Of course I have been deadly afraid of a minister all my life, and the times we have had the bishops and presiding elders and pastors to dinner with us in honor of the memory of Grandmother Wickliffe have been times of torture to me. I always thought, of course, they were not real men, though the way they looked and their hearty appetites for both viands and jokes kept them from seeming conventional angels; but this Gabriel materialization that sat close to me on that rock, which was the end of the universe, was a strong, heart-beating man, who alone stood between me and the real wilderness of the woods and the awful wilderness of my ignorant and convicted spirit. It was terrific, but heavenly sweet.
“I know He made me,—I found that out to-night,—but I don’t see what for, and I wish I knew why,” I said in the smallest voice I had ever heard myself use; and this time there was just the echo of that last sob left to sigh out on the wind.
“He saw I needed you pretty badly a few hours ago,” Gabriel said in that delicious warm voice he had used to me to encourage me through the worst baby chokings.
“I’ve always been a dreadful woman, and wanted to be more and more so until I heard you sing ‘Stand up for Jesus!’ when I was dead and gone from fear of your gun, and talk to Bill about loving the girl with the snuff-stick in the right way, and the man, too, just because we are all God’s children. I was lost, but Something found me in the dark just before you and the baby did. I never belonged to anything or anybody before, and even now how do I know that God wants me after the awful way I have lived?” My words trailed in positive anguish.
“He does want you, woman dear. Take my word for that, or would you like me to quote you about five hundred passages from His Book to prove it to you?” He laughed as he said it in a wooing, comforting way that was both manly and ministerial.
“You don’t know me. I’m a perfect stranger to you,” I answered with agonizing honesty, because the regard of that man, whom I had never seen a few hard, long hours before, was becoming very valuable to me, and I felt afraid that if I didn’t warn him about myself before he took me for a friend, I might not ever do it, but dishonestly make him like me, as I have done to so many other men.
“We couldn’t be perfect strangers after the battle with those potatoes—and after seeing what that flash revealed of the valley together, could we?” he asked, with the amusement sounding still more plainly in his voice. “And you know you heard me preach twice. Isn’t that a kind of left-handed introduction?”
“People that are introduced to me don’t ever know me,” I answered forlornly; for I felt that the time had come for me to confess my sins before men, and this was the hardest man to do it to I had ever met, and also the easiest.
“Then tell me about yourself. I’ve been wondering a bit since I have had time. You answered a hurry-call I had to send above pretty quickly,” he said in a beguiling and encouraging tone of voice that sounded just as other agreeable men’s voices have sounded to me before, only more so.
Just then a furry thing rustled in the bushes, and I moved an inch nearer him. I felt him stir, but he sat comfortingly still. I didn’t want him to move to me.