Prisoners of Conscience

“We shall meet no more in this life, Paul.”

“Then I tryst thee for the next life; that will be a good meeting. Fare thee well. God keep thee!”

“And thee also.”

“Then we shall be well kept, both of us.”

That was the last of Shetland for Liot Borson. He watched his kinsman out of sight, and then lifted his anchor, and in the silence and moonlight went out to sea. When the Lerwick people awoke in the morning Liot was miles and miles away. He was soon forgotten. It was understood that he would never come back, and there was no more interest in him than there is in the dead. Like them, he had had his time of sojourn, and his place knew him no more.

As for Liot, he was happy. He set his sails, and covered David more warmly, and then lay down under the midnight stars. The wind was at his back, and the lonely land of his birth passed from his eyes as a dream passes. In the morning the islands were not to be seen; they were hidden by belts of phantom foam, wreathed and vexed with spray and spindrift. There was, fortunately, no wrath in the morning tide, only a steady, irresistible set to the westward; and this was just what Liot desired. For many days these favorable circumstances continued, and Liot and David were very happy together; but as they neared the vexed seas which lash Cape Wrath and pour down into the North Minch, Liot had enough to do to keep his boat afloat.

He was driven against his will and way almost to the Butt of Lewis; and as his meal and water were very low, he looked for death in more ways than one. Then the north wind came, and he hoped to reach the broad Bay of Stornoway with it; but it was soon so strong and savage that nothing could be done but make all snug as possible for the gale and then run before it. It proved to be worse than Liot anticipated, and, hungry and thirsty and utterly worn out, the helpless boat and her two dying occupants were picked up by some Celtic coasters from Uig, and taken to the little hamlet to which they were going.

There Liot stayed all summer, fishing with the men of the place; but he was not happy, for, though they were Calvinists as to faith, they were very different from the fair, generous, romantic men of his own islands. For the fishers of Uig were heavy-faced Celts, with the impatient look of men selfish and greedy of gain. They made Liot pay well for such privileges as they gave him; and he looked forward to the close of the fishing season, for then he was determined to go to Stornoway and get David a more comfortable and civilized home, after which he would sell his boat and nets. And then? Then he would take the first passage he could get to Glasgow, for at Glasgow there were ships bound for every port in the world.

It was on the 5th of September that he again set sail for Stornoway, and on the 11th he was once more brought back to Uig. A great storm had stripped him of everything he possessed but his disabled boat. David was in a helpless, senseless condition, and Liot had a broken arm, and fainted from suffering and exhaustion while he was being carried on shore. In some way he lost his purse, and it contained all his money. He looked at the sea and he looked at the men, and he knew not which had it. So there was nothing possible for another winter but poverty and hard toil, and perchance a little hope, now and then, of a better voyage in the spring.

With endless labor and patience he prepared for this third attempt, and one lovely day in early June set sail for the Butt of Lewis. He had good weather and fair winds for two days; then the norther came and drove him round Vatternish, and into the dangerous whirlpools and vexed waterways of that locality. His boat began to leak, and he was forced to abandon her, and for thirty hours to thole the blustering winds and waves that tossed the little cockle-shell, in which they took a last refuge, like a straw upon the billows. Again the men of Uig brought them to shore; and this time they were sulky, and expressed no sympathy for Liot’s disappointment, loss, and suffering. They had become superstitious about him, and they speculated and wondered at the ill luck that always drove him back to Skye. Roy Hunish, a very old man, spoke for the rest when he said, “It seems to me, Liot Borson, that the Lord has not sent you to Stornoway; he is against the journey.” And Liot answered sadly: “He is against all I desire.”

When they had been warmed and fed and rested in one of the nearest cottages, Liot took David in his arms and went back to his old hut. He put the sleeping child in the bunk, and then sat down on the cold, dark hearthstone. What Hunish expressed so plainly was the underlying thought in his own heart. He could not escape from a conclusion so tragically manifested. In sorrow too great for tears, he compelled himself to resign all his hopes and dreams–a renunciation as bitter as wormwood, but not as cruelly bitter as the one it included; for his rejection was also the rejection of his son. God had not forgiven him, nor had he accepted David’s dedication to his service, for he had stripped him of all means to accomplish it. He might have permitted him to reach Stornoway and leave the boy among his kindred; he had chosen rather to include David in the sin of his father. This was the thought that wounded his heart like a sword. He went to the sleeping boy and kissed his face, weeping most of all for the sorrow he had brought on the innocent one.

