He thought that having been taken ill suddenly I had waved to him for help because he chanced to be near. With all my wits about me I might have left him in that belief, for rather would I have deceived him than had him wonder why his welfare seemed so vital to me. But I, who thought the capacity for being taken aback had gone from me, clung to his arm and thanked God audibly that he still lived. He did not tell me then how my agitation puzzled him, but led me kindly to the hill, where we could talk without listeners. By the time we reached it I was again wary, and I had told him what had brought me to Thrums, without mentioning how the story of his death reached my ears, or through whom.

“Mr. McKenzie,” he said, interrupting me, “galloped all the way from the Spittal on the same errand. However, no one has been hurt much, except the piper himself.”

Then he told me how the rumor arose.

“You know of the incident at the Spittal, and that Campbell marched off in high dudgeon? I understand that he spoke to no one between the Spittal and Thrums, but by the time he arrived here he was more communicative; yes, and thirstier. He was treated to drink in several public-houses by persons who wanted to hear his story, and by-and-by he began to drop hints of 238 knowing something against the earl’s bride. Do you know Rob Dow?”

“Yes,” I answered, “and what you have done for him.”

“Ah, sir!” he said, sighing, “for a long time I thought I was to be God’s instrument in making a better man of Rob, but my power over him went long ago. Ten short months of the ministry takes some of the vanity out of a man.”

Looking sideways at him I was startled by the unnatural brightness of his eyes. Unconsciously he had acquired the habit of pressing his teeth together in the pauses of his talk, shutting them on some woe that would proclaim itself, as men do who keep their misery to themselves.

“A few hours ago,” he went on, “I heard Rob’s voice in altercation as I passed the Bull tavern, and I had a feeling that if I failed with him so should I fail always throughout my ministry. I walked into the public-house, and stopped at the door of a room in which Dow and the piper were sitting drinking. I heard Rob saying, fiercely, ’If what you say about her is true, Highlandman, she’s the woman I’ve been looking for this half year and mair; what is she like?’ I guessed, from what I had been told of the piper, that they were speaking of the earl’s bride; but Rob saw me and came to an abrupt stop, saying to his companion, ‘Dinna say another word about her afore the minister.’ Rob would have come away at once in answer to my appeal, but the piper was drunk and would not be silenced. ‘I’ll tell the minister about her, too,’ he began. ‘You dinna ken what you’re doing,’ Rob roared, and then, as if to save my ears from scandal at any cost, he struck Campbell a heavy blow on the mouth. I tried to intercept the blow, with the result that I fell, and then some one ran out of the tavern crying, ‘He’s killed!’ The piper had been stunned, 239 but the story went abroad that he had stabbed me for interfering with him. That is really all. Nothing, as you know, can overtake an untruth if it has a minute’s start.”

“Where is Campbell now?”

“Sleeping off the effect of the blow: but Dow has fled. He was terrified at the shouts of murder, and ran off up the West Town end. The doctor’s dogcart was standing at a door there and Rob jumped into it and drove off. They did not chase him far, because he is sure to hear the truth soon, and then, doubtless, he will come back.”

Though in a few hours we were to wonder at our denseness, neither Gavin nor I saw why Dow had struck the Highlander down rather than let him tell his story in the minister’s presence. One moment’s suspicion would have lit our way to the whole truth, but of the spring to all Rob’s behavior in the past eight months we were ignorant, and so to Gavin the Bull had only been the scene of a drunken brawl, while I forgot to think in the joy of finding him alive.

“I have a prayer-meeting for rain presently,” Gavin said, breaking a picture that had just appeared unpleasantly before me of Babbie still in agony at Nanny’s, “but before I leave you tell me why this rumor caused you such distress.”

The question troubled me, and I tried to avoid it. Crossing the hill we had by this time drawn near a hollow called the Toad’s-hole, then gay and noisy with a caravan of gypsies. They were those same wild Lindsays, for whom Gavin had searched Caddam one eventful night, and as I saw them crowding round their king, a man well known to me, I guessed what they were at.

“Mr. Dishart,” I said abruptly, “would you like to see a gypsy marriage? One is taking place there just now. That big fellow is the king, and he is about to 240 marry two of his people over the tongs. The ceremony will not detain us five minutes, though the rejoicings will go on all night.”

