Home › The Little Minister › The Little Minister: Rintoul

The Little Minister: Rintoul

Babbie told Gavin her story then--that she was to be Lord Rintoul's bride on the morrow. He had found her when a mite, fallen from a gipsy wagon, and for her beauty had reared and educated her. Babbie and Gavin tried to give each other up; then Babbie heard Lord Rintoul's voice, and in terror clung to Gavin, and the two ran off in the darkness to the gipsy camp on the hill to be married over the tongs by the gipsy king.

That terrible night, when the storm coming, the earl seeking his lost bride, the dour elders relentlessly following their errant minister--and drunken Rob madly bound to save his friend.

Then came the flood, when the heavens opened and lochs seemed to fall. Babbie, separated from Gavin after the gipsy marriage, fell into Rob's hands, but mercifully escaped and reached the manse. Gavin wandered all night through the storm after Babbie, and I found him exhausted near my house next morning. He told me all that had passed, and my anxiety for Margaret at the consequences of his rash act led me to attempt to reach Thrums. But before I left it was necessary to tell Gavin my story, that he was my son and Margaret was my wife. Margaret had married Adam Dishart first, and he had gone to sea, and after two years all thought him lost, and she married me. Then when Gavin was three years old Adam suddenly returned, and I passed out of Margaret's life forever. Gavin sought to learn if Babbie had been carried off by Lord Rintoul, and found the earl on an island in the midst of floods. Gavin jumped to his aid, but nothing could be done, and it was thought both must perish. His congregation, gathered by the precipice, forgot they had meant to expel him, and listening with dim eyes to his brave last words, knew only that they loved him. Then Rob Dow threw his life away to save his friend, and the rope with which he sprang into the flood withdrew minister and earl to safety. So Gavin and Babbie were married, and no one seeing Babbie going demurely to church on Gavin's arm would guess her history. Yet sometimes at night Babbie slips into her gipsy's frock, with rowan berries in her hair, and Gavin always kisses her. My little maid knows this story as well as I do. She was named for Margaret, and has been my dearest comfort since my Margaret died; but I have lived to rejoice in the happiness of Gavin and Babbie and their children. THACKERAY "IN the creation of living character, Thackeray stands simply alone among novelists," says Saintsbury. Becky Sharp, unscrupulous and fascinating; Colonel Newcome, noble and lovable; Clive and Pendennis, natural young men-all, from Barry Lyndon to Denis Duval, live and have a being of their own. "Once created," says Thackeray, they lead me and I follow where they direct. . . . I have never seen the people I describe nor heard the conversations I put down. . . . I am often astonished myself to read it.... It seems as if an occult power was moving the pen."

It was this very quality of a life outside his own mind which made his characters so vivid to himself as well as to his readers. He says: "I know these people utterly-I know the sound of their voices." He even visited, after the publication of "Vanity Fair," the hotel in Brussels where Becky Sharp had stopped. He never grew tired of most of these people who were born out of his imagination. The one who bored him was Esmond and he lived in the only novel of Thackeray's which was completely planned.

Paradoxically enough, while his people thus lived outside of himself, settings and episodes throughout his novels are traceable to his own experience. His school, Characterhouse, appears as Slaughterhouse and Grey Friars; Pendennis at his university relived Thackeray's own life; Grub Street and its inhabitants existed in reality as in "Pendennis." Personalities and scenes, however, which live again in his books, are so transmuted by his genius as to seem absolute creations.