Chapter 11

"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."

"God'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."

"To be sure," acknowledged Barbara. "Death has asked no man's leave to enter; he has gone into the rich man's house as well as into poor Nanna's hut."

"Every door is wide enough for a coffin."

"Yes; and the minister said last Sabbath that it was this which dissatisfied us with these habitations of clay, and made us lift our eyes to those eternal in the heavens."

"Well, then, to come back to David," said Sally, "he is good, and able to marry. He has saved money, no doubt. Some young men spend their last bawbee, and just live between ebb and flow. That isn't David Borson. Besides, Barbara, you ought to tell him how people are talking."

"I may do that. David is imprudent, and Nanna is too miserable to care. Well, then, those who kindle the fire must put up with the smoke; yet, for all that, I shall have a word or two for him, and that very soon."

David had been at sea all night, and while this conversation was going on he was sleeping; but in the afternoon, as Barbara saw him preparing to go to Nanna's, she said:

"Stay a minute, David Borson. I want to speak to you. I had good news early this morning. My son's ship was met not so far away, and he may get home at any time, and me not thinking of it."

"I am glad to hear it, Barbara. Then, also, you will want my room. I must look for a new place, and that is bad for me."

"I was thinking of Nanna Sinclair," said Barbara, in a musing manner. "People do talk about you and her. I have heard say--"

"'I have heard say' is half a lie," answered David.

"I think that too; but Nanna's good name is to be thought of, and a man does not go every day to see a woman for nothing."

Then David leaped to his feet with a face like a flame. "The shortest and best answer is doing the thing," he muttered; and he walked straight to Nanna's house, telling himself as he went, "I have been too long about it; I must speak now, and she must answer me."

He was in his fishing-garb, for he intended going to sea with the tide then rising; but he thought no more of dressing for the interview than he thought of preparing his speeches. Hitherto he had in a manner drifted with the current of his great affection, never consciously asking himself where it was bearing him; but if people were talking about Nanna, then he must take away all occasion for suspicion--he must at once ask Nanna to be his wife. And as soon as he took the first step toward her he felt how close and dear she had become to him. He knew then that if Nanna was lost all the world would be nothing. She had grown into his life as the sea and the stars had grown, and he shrank from any thought that could imply separation. He walked with rapid steps across the moor, feeling dimly the beauty of the spring afternoon, with its haze of gold and purple on the horizon, where the gray clouds opened out in wistful stretches of daffodil skies.

The door of Nanna's house stood open, and the wind, full of the sharp salt savor of the sea, blew life into the little room. Nanna was busy with her knitting, and the soft, lace-like shawl lay upon her knee. David shut the door and went to her side. His heart was too full to hesitate or to choose words; the simplest were the best.

"Nanna, I have found out that I love you," he said. "Nanna, dearest woman, do you hear me?"

Then her cheeks burned rosy, and she looked at David, and her hands trembled, and the work fell from them.

"Love me a little, my dear! Love me, Nanna!"

"I do love you, David. Who in all the world have I but you?" And the beautiful woman stood up, and he took her within his arms and kissed her.

For a moment or two David was happy. His large, fair face shone; he laughed softly as he drew Nanna to his breast. He was really as intoxicated with joy as some men are with wine.

"We will be married next week, Nanna," he said; "this week--to-morrow, if you will. It has come to this: I must leave Barbara, and there is a house empty close to the quay, and it shall be our home, Nanna; for I have sixty pounds, my dear woman, and at last, at last--"

Before he reached this point he was sensible of some chill or dissent, but he was not prepared for Nanna's answer:

"David, why do you talk of marrying? It is ever that. I will not marry."

"Not yet, Nanna? Is it too soon? But why for a dead man will you keep me waiting?"

"I think not of any dead man."

"Is it Vala? Vala would rejoice in our happiness."

"I will not marry--no, not any man living."

"Why did you say that you loved me?"

"I do love you."

"No; you do not."

He put her gently away from him, and looked at her with a somber sternness. "You do not love me," he continued. "If you did, you would put me first; you would say, 'I will be your wife.' You would delight to make me happy--I, who have never been happy but in sharing your joys and sorrows."

"O David, I do love you!"

"Then be my wife."

"I cannot! I cannot!"

"Then you love me as light, vain women love: to make slaves of men, and bring them back and back to be hurt. It is not to be so with me. No, indeed! Farewell, Nanna."

His voice failed him. He turned toward the door, and for a moment Nanna could not realize that he was actually bidding her a final farewell. When she did she flew to his side, and arrested his hand as he was opening the door.

"Come back! Come back, David!" she entreated. "You are all wrong; you are very cruel to me. If you leave me it will break my heart! It will be the last blow, David. It is the very truth."

