“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.
“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.”
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.
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.”
