It’s a lie!” cried the outraged Jean. “I just saw the holly this morning in a jug on his chimley.”
 
“Carefully put by? Is it hod on the chimley? Does he stand looking at it? Do you tell me he’s fond-like o’t?”
 
“Mercy me!” Jean exclaimed, beginning to shake; “wha is she, Rob Dow?”
 
“Let me see it first in its jug,” Rob answered, slyly, “and syne I may tell you.”
 
This was not the only time Jean had been asked to show the minister’s belongings. Snecky Hobart, among others, had tried on Gavin’s hat in the manse kitchen, and felt queer for some time afterwards. Women had been introduced on tiptoe to examine the handle of his umbrella. But Rob had not come to admire. He snatched the holly from Jean’s hands, and casting it on the ground pounded it with his heavy boots, crying, “Greet as you like, Jean. That’s the end o’ his flowers, and if I had the tawpie he got them frae I would serve her in the same way.”
 
“I’ll tell him what you’ve done,” said terrified Jean, who had tried to save the berries at the expense of her fingers.
 
“Tell him,” Dow roared; “and tell him what I said too. Ay, and tell him I was at the Kaims yestreen. Tell him I’m hunting high and low for an Egyptian woman.”
 
He flung recklessly out of the courtyard, leaving Jean looking blankly at the mud that had been holly lately. Not his act of sacrilege was distressing her, but his news. Were these berries a love token? Had God let Rob Dow say they were a gypsy’s love token, and not slain him?
 
That Rob spoke of the Egyptian of the riots Jean never doubted. It was known that the minister had 154 met this woman in Nanny Webster’s house, but was it not also known that he had given her such a talking-to as she could never come above? Many could repeat the words in which he had announced to Nanny that his wealthy friends in Glasgow were to give her all she needed. They could also tell how majestic he looked when he turned the Egyptian out of the house. In short, Nanny having kept her promise of secrecy, the people had been forced to construct the scene in the mud house for themselves, and it was only their story that was known to Jean.
 
She decided that, so far as the gypsy was concerned, Rob had talked trash. He had seen the holly in the minister’s hand, and, being in drink, had mixed it up with the gossip about the Egyptian. But that Gavin had preserved the holly because of the donor was as obvious to Jean as that the vase in her hand was empty. Who could she be? No doubt all the single ladies in Thrums were in love with him, but that, Jean was sure, had not helped them a step forward.
 
To think was to Jean a waste of time. Discovering that she had been thinking, she was dismayed. There were the wet clothes in the basket looking reproachfully at her. She hastened back to Gavin’s room with the vase, but it too had eyes, and they said, “When the minister misses his holly he will question you.” Now Gavin had already smiled several times to Jean, and once he had marked passages for her in her “Pilgrim’s Progress,” with the result that she prized the marks more even than the passages. To lose his good opinion was terrible to her. In her perplexity she decided to consult wise Tammas Haggart, and hence her appeal to Margaret.
 
To avoid Chirsty, the humourist’s wife, Jean sought Haggart at his workshop window, which was so small that an old book sufficed for its shutter. Haggart, whom she could see distinctly at his loom, soon guessed 155 from her knocks and signs (for he was strangely quick in the uptake) that she wanted him to open the window.
 
“I want to speak to you confidentially,” Jean said in a low voice. “If you saw a grand man gey fond o’ a flower, what would you think?”
 
“I would think, Jean,” Haggart answered, reflectively, “that he had gien siller for’t; ay, I would wonder——”
 
“What would you wonder?”
 
“I would wonder how muckle he paid.”
 
“But if he was a—a minister, and keepit the flower—say it was a common rose—fond-like on his chimley, what would you think?”
 
“I would think it was a black-burning disgrace for a minister to be fond o’ flowers.”
 
“I dinna haud wi’ that.”
 
“Jean,” said Haggart, “I allow no one to contradict me.”
 
“It wasna my design. But, Tammas, if a—a minister was fond o’ a particular flower—say a rose—and you destroyed it by an accident, when he wasna looking, what would you do?”
 
“I would gie him another rose for’t.”
 
“But if you didna want him to ken you had meddled wi’t on his chimley, what would you do?”
 
“I would put the new rose on the chimley, and he would never ken the differ.”
 
“That’s what I’ll do,” muttered Jean, but she said aloud—
 
“But it micht be that particular rose he liked?”
 
“Havers, Jean. To a thinking man one rose is identical wi’ another rose. But how are you speiring?”
 
“Just out o’ curiosity, and I maun be stepping now. Thank you kindly, Tammas, for your humour.”
 
“You’re welcome,” Haggart answered, and closed his window.
 
That day Rob Dow spent in misery, but so little were 156 his fears selfish that he scarcely gave a thought to his conduct at the manse. For an hour he sat at his loom with his arms folded. Then he slouched out of the house, cursing little Micah, so that a neighbour cried “You drucken scoundrel!” after him. “He may be a wee drunk,” said Micah in his father’s defence, “but he’s no mortal.” Rob wandered to the Kaims in search of the Egyptian, and returned home no happier. He flung himself upon his bed and dared Micah to light the lamp. About gloaming he rose, unable to keep his mouth shut on his thoughts any longer, and staggered to the Tenements to consult Haggart. He found the humourist’s door ajar, and Wearyworld listening at it. “Out o’ the road!” cried Rob, savagely, and flung the policeman into the gutter.
 
“That was ill-dune, Rob Dow,” Wearyworld said, picking himself up leisurely.
 
“I’m thinking it was weel-dune,” snarled Rob.
 
“Ay,” said Wearyworld, “we needna quarrel about a difference o’ opeenion; but, Rob——”
 
Dow, however, had already entered the house and slammed the door.
 
“Ay, ay,” muttered Wearyworld, departing, “you micht hae stood still, Rob, and argued it out wi’ me.”
 
