"I couldn't tell you all," said Meg, her face flushing. "She said that men got tired of their fancies, and that, though you were better than most, you wouldn't stand my ways any more some day. Don't look so, Barnabas; I didn't believe it! I knew you were too good; but some of it was true. She said you fed and clothed me and got nothing for it; and that was true. She said I was a fine lady. I have tried not to be, but it is so difficult to alter the way one has been made. And she told me horrible stories of—of what her husband did to her when she was young. I couldn't repeat those—they were too terrible." And Meg shuddered. "But, when one hears of such things, it makes the whole world dark, and God seems too far away to care."
"Do 'ee think so?" said Barnabas. "But it's just the knowledge o' such cruelties and horrors and black wickedness that drives a man to be a preacher, lass. They burn at th' bottom o' one's thoughts, an' one has no rest till one has given one's life to th' fighting o' them."
"I know, I know," said Meg. "Oh yes, you have taught me that; one has no rest for thinking of them! But, if one fights and fails? Barnabas, you will not understand this, because you never despair, and you don't know what it is to be beaten, and you are never afraid; but I was. Ah, look the other way, I know it was cowardly, but it tempted me so; and I wanted to get free of—of everything; of trying and failing, of loving people who can't bear to see one, of being a weight on strangers; of the hopeless tangle. The longing came over me quite suddenly, I had not thought I was so wicked. I knew, all at once, that I was horribly afraid of living, and death pulled me so hard, as if there were something stronger than me in the water; and then you called' Margaret, Margaret!' and I pulled myself back. I was ashamed of being such a coward. It was as bad as a soldier who deserts, except that I didn't quite—though even that I did not was more your doing than mine."
"Neither yours nor mine," said the preacher; "but the Lord's!"
He leaned his arms on the half-door of the loft, and looked away over the flat country, glistening with water, sweet and fresh after the baptism of rain. Had he, in leading the woman he loved from the evil of the world, brought her to this?—this horror of despair and loneliness, that temptation which she had only just escaped, whose shadow he had surely felt!
He thanked God she was safe, but with an intensity of realisation of her peril that went through him like the sharpness of steel.
"I'm sore to think that the devil had power to tempt ye. I'm sore to think ye met him, wi' me not by, Margaret. How shall I comfort ye? What shall I say?" cried the man.
If she had loved him he could have comforted so easily; if he had not loved her, he would have had no doubt what to say. He made an effort to put that human love aside, and turned to her at last, his blue eyes very bright. "Doan't believe him who was a liar fro' th' beginning," he said. "The good must allus be th' strongest, lass, i' th' end. It's against lies an' black shadows that we fight. With us is the power an' th' glory. You an' I, Margaret, will win through our failures and our sins, and count them dead at our feet one day!"
Meg shook her head. "I know you think so," she said; "I am not so sure—I don't think I am sure of anything,—if even father——" the sentence did not bear finishing. Alas! though human love first teaches the divine, the failure of "the brother whom we have seen" shakes our belief in a Divinity we have not seen, as nothing else can. Then a smile touched her lips.
"But I daresay you will see all your sins and failures dead at your feet," she said. "I think you would win through anything; it is the very sure people who do; and you will be quite triumphant and happy one day!"