GROAT.
GROAT.
“Please, minister, I think not. It is Nanna Sinclair.”
“I thought so. You love her, David?”
“Better than my life.”
“And she does not love you?”
“She loves me as I love her.”
“Then what is there to make you miserable? In a few months, David, you will marry her and be happy.”
“Nanna will not marry me in a few months–she will not marry me at all.”
“Nanna ought not to trouble a good man with such threats. Of course she will marry. Why not?”
Then David told the minister “why not.” He listened at first with incredulity, and then with anger. “Nanna Sinclair is guilty of great presumption,” he answered. “Why should she sift God’s ordination and call in question results she is not able to understand? Marriage is in the direct command of God, and good men and women innumerable have obeyed the command without disputing. It is Nanna’s place to take gratefully the love God has sent her–to obey, and not to argue. Obedience is the first round of the ascending ladder, David; and when any one casts it off, he makes even the commencement of spiritual life impossible.”
He spoke rapidly, and more as if he was trying to convince himself than to console David. His words, in any case, made no impression. David listened in his shy, sensitive, uncomplaining way, but the minister was quite aware he had touched only the outermost edge of feeling. David’s eyes, usually mild and large,had now his soul at their window. It was not always there, but when present it infected and went through those upon whom it looked. The minister could not bear the glance. He rose, and gently pushed David into a chair, and laid his hands on his shoulders, and looked steadily at him. He could see that a gap had been made in his life, and that the bright, strong man had emerged from it withered and stricken. He sat down by his side and said:
“Talk, David. Tell me all.”
And David told him all, and the two men wept together. Yet, though much that David said went like a two-edged sword through the minister’s convictions, he resented the thrust, and held on to his stern plan of sin and retribution like grim death, all the more so because he felt it to be unconsciously attacked. And when David said: “It is the Shorter Catechism, minister; it is a hard book for women and bairns, and I wonder why they don’t teach them from the Scriptures, which are easy and full of grace,” the answer came with a passionate fervor that was the protest for much besides the catechism.
“David! David! You must say nothing against the Shorter Catechism. It is the Magna Charta of Calvinism, and woe worth the day for dear old Scotland when its silver trumpet shall no longer be heard and listened to. Its rules and bonds and externals are all very necessary. Believe me, David, few men would remain religious without rules and bonds and externals.”
“I am, as I said, minister, all at sea. I find nothing within my soul, nothing within my life-experience,to give me any hope, and I am going away a miserable man.”
“David, your hope is not to be grounded on anything within yourself or your life-experience. When you wish to steady your boat, do you fix your anchor on anything within it, or do you cast your anchor outside?”
“I cast it out.”
“So the soul must cast out its anchor, and lay hold, not on anything within itself, but on the hope set before it. The anchor of your boat often drags, David, and you drift in spite of it, for there is no sure bottom; but the soul that anchors on the truth of God, the immutability of his counsels, the faithfulness of his promises, is surely steadfast. For I will tell you a great thing, David: God has given us this double guaranty–he has not only said, but sworn it.”
Thus the two men talked the morning away. Then David remembered that he had come specially to ask the minister to write out his will and take charge of the money he would leave behind and the rents accruing from the hire of his boat and lines. There was nothing unusual in this request. Minister Campbell had already learned how averse Shetlanders are to having dealings with a lawyer, and he was quite willing to take the charge David desired to impose upon him.
“I may not come back to Shetland,” David said. “My father went away and never returned. I am bound for foreign seas, and I may go down any day or night. All I have is Nanna’s. If she is sick or in trouble, you will see to her relief, minister. And if Icome not back in five years, sell the boat and lines and make over all to Nanna Sinclair.”
Then a writing was drawn up to this effect; and David brushed the tears from his eyes with his right hand, and put it, wet with them, into the minister’s. He had nothing more to say with his lips, but oh, how eloquent were his great, sad, imploring eyes! They went together to the manse door, and then the minister followed him to the gate of the small croft. And as they stood, one on either side of it, David murmured:
“Good-by, minister.”
“Good-by, David, and see that you don’t think hardly of either your God or your creed. Your God will be your guide, even unto death; and as for your creed, whatever faults men may find in it, this thing is sure: Calvinism is the highest form ever yet assumed by the moral life of the world.”
