“Why, bring her back with you to Pole Moor. Tell her you’re worn out with nursing me and want rest. Tell her I’m going back-ards way for want of proper attention—oh, tell her any mak’ o’ a fairy-tale you like—only bring her.”
Ruth fetched me a smacking kiss on my forehead.
“And bring her I will,” she cried, “if I’ve to make Jim hug her here,” and she tripped blithely out of the room and down the narrow staircase, singing like a thrush out of the lightness of her heart, and calling “Jim, Jim,” in her clear, young voice.
CHAPTER IX.
A GREAT TEA-DRINKING.
AND bring her she did: her and as tiny a kit of clothing as ever, I imagine, was borne even by the poorest emigrant leaving these shores for distant lands. Poor Miriam, she looked sadly abashed when first she set foot in our modest home. The Manse at Pole Moor, you may well believe, was not a palace, yet a palace it may well have seemed to one who all her young life had known nought but the dirty squalor of Burnplatts. And what a magician that saucy Ruth of ours proved herself in those early days of Miriam’s coming. I would have you to understand that whereas my Miriam was slender and willowy of bodily build, Ruth was not so tall as she by a good two inches and of a comfortable and restful plumpness. Yet, before Miriam had been three days beneath my father’s roof, behold her arrayed in one of Ruth’s frocks that, to the male eye at least, appeared to fit her like a glove. Then her hair—her glorious, shiny, lustrous locks, dark as night, that ever since I had known my love had flowed at large about her neck and shoulders and twisted and twined about her bosom in a curling disarray—Ruth had tucked it up into a coiling knot that nestled snugly in the nape of the neck. I vow that when Ruth led Miriam thus transfigured into my room, her eyes downcast, the ready blush mantling her cheeks, I scarce knew her at first glance. With what a gentle grace the moved; how soft and sweet her speech; there was a self-possession and composure about her that are foreign to the girls one mostly meets on the hill-sides, with their hearty ways and quick, bustling movements.
Now you won’t need to be told that if ever a man felt bursting with happiness that man was no other than myself in those weeks of my convalescence, with Miriam to keep me company, and, as Jim put it, “cocker me up like a great spoiled babby.” But I protest that Miriam was in greater danger of being spoiled than I. I say nothing of my wondering pride and worship in those days. It is right and natural that a lover should worship his mistress—doesn’t the very marriage service say, “With my body I thee worship?”—it is natural that he should deem her peerless among women; but I say that in those days my lover’s worship was blended with a sort of wondering awe and a fearful pride. For, whether it was the change from the wild and uncouth ways of the folk among whom she had been brought up, or the spirit of her father that moved in her blood, or the conscious striving to put her past behind her and be a new and nobler being for love’s sake, or all these and I know not what other subtler influences put together, that is a riddle I cannot solve. But this is certain, that the wild, elfish creature, more than half gipsy, to whom I had poured out my love on the wild moors that seemed so fitting setting for the picture she then made, became by quick, yet insensible, degrees a maiden of so sweet yet quiet a charm, moving serenely as a swan sails the waters, and, as it were, queening it among us without an effort and without even meaning it.
“I don’t know how it is,” said Ruth in commenting on this marvellous change to Jim. “She makes me feel as if she were a porcelain vase and I a common pewter flagon.”
“Well, aw always liked pewter mysen,” Jim had said. “Ale never tastes so guid as out o’ a pewter pot. Gi’ me pewter, let them ha’ porcelain ’at wants it.” But I don’t think Ruth took much comfort from this. Not that she bore Miriam any malice. Not she indeed. She just simply accepted her as an elder sister whom it was a pleasure and a duty to minister to and to admire. Miriam ran some danger of being spoiled, even by Ruth, until, after our guest had settled down somewhat into our ways, Ruth set her to help in the kitchen. And then came the amazing and, to Ruth, not unpleasing discovery that Miriam was just as ignorant of the commonest household duties as Ruth was proficient. She couldn’t bake, she couldn’t brew, she didn’t know what a churn was, she had never in her life made a pat of butter, and she had the most elementary notions even of the abstruse science of bed-making. And in the teaching of her new pupil Ruth was able to recover somewhat of that sense of general superiority which years of undisputed sway at Pole Moor had made a second nature with my good sister.
But in the spoiling of Miriam the greatest and chief of sinners was none other than my reverend father. Is it to be counted a weakness in a minister of the Gospel to seek to make converts to his faith? Surely nay, even though, as the Book says, he compass sea and land to do it.