In less than an hour after his conversation with Jean at the window it had suddenly struck Haggart that the minister she spoke of must be Mr. Dishart. In two hours he had confided his suspicions to Chirsty. In ten minutes she had filled the house with gossips. Rob arrived to find them in full cry.
 
“Ay, Rob,” said Chirsty, genially, for gossip levels ranks, “you’re just in time to hear a query about the minister.”
 
“Rob,” said the Glen Quharity post, from whom I subsequently got the story, “Mr. Dishart has fallen in—in—what do you call the thing, Chirsty?”
 
157
Birse knew well what the thing was called, but the word is a staggerer to say in company.
 
“In love,” answered Chirsty, boldly.
 
“Now we ken what he was doing in the country yestreen,” said Snecky Hobart, “the which has been bothering us sair.”
 
“The manse is fu’ o’ the flowers she sends him,” said Tibbie Craik. “Jean’s at her wits’-end to ken whaur to put them a’.”
 
“Wha is she?”
 
It was Rob Dow who spoke. All saw he had been drinking, or they might have wondered at his vehemence. As it was, everybody looked at every other body, and then everybody sighed.
 
“Ay, wha is she?” repeated several.
 
“I see you ken nothing about her,” said Rob, much relieved; and he then lapsed into silence.
 
“We ken a’ about her,” said Snecky, “except just wha she is. Ay, that’s what we canna bottom. Maybe you could guess, Tammas?”
 
“Maybe I could, Sneck,” Haggart replied, cautiously; “but on that point I offer no opinion.”
 
“If she bides on the Kaims road,” said Tibbie Craik, “she maun be a farmer’s dochter. What say you to Bell Finlay?”
 
“Na; she’s U. P. But it micht be Loups o’ Malcolm’s sister. She’s promised to Muckle Haws; but no doubt she would gie him the go-by at a word frae the minister.”
 
“It’s mair likely,” said Chirsty, “to be the factor at the Spittal’s lassie. The factor has a grand garden, and that would account for such basketfuls o’ flowers.”
 
“Whaever she is,” said Birse, “I’m thinking he could hae done better.”
 
“I’ll be fine pleased wi’ ony o’ them,” said Tibbie, who had a magenta silk, and so was jealous of no one.
 
“It hasna been proved,” Haggart pointed out, “that 158 the flowers came frae thae parts. She may be sending them frae Glasgow.”
 
“I aye understood it was a Glasgow lady,” said Snecky. “He’ll be like the Tilliedrum minister that got a lady to send him to the college on the promise that he would marry her as soon as he got a kirk. She made him sign a paper.”
 
“The far-seeing limmer,” exclaimed Chirsty. “But if that’s what Mr. Dishart has done, how has he kept it so secret?”
 
“He wouldna want the women o’ the congregation to ken he was promised till after they had voted for him.”
 
“I dinna haud wi’ that explanation o’t,” said Haggart, “but I may tell you that I ken for sure she’s a Glasgow leddy. Lads, ministers is near aye bespoke afore they’re licensed. There’s a michty competition for them in the big toons. Ay, the leddies just stand at the college gates, as you may say, and snap them up as they come out.”
 
“And just as well for the ministers, I’se uphaud,” said Tibbie, “for it saves them a heap o’ persecution when they come to the like o’ Thrums. There was Mr. Meiklejohn, the U. P. minister: he was no sooner placed than every genteel woman in the town was persecuting him. The Miss Dobies was the maist shameless; they fair hunted him.”
 
“Ay,” said Snecky; “and in the tail o’ the day ane o’ them snacked him up. Billies, did you ever hear o’ a minister being refused?”
 
“Never.”
 
“Weel, then, I have; and by a widow woman too. His name was Samson, and if it had been Tamson she would hae ta’en him. Ay, you may look, but it’s true. Her name was Turnbull, and she had another gent after her, name o’ Tibbets. She couldna make up her mind atween them, and for a while she just keeped them dangling on. Ay, but in the end she took Tibbets. And 159 what, think you, was her reason? As you ken, thae grand folk has their initials on their spoons and nichtgowns. Ay, weel, she thocht it would be mair handy to take Tibbets, because if she had ta’en the minister the T’s would have had to be changed to S’s. It was thoctfu’ o’ her.”
 
“Is Tibbets living?” asked Haggart sharply.
 
“No; he’s dead.”
 
“What,” asked Haggart, “was the corp to trade?”
 
“I dinna ken.”
 
“I thocht no,” said Haggart, triumphantly. “Weel, I warrant he was a minister too. Ay, catch a woman giving up a minister, except for another minister.”
 
All were looking on Haggart with admiration, when a voice from the door cried—
 
“Listen, and I’ll tell you a queerer ane than that.”
 
“Dagont,” cried Birse, “it’s Wearywarld, and he has been hearkening. Leave him to me.”
 
When the post returned, the conversation was back at Mr. Dishart.
 
“Yes, lathies,” Haggart was saying, “daftness about women comes to all, gentle and simple, common and colleged, humourists and no humourists. You say Mr. Dishart has preached ower muckle at women to stoop to marriage, but that makes no differ. Mony a humorous thing hae I said about women, and yet Chirsty has me. It’s the same wi’ ministers. A’ at aince they see a lassie no’ unlike ither lassies, away goes their learning, and they skirl out, ‘You dawtie!’ That’s what comes to all.”
 
“But it hasna come to Mr. Dishart,” cried Rob Dow, jumping to his feet. He had sought Haggart to tell him all, but now he saw the wisdom of telling nothing. “I’m sick o’ your blathers. Instead o’ the minister’s being sweethearting yesterday, he was just at the Kaims visiting the gamekeeper. I met him in the Wast town-end, and gaed there and back wi’ him.”
 
160
“That’s proof it’s a Glasgow leddy,” said Snecky.
 
“I tell you there’s no leddy ava!” swore Rob.
 
“Yea, and wha sends the baskets o’ flowers, then?”
 
