Prisoners of Conscience

Nanna shivered at the words. She comprehended in a moment the torture this man had probably come purposely to inflict upon her. Already his cruel hands had crippled her child; and what neglect, what terrors, what active barbarities, might he not impose on the little one in the hell of his own ship! Who there could prevent him? Little did Nicol Sinclair care for public opinion on land; but out at sea, where Vala’s tears and cries could bring her no help, what pitiless inhumanities might he not practise?

“Fly with the child!”

The words were struck upon her heart like blows. But how should she fly? and where to? Far or near, the law would find her out and would give Vala to her father’s authority. And she had no friend strong enough to protect her. Only by death could she defy separation. Thus, while she was pouring the boiling water on the tea-leaves, she was revolving questions more agonizing than words have power to picture.

At length the food was on the table, and, save for those few threatening words, the silence was unbroken. Sinclair sat down to his meal with a bravado very near to cursing, and at that moment the kirk bells began to ring again. To Nanna they were like a voice from heaven. Quick as thought she lifted her child and fled from the house.

Oh, what stress of life and death was in her footsteps! Only to reach the kirk! If she could do that, she would cling to the altar and die there rather than surrender Vala to unknown miseries. Love and terror gave her wings. She did not turn her head; she did not feel the frozen earth or the cutting east wind; she saw nothing but Vala’s small face on her breast, and she heard nothing but the echo in her heart of those terrible words threatening her with the loss of her child.

When she reached the kirk the service had begun. The minister was praying. She went into the nearest pew, and though all were standing, she laid Vala on the seat, and slipped to her knees beside her. She could not now cry out as she longed to do, and sob her fright and anguish away at God’s feet. “Folk would wonder at me. I would disturb the service.” These were her thoughts as soon as the pressure of her flight was over. For the solemn voice of the minister praying, the strength of numbers, the holy influence of the time and place, cooled her passionate sense of wrong and danger, and she was even a little troubled at her abandonment of what was usual and Sabbath-like.

The altar now looked a long way off; only Sinclair at touch could have forced her down that guarded aisle to its shelter. Heaven itself was nearer, and God needed no explanations. He knew all. What was the law of man to him? And he feared not their disapproval. Thus in her great strait she overleaped her creed, and cast herself on him who is “a God of the afflicted, an helper of the oppressed, an upholder of the weak, a protector of the forlorn, a savior of them that are without hope.”

When the preaching was over David and Barbara came to her; and David knit his brows when he saw her face, for it was the face of a woman who had seen something dreadful. Her eyes were full of fear and anguish, and she was yet white and trembling with the exertion of her hard flight.

“Nanna,” he said, “what has happened?”

“My husband has come back.”

“I heard last night that his ship was in harbor.”

“He has come for Vala. He will take her from me. She will die of neglect and hard usage. He may give her to some stranger who will be cross to her. O David! David!”

“He shall not touch her.”

“O David!”

“Put her in my arms now.”

“Do you mean this?”

“I do.”

“Can I trust you, David?”

“You may put it to any proof.”

“Pass your word to me, cousin.”

“As the Lord God Almighty lives, I will put my life between Vala and Nicol Sinclair!”

“But how?”

“I will take her to sea if necessary, for my boat can go where few will dare to follow.”

Then he turned to Barbara and said: “Nicol Sinclair has indeed come back. He says he has come for Vala.”

“Then the devil has led him here,” answered Barbara, flashing into anger. “As for Vala, let her stay with me. She has a good guard at my house. There is Groat and his four sons on one side, and Jeppe Madson and his big brother Har on the other side; and there is David Borson, who is worth a whole ship’s crew, to back them in anything for Vala’s safety. Stay with me to-day, Nanna, and we will talk this matter out.”

But Nanna shook her head in reply. As she understood it, duty was no peradventure; it was an absolute thing from which there was no turning away. And her duty was to be at home when her husband was there. But she put Vala’s hand into David’s hand, and then looked at the young man with eyes full of anxiety. He answered the look with one strong word:

“Yes!”

And she knew he would redeem it with his life, if that should be necessary.

