The Little Minister

“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.”

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?”

“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.”

This was said in apology, but the wilful Egyptian chose to change its meaning.