I have been present at more than one gypsy wedding in my time, and at the wild, weird orgies that followed them, but what is interesting to such as I may not be for a minister’s eyes, and, frowning at my proposal, Gavin turned his back upon the Toad’s-hole. Then, as we recrossed the hill, to get away from the din of the camp, I pointed out to him that the report of his death had brought McKenzie to Thrums, as well as me.

“As soon as McKenzie heard I was not dead,” he answered, “he galloped off to the Spittal, without even seeing me. I suppose he posted back to be in time for the night’s rejoicings there. So you see, it was not solicitude for me that brought him. He came because a servant at the Spittal was supposed to have done the deed.”

“Well, Mr. Dishart,” I had to say, “why should I deny that I have a warm regard for you? You have done brave work in our town.”

“It has been little,” he replied. “With God’s help it will be more in future.”

He meant that he had given time to his sad love affair that he owed to his people. Of seeing Babbie again I saw that he had given up hope. Instead of repining, he was devoting his whole soul to God’s work. I was proud of him, and yet I grieved, for I could not think that God wanted him to bury his youth so soon.

“I had thought,” he confessed to me, “that you were one of those who did not like my preaching.”

“You were mistaken,” I said, gravely. I dared not tell him that, except his mother, none would have sat under him so eagerly as I.

“Nevertheless,” he said, “you were a member of the Auld Licht church in Mr. Carfrae’s time, and you left it when I came.”

“I heard your first sermon,” I said.

“Ah,” he replied. “I had not been long in Thrums before I discovered that if I took tea with any of my congregation and declined a second cup, they thought it a reflection on their brewing.”

“You must not look upon my absence in that light,” was all I could say. “There are reasons why I cannot come.”

He did not press me further, thinking I meant that the distance was too great, though frailer folk than I walked twenty miles to hear him. We might have parted thus had we not wandered by chance to the very spot where I had met him and Babbie. There is a seat there now for those who lose their breath on the climb up, and so I have two reasons nowadays for not passing the place by.

We read each other’s thoughts, and Gavin said calmly, “I have not seen her since that night. She disappeared as into a grave.”

How could I answer when I knew that Babbie was dying for want of him, not half a mile away?

“You seemed to understand everything that night,” he went on; “or if you did not, your thoughts were very generous to me.”

In my sorrow for him I did not notice that we were moving on again, this time in the direction of Windyghoul.

“She was only a gypsy girl,” he said, abruptly, and I nodded. “But I hoped,” he continued, “that she would be my wife.”

“I understood that,” I said.

“There was nothing monstrous to you,” he asked, looking me in the face, “in a minister’s marrying a gypsy?”

I own that if I had loved a girl, however far below or above me in degree, I would have married her had she been willing to take me. But to Gavin I only 242 answered, “These are matters a man must decide for himself.”

“I had decided for myself,” he said, emphatically.

“Yet,” I said, wanting him to talk to me of Margaret, “in such a case one might have others to consider besides himself.”

“A man’s marriage,” he answered, “is his own affair, I would have brooked no interference from my congregation.”

I thought, “There is some obstinacy left in him still;” but aloud I said, “It was of your mother I was thinking.”

“She would have taken Babbie to her heart,” he said, with the fond conviction of a lover.

I doubted it, but I only asked, “Your mother knows nothing of her?”

“Nothing,” he rejoined. “It would be cruelty to tell my mother of her now that she is gone.”

Gavin’s calmness had left him, and he was striding quickly nearer to Windyghoul. I was in dread lest he should see the Egyptian at Nanny’s door, yet to have turned him in another direction might have roused his suspicions. When we were within a hundred yards of the mudhouse, I knew that there was no Babbie in sight. We halved the distance and then I saw her at the open window. Gavin’s eyes were on the ground, but she saw him. I held my breath, fearing that she would run out to him.

“You have never seen her since that night?” Gavin asked me, without hope in his voice.

Had he been less hopeless he would have wondered why I did not reply immediately. I was looking covertly at the mudhouse, of which we were now within a few yards. Babbie’s face had gone from the window, and the door remained shut. That she could hear every word we uttered now, I could not doubt. But she was hiding from the man for whom her soul longed. She was sacrificing herself for him.

