He turned sharp on his heel and left her. Sorry he was, but nothing more; he knew that she would forget, and the present trouble seemed to him scarcely more than a child's first taste of toothache. He forgot that the agony of a fall into a two-foot pond is very real if the victim imagines it to be as deep as the sea.
Once he looked back. Amid the glowing waste stood a little hothouse figure of a woman, with yellow hair and a dimpled white-and-pink face. He thought it a quaint picture, and waved his hand twice, and swung off across the heather to the wife who would be impatiently awaiting his home-coming.
CHAPTER XXIII. A "REVIVAL."
Things had gone hard with the preacher since Greta and he went hand-in-hand, like a couple of guilty children, across the moor to Gorsthwaite. It was out of the question that Greta should return that night, whatever the result of her absence might be when it came to her father's ears. Gabriel, too, was induced to spend the night at Gorsthwaite; so tired out was he with trouble and the quick succession of trying scenes. But the preacher was tough in the fibre, and the night's rest well-nigh cured his body, while it gave his mind fresh vigour to understand his own Titanic worthlessness. Had he been able to fly from Greta—lest he should contaminate her—it is probable that his first instinct on awakening would have been towards showing a clean pair of heels, under the delusion that he was doing the lassie a service; but luckily his duty ran with his pleasure for once, for it was clear, even to his perceptions, that the miller would hear of Greta's leaving home the night before, and that a sufficient explanation must be forthcoming.
So Gabriel took the girl home about eleven of the next morning, and, finding Miller Rotherson just returned from his journey, gave the kindly old man a full and faithful account of the whole affair. The miller rubbed his chin when Gabriel had finished, and looked at him quizzically.
"So you want to marry my daughter? Well, I don't know about that. It seems to me you're far too hot-headed to be comfortable as a son-in-law. For all that, I can't rightly see that you show up so badly in the matter. You fought because—but we won't go into that. At any rate, if it weren't for you, I should have neither daughter nor mill at this moment. But to marry her—it's asking a deal; well, we must think about it."
And soon after that it was known through the length and breadth of Ling Crag village and Marshcotes parish that Gabriel Hirst and the miller's daughter were "bahn to be wed." Betty Binns named Greta "a forrard young hussie, about as fit to be a godly man's wife as skim-milk is fit to butter your bread;" and the rest of the village thought as much—for was not poor Greta "a furriner"?
And this was the beginning of a hard time for the preacher. He had trafficked too little in happiness to accept it quietly when it came. He felt an earnest need for some set-off in the shape of misery, and he had that fight with Griff ready to his conscience. The more he pondered over it, the greater seemed his offence. True, Griff looked at him nowadays with a kindlier eye than ever before; true, the sin had brought him his heart's desire (next after God, he added, but the parenthesis carried little conviction even to himself). But was the sin any the less in that it had borne good fruit? If he held that, he was no better than a papist, an idolater—and that was almost the hardest rap Gabriel could give himself.