If this earth be a penal world, Liot that night went down to one of its lowest hells. Sorrow of many kinds brutally assailed him. He hid nothing from his consciousness. He compelled himself to see over again the drowning of Bele–that irreparable wrong which had ruined all his happiness; he compelled himself to stand once more by Karen’s coffin, and listen to his own voice calling God to witness his innocence; he compelled himself to admit that he had thought God had forgotten his sin of seven years ago. And when these things had been thought out to the end, his heart was so full that he quite unconsciously gave utterance to his thoughts in audible speech. The tones of his voice in the darkness were like those of a man praying, and the hopeless words filled the sorrowful room with a sense of suffering:

“So, then, it is for a life-sentence that I am sent here. There is to be no pardon till I have dreed out the years appointed me in the gust and poverty of this dreadful place, among its hard, unfriendly men. My God! I am but thirty-three years old. How long wilt thou be angry with me? And the little lad! Pass me by, but oh, be merciful to him!”

A great silence followed this imploration. The man was waiting. For hours he sat motionless; but just before dawn he must have heard a word of strength or comfort, for he rose to his feet and bowed his head. He was weeping bitterly, and his voice was like a sob; but from that hut on the wild Skye coast there arose with a heartbroken cry the sublimest of mortal prayers–“Thy will be done.”

IV

THE DOOR WIDE OPEN

Resignation is not always contentment, and though Liot accepted God’s will in place of his own will, he took it rather with a dour patience than with a cheerful satisfaction. Yet in a certain way life gets made independent of our efforts. A higher power than our own brings events about, finds a way across the hills of difficulty, smooths out the rough places, and makes straight what our folly has made crooked. When it became certain that Liot would make his life-home near Uig the men on that coast began to treat him with more friendliness, and the women pitied and cared a little for his motherless boy. And by and by there came a new minister, who found in Liot a man after his own heart. The two men became familiars, and the friendship made life more supportable to both.

It was a hard existence, however, for the child. Liot loved his son, but he was not a demonstrative father, and he thought more of doing his duty to David than of showing him affection or providing him with pleasure. For when all hopes of making him a minister were over David lost something in Liot’s estimation. He was, then, just a common lad, in whose heart, as a matter of course, folly and disobedience were bound up. It was his place to exorcise everything like joy, and with the phantoms of a gloomy creed to darken and terrify his childhood.

Before David had shed his baby teeth, hell and the devil were tremendous realities to him. An immaculate, pitiless God, who delighted in taking vengeance on his enemies, haunted all his boyhood’s dreams; and the “scheme of salvation,” by which perchance this implacable Deity might be conciliated, was the beginning and the end of his education. With an amazing distinctness in question and answer, this “scheme” was laid before him, and by the word and the rod of admonition he was made familiar with the letter of its awful law.

Here, then, was a child whom a sad destiny had led far away from happiness. His nature was singularly affectionate, yet he had no memory of a mother’s kiss, or, indeed, of any tender human kindness. No one petted or loved him; no one heeded his childish sorrows and sufferings. He had toothaches and earaches, about which he felt it useless to speak. He went into the boats with his father as soon as he could bait a line, and was forced to endure all that men endured from salt-water boils, chilblains, frost-bites, and the lashing of spray-laden winds. Cold and hunger, heat and thirst, and the frequent intolerable sleepiness of overtaxed strength made up the sad drama of his childhood; and he played his part in it with a patient submission that sometimes won from his father astonishment and a few words of praise or admiration.