“There was only one flower,” said Rob, turning to his host.
 
“I aye understood,” said Haggart heavily, “that there was only one flower.”
 
“But though there was just ane,” persisted Chirsty, “what we want to ken is wha gae him it.”
 
“It was me that gae him it,” said Rob; “it was growing on the roadside, and I plucked it and gae it to him.”
 
The company dwindled away shamefacedly, yet unconvinced; but Haggart had courage to say slowly—
 
“Yes, Rob, I had aye a notion that he got it frae you.”
 
Meanwhile, Gavin, unaware that talk about him and a woman unknown had broken out in Thrums, was gazing, sometimes lovingly and again with scorn, at a little bunch of holly-berries which Jean had gathered from her father’s garden. Once she saw him fling them out of his window, and then she rejoiced. But an hour afterwards she saw him pick them up, and then she mourned. Nevertheless, to her great delight, he preached his third sermon against Woman on the following Sabbath. It was universally acknowledged to be the best of the series. It was also the last.
Chapter Eighteen.   CADDAM—LOVE LEADING TO A RUPTURE.
 Gavin told himself not to go near the mud house on the following Monday; but he went. The distance is half a mile, and the time he took was two hours. This was owing to his setting out due west to reach a point due north; yet with the intention of deceiving none save himself. His reason had warned him to avoid the Egyptian, and his desires had consented to be dragged westward because they knew he had started too soon. When the proper time came they knocked reason on the head and carried him straight to Caddam. Here reason came to, and again began to state its case. Desires permitted him to halt, as if to argue the matter out, but were thus tolerant merely because from where he stood he could see Nanny’s doorway. When Babbie emerged from it reason seems to have made one final effort, for Gavin quickly took that side of a tree which is loved of squirrels at the approach of an enemy. He looked round the tree-trunk at her, and then reason discarded him. The gypsy had two empty pans in her hands. For a second she gazed in the minister’s direction, then demurely leaped the ditch of leaves that separated Nanny’s yard from Caddam, and strolled into the wood. Discovering with indignation that he had been skulking behind the tree, Gavin came into the open. How good of the Egyptian, he reflected, to go to the well for water, and thus save the old woman’s arms! Reason shouted from near the manse (he only heard the echo) that he could still make up on it. “Come along,” 162 said his desires, and marched him prisoner to the well.
 
The path which Babbie took that day is lost in blaeberry leaves now, and my little maid and I lately searched for an hour before we found the well. It was dry, choked with broom and stones, and broken rusty pans, but we sat down where Babbie and Gavin had talked, and I stirred up many memories. Probably two of those pans, that could be broken in the hands to-day like shortbread, were Nanny’s, and almost certainly the stones are fragments from the great slab that used to cover the well. Children like to peer into wells to see what the world is like at the other side, and so this covering was necessary. Rob Angus was the strong man who bore the stone to Caddam, flinging it a yard before him at a time. The well had also a wooden lid with leather hinges, and over this the stone was dragged.
 
Gavin arrived at the well in time to offer Babbie the loan of his arms. In her struggle she had taken her lips into her mouth, but in vain did she tug at the stone, which refused to do more than turn round on the wood. But for her presence, the minister’s efforts would have been equally futile. Though not strong, however, he had the national horror of being beaten before a spectator, and once at school he had won a fight by telling his big antagonist to come on until the boy was tired of pummelling him. As he fought with the stone now, pains shot through his head, and his arms threatened to come away at the shoulders; but remove it he did.
 
“How strong you are!” Babbie said with open admiration.
 
I am sure no words of mine could tell how pleased the minister was; yet he knew he was not strong, and might have known that she had seen him do many things far more worthy of admiration without admiring them. This, indeed, is a sad truth, that we seldom give our love to what is worthiest in its object.
 
163
“How curious that we should have met here,” Babbie said, in her dangerously friendly way, as they filled the pans. “Do you know I quite started when your shadow fell suddenly on the stone. Did you happen to be passing through the wood?”
 
“No,” answered truthful Gavin, “I was looking for you. I thought you saw me from Nanny’s door.”
 
“Did you? I only saw a man hiding behind a tree, and of course I knew it could not be you.”
 
Gavin looked at her sharply, but she was not laughing at him.
 
“It was I,” he admitted; “but I was not exactly hiding behind the tree.”
 
“You had only stepped behind it for a moment,” suggested the Egyptian.
 
Her gravity gave way to laughter under Gavin’s suspicious looks, but the laughing ended abruptly. She had heard a noise in the wood, Gavin heard it too, and they both turned round in time to see two ragged boys running from them. When boys are very happy they think they must be doing wrong, and in a wood, of which they are among the natural inhabitants, they always take flight from the enemy, adults, if given time. For my own part, when I see a boy drop from a tree I am as little surprised as if he were an apple or a nut. But Gavin was startled, picturing these spies handing in the new sensation about him at every door, as a district visitor distributes tracts. The gypsy noted his uneasiness and resented it.
 
“What does it feel like to be afraid?” she asked, eyeing him.
 
“I am afraid of nothing,” Gavin answered, offended in turn.
 
“Yes, you are. When you saw me come out of Nanny’s you crept behind a tree; when these boys showed themselves you shook. You are afraid of being seen with me. Go away, then; I don’t want you.”
 
164
“Fear,” said Gavin, “is one thing, and prudence is another.”
 
“Another name for it,” Babbie interposed.
 
“Not at all; but I owe it to my position to be careful. Unhappily, you do not seem to feel—to recognise—to know——”
 
“To know what?”
 
“Let us avoid the subject.”
 
“No,” the Egyptian said, petulantly. “I hate not to be told things. Why must you be ‘prudent?’”
 
“You should see,” Gavin replied, awkwardly, “that there is a—a difference between a minister and a gypsy.”
 
“But if I am willing to overlook it?” asked Babbie, impertinently.
 
