The Greatest Works of J. M. Barrie: 90+ Titles in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). James Matthew Barrie
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Babbie said, in her dangerously friendly way, as they filled the pans. “Do you know I quite started when your shadow fell suddenly on the stone. Did you happen to be passing through the wood?”
“No,” answered truthful Gavin, “I was looking for you. I thought you saw me from Nanny’s door.”
“Did you? I only saw a man hiding behind a tree, and of course I knew it could not be you.”
Gavin looked at her sharply, but she was not laughing at him.
“It was I,” he admitted; “but I was not exactly hiding behind the tree.”
“You had only stepped behind it for a moment,” suggested the Egyptian.
Her gravity gave way to laughter under Gavin’s suspicious looks, but the laughing ended abruptly. She had heard a noise in the wood, Gavin heard it too, and they both turned round in time to see two ragged boys running from them. When boys are very happy they think they must be doing wrong, and in a wood, of which they are among the natural inhabitants, they always take flight from the enemy, adults, if given time. For my own part, when I see a boy drop from a tree I am as little surprised as if he were an apple or a nut. But Gavin was startled, picturing these spies handing in the new sensation about him at 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.”
Babbie laughed. “Are ministers so poor?” she asked, calling