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XI
THE LOWEST HELL

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 asked him 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 Norse town, 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, he said, 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 spiritual center, 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 that theirs 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. We shall 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 for the express purpose of breaking them? No, no, David! He is not willing that any should 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 business in 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. He has to 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 my home, 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 and women 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, we make 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.”

XII
“AT LAST IT IS PEACE”

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 nothing of 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.

“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:

Oh, my love! my love! Farewell forever! I am come to the end of my life. I am going away, and I know not where to. All is dark. But I have cast myself at His feet, and said, “Thy will be done!”

I am still alive, David. I have been alone all night, and every breath has been a death-pang. How can His eternal purpose need my bitter suffering? Oh, that God would pity me! His will be done!

My love, it is nearly over. I have seen Vala! At last it is peace–peace! His will be done! Mercy–mercy–mercy–

These pitiful despairs and farewells were written in a large, childish hand, and on a poor sheet of paper. David spread this paper upon Vala’s couch, and, kneeling down, covered it with tears and kisses; but anon he lifted it up toward heaven, and prayed as men pray when they feel prayer to be an immediate and veritable thing–when they detain God, and clasp his feet, and cling to his robe, and will not let him go until he bless them.

Christine Yell had seen David enter the cottage, and after an hour had passed she went to the door intending to speak to him; but she heard the solemn, mysterious voice of the man praying, and she went away and called her neighbors, Margaret Jarl and Elga Fae and Thora Thorson. And they talked of David a little, and then Magnus Thorson, the father-in-law of Thora, being a very old man, went alone into Nanna’s cottage to see David. And after a while the women were called, and Christine took with her a plate of fish and bread which she had prepared; and David was glad of their sympathy.

They sat down outside the door. The tender touch of the gray gloaming softened the bleak cliffs and the brown moorland, and the heavens were filled with stars. Then softly and solemnly Christine spoke of Nanna’s long, hard fight with death, and of the spiritual despair which had intensified her suffering.

“It was in season and out of season that she was at Vala’s grave,” said Christine, “and kneeling and lying on the cold ground above her; and the end was–what could only be looked for–a cough and a fever, and the slow consumption that wasted her away.”

“Was there none of you to comfort her?”

“It is true, David, that the child was never baptized,” said Christine; “so, then, what comfort could there be for her? And then she began to think that God had never loved her.”

“Thanks to the Best, she knows now how far wrong she was,” said David, fervently; “she knows now that his love is from everlasting to everlasting. Her poor heart, wearied with so many sorrows and troubled by so many fears, has tasted one supreme happiness–that God is love.”

“She thought for sure that he was continually angry with her. ‘If he had cared for my soul,’ she said to me, one day, ‘he would not have let me marry Nicol Sinclair. He would have kept his hand about me until my cousin David Borson came from the Hebrides. And if he had cared for my poor bairn he would not, by this and that, have prevented the minister coming to baptize her.”

“Was she long ill?” asked David.

“At the beginning of last winter she became too ill to go to the ordinances, and too feared to open her Bible, lest she should read her own condemnation in it; and so gradually she seemed to lose all hope, either for this life or the next one. And folk wearied of her complaining, I think.”

“The elders and the minister, did they not try to comfort her?”

“At first Elder Peterson and Elder Hoag came to see her; but Nanna put strange questions to them–questions they could not answer; and they said the minister could not answer them, either–no, nor the whole assembly of the kirk of Scotland. And I was hearing that the minister was angered by her words and her doubting, and he told her plainly ‘women had no call to speer after the “why” of God’s purposes.’ And indeed, David, she was very outspoken,–for she was fretful with pain and fever,–and she told him that she was not thankful to go to hell for the glory and honor of God, and that, moreover, she did not want to go to heaven if Vala was not there. And when the minister said, ‘Whist, woman!’–for he was frightened at her words,–she would not be still, but went on to wonder how fathers and mothers could be happy, even in the very presence of God, if their sons and daughters were wandering in the awful outer darkness; and, moreover, she said she was not grateful to God for life, and she thought her consent to coming into life on such hard terms ought to have been first asked.”

And Christine looked at David, and ceased speaking, for she was afraid that her words would both anger and trouble the young man. But David’s eyes were full of happy tears, and there was a tender smile round his mouth. He was thinking of the glad surprises that Nanna must have had–she who belonged to the God of compassions. After all her shuddering questions and lamentable doubts and cruel pain, the everlasting arms under her; Vala and her beloved dead to comfort her; ineffable peace; unclouded joy; the night past; the last tear wiped away! At that moment he felt that it was too late to weep for Nanna; indeed, he smiled like one full of blessed thought. And Christine, a little irritated by the unexpected mood, did not further try to smooth over the hard facts of the lonely woman’s death-bed.

