“Well, ‘pshaw’ be it. You see Miriam and tell her, I’ll make it in my way to meet her on the moor, and if she’s a mind to be friends with me, why, for your sake, Abel, I’ll go far out of my way to be friends with her. Though what th’ congregation will say if they come to know of my ’companying with her and that they will, for certain sure, is more than I care to think.”
“Can’t you say you’re trying to convert her Ruth? There’s more rejoicing, you know, over one sinner that repenteth—though I’ll knock the man down that calls Miriam a sinner. Still, if she could be got to chapel….”
“Abel Holmes wouldn’t fail to be at chapel, too. Why, man, I don’t suppose the poor girl’s got a go-to-meeting frock to bless herself with. But there, Jim’s come out of the house and gone into the barn. He’ll be lighting his pipe and setting th’ hay on fire if I don’t watch him. Go your ways, Abel, and good luck to you. ‘Who maun to Coupar, maun to Coupar.’ What has to be, will be’s good doctrine, if all’s fore-ordained from the beginning; but I could have wished the good Lord had ordained anyone but a Burnplatter for my sister-in-law”—and off she tripped towards the shippon.
I could scarce wait till our Sunday “drinking”—they call it tea nowadays—before I was off to keep my tryst with Miriam, making what I felt to be the lamest of excuses for shirking the evening service. Sundown, Miriam had set, and that I took to be about the time my father would have inverted the hour-glass on the edge of his pulpit and begun one of those long discourses of his that nothing short of an earthquake could have curtailed. So over the moors I sped on the wings of love, only, of course, to reach the plantation long before there were signs of Miriam, and to pass the interval in an agony of longing and apprehension. Sober-minded folk, with as much blood in their bodies as there is in a fish’s tail, may marvel at the fever that now contained me and point sagaciously to the fact that I knew little or nothing of the maiden.
But love, I take it, is like the wind that bloweth where it listeth, and one cannot tell whence it cometh. Time will not breed it, nor does it come of the will, nor yet of judgment and calculation. A man cannot love where he will, nor where he should, nor can he deny love entry when it clamours at the door of his heart. ’Tis like the importunate widow; it will not be said nay. And to my thinking love is born full grown, hot, and lusty. It isn’t a seedling that that has to be watered and sun-shone into life, nor yet a puny weakling that has to be coddled into strength and vigour. It is born a giant, and every man it sways is a hero for the nonce. Nor, I doubt, can love be cast out by prayer and fasting.
But it was not of philosophising I dreamed as I paced on and about that plantation, glancing at my watch and that laggard sun a thousand times, and raking the horizon with anxious eye. I vow I knew by the thumping of my heart that she was near ere sight or sound revealed her approach, and at weary length she came, not from the direction of Burnplatts, but as though she had made a wide detour, as indeed I learned she had, fetching a compass of many a mile’s length, and heeding the distance not one jot, for in those days, when coach fares were high, people had legs and knew how to use them, too, and thought little of covering on foot forty or fifty miles of rough country between sunrise and sundown of a summer’s day.
Now all the way from Pole Moor I had been inventing speeches in my head to outpour to Miriam. I had framed compliments after the manner of the gallants of whom I had read in books. I had even ransacked my memory for poetry, but could think of nothing but that silly jingle—
“Carnation’s red,
The violet’s blue,
The rose is sweet,