The next morning, in the cold white light of the early dawn, David left Lerwick. The blue moon was low in the west, the mystery and majesty of earth all around him. At this hour the sea was dark and quiet, the birds being still asleep upon their rocky perches, and the only noise was the flapping of the sails, and the water purring softly with little treble sounds among the clincher chains and against the sides of the boat. David was a passenger on the mail-boat. He had often seen her at a distance, but now, being on board, he looked her over with great interest. She seemed to be nearly as broad as she was long, very bluff at the bows, and so strongly built that he involuntarily asked the man at the wheel: “What kind of seas at all is this boat built for?”
“She’s built for the Pentland Firth seas, my lad,weather permitting. And there’s no place on God’s land or water where them two words mean so much; for I can tell you, weathernotpermitting, even this boat couldn’t live in them.”
Gradually David made his way to Glasgow, and from Glasgow to London. Queen Victoria had then just been crowned, and one day David saw her out driving. The royal carriage, with its milk-white horses, its splendid outriders and appointments, and its military escort, made a great impression on him, but the fair, girlish face of the young, radiant queen he never forgot. Hitherto kings and queens had been only a part of his Bible history; he had not realized their relation to his own life. Shetland was so far from London that newspapers seldom reached Lerwick. Politics were no factor in its social or religious life. The civil lords came to try criminal cases, but the minister was the abiding power. Until David saw the young queen he had not heard of her accession to the throne, but with the first knowledge of her “right” there sprang up in his heart the loyalty she claimed. Had any one asked him in that hour to enter her service, he would have stepped on board her war-ships with the utmost enthusiasm.
But nobody did ask him, and he found more commonplace employment on theElizabeth, a trig, well-built schooner, trading to the Mediterranean for fruits and other products of the Orient. The position was the very one his father had so earnestly desired. Touching first at one historic city and then at another, living in the sunshine, and seeing the most picturesqueside of civilization, David added continually to the store of those impressions which go to make up the best part of life.
The captain of theElizabethowned the vessel and was very fond of her; consequently he was not long in finding out the splendid sea qualities of the young Shetlander. On the fourth voyage he made David his mate, and together they managed theElizabethso cleverly that she became famous for her speed and good fortune. It was indeed wonderful to see what consciousness and sympathy they endowed her with.
“Elizabethis behaving well,” the captain said one morning, as he watched her swelling canvas and noted her speed.
“There isn’t much sea on,” answered David; “hardly more than what we used to call in Shetland ‘a northerly lipper.’ But yet I don’t like the look to the east’ard and the nor’ard.”
“Nor I. You had better tellElizabeth. Talk to her, David; coax her to hurry and get out of the bay. Promise her a new coat of paint; say that I think of having her figurehead gilded.”
David was used to hearingElizabethtreated as if she were a living, reasonable creature, but he always smiled kindly at the imputation; it touched something kindred in his own heart, and he replied:
“She’ll do her best if she’s well handled. It’s her life as well as ours, you know.”
“It is; anybody knows that. If you ever went into shipping and insurance offices, David, you would hear even landsmen say so. They make all their calculations on the averagelifeof a ship. My lad, men buildher of wood and iron, but there is something more in a good ship than wood and iron.”
“Look to the east, captain.”
Then there was the boatswain’s whistle, and the shout of sailormen, and the taking in of sails, and that hurrying and scurrying to make a ship trig which precedes the certain coming of a great storm. And the Bay of Biscay is bad quarters in any weather, but in a storm it defies adequate description. When the wind has an iron ring and calls like a banshee, and the waves rise to its order as high as the masthead, then God help the men and ships on the Bay of Biscay!
Five days after the breaking of this storm theElizabethwas sorely in need of such potential help. Her masts were gone, the waves were doubling over her, and her plunges were like the dive of a whale. At the wheel there was a man lashed,–for the hull was seldom above water,–and this man was David Borson. He was the only sailor left strong enough for the work, and he was at the last point of endurance. The icy gusts roared past him; the spray was like flying whiplashes; and it was pitiful to see David, with his bleeding hands on the wheel, stolidly shaking his head as the spray cut him.