“Never,” I answered, notwithstanding my pity of the brave girl, and then while I was shaking lest he should go in to visit Nanny, I heard the echo of the Auld Licht bell.

“That calls me to the meeting for rain,” Gavin said, bidding me good-night. I had acted for Margaret, and yet I had hardly the effrontery to take his hand. I suppose he saw sympathy in my face, for suddenly the cry broke from him —

“If I could only know that nothing evil had befallen her!”

Babbie heard him and could not restrain a heart-breaking sob.

“What was that?” he said, starting.

A moment I waited, to let her show herself if she chose. But the mudhouse was silent again.

“It was some boy in the wood,” I answered.

“Good-bye,” he said, trying to smile.

Had I let him go, here would have been the end of his love story, but that piteous smile unmanned me, and I could not keep the words back.

“She is in Nanny’s house,” I cried.

In another moment these two were together for weal or woe, and I had set off dizzily for the school-house, feeling now that I had been false to Margaret, and again exulting in what I had done. By and by the bell stopped, and Gavin and Babbie regarded it as little as I heeded the burns now crossing the glen road noisily at places that had been dry two hours before.

Chapter Twenty-Nine.
STORY OF THE EGYPTIAN

God gives us more than, were we not overbold, we should dare to ask for, and yet how often (perhaps after saying “Thank God” so curtly that it is only a form of swearing) we are suppliants again within the hour. Gavin was to be satisfied if he were told that no evil had befallen her he loved, and all the way between the school-house and Windyghoul Babbie craved for no more than Gavin’s life. Now they had got their desires; but do you think they were content?

The Egyptian had gone on her knees when she heard Gavin speak of her. It was her way of preventing herself from running to him. Then, when she thought him gone, he opened the door. She rose and shrank back, but first she had stepped toward him with a glad cry. His disappointed arms met on nothing.

“You, too, heard that I was dead?” he said, thinking her strangeness but grief too sharply turned to joy.

There were tears in the word with which she answered him, and he would have kissed her, but she defended her face with her hand.

“Babbie,” he asked, beginning to fear that he had not sounded her deepest woe, “why have you left me all this time? You are not glad to see me now?”

“I was glad,” she answered in a low voice, “to see you from the window, but I prayed to God not to let you see me.”

She even pulled away her hand when he would have 245 taken it. “No, no, I am to tell you everything now, and then – ”

“Say that you love me first,” he broke in, when a sob checked her speaking.

“No,” she said, “I must tell you first what I have done, and then you will not ask me to say that. I am not a gypsy.”

“What of that?” cried Gavin. “It was not because you were a gypsy that I loved you.”

“That is the last time you will say you love me,” said Babbie. “Mr. Dishart, I am to be married to-morrow.”

She stopped, afraid to say more lest he should fall, but except that his arms twitched he did not move.

“I am to be married to Lord Rintoul,” she went on. “Now you know who I am.”

She turned from him, for his piercing eyes frightened her. Never again, she knew, would she see the love-light in them. He plucked himself from the spot where he had stood looking at her and walked to the window. When he wheeled round there was no anger on his face, only a pathetic wonder that he had been deceived so easily. It was at himself that he was smiling grimly rather than at her, and the change pained Babbie as no words could have hurt her. He sat down on a chair and waited for her to go on.

“Don’t look at me,” she said, “and I will tell you everything.” He dropped his eyes listlessly, and had he not asked her a question from time to time, she would have doubted whether he heard her.

“After all,” she said, “a gypsy dress is my birth-right, and so the Thrums people were scarcely wrong in calling me an Egyptian. It is a pity any one insisted on making me something different. I believe I could have been a good gypsy.”

“Who were your parents?” Gavin asked, without looking up.

“You ask that,” she said, “because you have a good 246 mother. It is not a question that would occur to me. My mother – If she was bad, may not that be some excuse for me? Ah, but I have no wish to excuse myself. Have you seen a gypsy cart with a sort of hammock swung beneath it in which gypsy children are carried about the country? If there are no children, the pots and pans are stored in it. Unless the roads are rough it makes a comfortable cradle, and it was the only one I ever knew. Well, one day I suppose the road was rough, for I was capsized. I remember picking myself up after a little and running after the cart, but they did not hear my cries. I sat down by the roadside and stared after the cart until I lost sight of it. That was in England, and I was not three years old.”