Then she turned homeward, and walked with a direct and rapid energy. She put away thought; she formed no plan, she said no prayer. Her petition had been made in the kirk; she thought there would be a want of faith in repeating a request already promised. She felt even the modesty of a suppliant, and would not continually press into the presence of the Highest; for to the reverent there is ever the veil before the Shechinah.

And this conscious putting aside of all emotion strengthened her. When she saw her home she had no need to slacken her speed or to encourage herself. She walked directly to the door and opened it. There was no one there; the place was empty. The food on the table was untouched. Nothing but a soiled and crumpled handkerchief remained of the dreadful visitor. She lifted it with the tongs and cast it into the fire. Then she cleared away every trace of the rejected meal.

Afterward she made some inquiries in the adjoining huts. One woman only had seen his departure. “I could not go to kirk this morning,” she said with an air of apology, “for my bairn is very sick; and I saw Nicol Sinclair go away. It was near the noon hour. Drunk he was, and worse drunk than most men can be. His face was red as a hot peat, and he swayed to and fro like a boat on the Gruting Voe. There was something no’ just right about the man.”

That was all she could learn, and she was very unhappy, for she could imagine no good reason for his departure. In some way or other he was preparing the blow he meant to deal her; and though it was the Sabbath, there would be no difficulty in finding men whom he could influence. And there was also his cousin Matilda Sabiston, that wicked old woman who had outlived all human passions but hatred. Against this man and the money and ill-will that would back him she could do nothing, but she “trusted in God that he would deliver her.”

So she said to herself, “Patience”; and she sat down to wait, shutting her eyes to the outside world, and drawing to a focus all the strength that was in her. The closed Bible lay on the table beside her, and occasionally she touched it with her hand. She had not been able to read it; but there was comfort in seeing the old, homely-looking book, with its everyday aspect and its pages full of kindly blessing, and still more comfort in putting herself in physical contact with its promises. They seemed to be more real. And as she sat hour after hour, psalms learned years before, and read many and many a time without apprehension of their meaning, began to speak to her. She saw the words with her spiritual sight, and they shone with their own glory. And she obtained what she so sorely needed:

A little comforting shadowFrom the hot sun’s fiery glow;A little rest by the fountainWhere the waters of comfort flow.

When midnight struck she looked at the clock and thanked God. Surely she was safe for that night; and she turned the key in her door and went to sleep. And her sleep was that which God giveth to his beloved when they are to be strengthened for many days–a deep, dreamless suspense of all thought and feeling.

Yet, heavenly as the sleep had been, the awakening was a shock. And as the day grew toward noon she was as much troubled by the silence of events as her husband had been by the silence of her lips. Human hearts are nests of fear. Her whole soul kept going to the window, and she said, with the impatience of suspended suffering, “Now! now! I have no fortitude for to-morrow, but I can bear anything now.” Finally she resolved to go to Barbara’s, and see Vala, and hear whatever there was to hear. But as she was putting on her cloak she saw David coming over the moor, and he was carrying Vala in his arms.

“So,” she said, “I see that I will not need to run after my fate; it will come to me; and there will be no use striving against it. For what must be is sure to happen.”

Then she turned back into the house, and David followed with unusual solemnity, and laid Vala upon her bed. “She is sleeping,” he said, “and there is something to tell you, Nanna.”

“About my husband?”

“Yes.”

“Say it out at once, then.”

“Last night he was carried to his own ship.” And David’s face was grave almost to sternness.

“Carried! Have you then hurt him, David?”

“No; he is a self-hurter. But this is what I know. He went from here to Matilda Sabiston’s house. She had gone to kirk with two of her servants, and when she came back she found him delirious on the sofa. Then the doctor was sent for, and when he said the word ‘typhus,’ Matilda shrieked with passion, and demanded that he should be instantly taken away.”

“But no! Surely not!”

“Yes; it was so. Both the minister and the doctor said it was right and best for him to be taken to his own ship. The town–yes, indeed, and the whole islands were in danger. And when they took him on board the Sea Rover, they found that two of the sailors were also very ill with the fever. They had been ill for a week, and Sinclair knew it; yet he came among the boats, and went through the town, speaking to many people. It was a wicked thing for him to do.”