Such words made glorious epochs in the boy’s life; he could remember every one of them. Once, when Liot could get no one to launch a boat and go with him to the help of four men drowning before their eyes, the ten-year-old lad came radiantly forward and said, “Take me, father; I will go with you.” And the two went on the desperate errand together, and brought back safely the men ready to perish. Then, when all was well over and the child stood trembling with exhaustion, Liot drew him close to his side, and pushed his wet hair from his brow, and said with proud tenderness, “You are a good, brave boy. God bless you, David!” And the happy upward look of the child had his mother’s smile in it, and before Liot knew what he was doing he had stooped and kissed him. The event was a wonderful one, and it made a tie between the father and the son that it was beyond the power of time to loosen.

Liot’s own boyhood had been filled with the dreams and stories of the elder world. He had been conscious all his life of this influence streaming up from the centuries behind him, and coloring, and even moving, his present existence. The fierce hatred he felt for Bele Trenby came from unchristened ancestors, and the dumb murder, which had darkened his life and sent him to Uig, from the same source. He told David none of these stirring sagas. He was resolved that the knowledge of the thrall’s curse should not call sorrow to him. He never named the heroic Gisli in his hearing. And once, when he found an old fisherman reciting “Ossian” to David, he fell into such anger as terrified every one. Indeed, he said words at that hour which would have made much trouble and ill-will if the minister had not justified them and called Liot’s anger a “righteous one.”

And in those days there was absolutely no literature for the people. Books were dear and scarce; ten years might pass without a new one drifting into a hamlet; and newspapers were few and for the rich alone. David, then, had but one book–the Holy Scriptures. He read them, and read them again, and found everything in them. Fortunately, the wonderful wisdom and stories of the Apocrypha had not then been discarded; the book had its place between the Old and the New Testament. And David was wise with Solomon, and saw beautiful visions with Esdras, and lived and glowed and fought with the heroic Maccabees.

And we who have far more books than we can read can hardly understand how David loved the Bible. It was his poetry, his philosophy, his history; it was, above all, the speech of God to man. Through it he breathed the air of the old, old East, and grew up under the shadows of Judea’s palms and olives; so that the rainy gloom of the coast of Skye was but an accident of his existence. Abraham and Joseph, Moses and Joshua, were far more real personages to David Borson than the Duke of Wellington or Napoleon and his twelve marshals. Through the stormy days when it was impossible to go to sea, and in the long winter nights, when he stretched himself before the red peats with a little oil-cruse, he and the Bible were friends and companions. It kept him in direct relation with God and heaven; it fed him on faith; it made him subject to duty; it gave him a character at once courageous and gentle, calm and ideal–such a character as is very rare in our days, and which, where it does exist, will not be transmitted.

So that, with all his hard work and many deprivations, David had his happy hours. And the years went by, and he grew up to a fair and stately manhood, not rebelling against his fate, but taking it as a part of the inscrutable mystery of life and death constantly before his eyes. Others around him suffered in like manner, and at the end one thing happened to all. No; it was not the tyranny of nature nor of his material life that troubled David as he approached manhood; it was the spiritual tyranny under which he lived and prayed which darkened his days and filled his nights with thoughts which he dared not follow to their proper conclusion and was equally afraid to dismiss.

This was his dilemma. He had been taught by a father whom he trusted implicitly that life was only a short and precarious opportunity for working out his salvation with fear and trembling; peradventure he might be counted among the remnant whom God would elect to save from eternal misery. And in a measure the constant east winds and cloudy heavens, the cold and stormy seas, and the gloom and poverty of all his surroundings were so many confirmations of this unhappy conviction. Yet it was very hard for him to believe that the God of the Bible, “like a father pitying his children,” was the God of his Shorter and Longer Catechisms. As his twentieth year approached these doubts and questions would not be put away, and yet he dared not speak of them either to the minister or to his father.

Then, one night, as he was watching his lines and hooks, something happened which broke the adamantine seal upon his soul. He was quite alone in his boat, and she was drifting slowly under the full moon; there was not a sound upon the ocean but the wash of the water against her sides. He was sitting motionless, thinking of the sadness and weariness of life, and wishing that God would love him, though ever so little, and, above all, that he would give him some word or sign of his care for him. His hands were clasped upon his knees, his eyes fixed on the far horizon; between him and the God whom he so ignorantly feared and desired there was apparently infinite space and infinite silence.