“But surely,” Gavin said, “they came back to look for you?”

“So far as I know,” Babbie answered hardly, “they did not come back. I have never seen them since. I think they were drunk. My only recollection of my mother is that she once took me to see the dead body of some gypsy who had been murdered. She told me to dip my hand in the blood, so that I could say I had done so when I became a woman. It was meant as a treat to me, and is the one kindness I am sure I got from her. Curiously enough, I felt the shame of her deserting me for many years afterwards. As a child I cried hysterically at thought of it; it pained me when I was at school in Edinburgh every time I saw the other girls writing home; I cannot think of it without a shudder even now. It is what makes me worse than other women.”

Her voice had altered, and she was speaking passionately.

“Sometimes,” she continued, more gently, “I try to think that my mother did come back for me, and then went away because she heard I was in better hands than hers. It was Lord Rintoul who found me, and I owe 247 everything to him. You will say that he has no need to be proud of me. He took me home on his horse, and paid his gardener’s wife to rear me. She was Scotch, and that is why I can speak two languages. It was he, too, who sent me to school in Edinburgh.”

“He has been very kind to you,” said Gavin, who would have preferred to dislike the earl.

“So kind,” answered Babbie, “that now he is to marry me. But do you know why he has done all this?”

Now again she was agitated, and spoke indignantly.

“It is all because I have a pretty face,” she said, her bosom rising and falling. “Men think of nothing else. He had no pity for the deserted child. I knew that while I was yet on his horse. When he came to the gardener’s afterwards, it was not to give me some one to love, it was only to look upon what was called my beauty; I was merely a picture to him, and even the gardener’s children knew it and sought to terrify me by saying, ‘You are losing your looks; the earl will not care for you any more.’ Sometimes he brought his friends to see me, ‘because I was such a lovely child,’ and if they did not agree with him on that point he left without kissing me. Throughout my whole girlhood I was taught nothing but to please him, and the only way to do that was to be pretty. It was the only virtue worth striving for; the others were never thought of when he asked how I was getting on. Once I had fever and nearly died, yet this knowledge that my face was everything was implanted in me so that my fear lest he should think me ugly when I recovered terrified me into hysterics. I dream still that I am in that fever and all my fears return. He did think me ugly when he saw me next. I remember the incident so well still. I had run to him, and he was lifting me up to kiss me when he saw that my face had changed. ‘What a cruel disappointment,’ he said, and turned his back on me. 248 I had given him a child’s love until then, but from that day I was hard and callous.”

“And when was it you became beautiful again?” Gavin asked, by no means in the mind to pay compliments.

“A year passed,” she continued, “before I saw him again. In that time he had not asked for me once, and the gardener had kept me out of charity. It was by an accident that we met, and at first he did not know me. Then he said, ‘Why, Babbie, I believe you are to be a beauty, after all!’ I hated him for that, and stalked away from him, but he called after me, ‘Bravo! she walks like a queen’; and it was because I walked like a queen that he sent me to an Edinburgh school. He used to come to see me every year, and as I grew up the girls called me Lady Rintoul. He was not fond of me; he is not fond of me now. He would as soon think of looking at the back of a picture as at what I am apart from my face, but he dotes on it, and is to marry it. Is that love? Long before I left school, which was shortly before you came to Thrums, he had told his sister that he was determined to marry me, and she hated me for it, making me as uncomfortable as she could, so that I almost looked forward to the marriage because it would be such a humiliation to her.”

In admitting this she looked shamefacedly at Gavin, and then went on:

“It is humiliating him too. I understand him. He would like not to want to marry me, for he is ashamed of my origin, but he cannot help it. It is this feeling that has brought him here, so that the marriage may take place where my history is not known.”

“The secret has been well kept,” Gavin said, “for they have failed to discover it even in Thrums.”

“Some of the Spittal servants suspect it, nevertheless,” Babbie answered, “though how much they know I cannot say. He has not a servant now, either here or 249 in England, who knew me as a child. The gardener who befriended me was sent away long ago. Lord Rintoul looks upon me as a disgrace to him that he cannot live without.”