Gavin beat the brushwood mournfully with his staff.
 
“I cannot allow you,” he said, “to talk disrespectfully of my calling. It is the highest a man can follow. I wish——”
 
He checked himself; but he was wishing she could see him in his pulpit.
 
“I suppose,” said the gypsy, reflectively, “one must be very clever to be a minister.”
 
“As for that——” answered Gavin, waving his hand grandly.
 
“And it must be nice, too,” continued Babbie, “to be able to speak for a whole hour to people who can neither answer nor go away. Is it true that before you begin to preach you lock the door to keep the congregation in?”
 
“I must leave you if you talk in that way.”
 
“I only wanted to know.”
 
“Oh, Babbie, I am afraid you have little acquaintance with the inside of churches. Do you sit under anybody?”
 
“Do I sit under anybody?” repeated Babbie, blankly.
 
Is it any wonder that the minister sighed? “Whom 165 do you sit under?” was his form of salutation to strangers.
 
“I mean, where do you belong?” he said.
 
“Wanderers,” Babbie answered, still misunderstanding him, “belong to nowhere in particular.”
 
“I am only asking you if you ever go to church?”
 
“Oh, that is what you mean. Yes, I go often.”
 
“What church?”
 
“You promised not to ask questions.”
 
“I only mean what denomination do you belong to?”
 
“Oh, the—the——Is there an English church denomination?”
 
Gavin groaned.
 
“Well, that is my denomination,” said Babbie, cheerfully. “Some day, though, I am coming to hear you preach. I should like to see how you look in your gown.”
 
“We don’t wear gowns.”
 
“What a shame! But I am coming, nevertheless. I used to like going to church in Edinburgh.”
 
“You have lived in Edinburgh?”
 
“We gypsies have lived everywhere,” Babbie said, lightly, though she was annoyed at having mentioned Edinburgh.
 
“But all gypsies don’t speak as you do,” said Gavin, puzzled again. “I don’t understand you.”
 
“Of course you dinna,” replied Babbie, in broad Scotch. “Maybe, if you did, you would think that it’s mair imprudent in me to stand here cracking clavers wi’ the minister than for the minister to waste his time cracking wi’ me.”
 
“Then why do it?”
 
“Because——Oh, because prudence and I always take different roads.”
 
“Tell me who you are, Babbie,” the minister entreated; “at least, tell me where your encampment is.”
 
“You have warned me against imprudence,” she said.
 
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“I want,” Gavin continued, earnestly, “to know your people, your father and mother.”
 
“Why?”
 
“Because,” he answered, stoutly, “I like their daughter.”
 
At that Babbie’s fingers played on one of the pans, and, for the moment, there was no more badinage in her.
 
“You are a good man,” she said, abruptly; “but you will never know my parents.”
 
“Are they dead?”
 
“They may be; I cannot tell.”
 
“This is all incomprehensible to me.”
 
“I suppose it is. I never asked any one to understand me.”
 
“Perhaps not,” said Gavin, excitedly; “but the time has come when I must know everything of you that is to be known.”
 
Babbie receded from him in quick fear.
 
“You must never speak to me in that way again,” she said, in a warning voice.
 
“In what way?”
 
Gavin knew what way very well, but he thirsted to hear in her words what his own had implied. She did not choose to oblige him, however.
 
“You never will understand me,” she said. “I daresay I might be more like other people now, if—if I had been brought up differently. Not,” she added, passionately, “that I want to be like others. Do you never feel, when you have been living a humdrum life for months, that you must break out of it, or go crazy?”
 
Her vehemence alarmed Gavin, who hastened to reply—
 
“My life is not humdrum. It is full of excitement, anxieties, pleasures, and I am too fond of the pleasures. Perhaps it is because I have more of the luxuries of life than you that I am so content with my lot.”
 
“Why, what can you know of luxuries?”
 
167
“I have eighty pounds a year.”
 
Babbie laughed. “Are ministers so poor?” she asked, calling back her gravity.
 
“It is a considerable sum,” said Gavin, a little hurt, for it was the first time he had ever heard any one speak disrespectfully of eighty pounds.
 
The Egyptian looked down at her ring, and smiled.
 
“I shall always remember your saying that,” she told him, “after we have quarrelled.”
 
“We shall not quarrel,” said Gavin, decidedly.
 
“Oh, yes, we shall.”
 
“We might have done so once, but we know each other too well now.”
 
“That is why we are to quarrel.”
 
“About what?” said the minister. “I have not blamed you for deriding my stipend, though how it can seem small in the eyes of a gypsy——”
 
“Who can afford,” broke in Babbie, “to give Nanny seven shillings a week?”
 
“True,” Gavin said, uncomfortably, while the Egyptian again toyed with her ring. She was too impulsive to be reticent except now and then, and suddenly she said, “You have looked at this ring before now. Do you know that if you had it on your finger you would be more worth robbing than with eighty pounds in each of your pockets?”
 
“Where did you get it?” demanded Gavin, fiercely.
 
“I am sorry I told you that,” the gypsy said, regretfully.
 
“Tell me how you got it,” Gavin insisted, his face now hard.
 
“Now, you see, we are quarrelling.”
 
“I must know.”
 
“Must know! You forget yourself,” she said haughtily.
 
“No, but I have forgotten myself too long. Where did you get that ring?”
 
168
“Good afternoon to you,” said the Egyptian, lifting her pans.
 
“It is not good afternoon,” he cried, detaining her. “It is good-bye for ever, unless you answer me.”
 
“As you please,” she said. “I will not tell you where I got my ring. It is no affair of yours.”
 
“Yes, Babbie, it is.”
 
She was not, perhaps, greatly grieved to hear him say so, for she made no answer.
 
“You are no gypsy,” he continued, suspiciously.
 
“Perhaps not,” she answered, again taking the pans.
 
“This dress is but a disguise.”
 
“It may be. Why don’t you go away and leave me?”
 