All at once some one seemed to come into the boat beside him. An ineffable peace and tenderness, a sweetness not to be described, encompassed the lonely youth. He was sensible of a glory he could not see; he was comforted by words that were inaudible to his natural ears. During this transitory experience he scarcely breathed, but as it slowly passed away he rose reverently to his feet. “An angel has been with me,” he thought.

After this event the whole fabric of his creed vanished at times before the inexplicable revelation. Yet the terrible power of early impressions is not easily eradicated, even by the supernatural; and whenever he reasoned about the circumstance he came to the conclusion that it might have been a snare and a delusion of the Evil One. For why should an angel be sent with a word to him? or why should he dare to hope that his longing after God’s love had touched the heart of the Eternal? Yet, though the glory was dissolved by the doubting, nothing could quite rob him of his blessing; in the midst of the sternest realities of his rough daily toil he found himself musing on those wonderful days when angels went and came among men as they threshed their wheat or worked at their handicrafts, when prayer was visibly answered and the fire dropped from heaven on the accepted sacrifice.

He thought the more on this subject because his father was visibly dying from some internal disease, which was dissolving with rapid, inexorable suffering the house of clay in which the soul of Liot Borson dwelt. Liot was aware of it, and had borne with silent courage the enemy’s advances toward the citadel of life. Very reluctantly he had given up his duties one by one, until the day came when nothing remained for him to do but to wait and to suffer; then he spoke plainly to David. It happened to be the lad’s twenty-sixth birthday, and Liot had his own memories of the first one. Almost inadvertently the name of Karen passed his lips, and then he talked long of her goodness, her love, and her beauty; and David listened with an interest that tempted more confidence than Liot had ever thought to give.

“If you had such a wife as Karen Sabiston was to me,” he said, “then, David, you would be happy even in this place. But you will not stay here. When I am gone away to the land very far off, then you will go back to Shetland–to your own land and your own people.”

“I will do as you wish, father.”

“You will marry; that is to be looked for. I have seen that girl of Talisker’s watching you, and luring you with her sly smiles and glances. Give her no notice. I like not these Celtic women, with their round black eyes and their red color and black hair. In Shetland you will see women that you may safely love–good and beautiful girls of your own race; there must be no strange women among the Borsons. Your Bible tells you what sorrow comes from marrying daughters of Heth and their like. Go to Shetland for your wife.”

“I will, father.”

“You will find friends and kindred there–my good cousin Paul, and his sons and daughters, and your mother’s family in Yell, and Matilda Sabiston. I would say something of her, but she is doubtless in the grave by this time, and gone to the mercy of the Merciful.”

“Was she of our kindred, then?”

“Of your mother’s kin. They were ill friends here, but yonder all may–all will be different.”

During this conversation Liot made his son understand that the messenger of release might come at any hour; but in the morning he felt so free from pain that David thought he could safely go to the early fishing. When he reached the pier, however, the boat had sailed without him, and he walked into Uig and told the minister how near the end it was. And the minister answered:

“We have had our farewell, David. We shall meet no more till we meet in the city of God.” He spoke with a subdued enthusiasm, and his grave face was luminous with an interior transfiguration. Suddenly the sun came from behind a cloud, and the flying shower was crowned with a glorious rainbow. He drew David to the window, and said in a rapture of adoration:

“The token of His covenant! It compasseth the heavens about with a glorious circle, and the hands of the Most High have bended it. Could any words be more vitally realistic, David? Tell your father what you have seen–the token of His covenant! The token of His covenant!”

And David went away, awed and silent; for there was in the minister’s eyes that singular brilliance which presages a vision of things invisible. They looked straight into the sunshine. Did they see beyond it to where the “innumerable company of angels” were singing, “Holy, holy, holy”?