“The minister was angry with her, and he said God was angry. And Nanna said, well, then, she knew that he did not care about her perishing; it was all one to him. A little happiness would have saved her, and he refused her the smallest joy; and she did not see how crushing the poor and broken-hearted in the dust increased his glory. The minister told her she was resisting God, and she said, no; that was not possible. God was her master, and he smote her, and perhaps had the right to do so; but she was not his child: no father would treat a child so hardly as he had treated her. She was a slave, and must submit, and weep and die at the corner of the highway. And, to be sure, the minister did not think of her pain and her woman’s heart,–what men do?–and he thought it right to speak hard words to her. And then Nanna said she wished they would all leave her alone with her sorrow, and so they did.”

Then, suddenly and swiftly as a flash of light, a word came to David. His heart burned, and his tongue was loosened, and then and there he preached to the old man and the three women the unsearchable riches of the cross of Christ. He glorified God because Nanna had learned Christ at the radiant feet of Christ, in the joy and love of the redeemed. He took his Bible from his pocket, and repeated all the blessed words he had marked and learned. Until the midnight moon climbed cold and bright to the zenith he spoke. And old Magnus Thorson stood up, leaning on his staff, full of holy wonder, and the women softly sobbed and prayed at his feet. And when they parted there was in every heart a confident acceptance of David’s closing words:

“Whoever rests, however feebly, on the eternal mercy shall live forever.”

After this “call” sleep was impossible to David. That insight which changes faith into knowledge had comforted him concerning his dead. He lay down on Vala’s couch, and he felt sure that Nanna’s smile filled the silence like a spell; for there are still moments when we have the transcendental faculties of the illuminated who, as the apostle says, “have tasted of the powers of the world to come”–still moments when we feel that Jacob’s ladder yet stands between heaven and earth, and that we can see the angels ascending and descending upon it. He was so still that he could hear the beating of his own heart, but clear and vivid as light his duty spread out before him. He had found his vocation, and, oh, how rapidly men grow under the rays of that invisible sun!

The next morning he went to see the minister. He was seated, writing his sermon, precisely as David had found him on the occasion of his last visit. So much had happened to David since that morning that he found it difficult to believe nothing had happened to the minister. He looked up at the interruption with the same slight annoyance, but the moment he saw David his manner changed. He rose up quickly and went to meet him, and as he clasped his hand looked with curious intentness into his face.

“You are much changed, David,” he said. “What has happened to you?”

“Everything, nearly, minister. The David Borson who left here two years ago is dead and buried. I have been born again.”

“That is a great experience. Sit down and tell me about it.”

“Yes, minister, but first I must speak of Nanna Sinclair.”

“She is dead, David; that is true.”

“She has gone home. She has gone to the God who loved her.”

“I–hope so.”

“I know it is so. Nanna loved God, and those who love God in life will find no difficulty in going to him after life is over.”

“She had a hard life, and it was all in the dark to her.”

“But at the death-hour it was light, though the light was not of this world.” And David told the minister about the farewell message she had written him, and its final happy words, “At last it is peace–peace!” He could not bear that any eyes should see the paper, or any hand touch it, but his own; but he wished all to know that at the death-hour God had comforted her.

“She suffered a great deal, David.”

“What ailed her, minister?”

“What ails the lamp, David, when it goes out? There is no oil, that is all. Nanna used up all her strength in weeping and feeling; the oil of life wastes quickly in that way.”

“O minister, I am so sorry that I left her! It was selfish and cruel. I wish now that I could cover her hands with kisses, and ask her pardon on my knees; but I find nothing but a grave.”

“Ah, David, it is death that forces us to see the selfishness that comes into our best affections. Self permitted you to give all you had to Nanna, but forbade you to give yourself. There was self even in your self-surrender to God. If you could have seen that long, long disappointed look in Nanna’s eyes, and the pale lips that asked so little from you–”

“O minister, spare me! She asked only, ‘Stay near me, David’; and I might have stayed and comforted her to the end. Oh, for one hour–one hour only! But neither to-day nor to-morrow, nor through all eternity, shall I have the opportunity to love and soothe which I threw away because it hurt me and made my heart ache.” And David bowed his head in his hands and wept bitterly.

Alas! love, irreparably wronged, possesses these eternal memories; and the soul, forced to weep for opportunities gone forever, has these inconsolable refinements of tenderness. “One hour–one hour only!” was the cry of David’s soul. And the answer was, “No, never! She has carried away her sorrow. You may, indeed, meet her where all tears are dried and forgotten; but while she did weep you were not there; you had left her alone, and your hour to comfort her has gone forever.”

After a short silence the minister went to his desk, and brought from it David’s purse, and he laid it, with the will that had been written, before him. “It is useless now,” he said. “Nanna has need of nothing you can give her.”

“Did it do any good, minister?”

“Yes, a great deal. When Nanna was no longer able to come to the kirk, I went to see her. She was miserably sick and poor, and it made my heart ache to watch her thin, trembling fingers trying to knit. I took her work gently out of her hands, and said, ‘You are not able to hold the needles, Nanna, and you have no need to try to do so. There is provision made for all your wants.’ And she flared up like whin-bushes set on fire, and said she had asked neither kirk nor town for help, and that she trusted in God to deliver her from this life before she had to starve or take a beggar’s portion.”