“I am going,” he replied, wildly. “I will have no more to do with you. Formerly I pitied you, but——”
 
He could not have used a word more calculated to rouse the Egyptian’s ire, and she walked away with her head erect. Only once did she look back, and it was to say—
 
“This is prudence—now.”
 
Chapter Nineteen.   CIRCUMSTANCES LEADING TO THE FIRST SERMON IN APPROVAL OF WOMEN.
 A young man thinks that he alone of mortals is impervious to love, and so the discovery that he is in it suddenly alters his views of his own mechanism. It is thus not unlike a rap on the funny-bone. Did Gavin make this discovery when the Egyptian left him? Apparently he only came to the brink of it and stood blind. He had driven her from him for ever, and his sense of loss was so acute that his soul cried out for the cure rather than for the name of the malady.
 
In time he would have realised what had happened, but time was denied him, for just as he was starting for the mud house Babbie saved his dignity by returning to him. It was not her custom to fix her eyes on the ground as she walked, but she was doing so now, and at the same time swinging the empty pans. Doubtless she had come back for more water, in the belief that Gavin had gone. He pronounced her name with a sense of guilt, and she looked up surprised, or seemingly surprised, to find him still there.
 
“I thought you had gone away long ago,” she said stiffly.
 
“Otherwise,” asked Gavin the dejected, “you would not have come back to the well?”
 
“Certainly not.”
 
“I am very sorry. Had you waited another moment I should have been gone.”
 
170
This was said in apology, but the wilful Egyptian chose to change its meaning.
 
“You have no right to blame me for disturbing you,” she declared with warmth.
 
“I did not. I only——”
 
“You could have been a mile away by this time. Nanny wanted more water.”
 
Babbie scrutinised the minister sharply as she made this statement. Surely her conscience troubled her, for on his not answering immediately she said, “Do you presume to disbelieve me? What could have made me return except to fill the pans again?”
 
“Nothing,” Gavin admitted eagerly, “and I assure you——”
 
Babbie should have been grateful to his denseness, but it merely set her mind at rest.
 
“Say anything against me you choose,” she told him. “Say it as brutally as you like, for I won’t listen.”
 
She stopped to hear his response to that, and she looked so cold that it almost froze on Gavin’s lips.
 
“I had no right,” he said, dolefully, “to speak to you as I did.”
 
“You had not,” answered the proud Egyptian. She was looking away from him to show that his repentance was not even interesting to her. However, she had forgotten already not to listen.
 
“What business is it of mine?” asked Gavin, amazed at his late presumption, “whether you are a gypsy or no?”
 
“None whatever.”
 
“And as for the ring——”
 
Here he gave her an opportunity of allowing that his curiosity about the ring was warranted. She declined to help him, however, and so he had to go on.
 
“The ring is yours,” he said, “and why should you not wear it?”
 
“Why, indeed?”
 
171
“I am afraid I have a very bad temper.”
 
He paused for a contradiction, but she nodded her head in agreement.
 
“And it is no wonder,” he continued, “that you think me a—a brute.”
 
“I’m sure it is not.”
 
“But, Babbie, I want you to know that I despise myself for my base suspicions. No sooner did I see them than I loathed them and myself for harbouring them. Despite this mystery, I look upon you as a noble-hearted girl. I shall always think of you so.”
 
This time Babbie did not reply.
 
“That was all I had to say,” concluded Gavin, “except that I hope you will not punish Nanny for my sins. Good-bye.”
 
“Good-bye,” said the Egyptian, who was looking at the well.
 
The minister’s legs could not have heard him give the order to march, for they stood waiting.
 
“I thought,” said the Egyptian, after a moment, “that you said you were going.”
 
“I was only—brushing my hat,” Gavin answered with dignity. “You want me to go?”
 
She bowed, and this time he did set off.
 
“You can go if you like,” she remarked now.
 
He turned at this.
 
“But you said——” he began, diffidently.
 
“No, I did not,” she answered, with indignation.
 
He could see her face at last.
 
“You—you are crying!” he exclaimed, in bewilderment.
 
“Because you are so unfeeling,” sobbed Babbie.
 
“What have I said, what have I done?” cried Gavin, in an agony of self-contempt. “Oh, that I had gone away at once!”
 
“That is cruel.”
 
“What is?”
 
172
“To say that.”
 
“What did I say?”
 
“That you wished you had gone away.”
 
“But surely,” the minister faltered, “you asked me to go.”
 
“How can you say so?” asked the gypsy, reproachfully.
 
Gavin was distracted. “On my word,” he said, earnestly, “I thought you did. And now I have made you unhappy. Babbie, I wish I were anybody but myself; I am a hopeless lout.”
 
“Now you are unjust,” said Babbie, hiding her face.
 
“Again? To you?”
 
“No, you stupid,” she said, beaming on him in her most delightful manner, “to yourself!”
 
She gave him both her hands impetuously, and he did not let them go until she added:
 
“I am so glad that you are reasonable at last. Men are so much more unreasonable than women, don’t you think?”
 
“Perhaps we are,” Gavin said, diplomatically.
 
“Of course you are. Why, every one knows that. Well, I forgive you; only remember, you have admitted that it was all your fault?”
 
She was pointing her finger at him like a schoolmistress, and Gavin hastened to answer—
 
“You were not to blame at all.”
 
“I like to hear you say that,” explained the representative of the more reasonable sex, “because it was really all my fault.”
 
“No, no.”
 
“Yes, it was; but of course I could not say so until you had asked my pardon. You must understand that?”
 
The representative of the less reasonable sex could not understand it, but he agreed recklessly, and it seemed so plain to the woman that she continued confidentially—
 
173
“I pretended that I did not want to make it up, but I did.”
 
“Did you?” asked Gavin, elated.
 
“Yes, but nothing could have induced me to make the first advance. You see why?”
 
