Clergy -- Fiction; Love stories; Scotland -- Fiction
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 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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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