Prisoners of Conscience Part 18

"What good would eighty years of 'offers' do, if there was no election to eternal life?"

"Nanna, your father was a child of G.o.d, and you have loved him from your youth upward."

"Can that help Vala?"

"Even so. He keeps his mercy for children's children, to the third and fourth generation of them that fear him. Vala was in the direct succession of faith."

"You know what her father and his folk have been?"

"Yes, I know."

"Oh, why did my father let me marry the man? He should rather have tied me hands and feet, and cast me into the depths of the sea. He should have said to me, 'Nanna, you may have a bairn, and it may be a child of sin, and thus foreordained to h.e.l.l-fire.' Do you think then I would have wed Nicol Sinclair?"

"Ay, I think you would."

"Do you believe that I was born for that end?"

"I think you had set your heart on Nicol at all risks."

"At that time Nicol was in good favor with all folk."

"You have told me that your father liked him not, and that he said many things to you against a marriage with him; so, then, if your heart had not been fully set on its own way, his 'no' would have been sufficient. If we heed not fathers and mothers and teachers, we should not heed, Nanna, no, not if one came from the dead to warn us."

"That is an awful truth, David."

"And one must speak truth to heal a wounded soul. If there be a canker in the body, you know well the doctor must not spare the sharp knife. But I would not put away hope for Vala--no, indeed!"

"Why, David? Oh, why?"

"Has she not kindred in His presence? Will He not remember His promise to them? Will they forget to remind Him of it? I think not so hardly of the dead."

"David, I will tell you the last awful truth. I never could get the poor little one baptized,--things ay went so against it,--and she died without being signed and sealed to His mercy; that is the dreadful part of her death. I was ashamed--I was afraid to tell you before. O David, if you had stayed by Vala instead of going to that man, you might perhaps have won her this saving grace; but it was not to be."

David almost fainted with the shock of this intelligence. He understood now the anguish which was driving Nanna into the grave; and he had no comfort to offer her, for Nanna seemed to make out a terribly clear case of rejection and of foreordained refusal.

"I was feared to ask Nicol to stand with the child when it ought to have been presented in the kirk," she said.

"But your father?" asked David.

"I was feared to ask my father to stand in Nicol's place, lest it should make Nicol harder to me than he was. And," she continued, weeping bitterly as she spoke, "I thought not of Vala dying, and hoped that in the future there might be a way opened. If father had lived he would have seen to the child's right, but he was taken just when he was moving in the matter; and then Nicol grew harder and harder, and as for the kirk, he would not go there at all, and I had no kin left to take his place. Then the child was hurt, and I was long ill, and Nicol went away, and my friends grew cold, fearing lest I might want a little help, and even the minister was shy and far off. So I came out here with my sorrow, and waited and watched for some friend or some opportunity. 'To-morrow, perhaps to-morrow,'

I said; but it was not to be."

"Nanna, you should have told me this before. I would have made the promises for Vala; I would have done so gladly. Surely you should have spoken to me."

"Every day I thought about it, and then I was feared for what would happen when Nicol found it out. And do you not think that Matilda Sabiston would have sent him word that I had set you to do his duty? She would have twitted him about it until he would have raged like a roaring lion, and blackened my good name, and yours also, and most likely made it a cause for the knife he was ever so ready to use. And then, David, there are folks--kirk folks, and plenty of them--who would have said, 'There must be something wrong to set Nicol Sinclair to blood-spilling.' And Matilda Sabiston would have spoken out plainly and said, 'There is something wrong'--and this and that, and more to it."

"And well, then?"

"Well, then, being Matilda, no one would have thought of contradicting her; for she gives much money to the kirk and the societies, and has left all she has to free slaves. No; there was nothing to be done but to thole and be quiet."

"There might be some excuse for being quiet when Vala was not in danger, but when her life was going, why did you not send for the minister?"

"This is what happened; for, David, G.o.d's will must be done. No one came here but the doctor. On the second day he said, 'She is not very sick.' At his next visit he said, 'She will die.' Then I told him the child was not baptized, and prayed him to go for the minister. And he said he would certainly do so. But he was called here and there, and he forgot that day; and the next morning very early he went to the manse, and the minister had gone away; and the great storm kept him away for three days; so when he got back the message had been overlaid by many others."

"O Nanna! Nanna!"

"Yes, it was so. After the storm the doctor came again, and Vala was dying. And then he rode like a man riding for his life, and spoke very angrily to the minister, who was not to blame at all, and the minister was hurt at his words; but he came that afternoon, and it was _too late_."

"O Nanna! O Vala! Vala! Vala!"

"So the minister was angry with me for my delays, and he spoke the hard truth to me, and every word went to my soul like a sword. I thought I should die that night, and I longed to die. There was no friend to say to me one word of comfort, and I did not dare to pray.

I was feared G.o.d would ask me, 'Where is your child?' O David, what for at all did G.o.d make us? For this life is full of sorrow, and it is little comfort to be told that there is a worse one after it."