“It was just like him. Where is the Sea Rover now lying?”

“She has been taken to the South Voe. The fishing-boats will watch lest the men are landed, and the doctor will go to the ship every day the sea will let him go.”

“David, is it my duty–”

“No, it is not; there are five men with Sinclair. Three of them are, I believe, yet well men, and three can care for the sick and the ship. On the deck of the Sea Rover a woman should not put her foot.”

“But a ship with typhus on board?”

“Is a hell indeed! In this case, Nanna, it is a hell of their own making. They got the fever in a dance-house at Rotterdam. Sinclair knew of its presence, and laughed it to scorn. It was his mate who told the doctor so. Also, Nanna, there is Vala.”

She went swiftly to the side of the sleeping child, and she was sure there was a change in her. David would not acknowledge it, but in forty-eight hours the signs of the fatal scourge were unmistakable. Then Nanna’s house was marked and isolated, and she sat down to watch her dying child.

VIII

THE JUSTIFICATION OF DEATH

During the awful days of Vala’s dying no one came near Nanna. She watched her child night and day, and saw it go out into the darkness that girds our life around, in unutterable desolation of soul. From the first Vala was unconscious, and she went away without a word or token of comfort to the despairing mother. There was unspeakable suffering and decay, and then the little breathing-house in which Vala had sojourned a short space was suddenly vacant. For a moment Nanna stood on the border-lands of being, where life hardly draws breath. A little more, and she would have pushed apart the curtains that divide us from that spiritual world which lies so close and which may claim us at any moment. A little more, and she would, in her loving agony, have pressed beyond manifestations to that which is ineffable and nameless.

But at the last moment the flesh-and-blood conductor of spirit failed; a great weakness and weariness made her passive under the storm of sorrow that drove like rain to the roots of her life. When she was able to move, Vala lay sad and still. All was over, and Nanna stood astonished, smitten, dismayed, on a threshold she could not pass. The Eternal had given, and it was a gift; he had taken away, and it was an immeasurable loss, and she could not say, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” She was utterly desolate; and when she washed for the last time the little feet that had never trod the moor or street or house, she thought her heart would break. Who had led them through the vast spaces of the constellations? Whither had they been led? There was no answer to her moaning question. She looked from her dead Vala to God, and all was darkness. She could not see him.

It was a hurried burial in a driving storm. The sea rolled in fateful billows, the winds whistled loud and shrill, the rain soaked Nanna through and through. Two or three of her neighbors followed afar off; they wished her to see they were not oblivious of her grief and loss, but they dared not break the ordinance of town and kirk and voluntarily and without urgent reason come in contact with the contagion; for the island not many years previously had been almost decimated by the same scourge, and every man and woman was the guardian, not only of his or her own life, but of the lives of the community.

Nanna understood this. She saw the dark, cloaked figures of her friends standing in the storm at a distance, and she knew the meaning of their upraised hands; but she had no heart to answer the signal of sympathy. Alone, she stood by the small open grave and saw it filled. The rain beat on it, and she was glad that it beat on her. It was with difficulty, and only with some affected anger, the two men who had buried the child got her to return to her home.

How vacant it was! How unspeakably lonely! The stormy dreariness outside the cot, the atmosphere of sorrow and loss within it, were depressing beyond words. And what can be said of the loneliness and sorrow within the soul? But in every bitter cup there is one drop bitterest of all; and in Nanna’s case this was David’s neglect and apparent desertion. She had received no message from him, nor had he come near her in all her trouble. Truly, he must have broken the law to do so; but Nanna was sure no town ordinance would have kept her from David’s side in such an hour, and she despised that obedience to law which could teach him such cowardly neglect.

Day after day passed, and he came not. The fever was by this time in all the cottages around her, and the little hamlet was a plague-spot that every one avoided. But, for all that, Nanna’s heart condemned her cousin. She tried him by her own feelings, and found him guilty of unpardonable selfishness and neglect. And oh, how dreary are those waste places left by the loved who have deserted us! With what bitter tears we water them! Vala and David had been her last tie to love and happiness. “Thank God,” she cried out in her misery, “it can only be broken once!”

