Prisoners of Conscience Part 24

"Yes, yes, Barbara! Keep your room for me, and I will pay the price of it."

"I will do that gladly; and as for the price, we shall have no words about that."

"All this is well enough, but, mother! mother! what is there to hide from me? Speak with a straight tongue. Where is Nanna?"

Then Barbara said plainly, "Nanna is dead."

With a cry of amazed anguish David leaped to his feet, instinctively covering his ears with his hands, for he could not bear such words to enter them. "_Dead!_" he whispered; and Barbara saw him reeling and swaying like a tottering pillar. She pushed a chair toward him, and was thankful that he had strength left to take its support. But she made no outcry, and called in none of the neighbors. Quietly she stood a little way off, while David, in a death-like silence, fought away the swooning, drowning wave which was making his heart stand still and his limbs fail him. For she knew the nature of the suffering man--knew that when he came to himself there would be none but G.o.d could intermeddle in his heart's bitterness and loss.

After a sharp struggle David opened his eyes, and Barbara gave him a drink of cold water; but she offered neither advice nor consolation.

Only when David said, "I am sick, mother, and I will go to my room and lie down on my bed," she answered:

"My dear lad, that is the right way. Sleep, if sleep you can."

About sunsetting David asked Barbara for food; and as she prepared it he sat by the open window, silent and stupefied, dominated by the somber inertia of hopeless sorrow. When he began to eat, Barbara took from a china jar two papers, and gave them to him.

"I promised Nanna to put them into your hands," she said.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ON THE WAY TO NANNA'S COTTAGE.]

"When did she die?"

"Last December, the fourteenth day."

"Did you see her on that day?"

"I was there early in the morning, for I saw there was snow to fall.

She was dead at the noon hour."

"You saw her go away?"

"No; I was afraid of the storm. I left her at ten o'clock. She could not then speak, but she gave me the papers. We had talked of them before."

"Then did she die alone?"

"She did not. I went into the next cottage and told Christine Yell that it was the last hour with Nanna; and she said, 'I will go to her,' and so she did."

"You should have stayed, mother."

"My lad, the snow was already falling, and I had to hasten across the moor, as there was very good reason to do."

Then David went out, and Barbara watched him take the road that led to Nanna's empty cottage. The door opened readily to the lifted latch, and he entered the forsaken room. The peat fire had long ago burned itself to ashes. The rose-plant, which had been Nanna's delight, had withered away on its little shelf by the window. But the neighbors had swept the floor and put the simple furniture in order. David drew the bolt across the door, and opened the papers which Nanna had left for him. The first was a bequest to him of the cottage and all within it; the second was but a little slip on which the dying woman had written her last sad messages to him:

Oh, my love! my love! Farewell forever! I am come to the end of my life. I am going away, and I know not where to. All is dark. But I have cast myself at His feet, and said, "Thy will be done!"

I am still alive, David. I have been alone all night, and every breath has been a death-pang. How can His eternal purpose need my bitter suffering? Oh, that G.o.d would pity me! His will be done!

My love, it is nearly over. _I have seen Vala!_ At last it is peace--peace! His will be done! Mercy--mercy--mercy--

These pitiful despairs and farewells were written in a large, childish hand, and on a poor sheet of paper. David spread this paper upon Vala's couch, and, kneeling down, covered it with tears and kisses; but anon he lifted it up toward heaven, and prayed as men pray when they feel prayer to be an immediate and veritable thing--when they detain G.o.d, and clasp his feet, and cling to his robe, and will not let him go until he bless them.

Christine Yell had seen David enter the cottage, and after an hour had pa.s.sed she went to the door intending to speak to him; but she heard the solemn, mysterious voice of the man praying, and she went away and called her neighbors, Margaret Jarl and Elga Fae and Thora Thorson. And they talked of David a little, and then Magnus Thorson, the father-in-law of Thora, being a very old man, went alone into Nanna's cottage to see David. And after a while the women were called, and Christine took with her a plate of fish and bread which she had prepared; and David was glad of their sympathy.

They sat down outside the door. The tender touch of the gray gloaming softened the bleak cliffs and the brown moorland, and the heavens were filled with stars. Then softly and solemnly Christine spoke of Nanna's long, hard fight with death, and of the spiritual despair which had intensified her suffering.

"It was in season and out of season that she was at Vala's grave,"

said Christine, "and kneeling and lying on the cold ground above her; and the end was--what could only be looked for--a cough and a fever, and the slow consumption that wasted her away."

"Was there none of you to comfort her?"

"It is true, David, that the child was never baptized," said Christine; "so, then, what comfort could there be for her? And then she began to think that G.o.d had never loved her."

"Thanks to the Best, she knows now how far wrong she was," said David, fervently; "she knows now that his love is from everlasting to everlasting. Her poor heart, wearied with so many sorrows and troubled by so many fears, has tasted one supreme happiness--that G.o.d is love."