He had been on deck for forty hours, buffeted by the huge waves, and he was covered with salt-water boils. His feet were flayed and frozen, and his hands so gashed that he dared not close or rest them, lest the agony of unclasping or moving them again should make him lose his consciousness. He feared, also, that his feet were so badly frozen that he would never be able to walk on them any more. These miseriesothers were sharing with him; but David had been struck by a falling spar at the beginning of the storm, and there was now an abscess forming on his lung that tortured him beyond his usual speechless patience. “God pity me!” he moaned. “God pity me!”
When the storm ceased theElizabethwas as bare as a newly launched hull, and wallowing like a soaked log. David had fallen forward on his face, and was asleep or insensible. He did not hear the handspike thumped upon the deck, and the cry, “On deck! on deck! Lord help us! she is going down!” But some one lifted him on to a raft which had been hastily lashed together, and the misery that followed was only a part of some awful hours when physical pain from head to feet drove him to the verge of madness. He never knew how long it was before they were met by theAlert, a large passenger packet going into the port of London, and taken on board. Four of the men were then dead from exhaustion, and the physician on theAlertlooked doubtfully at David’s feet.
“But he is dying,” he said, “and why give him further pain?”
Then a young man stepped forward and looked at David. There was both pity and liking in his face, and he stooped, and said something in the dying man’s ear. A faint smile answered the words; and the youth spoke to the doctor, and both of them went to work with a will. The effort, even then so desperate, was ere long complicated by fever and delirium, and when David came to himself it was almost like a new birth. He was weaker than an infant–too weak, indeed, to wonder or speculate, or even remember.
He only knew that he was in a large room and that two men were with him. One was at his bedside, quiet and drowsy; the other was reading in a Bible, sitting close by the shaded candle. David knew it was a Bible. Who does not know a Bible, even afar off? No matter how it may be bound, the book has a homely and familiar look that no other book has. David shut his eyes again after seeing it; he felt as safe and happy as if a dear friend had spoken to him. And in a few days the man with the Bible began to come near him, and to read softly the most tender and gracious words he could find in that tenderest of all books.
This was the beginning of an interval of delicious rest to David. It was as if some strong angel swung and hushed and wrapped him in a drowsy, blissful torpor. He felt no pain, not even in his tortured feet, and his hands lay at rest upon the white coverlet, healed of all their smarting and aching. For once in his hard life they were not tired or sore. He knew that he was fed and turned, that his pillows were made soft and cool, and that there was the vague sense of kind presence about him; that sometimes he heard, like a heavenly echo, words of comfort that he seemed to have heard long ago; that he slept and wakened, and slept again, with a conscious pleasure in the transitions.
And he asked no questions. He was content to let life lie in blissful quiescence, to be still, and keep his eyes closed to the world, and his ears deaf to its cries. Gradually these sensations increased in strength. One day he heard his nurse say that it would be well to remove him into an entirely fresh room. And heknew that he was lifted in strong arms, and anon breathed a clearer atmosphere, and slept a life-giving sleep. When he awoke he had new strength. He voluntarily opened his eyes, and saw a tree waving branches covered with fresh, crinkly leaves before his window. It was like a glimpse of heaven. And that afternoon his preserver came to his side and said:
“Thee is much better. Can thee listen to me now?”
Then David looked at the young man and smiled; and their eyes met, and their hands met, and the well man stooped to the sick man and kissed his cheek.
“I am Friend John Priestly,” he said. “What is thy name?”
“David–David Borson–Shetland.”
“David, thee is going to live. That is good news, is it not?”
“No; life is hard–cruel hard.”
“Yes, but thee can say, ‘The Lord is mine helper.’ Thee can pray now?”
“I have no strength.”
“If thee cannot speak, lift up thy hand. He will see it and answer thee.”
And David’s face shadowed, and he did not lift up his hand; also, if the whisper in his heart had been audible, John Priestly would have heard him say, “What is the use of prayer? The Lord has cast me off.”
But John did not try the strength of his patient further at that time. He sat by his side, and laid his hand upon David’s hand, and began to repeat in a slow, assuring voice the One Hundred and Third Psalm. Its familiar words went into David’s ears likemusic, and he fell sweetly asleep to its promises. For, though men in their weakness and haste are apt to say, “The Lord hath forgotten to be gracious,” they who have but once felt his love, though dimly and far off, cannot choose but trust in it, even to the grave.
