Prisoners of Conscience by Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr (mini ebook reader txt) 📕

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,