Vala had been in her grave a week–a week of days that turned the mother’s heart gray–before Nanna heard a word of comfort. Then once more David lifted the latch of the cot and entered her presence. She was sitting still and empty-handed, and her white face and the quivering of her lips pierced him to the heart.

“Nanna! Nanna!” he said.

Then she rose, and looked round the lonely room, and David understood what she meant.

“Nanna! Nanna!” was still all that he could say. He could find no words fit for such sorrow; but there was the truth to speak, and that might have some comfort in it. So he took her hands in his, and said gently:

“Nanna! dear Nanna! your husband is dead.”

“I am glad of it!” she answered. “He killed Vala twice over.” Her voice was low and weary, and she asked no question about the matter.

“Did you think I had forgotten you, Nanna?”

“Well, then, yes.”

“Forgotten you and Vala?”

“It looked most like it. I thought you were either feared for yourself or the law.”

“No wonder men think ill of God, whom they do not know, when they are so ready to think ill of men, whom they do know.”

“O David! how could you desert me? Can you think of all that I have suffered alone? God nor man has helped me.”

“Poor, poor Nanna!”

“If you had been ill to death, neither the words of men nor the power of the law could have kept me from your sick-bed. No, indeed! I would have risked everything to help you. Where were you at all, David?”

“I was on the Sea Rover.”

“The Sea Rover! That is Nicol’s ship. What did he do to you? What were you there for?”

“I was on the Sea Rover nursing your husband.”

“My God!”

“That is the truth, Nanna. I have just finished my task.”

“Who sent you?”

“The minister came to me with the order, and I could not win by it and face God and man again.”

“What said he? O David! David!”

“He said, ‘David Borson, there are four men ill with typhus this morning on the Sea Rover. The one man yet unstricken is quite broken down with fright and fatigue. The doctor says some one ought to go there. What do you think?’ And I said, ‘Minister, do you mean me?’ And he smiled a bit and answered, ‘I thought you would know your duty, David.’”

“But why your duty, David? Surely Vala was dearer and nearer.”

“The minister said, ‘You are a lone man, David, and you fear God; so, then, you need not fear the fever.’”

“And he knew that you hated Sinclair! Knew that Sinclair had come to my house with the fever on him–knew that he had lifted my poor bairn, only that he might give her the death-kiss!”

“No, no! How could any father, any man, be as bad as that, Nanna?”

“You know not how bad the devil can make a man when he enters into him. And how could the minister send you such a hard road?”

“It was made easy to me; it was indeed, Nanna. The sensible presence of God, and the shining of his face on me, though only for a moment, made me willing to give up all my anger and all my revenge, and wait on my enemy, and do what I could for him to the last moment.”

“And Vala? How could you forget her?”

“I did not forget her. I was feared for the child, though I would not say that to you. Barbara told me she had fret all night, and when I said it would be for her mother, the woman shook her head in a way that made me tremble. I was on my way to see her and you when I met the minister, and he sent me the other way.”

“Why did you not tell him that you feared for Vala?”

“I said that, and he said, ‘Nanna will be able to care for the little one; but there is a strong man needed to care for her husband; Nicol Sinclair will be hard to manage.’ And then he minded me of the man’s sinful life, and he said peradventure it might be the purpose of God even yet to give him another opportunity for repentance through me.”

“If he had known Nicol Sinclair as I–”

“Yes, Nanna, but it is an awful thing to die eternally. If I could help to save any one from such a fate, even my worst enemy,–even your enemy and Vala’s,–what should I have done? Tell me.”

“Just what you did. You have done right. Yes; though the man killed Vala, you have done right! You have done right!”

“I knew that would be your last word.”

“Did he have one good thought, one prayer, to meet death with?”

“He did not. It was a wild night when he was in the dead thraws–a wild night for the flitting; and he went out in storm and darkness, and the sea carried him away.”

“God have mercy upon him! I have not a tear left for Nicol Sinclair.”

“It was an awful death; but on the same night there was a very good death after a very good life. You have heard, Nanna?”