And souls fraternize in their common exile. John Priestly loved the young man whom he had saved, and David felt his love. As he came fully back to life the past came clearly back to memory. He remembered Nanna as those who love white jasmine remember it when its starry flowers are gone–with a sweet, aching longing for their beauty and perfume. He remembered those terrible days when physical pain had been acute in every limb and every nerve, when he had fainted with agony, but never complained. He remembered his lonely journey to the grave’s mouth, and the dim human phantoms who had stood, as it were, afar off, and helped and cheered him as best they could. And he understood that he had really been born again: a new lease of life had been granted him, and he had come back to earth, as so many wish to come back, with all his old loves and experiences to help him in the future.
If only God would love him! If only God would give him ever so small a portion of his favor! If he would only let him live humbly before him, with such comfort of home and friends as a poor fisherman might have! He wondered, as he lay still, what he or his fathers had done that he should be so sorely punished. Perhaps he had shown too great partiality to his father’s memory in the matter of Bele Trenby. Well, then, he must bear the consequences; for even at thishour he could not make up his mind to blame his father more than his father had blamed himself.
And as he lay watching the waving of the green trees, and inhaling the scent of the lilies and violets from the garden below him, he began to think of Shetland with a great longing. The bare, brown, treeless land called him with a hundred voices, and thoughts of Nanna came like a small bird winging the still, blue air. For sorrow can endear a place as well as joy; and the little hut on the bare moor, in which he could see Nanna working at her braiding or her knitting, was the spot on all the earth that drew his soul with an irresistible desire.
Oh, how he wanted to see Nanna! Oh, how he wanted to see her! Just to hold her hand, and kiss her face, and sit by her side for an hour or two! He did not wish either her conscience or his own less tender, but he thought that now, perhaps, they might be cousins and friends, and so comfort and help each other in the daily trials of their hard, lonely lives.
One day, when he was much stronger, as he sat by the open window thinking of these things, John Priestly came to read to him. John had a faculty of choosing the sweetest and most comfortable portions of the Book in his hand. This selection was not without purpose. He had learned from David’s delirious complainings the intense piety of the youth, and the spiritual despair which had intensified his sufferings. And he hoped God, through him, would say a word of comfort to the sorrowful heart. So he chose, with the sweet determination of love, the most glorious and the most abounding words of the divine Father.
David listened with a reserved acceptance. It was in a measure a new Scripture to him. It appeared partial. When John read, with a kind of triumph, that the Lord “is long-suffering to us-ward, not willing thatanyshould perish, but thatallshould come to repentance,” David made a slight movement of dissent; and John asked:
“Is not that a noble love? Thee believes in it, David?”
“No.”
The word was softly but positively uttered.
“What then, David?”
“‘Some men and angels are predestined unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death; and their number is so certain and definite that it cannot be either increased or diminished.’” And David quoted these words from the Confession of Faith with such confidence and despair that John trembled at them.
“David! David!” he cried. “Jesus Christ came to seek and to save the lost.”
“It is impossible for the lost to be saved,” answered David, with a somber confidence; “only the elect, predestined to salvation.”
“And the rest of mankind, David? what of them?”
“God has been pleased to ordain them to wrath, that his justice may be satisfied and glorified.”
“David, who made thee such a God as this? Where did thee learn about him? How can thee love him?”
“It is in the Confession of Faith. And, oh, John Priestly, I do love him! Yes, I love him, though he has hid his face from me and, I fear, cast me off forever.”
“Dear heart,” said John, “thee is wronging thy best Friend.”
“If I could think so! Oh, if I could think so!”
“Well, then, as we are inquiring after God, and nothing less, is it not fair to take him at his own word?”
David looked inquiringly at John, but made no answer.
“I mean, will it not be more just to believe what God says of himself than to believe what men,–priests,–long ago dead, have said about him?”
“I think that.”
Then, one after another, the golden verses, full of God’s love, dropped from John’s lips in a gracious shower. And David was amazed, and withal a little troubled. John was breaking up all his foundations for time and for eternity. He was using the Scriptures to grind to powder the whole visible church as David understood it. It was a kind of spiritual shipwreck. His slow nature took fire gradually, and then burned fiercely. Weak as he was, he could not sit still. John Priestly was either a voice in the wilderness crying “Peace!” and “Blessing!” to him, or he was the voice of a false prophet crying “Peace!” where there was no peace. He looked into the face of this new preacher, frank and glowing as it was, with inquiry not unmixed with suspicion.