“I dare say he cares for you more than you think,” Gavin said gravely.

“He is infatuated about my face, or the pose of my head, or something of that sort,” Babbie said bitterly, “or he would not have endured me so long. I have twice had the wedding postponed, chiefly, I believe, to enrage my natural enemy, his sister, who is as much aggravated by my reluctance to marry him as by his desire to marry me. However, I also felt that imprisonment for life was approaching as the day drew near, and I told him that if he did not defer the wedding I should run away. He knows I am capable of it, for twice I ran away from school. If his sister only knew that!”

For a moment it was the old Babbie Gavin saw; but her glee was short-lived, and she resumed sedately:

“They were kind to me at school, but the life was so dull and prim that I ran off in a gypsy dress of my own making. That is what it is to have gypsy blood in one. I was away for a week the first time, wandering the country alone, telling fortunes, dancing and singing in woods, and sleeping in barns. I am the only woman in the world well brought up who is not afraid of mice or rats. That is my gypsy blood again. After that wild week I went back to the school of my own will, and no one knows of the escapade but my schoolmistress and Lord Rintoul. The second time, however, I was detected singing in the street, and then my future husband was asked to take me away. Yet Miss Feversham cried when I left, and told me that I was the nicest girl she knew, as well as the nastiest. She said she should love me as soon as I was not one of her boarders.”

“And then you came to the Spittal?”

“Yes; and Lord Rintoul wanted me to say I was sorry for what I had done, but I told him I need not say that, for I was sure to do it again. As you know, I have done it several times since then; and though I am a different woman since I knew you, I dare say I shall go on doing it at times all my life. You shake your head because you do not understand. It is not that I make up my mind to break out in that way; I may not have had the least desire to do it for weeks, and then suddenly, when I am out riding, or at dinner, or at a dance, the craving to be a gypsy again is so strong that I never think of resisting it; I would risk my life to gratify it. Yes, whatever my life in the future is to be, I know that must be a part of it. I used to pretend at the Spittal that I had gone to bed, and then escape by the window. I was mad with glee at those times, but I always returned before morning, except once, the last time I saw you, when I was away for nearly twenty-four hours. Lord Rintoul was so glad to see me come back then that he almost forgave me for going away. There is nothing more to tell except that on the night of the riot it was not my gypsy nature that brought me to Thrums, but a desire to save the poor weavers. I had heard Lord Rintoul and the sheriff discussing the contemplated raid. I have hidden nothing from you. In time, perhaps, I shall have suffered sufficiently for all my wickedness.”

Gavin rose weariedly, and walked through the mudhouse looking at her.

“This is the end of it all,” he said harshly, coming to a standstill. “I loved you, Babbie.”

“No,” she answered, shaking her head. “You never knew me until now, and so it was not me you loved. I know what you thought I was, and I will try to be it now.”

“If you had only told me this before,” the minister said sadly, “it might not have been too late.”

“I only thought you like all the other men I knew,” she replied, “until the night I came to the manse. It was only my face you admired at first.”

“No, it was never that,” Gavin said with such conviction that her mouth opened in alarm to ask him if he did not think her pretty. She did not speak, however, and he continued, “You must have known that I loved you from the first night.”

“No; you only amused me,” she said, like one determined to stint nothing of the truth. “Even at the well I laughed at your vows.”

This wounded Gavin afresh, wretched as her story had made him, and he said tragically, “You have never cared for me at all.”

“Oh, always, always,” she answered, “since I knew what love was; and it was you who taught me.”

Even in his misery he held his head high with pride. At least she did love him.

“And then,” Babbie said, hiding her face, “I could not tell you what I was because I knew you would loathe me. I could only go away.”

She looked at him forlornly through her tears, and then moved toward the door. He had sunk upon a stool, his face resting on the table, and it was her intention to slip away unnoticed. But he heard the latch rise, and jumping up, said sharply, “Babbie, I cannot give you up.”

She stood in tears, swinging the door unconsciously with her hand.

“Don’t say that you love me still,” she cried; and then, letting her hand fall from the door, added imploringly, “Oh, Gavin, do you?”