"Yes, and that pale blue tie, how it matches the flower in his coat!"
Thus they gossiped, all unaware that it was the hard-earned money of the plain-favoured and shy "best-man" which had bought all that wedding raiment, paid for that sky-blue tie, and that even the flower in the bridegroom's button-hole had grown in Nathan Monypenny's garden, and had been plucked and affixed by his hands.
Thus it was that the story began, and this was the reason why Nathan sought carefully day by day, if by any means he might yet withdraw his friend's erring feet out of fearful pit and miry clay.
Never a morning dawned for Nathan, waking, as he had done all his life, with the hum of the ranged bee-hives under his window in his ear, or else listening to the pattering of the winter storms on his lattice, that he did not bethink himself: "It is I who am responsible. I must help him." Then he would add with a sigh: "And her."
And so help he did, for the most part in ways hidden and secret. For he dared not give money to Doog. He knew all too well where that would have gone. Neither for very pride's sake, and in reverence for the secret of his heart, could he bring himself to give money to Dahlia. Nevertheless, as by some unseen hand, the tired heartsick woman found her burden in many directions marvellously eased.
Sticks were stacked in the little wood-shed which Doog had set up in the first virtuous glow of husbandhood—and never been inside since. No hens laid like Dahlia's—and the strange thing was that they invariably laid in the night, sometimes a dozen at a time, all in one nest. Her children, playing in the hot dusk of her little garden, had more than once turned up a sovereign or a crownpiece wrapped in paper and run with it to their mother.
From Nathan's shop, also, there came flitches of bacon which were never ordered by Dahlia Carnochan—flour and meal, too, in times of stress. And it nearly always was a time of stress with Doog.
Twice a year Nathan, with much circumlocution, would extract a reluctant shilling or two from Doog on a flush pay-night, taking care that some of his cronies should hear the colloquy. Then in the morning he would send round the six months' account duly and completely receipted.
But more often than not the crony would put it all round the village that Nathan Monypenny had been dunning poor Doog Carnochan the night before; and so, among the unthinking, Nathan got the reputation of being a hard man.
"He doesna do onything for nocht! Na, sune or syne, Nathan likes to see the colour o' his siller," was said of him behind his back. And Doog's generous kindness of heart was dwelt upon as a foil to his friend's niggardliness.