Indeed, he was so much impressed that he took the longest way home. He wanted to think over what his father and the minister had said, and he wanted that solitude of nature which had so often been to him the voice of God. The road itself was only a foot-path across a melancholy moor, covered with heather and boulders, and encompassed by cyclopean wrecks of mountains, the vapory outlines of which suggested nothing but endless ruin. Although the season was midsummer, there had been sharp, surly whiffs of rain all day long, and the dreary levels were full of little lochs of black moss water. So David kept to the seaward side, where the land was higher, and where he could see the roll of a spent gale swinging round Vatternish toward the red, rent bastions of Skye, and hear its thunder amid the purple caves of the basalt and the whitened tiers of the oölite, silencing all meaner sounds.

After a trailing, thoughtful walk of a mile, he came to a spot where a circle of druidical monoliths stood huge and pale in the misty air. He went straight into the haunted place with the manner of one familiar with it, cast his nets on the low central stone which had once been the sacrificial altar of the dead creed, and then leaned wearily against one of the sheltering pillars.

His person was at this time remarkably handsome and in wonderful harmony with its surroundings. He was large and strong–a man not made for the narrow doorways of the town, but for the wide, stormy spaces of the unstreeted ocean. The sea was in his eyes, which were blue and outlooking; his broad breast was bared to the wind and rain; his legs were planted apart, as if he was hauling up an anchor or standing on a reeling deck. An air of somber gravity, a face sad and mystical, distinguished his solitary figure. He was the unconscious incarnation of the lonely land and the stormy sea.

Leaning against the pagan pillar, he revolved in his mind those great questions that survive every change of race and dynasty: Whence come we? Where go we? How can a man be justified with God? Though the rain smote him east and west, he was in the sunshine of the Holy Land; he was drawing nets with Simon Peter on the Sea of Galilee; he was listening to Him who spake as never man spake. Suddenly the sharp whistle of a passing steamer roused him. He turned his eyes seaward, and saw the Polly Ann hastening to the railway port with her load of fish for the Glasgow market. The sight set him again in the nineteenth century. Then he felt the rain, and he drew his bonnet over his brows, and lifted his nets, and began to walk toward the little black hut on the horizon. It was of large stones roughly mortared together, and it had a low chimney, and a door fastened with a leather strap; but the small window wanted the screen of white muslin usual in Highland cots, and was dim with dust and cobwebs.

It was David’s home, and he knew his father waited there for his coming; so he hastened his steps; but the radiant, dreamy look which had made him handsome was gone, and he approached the door with the air of a man who is weary of to-day and without hope for the morrow. At the threshold he threw off this aspect, and entered with a smile. His father, sitting wearily in a wooden arm-chair, turned his face to meet him. It was the face of a man walking with death. Human agony grimly borne without complaint furrowed it; gray as ashes were the cheeks, and the eyes alone retained the “spark of heavenly flame” which we call life.

“There has been a change, David,” he said, “and it is well you are come; for I know I must soon be going, and there is this and that to say–as there always is at the parting.”

“I see that you are worse, father. Let me go for the doctor now.”

“I will have no man meddle with the hour of my death; no one shall either hurry or delay it.”

“The doctor might give you some ease from your sore pain.”

“I will bear His will to the uttermost. But come near to me, David; I have some last words to say, and there is One at my side hasting me forward.”

“Tell me your wish now, father. I will do all that you desire.”

“When you have put me in my grave, go to Shetland for me. I thought to do my own errand–to get there just in time to do it, and die; but it is hard counting with Death–he comes sooner than you expect. David, I have brought you up in the way of life. Think no wrong of me when I am gone away forever. Indeed, you’ll not dare to,” he said with a sudden flash of natural pride in himself; “for though I may have had a sore downfall, I could not get away from His love and favor.”

“None living shall say wrong of you in my hearing, father.”

“But, David, there are those of the unregenerate who would make much of my little slip. I might die, lad, and say nothing to any man about it. Put a few peats on the fire; death is cold, and my feet are in the grave already; so I may tell the truth now, for at this hour no man can make me afraid. And there is no sin, I hope, in letting Matilda Sabiston know, if she is still alive, that I owe Bele Trenby nothing for the wrong he did me. St. Paul left the Almighty to pay the ill-will he owed Alexander the coppersmith; but I could not ask that much favor, being only Liot Borson; and no doubt the Lord suffered me to pay my own debt–time and place being put so unexpected into my hand.”