He hesitated enough to make Nanna weep with passionate distress, and this emotion he was not able to bear. He took her within his arm again, led her to a chair, and sat down at her side, and as he kissed the tears from her face said:

"If indeed you do love me, Nanna--"

"_If_ I do love you!" she interrupted. "I love none but you. You are heart of my heart and soul of my soul. I hear you coming when you are half a mile away. I have no joy but when you are beside me. I shall die of grief if you leave me in anger. I would count it heaven and earth to be your wife, but I dare not! I dare not!"

She was sobbing piteously when she ended this protestation, and David comforted her with caresses and tender words. "What fears you, Nanna?" he asked. "Oh, my dear, what fears you?"

"This is what I fear," she answered, freeing herself from his embrace, and looking steadily at him. "This is what I fear, David. If we were married I might have another child--I might have many children."

Then he clasped her hand tightly, for he began to see where Nanna was leading him, as she continued with slow solemnity:

"Can you, can the minister, can any human being, give me assurance they will be elect children? If you can, I will be your wife to-morrow. If you cannot, as the God of my father lives, I will not bring sons and daughters into life for sin and sorrow here, and for perdition hereafter. The devil shall not so use my body! To people hell? No; I will not--not even for your love, David!"

Her words, so passionate and positive, moved him deeply. He was the old David again--the light, the gladness, all but the tender, mournful love of the past, gone from his face. He held both her hands, and he looked down at them lying in his own as he answered:

"Both of us are His children, Nanna. We are His by generations and by covenant. He has promised mercy to such. Well, then, we may have a reasonable hope--"

"Hope! No, no, David! I must have something better than hope. I hoped for Vala, and my hope has been my hell. And as for the child--my God! where is the child?"

"We love God, Nanna, and the children of the righteous--"

"Are no safer than the children of the wicked, David. I have thought of this continually. There was John Beaton's son; he killed a man, and died on the gallows-tree, to the shame and the heartbreak of his good father and mother. The lad had been baptized, too,--given to God when he drew his first breath,--and God must have rejected him. Minister Stuart's son forged a note, and was sent with felons across the sea. His father and mother had prayed for him all the days of his life; he was brought to the kirk and given to God in baptism; and God must have rejected him also. Think of good Stephen and Anna Blair's children. Their daughter's name cannot be spoken any more, and their sons are bringing down their gray hairs with sorrow to the grave--with sorrow and shame too. Go through the whole kirk, the whole town, the islands themselves, and you will be forced to say, David, that it is the children of the righteous that go to the devil."

"Nanna! Nanna!"

"It is the truth, David. How the good God can treat his bairns so, I know not; but you and I may also deserve his wrath in like manner. I am feared to hope different. O David, I am feared to be a mother again!"

"Nanna! Nanna! what can I say?"

"There is nothing to say. If I should meet Vala in that place where infants 'earnestly desire to see and love God, and yet are not able to do so,' I should cover my face before the child. If she blamed me, I should shiver in speechless agony; if she did not blame me, it would be still harder to bear. Were we only sure--but we are not sure."

"_We are not sure._" David repeated the words with a sad significance. Nanna's argument, evolved from her own misery and illustrated by that misery, had been before David's eyes for months. He could not escape from such reasoning and from such proof, and his whole life, education, and experience went to enforce the pitiful dilemma in which their love had placed them.

"It is His will, and we must bear it to the uttermost," continued Nanna, with a sorrowful resignation.

"I am very wretched, Nanna."

"So am I, David, very wretched indeed. I used to think monks and nuns, and such as made a merit of not marrying, were all wrong; maybe they are nearer right than we think for. Doubtless they have a tender conscience toward God, and a tender conscience is what he loves."

Then David rose from Nanna's side and walked rapidly to and fro in the room. Motion helped him to no solution of the tremendous difficulty. And Nanna's patient face, her fixed outward gaze, the spiritual light of resolute decision in her eyes, gave to her appearance an austere beauty that made him feel as if this offering up of their love and all its earthly sweetness was a sacrifice already tied to the horns of the altar, and fully accepted.

Now, the law of duty lay very close to David's thoughts; it was an ever-present consciousness, haunting his very being; but the sensual nature always shrinks away from it. David sat down and covered his face with his hands, and began to weep--to sob as strong men sob when their sorrow is greater than they can bear; as they never sob until the last drop, the bitterest drop of all, is added--the belief that God has forsaken them. This was the agony which tore David's great, fond heart in two. It forced from him the first pitiful words of reproach against his God:

"I was sure at last that I was going to be happy, and God is not willing. From my youth up he has ay laid upon me the rod of correction. I wish that I had never been born!"

"My poor lad! but you are not meaning it." And Nanna put her arms around his neck and wept with him. For some minutes he let her do so, for he was comforted by her sympathy; but at last he stood up, passed his hand across his eyes, and said as bravely as he could:

"You are right, Nanna. If you feel in this way, I dare not force your conscience. But I must go away until I get over the sore disappointment."

