Prisoners of Conscience

Chapter 7

David Borson was stirred to the very seat of life by the things Nanna had told him. It did not enter his heart to doubt their truth. The shameful deed of the first Gisli, and the still strong order of its consequences, which neither the guilt of his children hastened, nor their innocence delayed, nor their expiation arrested, was the dominant feeling aroused by her narrative. The whole story, with its terrible Nemesis, fitted admirably into the system of Calvinistic theology, and David had not yet come to the hour in which faith would crush down fatalism. The words of these ancient sagas went singing and swinging through his brain and heart, and life seemed so wonderful and bewildering, its sorrows so great and certain, its needs so urgent and present, and heaven, alas! so far off.

There came to him also, as he slowly trod the lonely moor, the most awful of all conceptions of eternity–the revelation of a repentance that could undo nothing. He was righteously angry at Gisli’s base ingratitude; he was sorry for his sin; but others had doubtless felt the same anger and sorrow, and it had been ineffectual. Helpless and passive in the hands of destiny, a nameless dread, an urgent want of help and comfort, forced him to feel out into the abyss for something more than flesh and blood to lean on; and then he found that God is best of all approached in indefinite awe and worship, and that moments of tender, vague mystery, haunted by uncertain presentiments, bring him near.

“Well, then,” he said as he came to the door of his house, “the wicked may be a rod, and smite for generations; but the rod is in the hand of God, and I will remind myself that my God is the Everlasting, Almighty, Infinite One; and I will ask him to give sentence with me, and to deliver me from the wicked, whether they be in the body or out of the body.” And he walked through the house-place where Barbara was sitting, and saw her not; for he was saying to himself, “‘Why art thou so vexed, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? O put thy trust in God: for I will yet give him thanks, which is the help of my countenance, and my God.’”

Nanna sat motionless for long after David left her. She had many causes for anxiety. She was fearful of losing her work, and absolute poverty would then be her lot. It was a fear, however, and not a certainty; and after a little reflection she also threw her care upon the Preserver of men. “Be at peace,” she said to her heart. “God feeds the gulls and the ravens, and he will not starve Nanna and Vala.”

It was harder to combat her spiritual anxieties. She was sorry she had told David about the thrall’s curse. Her first instinct was to ask his father and mother to forgive her; then she suddenly remembered that praying to or for the dead was a sin for a kirk session to meet on. And this thought led her easily to the dream that had troubled her last night’s sleep and made her day dark with sorrowful fears. All her life she had possessed something of that sixth sense by which we see and anticipate things invisible. And it is noticeable that many cripples have often a seraphic intelligence, a far-reaching vision, and very sensitive spiritual aptitudes. Vala was of this order. She too had been singularly depressed; she had seen more than she could tell; she was as restless and melancholy as birds just before their migrations, and she looked at her mother with eyes so wistful, so full of inquiry, so “far off,” that Nanna trembled under their fearfully prescient intimations. Alas for the dangerous happiness of maternity! How prodigious are its inquietudes! How uncertain its consolations!

She told David that she had dreamed a dream, and that she looked for a change; and she had made this statement as simply and as confidently as if she had said, “The wind is from the north, and I look for a storm.” Repeated experiences had taught her, as they teach constantly, that certain signs precede certain events, and that certain dreams are dictated by that delicate antenna of spiritual instinct which feels danger to be near and warns of it.

Nanna had had the dream that ever forecast her misfortunes, and she sat thinking of its vague intimations, and tightening her heart for any sorrow. She had been forewarned that she might be forearmed, and she regarded this warning as a mark of interest and favor from beyond the veil. God had always spoken to his children in dreams and by the oracles that abide in darkness, and Nanna knew that in many ways “dreams are large possessions.” She fell asleep pondering what her vision of the preceding night might mean, and awoke next morning, while it was still dark, with a dim sense of fear and sorrow encompassing her.

“But everything frightens one when night, the unknown, takes the light away,” she thought. And she rose and lighted a lamp, and looked at Vala. The child was in a deep and healthy slumber, and the sight of its face calmed and satisfied her. Yet she was strangely apprehensive, and there was a weight on her heart that made her faint and trembling. She knew right well that some hitherto unknown sorrow was creeping like a mist over her life, and she had not yet the strength and the pang of conflict.