Into the Highways and Hedges Part 19

Barnabas pushed back his chair, and followed him.

Mr. Thorpe got up too; and resumed the restless pace up and down that had been broken into by his new daughter-in-law's advent. She sat twisting the ring on her thin finger, and wondering whether the preacher was telling the whole story now, and what his brother thought of it. As it happened, she was not left long in doubt on that score.

The tap of Tom's sticks sounded again along the stone pa.s.sage; he was talking eagerly; when he almost reached the door, she heard his final dictum: "E--eh, lad! Now, I doan't know on my soul which was th' biggest fule, you or she!"

So Meg was brought to Barnabas Thorpe's kin; and, sitting alone in her room, looked over the wide marshes that were to become familiar to her; and knew herself a stranger in a strange land.

It was two months since she had become his wife in name; and the two months' experience had made its mark on her,--a mark so deep that she believed herself to be hardly recognisable--a different woman altogether.

Her face had sharpened in outline, and deepened in expression; the girlish beauty of colour had faded, and she had cut off her abundant soft hair.

They had travelled from village to village, the girl sometimes walking, sometimes getting a lift in pa.s.sing carts, never owning to weariness, or pain, or discomfort; but living, apparently, on the preacher's preaching.

Her zeal had outstripped his, burning like a devouring flame. She had sung at meetings; she had gone with him everywhere unshrinkingly; she had given away the very food she should have eaten. And the man had watched her; first with amazement, then with an overgrowing sense of uneasiness; never quite understanding what revelations of good and evil he had brought her face to face with, or how desperately she was clinging to her religious faith, as a child, frightened in the dark, clings to its father's hand.

Meg had been not only innocent, but more ignorant of some phases of evil than would have been possible in a woman of the preacher's own cla.s.s.

Her brain had nearly reeled with the shock of new experiences; her horror at much she had seen and heard had often kept her awake when her body was tired out; and when she slept, her sleep had been haunted with dreams that exhausted her as much as wakefulness. The supernatural grew very real to her then; she was happy only when Barnabas was praying or preaching; she was feverishly eager, growing bigger eyed and thinner day by day.

As for her companion, he had made up his mind to do his best for the la.s.s, who was his wife in name only, and whom he had thought to take through the world, guarding her as he would have guarded a younger sister; but, as day followed day, and week succeeded week, the "doing for her" cost him more--both in heart and mind; and, even in pocket!

He was a clever workman; and, though nothing would have induced him to take money for his faith healing, he had fewer scruples where his knack of bone setting was concerned.

He gave Margaret every comfort he could think of, but became more and more uneasily conscious with the flight of time that the physical hardships of her life were telling on her, and that he did not know how to prevent it; that there was something unnatural about her fervour, but that that, too, was beyond him.

He had got into a habit of watching her, and of taking note of her ways, silently as a rule, because, being accustomed to solitude, he was a silent man in ordinary intercourse.

For any thought he took for her she thanked him, with a gentle graciousness that was inherited from her father; but which seemed to her companion to belong only to this girl, and to have the curious quality of making his heart beat faster.

He was disconcerted when she cut off her hair; and she was surprised that he should even notice the loss. She was apt to be surprised in those days if Barnabas behaved like an ordinary mortal.

Then a change had come over them both--a strain in their relations, ever tightening, impossible to break through, impalpable, and, finally, unbearable.

The woman was aware of it first, and tried to ignore it. She sang, and prayed, and worked with even increased ardour. She was over-taxing her poor body, that was so unequally yoked; and she knew, and rather rejoiced at the fact.

Possibly, at the bottom of her heart, she felt that _that_ was one way of escape from a difficulty that lay in wait for her, unfaced as yet, and "impossible".

It had been in the evening, after a long day's walk, that the difficulty had stalked boldly out of its corner.

They had arrived late at an inn; and Meg, too tired to eat, had exerted herself to amuse a fretful child, who was sitting beside her on a bench.

She seldom spoke to strangers, but, at that moment, she had experienced a sudden and almost overpowering distaste for her surroundings. The hot, tobacco-reeking room, the smell of food, the noise every one made in eating, the way the men spat on the floor, and the way the woman next her laughed, affected her with a physical loathing. She fought desperately against the sensation, having a nervous fear that, should she once stop talking, and let herself go, she might break down altogether. Her cheeks flushed with the heat of the room, her eyes shone like stars, and her tongue went faster and faster. The child stared at her, open-mouthed; the child's mother looked at her rather inquisitively; but the father, a young mechanic, put down his knife and fork, and tried to draw the stranger's attention to himself.