“Because I was so unreasonable?” asked Gavin, doubtfully.
 
“Yes, and nasty. You admit you were nasty?”
 
“Undoubtedly, I have an evil temper. It has brought me to shame many times.”
 
“Oh, I don’t know,” said the Egyptian, charitably. “I like it. I believe I admire bullies.”
 
“Did I bully you?”
 
“I never knew such a bully. You quite frightened me.”
 
Gavin began to be less displeased with himself.
 
“You are sure,” inquired Babbie, “that you had no right to question me about the ring?”
 
“Certain,” answered Gavin.
 
“Then I will tell you all about it,” said Babbie, “for it is natural that you should want to know.”
 
He looked eagerly at her, and she had become serious and sad.
 
“I must tell you at the same time,” she said, “who I am, and then—then we shall never see each other any more.”
 
“Why should you tell me?” cried Gavin, his hand rising to stop her.
 
“Because you have a right to know,” she replied, now too much in earnest to see that she was yielding a point. “I should prefer not to tell you; yet there is nothing wrong in my secret, and it may make you think of me kindly when I have gone away.”
 
“Don’t speak in that way, Babbie, after you have forgiven me.”
 
“Did I hurt you? It was only because I know that you cannot trust me while I remain a mystery. I know 174 you would try to trust me, but doubts would cross your mind. Yes, they would; they are the shadows that mysteries cast. Who can believe a gypsy if the odds are against her?”
 
“I can,” said Gavin; but she shook her head, and so would he had he remembered three recent sermons of his own preaching.
 
“I had better tell you all,” she said, with an effort.
 
“It is my turn now to refuse to listen to you,” exclaimed Gavin, who was only a chivalrous boy. “Babbie, I should like to hear your story, but until you want to tell it to me I will not listen to it. I have faith in your honour, and that is sufficient.”
 
It was boyish, but I am glad Gavin said it; and now Babbie admired something in him that deserved admiration. His faith, no doubt, made her a better woman.
 
“I admit that I would rather tell you nothing just now,” she said, gratefully. “You are sure you will never say again that you don’t understand me?”
 
“Quite sure,” said Gavin, bravely. “And by-and-by you will offer to tell me of your free will?”
 
“Oh, don’t let us think of the future,” answered Babbie. “Let us be happy for the moment.”
 
This had been the Egyptian’s philosophy always, but it was ill-suited for Auld Licht ministers, as one of them was presently to discover.
 
“I want to make one confession, though,” Babbie continued, almost reluctantly. “When you were so nasty a little while ago, I didn’t go back to Nanny’s. I stood watching you from behind a tree, and then, for an excuse to come back, I—I poured out the water. Yes, and I told you another lie. I really came back to admit that it was all my fault, if I could not get you to say that it was yours. I am so glad you gave in first.”
 
She was very near him, and the tears had not yet dried on her eyes. They were laughing eyes, eyes in 175 distress, imploring eyes. Her pale face, smiling, sad, dimpled, yet entreating forgiveness, was the one prominent thing in the world to him just then. He wanted to kiss her. He would have done it as soon as her eyes rested on his, but she continued without regarding him—
 
“How mean that sounds! Oh, if I were a man I should wish to be everything that I am not, and nothing that I am. I should scorn to be a liar, I should choose to be open in all things, I should try to fight the world honestly. But I am only a woman, and so—well, that is the kind of man I should like to marry.”
 
“A minister may be all these things,” said Gavin, breathlessly.
 
“The man I could love,” Babbie went on, not heeding him, almost forgetting that he was there, “must not spend his days in idleness as the men I know do.”
 
“I do not.”
 
“He must be brave, no mere worker among others, but a leader of men.”
 
“All ministers are.”
 
“Who makes his influence felt.”
 
“Assuredly.”
 
“And takes the side of the weak against the strong, even though the strong be in the right.”
 
“Always my tendency.”
 
“A man who has a mind of his own, and having once made it up stands to it in defiance even of——”
 
“Of his session.”
 
“Of the world. He must understand me.”
 
“I do.”
 
“And be my master.”
 
“It is his lawful position in the house.”
 
“He must not yield to my coaxing or tempers.”
 
“It would be weakness.”
 
“But compel me to do his bidding; yes, even thrash me if——”
 
176
“If you won’t listen to reason. Babbie,” cried Gavin, “I am that man!”
 
Here the inventory abruptly ended, and these two people found themselves staring at each other, as if of a sudden they had heard something dreadful. I do not know how long they stood thus, motionless and horrified. I cannot tell even which stirred first. All I know is that almost simultaneously they turned from each other and hurried out of the wood in opposite directions.
Chapter Twenty.   END OF THE STATE OF INDECISION.
 Long before I had any thought of writing this story, I had told it so often to my little maid that she now knows some of it better than I. If you saw me looking up from my paper to ask her, “What was it that Birse said to Jean about the minister’s flowers?” or, “Where was Hendry Munn hidden on the night of the riots?” and heard her confident answers, you would conclude that she had been in the thick of these events, instead of born many years after them. I mention this now because I have reached a point where her memory contradicts mine. She maintains that Rob Dow was told of the meeting in the wood by the two boys whom it disturbed, while my own impression is that he was a witness of it. If she is right, Rob must have succeeded in frightening the boys into telling no other person, for certainly the scandal did not spread in Thrums. After all, however, it is only important to know that Rob did learn of the meeting. Its first effect was to send him sullenly to the drink.
 
Many a time since these events have I pictured what might have been their upshot had Dow confided their discovery to me. Had I suspected why Rob was grown so dour again, Gavin’s future might have been very different. I was meeting Rob now and again in the glen, asking, with an affected carelessness he did not bottom, for news of the little minister, but what he told me was only the gossip of the town; and what I should have known, that Thrums might never know it, he kept 178 to himself. I suppose he feared to speak to Gavin, who made several efforts to reclaim him, but without avail.
 
