Prisoners of Conscience by Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr (books to read this summer .TXT) 📖

him he sent from above--he sent you, John; he took me, he drew me out of many waters,--for great was his mercy toward me,--and he delivered my soul from the lowest hell."

----- [Footnote 4: Confession of Faith, chap. 3, secs. v-vii; chap. 16, sec. vii.]


XII


"AT LAST IT IS PEACE"

A week after this conversation David was near Lerwick. It was very early in the morning, and the sky was gray and the sea was gray, and through the vapory veiling the little town looked gray and silent as a city in a dream. During the voyage he had thought of himself always as hastening at once to Nanna's house, but as soon as his feet touched the quay he hesitated. The town appeared to be asleep; there was only here and there a thin column of peat smoke from the chimneys, and the few people going about their simple business in the misty morning were not known to him. Probably, also, he had some unreasonable expectation, for he looked sadly around, and, sighing, said:

"To be sure, such a thing would never happen, except in a dream."

After all, it seemed best that he should go first to Barbara Traill's. She would give him a cup of tea, and while he drank it he could send one of Glumm's little lads with a message to Nanna. There was nothing of cowardice in this determination; it was rather that access of reverential love which, as it draws nearer, puts its own desire and will at the feet of the beloved one.

Barbara's door stood open, and she was putting fresh fuel under the hanging tea-kettle. The smell of the peat smoke was homely and pleasant to David; he sniffed it eagerly as he called out:

"Well, then, mother, good morning!"

She raised herself quickly, and turned her broad, kind face to him. A strange shadow crossed it when she saw David, but she answered affectionately:

"Well, then, David, here we meet again!"

Then she hastened the morning meal, and as she did so asked question after question about his welfare and adventures, until David said a little impatiently:

"There is enough of this talk, mother. Speak to me now of Nanna Sinclair. Is she well?"

"Your aunt Sabiston is dead. There was a great funeral, I can tell you that. She has left all her money to the kirk and the societies; and a white stone as high as two men has come from Aberdeen for her grave. Well, so it is. And you must know, also, that my son has married himself, and not to my liking, and so he has gone from me; and your room is empty and ready, if you wish it so; and--"

"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 God 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.

"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 God 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 God, 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 passed 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 God 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 God 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 assembly 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 God'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 hell for the glory and honor of God, 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 God, if their sons and daughters were wandering in the awful outer darkness; and, moreover, she said she was not grateful to God for life, and she thought her consent to coming into life on such hard terms ought to have been first asked."