As yet her secret was unshared. Even her husband knew it not, for Matt was away in a distant town, fitting up machinery in a newly-erected mill. Miriam felt it to be as hard to carry alone the burden of a great joy as the burden of a great sorrow. But she resolved that none should know before him, whose right it was to first share the secret with herself; so she kept it, and pondered over it in her heart.
And now Matt was on his homeward journey, and Miriam knew that shortly they would be together in their cottage home. How should she meet him, and greet him, and confess to him the joy that overwhelmed her? What would he say? Would he love her more, or would the advent of the little life divide the love hitherto her undisputed own? Was the love of father towards mother a greater and stronger and holier love than that of husband towards wife? or did the birth of children draw off from each what was before a mutual interchange? Thus she teased her throbbing brain, and vexed her mind with questions she knew not how to solve. And yet her woman's instincts told her that the new love would weld together more closely the old, and that she and Matt would become one as never before. And then a dim memory of a sentence in the old creed came upon her—something about ‘One in three and three in one, undivided and eternal’—but she knew not what she thought.
As Miriam stood upon the little mound within the shadow of her roof-tree, eagerly scanning the moors for Matt's return, cool airs laden with moorland scents played around her, and masses of snowy cloud sailed along the horizon, flushing beneath the touch of the after-glow with as pure a rose as that mantling on her womanly face. The blue distances overhead were deepening with sundown, and the great sweeps of field and wild were sombre with the hill shadows that began to fall. In a copse near where she stood a little bird was busy with her fledglings, and from a meadow came the plaintive bleat of a late yeaned lamb. From the distant village the wind carried to her ears the cry of an infant—a cry that lingered and echoed and started strange melodies in the awakening soul of Miriam. Child of the hills as she was, never before in all her thirty years of familiarity with them, and freedom among them, had she seen and felt them as now. A great and holy passion was upon her, and she took all in through the medium of its golden haze. The early flowers at her feet glowed like stars of hope and promise—and the bursting buds of the trees told of spring's teeming womb and dew of youth; while the shadow of her cottage gable and chimney—falling as it did across the little mound on which she stood—recalled to her the promises of Him who setteth the solitary in families.
Then she returned to herself, and to her new and opening world of maternity. No longer would she be the butt at which the rude, though good-natured, jests of her neighbours were thrown, for she too would soon hold up her head proudly among the mothers of Rehoboth. And as for Matt's mother—fierce Calvinist that she was, and whom in the past she had so much feared—what cared she for her now? She would cease to be counted by her as one of the uncovenanted, and told that she had broken the line of promise given to the elect. How well she remembered the night when the old woman, taking up the Bible, read out aloud: ‘The promise is unto you, and to your children,’ afterwards clinching the words by saying: ‘Thaa sees, Miriam, thaas noan in it, for thaa's no childer’; and how, when she gently protested, ‘But is not the promise to all that are afar off?’ the elect sister of the church and daughter of God destroyed her one ray of hope by saying: ‘Yi! but only to as mony as the Lord aar God shall co.’ And Matt—poor Matt—across whom the cold shadow had so long lain, and which, despite his love of her, would creep now and again like a cloud over the sunshine of his face—Matt, too, would be redeemed from his long disappointment, and renewed in strength as he saw a purpose in his life's struggle, even the welfare of his posterity. These thoughts, and many others, all passed through Miriam's mind as she stood looking out from the mound upon the sundown moors.
Dreaming thus, she was startled by a well-known voice; and looking in the direction whence the sound came, she saw her husband in the distance beckoning her to meet him. Nor did she wait for his further eager gesticulations, but at once, with fleet foot, descended the slope, towards the path by which he was approaching.
Ere she reached him, however, she realized as never before the secret she was about to confide, and for the first time in her life became self-conscious. How could she meet Matt, and how could she tell him? In a moment her naturalness and girlish buoyancy forsook her. She was lost in a distrait mood. Joy changed to shyness; a hot flush, not of shame, but of restraint, mounted her cheeks. Then she slackened her pace, and for a moment wished that Matt could know all apart from her confession.
To how many of nervous temperament is self-consciousness the bane of existence—while the more such try to master it, the more unnatural they become! It separates souls, begetting an aloofness which, misunderstood, ends in mistrust and alienation; and it lies at the root of too many of the fatal misconceptions of life. There are loving hearts that would pay any price to be freed from the self-enfolding toils that wrap them in these crisis hours. And so would Miriam's, for she felt herself shrink within herself at the approach of Matt. She knew nothing of mental moods, never having heard of them, nor being able to account for, or analyze, them. All she knew, poor girl, was that for the first time in her life she was not herself; and as she responded to Matt's warm greeting, she felt she was not the wife, nor the woman, who but a few weeks ago had so affectionately farewelled him, and who but a few moments ago so longed for his return.
Nor was Matt unconscious of this change, for as soon as the greeting was over he said, with tones of anxiety in his voice:
‘What ails thee, my lass?’
‘Who sez as onnythin' ails me?’ was her reply, but in a tone of such forced merriment that Matt only grew the more concerned.