Yet Rob’s heart opened for a moment to one man, or rather was forced open by that man. A few days after the meeting at the well, Rob was bringing the smell of whisky with him down Banker’s Close when he ran against a famous staff, with which the doctor pinned him to the wall.
 
“Ay,” said the outspoken doctor, looking contemptuously into Rob’s bleary eyes, “so this is what your conversion amounts to? Faugh! Rob Dow, if you were half a man the very thought of what Mr. Dishart has done for you would make you run past the public houses.”
 
“It’s the thocht o’ him that sends me running to them,” growled Rob, knocking down the staff. “Let me alane.”
 
“What do you mean by that?” demanded McQueen, hooking him this time.
 
“Speir at himsel’; speir at the woman.”
 
“What woman?”
 
“Take your staff out o’ my neck.”
 
“Not till you tell me why you, of all people, are speaking against the minister.”
 
Torn by a desire for a confidant and loyalty to Gavin, Rob was already in a fury.
 
“Say again,” he burst forth, “that I was speaking agin the minister and I’ll practise on you what I’m awid to do to her.”
 
“Who is she?”
 
“Wha’s wha?”
 
“The woman whom the minister——?”
 
“I said nothing about a woman,” said poor Rob, alarmed for Gavin. “Doctor, I’m ready to swear afore a bailie that I never saw them thegither at the Kaims.”
 
“The Kaims!” exclaimed the doctor suddenly enlightened. “Pooh! you only mean the Egyptian. 179 Rob, make your mind easy about this. I know why he met her there.”
 
“Do you ken that she has bewitched him; do you ken I saw him trying to put his arms round her; do you ken they have a trysting-place in Caddam wood?”
 
This came from Rob in a rush, and he would fain have called it all back.
 
“I’m drunk, doctor, roaring drunk,” he said, hastily, “and it wasna the minister I saw ava; it was another man.”
 
Nothing more could the doctor draw from Rob, but he had heard sufficient to smoke some pipes on. Like many who pride themselves on being recluses, McQueen loved the gossip that came to him uninvited; indeed, he opened his mouth to it as greedily as any man in Thrums. He respected Gavin, however, too much to find this new dish palatable, and so his researches to discover whether other Auld Lichts shared Rob’s fears were conducted with caution. “Is there no word of your minister’s getting a wife yet?” he asked several, but only got for answers, “There’s word o’ a Glasgow leddy’s sending him baskets o’ flowers,” or “He has his een open, but he’s taking his time; ay, he’s looking for the blade o’ corn in the stack o’ chaff.”
 
This convinced McQueen that the congregation knew nothing of the Egyptian, but it did not satisfy him, and he made an opportunity of inviting Gavin into the surgery. It was, to the doctor, the cosiest nook in his house, but to me and many others a room that smelled of hearses. On the top of the pipes and tobacco tins that littered the table there usually lay a death certificate, placed there deliberately by the doctor to scare his sister, who had a passion for putting the surgery to rights.
 
“By the way,” McQueen said, after he and Gavin had talked a little while, “did I ever advise you to smoke?”
 
180
“It is your usual form of salutation,” Gavin answered, laughing. “But I don’t think you ever supplied me with a reason.”
 
“I daresay not. I am too experienced a doctor to cheapen my prescriptions in that way. However, here is one good reason. I have noticed, sir, that at your age a man is either a slave to a pipe or to a woman. Do you want me to lend you a pipe now?”
 
“Then I am to understand,” asked Gavin, slyly, “that your locket came into your possession in your pre-smoking days, and that you merely wear it from habit?”
 
“Tuts!” answered the doctor, buttoning his coat. “I told you there was nothing in the locket. If there is, I have forgotten what it is.”
 
“You are a hopeless old bachelor, I see,” said Gavin, unaware that the doctor was probing him. He was surprised next moment to find McQueen in the ecstasies of one who has won a rubber.
 
“Now, then,” cried the jubilant doctor, “as you have confessed so much, tell me all about her. Name and address, please.”
 
“Confess! What have I confessed?”
 
“It won’t do, Mr. Dishart, for even your face betrays you. No, no, I am an old bird, but I have not forgotten the ways of the fledgelings. ‘Hopeless bachelor,’ sir, is a sweetmeat in every young man’s mouth until of a sudden he finds it sour, and that means the banns. When is it to be?”
 
“We must find the lady first,” said the minister, uncomfortably.
 
“You tell me, in spite of that face, that you have not fixed on her?”
 
“The difficulty, I suppose, would be to persuade her to fix on me.”
 
“Not a bit of it. But you admit there is some one?”
 
“Who would have me?”
 
181
“You are wriggling out of it. Is it the banker’s daughter?”
 
“No,” Gavin cried.
 
“I hear you have walked up the back wynd with her three times this week. The town is in a ferment about it.”
 
“She is a great deal in the back wynd.”
 
“Fiddle-de-dee! I am oftener in the back wynd than you, and I never meet her there.”
 
“That is curious.”
 
“No, it isn’t, but never mind. Perhaps you have fallen to Miss Pennycuick’s piano? Did you hear it going as we passed the house?”
 
“She seems always to be playing on her piano.”
 
“Not she; but you are supposed to be musical, and so when she sees you from her window she begins to thump. If I am in the school wynd and hear the piano going, I know you will turn the corner immediately. However, I am glad to hear it is not Miss Pennycuick. Then it is the factor at the Spittal’s lassie? Well done, sir. You should arrange to have the wedding at the same time as the old earl’s, which comes off in summer, I believe.”
 
“One foolish marriage is enough in a day, doctor.”
 
“Eh? You call him a fool for marrying a young wife? Well, no doubt he is, but he would have been a bigger fool to marry an old one. However, it is not Lord Rintoul we are discussing, but Gavin Dishart. I suppose you know that the factor’s lassie is an heiress?”
 
“And, therefore, would scorn me.”
 