"Where will you go to, David?"

"Who can tell? The countries in which I may have to earn and eat my bread I know not. But if I was seeing you every day, I might get to feel hard at God."

"No, no! He fashioned us, David, and he knows what falls and sore hurts we must get before we learn to step sure and safe."

"In the end it may all be right. I know not. But this I know: pain and cold and hunger and weariness and loneliness I have borne with a prayer and a tight mouth, and I have never said before that I thought him cruel hard."

"His ways are not cruel, my dear love; they are only past our finding out. The eternal which makes for righteousness cannot be cruel. And if we could see God with our eyes, and hear him with our ears, and understand him with our reason, what grace would there be in believing in him? Did not the minister say last Sabbath that our life was hid with Christ in God, and that therefore God must first be pierced ere we could be hurt or prejudiced? Then let us take what comfort we can in each other's affection, David, and just try and believe that God's ways are the very best of all ways for us."

"Sometime--perhaps--"

"And don't leave me, David. I can bear all things if you are near to help and comfort me."

"Ay, ay; but women are different. I cannot fight the temptation when I am in it; I must run away from it. Farewell! Oh, dear, dear Nanna, farewell!"

He kissed the words upon her lips, and went hastily out of the house; but when he had walked about one hundred yards he returned. Nanna had thrown herself despairingly upon the rude couch made for Vala, and on which the child had spent most of her life. There Nanna lay like one dead. David knelt down by her; he took her within his arms, kissed her closed eyes, and murmured again upon her lips his last words of love and sorrow. Her patient acceptance of her hard lot made him quiver with pain, but he knew well that for a time, at least, they must each bear their grief alone.

Nanna's confession of her love for him had made everything different. In her presence now he had not the power to control his longing for reciprocal affection. He felt already a blind resentment and rebellion against fate--a sense of wrong, which it was hard to submit to. But how could he fight circumstances whose foundations were in eternity? At this hour, at least, he had come to the limit of his reason and his endurance. Again and again he kissed Nanna farewell, and it was like tearing his life asunder when he put away her clinging arms and left her alone with the terrible problem that separated their lives.

There is something worse than the pang of keenest suffering--the passive state of a subjugated heart. A dismal, sullen stillness succeeded to David's angry sorrow. He avoided Barbara and shut himself in his room. And his strong and awful prepossession in favor of the Bible led him, first of all, to go to the book. But he found no help there. His soul was tossed from top to bottom, and he was vanquished by the war in his own bosom. For in our wrestling alone angels do not always come. And David brought his dogmas over and over to the Scriptures, and was crushed spiritually between them, so that at last, worn out with the mental and heart struggle, he submitted to the fatality he could not alter.

"I will go the right road," he said, "however cruel that road may be. Then death may give me back to God a miserable man, but not a guilty one."

And he did not comprehend that, in thus preferring an unseen duty because it was right to a seen pleasure because it was pleasant, he was consummating that sublime act of faith whose cry of victory is, "Thy will be done."

Nanna did not suffer so much. In the first place, the pale, sad, almost despairing woman was glad and dared, in her despair, because the man she loved durst not sin, even for her. In the second, her battle was practically over. She had been in the van of it for months, and had come gradually to that state of submission which fears to resist, lest resistance might be found to be fighting against God. While David was yet in an agony of struggle with his love and his desires, his tender conscience and his dread of offending the Deity, Nanna had washed away her tears, and was strengthening her heart by saying continually, as the glancing needles glided to and fro:

My God and Father, while I stray Far from my home, on life's rough way, Oh, teach me from my heart to say, "Thy will be done!"

For some dauntless, primitive confidence in the love of the Maker of men is older than any creed. And there were yet hours when Nanna's soul outleaped its mortal shadow and had mystic flashes, native and sweet, beyond the reach of will and endeavor--intimations of serenities and compensations which would be neither small nor long delayed.

X

IN THE FOURTH WATCH

Holding despair at bay, David quickly made his preparations for an extended absence. He hired his boat and lines to Groat's sons, and on the morning of the second day, after bidding Nanna farewell, he went to Minister Campbell's to complete his arrangements. The minister was writing his sermon, and he was not pleased at the interruption; but when he saw David's face, the shadow of annoyance on his own passed away like a thought. He dropped his pen, and turned in his chair so as to see the young man fairly, and then he asked:

"What is wrong, David?"

"I am all at sea, minister, drifting--drifting--"

"Where's your anchor, David? Can't you steady yourself on God? Can't you make harbor someway?"

David shook his head sadly.

"Then up sail and out to sea, and face the storm. What quarter is it from?"

"It comes from a woman."

"Ah, David, that is bad to buffet. I have been through it. It was that storm which brought me here. I know all about it."

"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 I come 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."