David took her hand, and a tear dropped upon her slender brown fingers; but he did not answer her question. Indeed, he could not. The same bewildering inquiry had haunted his own sad life.

So much sorrow and pain, and at the end perhaps to be "hardly saved," while all around innumerable souls were going down, without hope or helper, to eternal wrath! What for at all had G.o.d made man for such a fate?

For that he had _not_ made man for such ends was a fact outside their understandings, even as a possibility; and its very suggestion at this hour would have appeared to both an impiety of the worst kind.

So they consoled each other in the only way possible to souls at once so miserable and so submissive. With clasped hands they wept together over the inscrutable fate which had set them so hard a lesson to learn as life, with so little light to learn it by.

Natural events deepened the gloom of this spiritual thraldom. Storms of unusual severity swept over the bare, brown land, and the fishing was not only dangerous, but often impossible. But David regarded frost and snow, stormy winds and raging seas, poverty, pestilence, and death, as part of the eternal necessity pursuing its never-ending work through discord and imperfection. When there was a possibility of casting the fifty fathoms of ling-lines, David and his helpers were sure to venture out; when it was clearly impossible, he went to Nanna's and sat with her.

To the ordinary observer there did not seem to be pleasure enough in these visits to reward him for the stormy walk over the moor.

His clothing was often wet or stiff with frost, or he was breathless with fighting the strong wind, and not infrequently he lost himself in the bewildering snow; but with some trifle in his pocket for Nanna, he always managed to reach her. It might be only a fish, or a loaf of bread which Barbara had baked for her, or a little fresh milk in a bottle; but it was an offering made rich by that true affection which counted weariness rest for her sake.

He generally found her sitting brooding by her peat fire. Now, peat is cheap in Shetland, and Nanna had no stint of the fuel, but it does not make a cheerful fire. Its want of flame and its dull-red glow stimulate sorrowful musing; and as there is little radiation of heat from it, those whom it warms must sit close to its embers.

Thus David and Nanna pa.s.sed many hours of that sad winter. The snow often veiled what light of day there was, and the great sea-winds shrieked around the hut and blew the peat smoke down the chimney into their faces; and there was little warmth or comfort, and none of the pretty accessories that love generally delights in.

But David's love was not dependent upon accidentals. He had seen Nanna when he thought her very finely dressed; he had watched her when she was happy with her child and contented with his friendship; but she was not then more beautiful than she was now, when her eyes were haunted by despairing thoughts, and her face white and sad, and her n.o.ble form was shrouded rather than dressed in the black gown of her loss and woe.

To David she was ever Nanna. It was the woman beneath the outward form he desired--the woman whose tears and fears and wounded love were part of his own sufferings, whose despair was his despair, whose personality, even, affected something far deeper and chaster than that physical emotion too often misnamed love. He knew that he could live for her, however sorrowful life might be; he knew that he could gladly die for her, if his death could bring her spiritual peace or hope.

Thus, in the red light of the glowing peats, with the stormy world around them, to David and Nanna the winter months wore away. When Nanna was able to weep she was then at her best--the most companionable, the most grateful, and the most affectionate.

And few would think such circ.u.mstances favorable to the growth of love; but that is a great mistake. Love is not perfect love until it has been watered again and again with tears.

Of the growth of this affection it is not likely either was quite unaware; but there is an instinctive dislike in a pure heart to investigate the beginnings of love. It is like laying bare the roots of a flower to see how it grows. And in Nanna's case there was even a fear of such a condition. Love had brought her only heartbreak and despair. Without deliberate intention, she yet grew a little more shy of David; she began to restrain spiritual confidence and to weep alone. He was not slow to feel the change, and it depressed him, and made Barbara wonder at Nanna's ingrat.i.tude and womanish unreason.

"A good man fretting for her love, when there are hearts and hearts full waiting for his asking," she said to her neighbor Sally Groat.

And Sally answered: "Well, well, there is a fool in every one's sleeve sometimes; and David Borson is that daft about blood-kin, there is no talking to him. But this is what I say: for all your kindred, make much of your friends--and a friend you have been to him, Barbara."

"Well, then, I have done my best; and friends are to be taken with their faults. To-day I shall talk to David; for the spring comes on so quickly, and I heard that my son's ship had been spoke in the Iceland seas."

"It is long now since Nanna's baby died, and she still weeps without end for her. She ought to try and forget. It was but a sickly child, and never like to be world-wise or world-useful."

"I wouldn't say such words, Sally," answered Barbara, with some warmth. "No one can tell a mother, 'Thy heart shall not remember.' I have laid in earth five children, and do you think I ever slunk away from heartache by forgetting them? No, indeed! I would have counted _that_ treason against my own soul."

"G.o.d's blessing! there is none wants to contradict you, Barbara.

Don't be so hasty, woman. But you know there has been death and weeping in many houses besides Nanna's this winter."