“Try her,” said the doctor, drily. “Her father and mother, as I know, married on a ten-pound note. But if I am wrong again, I must adopt the popular view in Thrums. It is a Glasgow lady after all? Man, you needn’t look indignant at hearing that the people are discussing your intended. You can no more stop it than a doctor’s orders could keep Lang Tammas out of 182 church. They have discovered that she sends you flowers twice every week.”
 
“They never reach me,” answered Gavin, then remembered the holly and winced.
 
“Some,” persisted the relentless doctor, “even speak of your having been seen together; but of course, if she is a Glasgow lady, that is a mistake.”
 
“Where did they see us?” asked Gavin, with a sudden trouble in his throat.
 
“You are shaking,” said the doctor, keenly, “like a medical student at his first operation. But as for the story that you and the lady have been seen together, I can guess how it arose. Do you remember that gypsy girl?”
 
The doctor had begun by addressing the fire, but he suddenly wheeled round and fired his question in the minister’s face. Gavin, however, did not even blink.
 
“Why should I have forgotten her?” he replied, coolly.
 
“Oh, in the stress of other occupations. But it was your getting the money from her at the Kaims for Nanny that I was to speak of. Absurd though it seems, I think some dotard must have seen you and her at the Kaims, and mistaken her for the lady.”
 
McQueen flung himself back in his chair to enjoy this joke.
 
“Fancy mistaking that woman for a lady!” he said to Gavin, who had not laughed with him.
 
“I think Nanny has some justification for considering her a lady,” the minister said, firmly.
 
“Well, I grant that. But what made me guffaw was a vision of the harum-scarum, devil-may-care little Egyptian mistress of an Auld Licht manse!”
 
“She is neither harum-scarum nor devil-may-care,” Gavin answered, without heat, for he was no longer a distracted minister. “You don’t understand her as I do.”
 
183
“No, I seem to understand her differently.”
 
“What do you know of her?”
 
“That is just it,” said the doctor, irritated by Gavin’s coolness. “I know she saved Nanny from the poorhouse, but I don’t know where she got the money. I know she can talk fine English when she chooses, but I don’t know where she learned it. I know she heard that the soldiers were coming to Thrums before they knew of their destination themselves, but I don’t know who told her. You who understand her can doubtless explain these matters?”
 
“She offered to explain them to me,” Gavin answered, still unmoved, “but I forbade her.”
 
“Why?”
 
“It is no business of yours, doctor. Forgive me for saying so.”
 
“In Thrums,” replied McQueen, “a minister’s business is everybody’s business. I have often wondered who helped her to escape from the soldiers that night. Did she offer to explain that to you?”
 
“She did not.”
 
“Perhaps,” said the doctor, sharply, “because it was unnecessary?”
 
“That was the reason.”
 
“You helped her to escape?”
 
“I did.”
 
“And you are not ashamed of it?”
 
“I am not.”
 
“Why were you so anxious to screen her?”
 
“She saved some of my people from gaol.”
 
“Which was more than they deserved.”
 
“I have always understood that you concealed two of them in your own stable.”
 
“Maybe I did,” the doctor had to allow. “But I took my stick to them next morning. Besides, they were Thrums folk, while you had never set eyes on that imp of mischief before.”
 
184
“I cannot sit here, doctor, and hear her called names,” Gavin said, rising, but McQueen gripped him by the shoulder.
 
“For pity’s sake, sir, don’t let us wrangle like a pair of women. I brought you here to speak my mind to you, and speak it I will. I warn you, Mr. Dishart, that you are being watched. You have been seen meeting this lassie in Caddam as well as at the Kaims.”
 
“Let the whole town watch, doctor. I have met her openly.”
 
“And why? Oh, don’t make Nanny your excuse.”
 
“I won’t. I met her because I love her.”
 
“Are you mad?” cried McQueen. “You speak as if you would marry her.”
 
“Yes,” replied Gavin, determinedly, “and I mean to do it.”
 
The doctor flung up his hands.
 
“I give you up,” he said, raging. “I give you up. Think of your congregation, man.”
 
“I have been thinking of them, and as soon as I have a right to do so I shall tell them what I have told you.”
 
“And until you tell them I will keep your madness to myself, for I warn you that, as soon as they do know, there will be a vacancy in the Auld Licht kirk of Thrums.”
 
“She is a woman,” said Gavin, hesitating, though preparing to go, “of whom any minister might be proud.”
 
“She is a woman,” the doctor roared, “that no congregation would stand. Oh, if you will go, there is your hat.”
 
Perhaps Gavin’s face was whiter as he left the house than when he entered it, but there was no other change. Those who were watching him decided that he was looking much as usual, except that his mouth was shut very firm, from which they concluded that he had been taking the doctor to task for smoking. They also noted 185 that he returned to McQueen’s house within half an hour after leaving it, but remained no time.
 
Some explained this second visit by saying that the minister had forgotten his cravat, and had gone back for it. What really sent him back, however, was his conscience. He had said to McQueen that he helped Babbie to escape from the soldiers because of her kindness to his people, and he returned to own that it was a lie.
 
Gavin knocked at the door of the surgery, but entered without waiting for a response. McQueen was no longer stamping through the room, red and furious. He had even laid aside his pipe. He was sitting back in his chair, looking half-mournfully, half-contemptuously, at something in his palm. His hand closed instinctively when he heard the door open, but Gavin had seen that the object was an open locket.
 
“It was only your reference to the thing,” the detected doctor said, with a grim laugh, “that made me open it. Forty years ago, sir, I——Phew! it is forty-two years, and I have not got over it yet.” He closed the locket with a snap. “I hope you have come back, Dishart, to speak more rationally?”
 
Gavin told him why he had come back, and the doctor said he was a fool for his pains.
 
“Is it useless, Dishart, to make another appeal to you?”
 
“Quite useless, doctor,” Gavin answered, promptly. “My mind is made up at last.”

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