“Well, then,” he cried, “if these things be so, let God speak to me. Bring me a Bible with large letters. I want to see these words with my eyes, and touch them with my fingers.”
The conversation thus begun was constantly continued,and David searched the Scriptures from morning to night. Often, as the spring grew fairer and warmer, the two young men sat in the garden with the Bible between them; and while the sunshine fell brightly on its pages they reasoned together of fate and free will, and of that divine mercy which is from everlasting to everlasting. For where young men have leisure spiritual things employ them much more frequently than is supposed. Indeed, it is the young who are most earnestly troubled about the next life; the middle-aged are too busy with this one, and the aged do not speculate, because they will soon know.
Thus, daily, little by little, through inlets and broader ways known only to God and himself, the light grew and grew unto perfect day, and flooded not only the great hills and promontories of his soul, but also shone into all its secret caves and gloomy valleys and lonely places. Then David knew how blind and ignorant he had been; then he was penetrated with loving amazement, and humbled to the dust with a sense of the wrong he had done the Father of his spirit; and he locked himself in his room, and fell down on his face before his God. But into that awful communion, in which so much was confessed and so much forgiven, it is not lawful to inquire.
After this the thought of Nanna became an irresistible longing. He could not be happy until she sat in the sunshine of God’s love with him. He went into the garden and tested his strength, and as soon as he was in the open air he was smitten with a homesickness not to be controlled. He wanted the sea; he wanted the great North Sea; he longed to feel the cradling of its salt waves under him; and the idea of a schooner reefed down closely, and charging along over the stormy waters, took possession of him. Then he remembered the fishermen he used to know–the fishermen who peopled the desolate places of the Shetland seas.
“I must go home!” he said with a soft, eager passion. “I must go home to Shetland.” And there was in his voice and accent that pride and tenderness with which one’s home should be mentioned in a strange land.
When he saw John next he told him so, and they began to talk of his life there. John had never askedhim of his past. He knew him to be a child of God, however far away from his Father, and he had accepted his spiritual brotherhood with trustfulness. He understood that it was David’s modesty that had made him reticent. But when David was ready to leave he also felt that John had a right to know what manner of man he had befriended. So, as they sat together that night, David began his history.
“I was in the boats at six years old,” he said; “for there was always something I could do. During the night-fishing, unless I went with father, I was alone; and I had hours of such awful terrors that I am sad only to remember them; it was better to freeze out on the sea, if father would let me go with him. I was often hungry and often weary; I had toothaches and earaches that I never spoke of; I was frequently so sleepy that I fell down in the boat. And I had no mother to kiss me or pity me, and the neighbors were shy and far off. Father was not cross or unkind; he just did not understand. Even in those days I wondered why God made little lads to be so miserable and to suffer so much.”
He spoke then in a very guarded way about that revelation in the boat, for he felt rebuked for his want of faith in it; and he said sorrowfully, as he left the subject, “Why, then, should God send angels to men? They are feared of them while they are present, and they doubt them when they are gone away. He sent one to comfort me, and I denied it to my own heart; yes, even though I sorely needed the comfort.”
Then he took John to Shetland with him. He showed him, in strong, simple words, the old Norsetown, with its gray skies and its gray seas, and its fishing-smacks hanging to the rushing sides of foaming mountains. He described the hoary cliffs and their world of sea-birds, the glorious auroras, the heavenly summers, and the deadly chillness of the winter fogs as one drift after another passed in dim and desolate majesty over the sea and land.
Slowly and with some hesitation he got to Nanna in her little stone hut, braiding her straw and nursing her crippled baby. The tears came into his eyes, he clasped his knees with his hands as if to steady himself, while he spoke rapidly of her marriage with Nicol Sinclair, the drowning of her father and brothers, the cruelty of her husband, his desertion, his return, Nanna’s terror of losing Vala, the fatal typhus, her desolation, and her spiritual anguish about Vala’s condition. All these things he told John with that powerful eloquence which is born of living, intense feeling.
