The Little Minister - Sir James Matthew Barrie (best short novels TXT) 📗

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."

"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 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.

"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?"

"I have eighty pounds a year."

Babble 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?"

"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 XIX.


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."

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?"

"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