"She thought for sure that he was continually angry with her. 'If he had cared for my soul,' she said to me, one day, 'he would not have let me marry Nicol Sinclair. He would have kept his hand about me until my cousin David Borson came from the Hebrides. And if he had cared for my poor bairn he would not, by this and that, have prevented the minister coming to baptize her."

"Was she long ill?" asked David.

"At the beginning of last winter she became too ill to go to the ordinances, and too feared to open her Bible, lest she should read her own condemnation in it; and so gradually she seemed to lose all hope, either for this life or the next one. And folk wearied of her complaining, I think."

"The elders and the minister, did they not try to comfort her?"

"At first Elder Peterson and Elder Hoag came to see her; but Nanna put strange questions to them--questions they could not answer; and they said the minister could not answer them, either--no, nor the whole a.s.sembly of the kirk of Scotland. And I was hearing that the minister was angered by her words and her doubting, and he told her plainly 'women had no call to speer after the "why" of G.o.d's purposes.' And indeed, David, she was very outspoken,--for she was fretful with pain and fever,--and she told him that she was not thankful to go to h.e.l.l for the glory and honor of G.o.d, and that, moreover, she did not want to go to heaven if Vala was not there.

And when the minister said, '_Whist_, woman!'--for he was frightened at her words,--she would not be still, but went on to wonder how fathers and mothers could be happy, even in the very presence of G.o.d, if their sons and daughters were wandering in the awful outer darkness; and, moreover, she said she was not grateful to G.o.d for life, and she thought her consent to coming into life on such hard terms ought to have been first asked."

And Christine looked at David, and ceased speaking, for she was afraid that her words would both anger and trouble the young man.

But David's eyes were full of happy tears, and there was a tender smile round his mouth. He was thinking of the glad surprises that Nanna must have had--she who belonged to the G.o.d of compa.s.sions.

After all her shuddering questions and lamentable doubts and cruel pain, the everlasting arms under her; Vala and her beloved dead to comfort her; ineffable peace; unclouded joy; the night past; the last tear wiped away! At that moment he felt that it was too late to weep for Nanna; indeed, he smiled like one full of blessed thought.

And Christine, a little irritated by the unexpected mood, did not further try to smooth over the hard facts of the lonely woman's death-bed.

"The minister was angry with her, and he said G.o.d was angry. And Nanna said, well, then, she knew that he did not care about her perishing; it was all one to him. A little happiness would have saved her, and he refused her the smallest joy; and she did not see how crushing the poor and broken-hearted in the dust increased his glory. The minister told her she was resisting G.o.d, and she said, no; that was not possible. G.o.d was her master, and he smote her, and perhaps had the right to do so; but she was not his child: no father would treat a child so hardly as he had treated her. She was a slave, and must submit, and weep and die at the corner of the highway. And, to be sure, the minister did not think of her pain and her woman's heart,--what men do?--and he thought it right to speak hard words to her. And then Nanna said she wished they would all leave her alone with her sorrow, and so they did."

Then, suddenly and swiftly as a flash of light, a word came to David.

His heart burned, and his tongue was loosened, and then and there he preached to the old man and the three women the unsearchable riches of the cross of Christ. He glorified G.o.d because Nanna had learned Christ at the radiant feet of Christ, in the joy and love of the redeemed. He took his Bible from his pocket, and repeated all the blessed words he had marked and learned. Until the midnight moon climbed cold and bright to the zenith he spoke. And old Magnus Thorson stood up, leaning on his staff, full of holy wonder, and the women softly sobbed and prayed at his feet. And when they parted there was in every heart a confident acceptance of David's closing words:

"Whoever rests, however feebly, on the eternal mercy shall live forever."

After this "call" sleep was impossible to David. That insight which changes faith into knowledge had comforted him concerning his dead. He lay down on Vala's couch, and he felt sure that Nanna's smile filled the silence like a spell; for there are still moments when we have the transcendental faculties of the illuminated who, as the apostle says, "have tasted of the powers of the world to come"--still moments when we feel that Jacob's ladder yet stands between heaven and earth, and that we can see the angels ascending and descending upon it. He was so still that he could hear the beating of his own heart, but clear and vivid as light his duty spread out before him. He had found his vocation, and, oh, how rapidly men grow under the rays of that invisible sun!

The next morning he went to see the minister. He was seated, writing his sermon, precisely as David had found him on the occasion of his last visit. So much had happened to David since that morning that he found it difficult to believe nothing had happened to the minister.

He looked up at the interruption with the same slight annoyance, but the moment he saw David his manner changed. He rose up quickly and went to meet him, and as he clasped his hand looked with curious intentness into his face.

"You are much changed, David," he said. "What has happened to you?"