“There’s nobody there,” he said,
coming back, “but Nanny and Sanders. You’ll
mind Sanders was to be freed the day.”
“I’ll go in and see Sanders,” said
Hendry, but the precentor pulled him back, saying,
“You’ll do nothing o’ the kind, Hendry
Munn; you’ll come awa wi’ me now to the
manse.”
“It’s mair than me and Peter’ll
do, then,” said Spens, who had been consulting
with the other farmer. “We’re gaun
as straucht hame as the darkness ’ll let us.”
With few more words the Session parted, Spens and
Tosh setting off for their farms, and Hendry accompanying
the precentor. No one will ever know where Dow
went. I can fancy him, however, returning to
the wood, and there drawing rein. I can fancy
his mind made up to watch the mudhouse until Gavin
and the gypsy separated, and then pounce upon her.
I daresay his whole plot could be condensed into a
sentence, “If she’s got rid o’ this
nicht, we may cheat the Session yet,” But this
is mere surmise. All I know is that he waited
near Nanny’s house, and by and by heard another
trap coming up Windyghoul. That was just before
the ten o’clock bell began to ring.
Leading swiftly to the appalling
marriage.
The little minister bowed his head in assent when
Babbie’s cry, “Oh, Gavin, do you?”
leapt in front of her unselfish wish that he should
care for her no more.
“But that matters very little now,” he
said.
She was his to do with as he willed; and, perhaps,
the joy of knowing herself loved still, begot a wild
hope that he would refuse to give her up. If
so, these words laid it low, but even the sentence
they passed upon her could not kill the self-respect
that would be hers henceforth. “That matters
very little now,” the man said, but to the woman
it seemed to matter more than anything else in the
world.
Throughout the remainder of this interview until the
end came, Gavin never faltered. His duty and
hers lay so plainly before him that there could be
no straying from it. Did Babbie think him strangely
calm? At the Glen Quharity gathering I once saw
Rob Angus lift a boulder with such apparent ease that
its weight was discredited, until the cry arose that
the effort had dislocated his arm. Perhaps Gavin’s
quietness deceived the Egyptian similarly. Had
he stamped, she might have understood better what
he suffered, standing there on the hot embers of his
passion.
“We must try to make amends now,” he said
gravely, “for the wrong we have done.”
“The wrong I have done,” she said, correcting
him. “You will make it harder for me if
you blame yourself. How vile I was in those days!”
“Those days,” she called them, they seemed
so far away.
“Do not cry, Babbie,” Gavin replied, gently.
“He knew what you were, and why, and He pities
you. ’For His anger endureth but a moment:
in His favor is life: weeping may endure for a
night, but joy cometh in the morning.’”