John was greatly moved by the whole simple, tragic story, but he spoke only on the last topic, for it seemed to him to dwarf all other sorrow. It roused his indignation, and he said it was a just and holy anger. He wondered how men, and especially mothers, could worship a God who was supposed to damn little children before they were born. He vowed that neither Moloch nor Baal, nor any pagan deity, had been so brutal. He was amazed that ministers believing such a doctrine dared to marry. What special right had they to believe their children would all be elect? And if there was a shadow of doubt on this subject, how awful was their responsibility! Nanna’s scruples, hesaid, were the only possible outcome of a conscientious, unselfish soul believing the devilish doctrine. And he cried out with enthusiasm:
“Nanna is to be honored! Oh, for a conscience as tender and void of offense toward God! I will go to Shetland and kiss the hem of her garment! She is a woman in ten thousand!”
“Well, then,” said David, softly, “I shall take comfort to her.”
“To think,” said John, who was still moved by a holy anger, “to think that God should have created this beautiful world as a nursery for hell! that he should have made such a woman as Nanna to suckle devils! No, no, David!” he said, suddenly calming himself; “thee could never believe such things of thy God.”
“I was taught them early and late. I can say the Confession of Faith backward, I am sure.”
“Let no man-made creed impose itself on thee, David–enter into thee, and possess thee, and take the place of thy soul. The voice that spoke from Sinai and from Bethlehem is still speaking. And man’s own soul is an oracle, if he will only listen to it–the inward, instant sense of a present God, and of his honorable, true, and only Son Christ Jesus.”
“I will listen, if God will speak.”
“Never thee mind catechisms and creeds and confessions. The Word of God was before them, and the Word will be the Word when catechisms and confessions are cast into the dusty museums of ancient things, with all the other shackles of the world in bondage. David, there is in every good man a spiritualcenter, answering to a higher spiritual center in the universe. All controversies come back to this.”
“I wish, John Priestly, that you could see Nanna, and speak comfort to her heart.”
“That must be thy message, David. And be sure that thee knows well the children’s portion in the Scriptures. Thee must show Nanna thattheirs is the kingdom. What we win through great tribulation they inherit through the love of the Father.Theirs is the kingdom; and there is no distinction of elect or non-elect, as I read the title.”
“I count the hours now until I am able to travel. I long for the sea that stretches nor’ard to the ice, and the summer days, when the sunset brightens the midnight. No need to egg me on. I am all the time thinking of the old town growing out of the mist, and I know how I shall feel when I stand on the pier again among the fishers, when I hurry through the clean, quiet streets, while the kind people nod and smile, and call to each other, ‘Here is David Borson come back again.’”
“And Nanna?”
“She is the heart of my longing.”
“And thee is taking her glad tidings of great joy.”
“I am that. So there is great hurry in my heart, for I like not to sit in the sunshine and know that Nanna is weeping in the dark.”
“Thee must not be discouraged if she be at first unable to believe thy report.”
“The hour will come. Nanna was ever a seeker after God. She will listen joyfully. She will take the cup of salvation, and drink it with thanksgiving. Weshall stand together in the light, loving God and fearing God, but not afraid of him. Faith in Christ will set her free.”
“But lean hard upon God’s Word, David. There is light enough and help enough for every strait of life in it. Let thy creed lie at rest. There are many doors to scientific divinity, but there is only one door to heaven. And I will tell thee this thing, David: if men had to be good theologians before they were good Christians, the blessed heaven would be empty.”
“Yet, John, my theology was part of my very life. Nothing to me was once more certain than that men and women were in God’s hand as clay in the potter’s. And as some vessels are made to honor, and some to dishonor, so some men were made for salvation and honor, and others for rejection and dishonor.”
“Clay in the potter’s hand! And some for honor, and some for dishonor! We will even grant that much; but tell me, David, does the potter ever make his vessels forthe express purpose of breaking them? No, no, David! He is not willing thatanyshould perish. Christ is not going to lose what he has bought with his blood. The righteous are planted as trees by the watercourses, but God does not plant any tree for fuel.”
“He is a good God, and his name is Love.”
“So, then, thee is going back to Shetland with glad tidings for many a soul. What will thy hands find to do for thy daily bread?”
“I shall go back to the boats and the nets and lines.”
