The Little Minister | Page 3

every man is a diary in which he means to write one
story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares
the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it. But the biographer
sees the last chapter while he is still at the first, and I have only to write
over with ink what Gavin has written in pencil.
How often is it a phanton woman who draws the man from the way he
meant to go? So was man created, to hunger for the ideal that is above
himself, until one day there is magic in the air, and the eyes of a girl
rest upon him. He does not know that it is he himself who crowned her,
and if the girl is as pure as he, their love is the one form of idolatry that
is not quite ignoble. It is the joining of two souls on their way to God.
But if the woman be bad, the test of the man is when he wakens from
his dream. The nobler his ideal, the further will he have been hurried
down the wrong way, for those who only run after little things will not
go far. His love may now sink into passion, perhaps only to stain its
wings and rise again, perhaps to drown.
Babbie, what shall I say of you who make me write these things? I am
not your judge. Shall we not laugh at the student who chafes when
between him and his book comes the song of the thrushes, with whom,
on the mad night you danced into Gavin's life, you had more in
common than with Auld Licht ministers? The gladness of living was in
your step, your voice was melody, and he was wondering what love
might be.
You were the daughter of a summer night, born where all the birds are
free, and the moon christened you with her soft light to dazzle the eyes
of man. Not our little minister alone was stricken by you into his
second childhood. To look upon you was to rejoice that so fair a thing
could be; to think of you is still to be young. Even those who called you
a little devil, of whom I have been one, admitted that in the end you
had a soul, though not that you had been born with one. They said you

stole it, and so made a woman of yourself. But again I say I am not
your judge, and when I picture you as Gavin saw you first, a
bare-legged witch dancing up Windyghoul, rowan berries in your black
hair, and on your finger a jewel the little minister could not have
bought with five years of toil, the shadows on my pages lift, and I
cannot wonder that Gavin loved you.
Often I say to myself that this is to be Gavin's story, not mine. Yet must
it be mine too, in a manner, and of myself I shall sometimes have to
speak; not willingly, for it is time my little tragedy had died of old age.
I have kept it to myself so long that now I would stand at its grave
alone. It is true that when I heard who was to be the new minister I
hoped for a day that the life broken in Harvie might be mended in
Thrums, but two minutes' talk with Gavin showed me that Margaret
had kept from him the secret which was hers and mine and so knocked
the bottom out of my vain hopes. I did not blame her then, nor do I
blame her now, nor shall anyone who blames her ever be called friend
by me; but it was bitter to look at the white manse among the trees and
know that I must never enter it. For Margaret's sake I had to keep aloof,
yet this new trial came upon me like our parting at Harvie. I thought
that in those eighteen years my passions had burned like a ship till they
sank, but I suffered again as on that awful night when Adam Dishart
came back, nearly killing Margaret and tearing up all my ambitions by
the root in a single hour. I waited in Thrums until I had looked again on
Margaret, who thought me dead, and Gavin, who had never heard of
me, and then I trudged back to the school-house. Something I heard of
them from time to time during the winter--for in the gossip of Thrums I
was well posted--but much of what is to be told here I only learned
afterwards from those who knew it best. Gavin heard of me at times as
the dominie in the glen who had ceased to attend the