All at once Meg was startled by the preacher's pushing back his chair noisily, and putting a hand on her shoulder.

"If ye can't eat, there's no call for 'ee to stop here chattering. Ye'd better go upstairs," he said.

His voice sounded a little thick, and his face was flushed, though he never drank anything but water.

Meg turned and looked at him in utter astonishment; then rose and left them without a word.

It had been nothing to speak of, nothing to make a fuss about, yet when she had found herself alone in the tiny room upstairs that he had taken for her, she had hidden her face in her hands with an indescribable feeling of shame.

"What right had this man to speak so to her,--to look at her as if he were jealous? He might, in his capacity of preacher, have reproved her for breaking any law in the decalogue, and she would not have been angry; but this was quite different."

Alas! it did not bear thinking of. She had given him "right" enough!

She had felt she could not sit still; the restlessness that had been growing on her had made anything more bearable than the quiet of her room. She had put on her bonnet, and gone down again almost immediately.

She had found Barnabas leaning against the porch outside; he had heard or felt her approach, and turned the moment she had joined him. Voices from the inn had a.s.sailed their ears, in a gust of sound with the opening of the door; and then they had been alone, wrapped in the sweet solemn night, and Meg's anger and shame had died. After all, they two were pilgrims together, through a tumultuous and alien world, and she had been foolish to have been so disturbed. It had always been wonderfully easy to Meg to look at things from a purely spiritual point of view.

"Are you going out again?" she had asked him; and he had answered, with some constraint, that he was going to catch the lads coming out of the factory in the town, pointing to where the lights of Nottingham twinkled in the distance.

"Then I'll come too," Meg had said. "I can start the singing if you want it; and I always like to hear you speak."

But, for the first time since she had known him, he had refused her companionship, speaking still with the same constrained tone, and without looking at her.

"Ye are just killing yourself, la.s.s; I canna let you do that."

The girl had evinced much the same half-reproachful wonder that she had shown when he had objected to the cutting off of her hair.

"If I am of any service at all," she had said, "you, of all men, should not try to stop me." And at that, the man had stood upright with a laugh and a quick pa.s.sionate gesture, as if he would have stretched out his arms to her.

"I, of all men! I, of all men!" he had cried. "La.s.s, do ye suppose I am no' of flesh and blood, like the others? The Lord has angels enough; let _me_ ha' the woman by my side; I of all men shouldna stay ye. Come then an' ye want to, Margaret!" And Meg, aghast, had stood for one moment with frightened eyes; then had turned and fled.

He had wakened her with a rough shock, and had brought her back to an earth that was no longer only "the road to Heaven".

It was a natural thing enough that had befallen the strange pair; only Meg, with her eyes fixed on the stars, had never dreamed of its possibility, and her heart had sunk.

The next morning the preacher had met her with recovered self-command.

"I spoke to ye as I shouldna have," he had said gravely. "An' I am 'shamed to ha' done it; an' yet it was truth, la.s.s, that it isna possible to go on as we are. I canna stand by an' see ye get thinner an'

weaker afore my eyes. Will ye let me take ye to my own home an' leave ye for a spell wi' my own people? Happen ye'll grow stronger at th' farm an' piece on your life again."

And Meg had acquiesced. She would do as he liked, though he had fallen from his pinnacle and was no more an inspired prophet; for what else could she do?

"To piece on her life" would be a puzzling and difficult thing, far more confusing than to take the kingdom of Heaven by storm, and die of over-work and under-feeding, like a saint; but she had no choice.

While she sat at her window, her thoughts flew back over all that had happened, till the remembrance of Tom Thorpe's remark came as a sort of anti-climax to the painful gravity of her thoughts, and Meg laughed softly in the darkness.

"Which _was_ the bigger fule?"

Well! if she had been that, there was no need to be a coward as well.

The girl straightened herself with a touch of pride and determination that was a good sign. "I cut one knot--I'll untie the next," she said; "and live it out as best I can!"