“Would thee like to have a less dangerous way of earning thy bread? My father has a great businessin the city, and thee could drive one of the big drays that go to the docks.”
“I could not. I can carry a ship through any sea a ship can live in; I could not drive a Shetland shelty down an empty street. I am only a simple sea-dog. I love the sea. Men say for sure it is in my heart and my blood. I must live on the sea. When my hour comes to die, I hope the sea will keep my body in one of her clean, cool graves. If God gives me Nanna, and we have sons and daughters, they shall have a happy childhood and a good schooling. Then I will put all the boys in the boats, and the girls shall learn to grow like their mother, and, if it please God, they shall marry good men and good fishers.”
“It seems to me that the life of a fisher is a very hard one, and withal that it hath but small returns.”
“Fishers have their good and their bad seasons. They take their food direct from the hand of God; so, then, good or bad, it is all right. Fishers have their loves and joys and sorrows; birth and marriage and death come to them as to others. They have the same share of God’s love, the same Bible, the same hope of eternal life, that the richest men and women have. It is enough.”
“And hard lives have their compensations, David. Doubtless the fisherman’s life has its peculiar blessings?”
“It has. The fisher’s life is as free from temptation as a life can be. Hehasto trust God a great deal; if he did not he would very seldom go into the boats at all.”
“Yet he holds the ocean ‘in the hollow of his hand.’”
“That is true. I never feel so surely held in the hollow of his hand as when the waves are as high as my masthead, and my boat smashes into the black pit below. There is none but God then. Thank you, Friend John, but I shall live and die a fisherman.”
“Would thee care to change Shetland for some warmer and less stormy climate?”
“Would a man care to change his own father and mother for any other father and mother? Stern and hard was my poor father, and he knew not how to love; but his memory is dear to me, and I would not break the tie between us–no, not to be the son of a king! My native land is a poor land, but I have thought of her green and purple moors among gardens full of roses. Shetland is myhome, and home is sweet and fair and dear.”
“Traveling Zionward, David, we have often to walk in the wilderness. Thee hast dwelt in Skye and in Shetland; what other lands hast thee seen?”
“I have been east as far as Smyrna. I sat there and read the message of ‘the First and the Last’ to its church. And I went to Athens, and stood where St. Paul had once stood. And I have seen Rome and Naples and Genoa and Marseilles, and many of the Spanish and French ports. I have pulled oranges from the trees, and great purple grapes from the vines, and even while I was eating them longed for the oat-cakes and fresh fish of Shetland.”
“Rome and Naples and Athens! Then, David, thee hast seen the fairest cities on the earth.”
“And yet, Friend John, what hells I saw in them! I was taken through great buildings where men andwomen die of dreadful pain. I saw other buildings where men and women could eat and sleep, and could not think or love or know. I saw drinking-hells and gambling-hells. I saw men in dark and awful prisons, men living in poverty and filth and blasphemy, without hope for this world or the next. I saw men die on the scaffold. And, John, I have often wondered if this world were hell. Are we put here in low, or lower, or lowest hell to work out our salvation, and so at last, through great tribulation, win our weary way back to heaven?”
John Priestly was silent a few moments ere he answered: “If that were even so, there is still comfort, David. For if we make our bed in any of such hells,–mind,wemake it,–even there we are not beyond the love and the pity of the Infinite One. For when the sorrows of hell compassed David of old, he cried unto God, and he delivered him from his strong enemy, and brought him forth into a large place. So, then, David, though good men may get into hell, they do not need to stay there.”
“I know that by experience, John. Have I not been in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps, in that lowest hell of the soul where I had no God to pray to? For how could I pray to a God so cruel that I did not dare to become a father, lest he should elect my children to damnation? a God so unjust that he loved without foresight of faith or good works, and hated because it was his pleasure to hate, and to ordain the hated to dishonor and wrath?”[4]
“And yet, David?”
“In my distress my soul cried out, ’God pity me! God pity me!’ And even while I so wronged 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.”
[4]Confession of Faith, chap. 3, secs. v-vii; chap. 16, sec. vii.
Confession of Faith, chap. 3, secs. v-vii; chap. 16, sec. vii.
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 nothingof 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.
ON THE WAY TO NANNA’S COTTAGE.
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: