Chapter 20

END OF THE STATE OF INDECISION.

Long before I had any thought of writing this story, I had told it
so often to my little maid that she now knows some of it better
than I. If you saw me looking up from my paper to ask her, "What
was it that Birse said to Jean about the minister's flowers?" or,
"Where was Hendry Munn hidden on the night of the riots?" and
heard her confident answers, you would conclude that she had been
in the thick of these events, instead of born many years after
them. I mention this now because I have reached a point where her
memory contradicts mine. She maintains that Rob Dow was told of
the meeting in the wood by the two boys whom it disturbed, while
my own impression is that he was a witness of it. If she is right,
Rob must have succeeded in frightening the boys into telling no
other person, for certainly the scandal did not spread in Thrums.
After all, however, it is only important to know that Rob did
learn of the meeting. Its first effect was to send him sullenly to
the drink.

Many a time since these events have I pictured what might have
been their upshot had Dow confided their discovery to me. Had I
suspected why Rob was grown so dour again, Gavin's future might
have been very different. I was meeting Rob now and again in the
glen, asking, with an affected carelessness he did not bottom, for
news of the little minister, but what he told me was only the
gossip of the town; and what I should have known, that Thrums
might never know it, he kept to himself. I suppose he feared to
speak to Gavin, who made several efforts to reclaim him, but
without avail.

Yet Rob's heart opened for a moment to one man, or rather was
forced open by that man. A few days after the meeting at the well,
Rob was bringing the smell of whisky with him down Banker's Close
when he ran against a famous staff, with which the doctor pinned
him to the wall.

"Ay," said the outspoken doctor, looking contemptuously into Rob's
bleary eyes, "so this is what your conversion amounts to? Faugh!
Rob Dow, if you, were half a man the very thought of what Mr.
Dishart has done for you would make you run past the public
houses."

"It's the thocht o' him that sends me running to them," growled
Rob, knocking down the staff. "Let me alane."

"What do you mean by that?" demanded McQueen, hooking him this
time.

"Speir at himsel'; speir at the woman."

"What woman?"

"Take your staff out o' my neck."

"Not till you tell me why you, of all people, are speaking against
the minister."

Torn by a desire for a confidant and loyalty to Gavin, Rob was