“I have heard nothing. For many days all has been still and tidingless. The fever is in every house, and no one comes near but the doctor, and he speaks only to the sick.”

“Well, then, the good minister has gone home. He was taken with the fever while giving the sacrament to Elder Somerlid. And he knew that he would die, for he said, ‘John Somerlid, we shall very soon drink this cup together in the house of our Father in heaven.’ So when he got back to the manse he sent for Elder Peterson, and gave him his last words.”

“And I know well that they would be good words.”

“They were like himself, full of hope. He spoke about his books, and the money in his desk to pay all his debts, and then he said:

“‘The days of my life are ended, but I have met the hand of God, Peter, and it is strong to lead and to comfort me. A word was brought to me even as I held the blessed cup in my hand. Read to me from the Book while I can listen to it.’ And Peterson asked, ‘What shall I read?’ And the minister said, ‘Take the Psalms. There is everything in the Psalms.’ So Peterson read the ones he called for, and after a little the minister said:

“‘That will do, Peter. I turn now from the sorrow and pain and darkness of earth to the celestial city, to infinite serenities, to love without limit, to perfect joy. And when I am dead, see you to my burying, Peter. Lay me in the grave with my face to the east, and put above me Jesus Christ’s own watchword, “Thy kingdom come.”’ After that he asked only for water, and so he died.”

“Blessed are such dead. There is no need to weep for them.”

“That is one thing sure; but I have seen this, Nanna: that the wicked is unbefriended in his death-pang.”

“And after it, David? O David, after it?”

“There is no darkness nor shadow of death where the worker of iniquity may hide,” he answered with an awful solemnity.

“O David, we come into the world weeping, and we go out fearing. It is a hard travail, both for body and soul.”

And David walked to the little table on which the Book lay, and he turned the leaves until he found the words he wanted. And Nanna watched him with eyes purified by that mysterious withdrawal into the life of the soul which comes through a great sorrow.

“It was not always so, Nanna,” he said. “Listen!

“For their sakes I made the world, and when Adam transgressed my statutes, then was decreed that now is done.

“Then were the entrances of this world made narrow, full of sorrow and travail; they are but few and evil, full of perils and very painful.

“For the entrances of the elder world were wide and sure, and brought immortal fruit.

But yet there is to be a restoration, Nanna.”

“I know not,” she answered wearily. “It is so far off–so far away.”

“But it is promised. It is sure.

“The world shall be turned into the old silence seven days, like as in former judgments, so that no man shall remain.

“And after seven days, the world, that yet awaketh not, shall be raised up; and that shall die that is corrupt.

“And the earth shall restore those that are asleep in her; and the dust, those that dwell in silence; and the secret places shall deliver those souls that were committed unto them.

“And the Most High shall appear upon the seat of judgment, and misery shall pass away, and the long suffering shall have an end.

“But judgment shall remain; truth shall stand; and faith shall wax strong.”

“I know nothing of these things, David; I cannot think of them. What I want is some word of comfort about Vala–a little word from beyond would make all the difference. Why is it not given? Why is there no answering voice from the other side? There is none on this. Why does God pursue a poor, broken-hearted woman so hardly? Even now, when I have wept my heart cold and dumb, I do not please him. One thing only is sure–my misery. Oh, why, why, David?”

And David could only drop his eyes before the sad, inquiring gaze of Nanna’s. He murmured something about Adam and the cross, and told her sorrowfully that He who hung upon it, forsaken, in the dark, also asked, “Why?” The austerity and profound mystery of his creed gave him no more comforting answer to the pathetic inquiry.

He spent the day in the little hamlet, and, the weather being dry and not very cold, he persuaded Nanna to take a walk upon the cliff-top with him. She agreed because she had not the strength to oppose his desire; but if David had had any experience with suffering women, he would have seen at once how ineffectual his effort would be. The gray, icy, indifferent sea had nothing hopeful to say to her. The gray gulls, with their stern, cold eyes, watchful and hungry, filled her ears with nothing but painful clamoring. There was no voice in nature to cry, “Comfort,” to a bruised soul.