Prisoners of Conscience Part 22

And David's face shadowed, and he did not lift up his hand; also, if the whisper in his heart had been audible, John Priestly would have heard him say, "What is the use of prayer? The Lord has cast me off."

But John did not try the strength of his patient further at that time. He sat by his side, and laid his hand upon David's hand, and began to repeat in a slow, a.s.suring voice the One Hundred and Third Psalm. Its familiar words went into David's ears like music, and he fell sweetly asleep to its promises. For, though men in their weakness and haste are apt to say, "The Lord hath forgotten to be gracious," they who have but once felt his love, though dimly and far off, cannot choose but trust in it, even to the grave.

And souls fraternize in their common exile. John Priestly loved the young man whom he had saved, and David felt his love. As he came fully back to life the past came clearly back to memory. He remembered Nanna as those who love white jasmine remember it when its starry flowers are gone--with a sweet, aching longing for their beauty and perfume. He remembered those terrible days when physical pain had been acute in every limb and every nerve, when he had fainted with agony, but never complained. He remembered his lonely journey to the grave's mouth, and the dim human phantoms who had stood, as it were, afar off, and helped and cheered him as best they could. And he understood that he had really been born again: a new lease of life had been granted him, and he had come back to earth, as so many wish to come back, with all his old loves and experiences to help him in the future.

If only G.o.d would love him! If only G.o.d would give him ever so small a portion of his favor! If he would only let him live humbly before him, with such comfort of home and friends as a poor fisherman might have! He wondered, as he lay still, what he or his fathers had done that he should be so sorely punished. Perhaps he had shown too great partiality to his father's memory in the matter of Bele Trenby. Well, then, he must bear the consequences; for even at this hour he could not make up his mind to blame his father more than his father had blamed himself.

And as he lay watching the waving of the green trees, and inhaling the scent of the lilies and violets from the garden below him, he began to think of Shetland with a great longing. The bare, brown, treeless land called him with a hundred voices, and thoughts of Nanna came like a small bird winging the still, blue air. For sorrow can endear a place as well as joy; and the little hut on the bare moor, in which he could see Nanna working at her braiding or her knitting, was the spot on all the earth that drew his soul with an irresistible desire.

Oh, how he wanted to see Nanna! Oh, how he wanted to see her! Just to hold her hand, and kiss her face, and sit by her side for an hour or two! He did not wish either her conscience or his own less tender, but he thought that now, perhaps, they might be cousins and friends, and so comfort and help each other in the daily trials of their hard, lonely lives.

One day, when he was much stronger, as he sat by the open window thinking of these things, John Priestly came to read to him. John had a faculty of choosing the sweetest and most comfortable portions of the Book in his hand. This selection was not without purpose. He had learned from David's delirious complainings the intense piety of the youth, and the spiritual despair which had intensified his sufferings. And he hoped G.o.d, through him, would say a word of comfort to the sorrowful heart. So he chose, with the sweet determination of love, the most glorious and the most abounding words of the divine Father.

David listened with a reserved acceptance. It was in a measure a new Scripture to him. It appeared partial. When John read, with a kind of triumph, that the Lord "is long-suffering to us-ward, not willing that _any_ should perish, but that _all_ should come to repentance,"

David made a slight movement of dissent; and John asked:

"Is not that a n.o.ble love? Thee believes in it, David?"

"No."

The word was softly but positively uttered.

"What then, David?"

"'Some men and angels are predestined unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death; and their number is so certain and definite that it cannot be either increased or diminished.'" And David quoted these words from the Confession of Faith with such confidence and despair that John trembled at them.

"David! David!" he cried. "Jesus Christ came to seek and to save the lost."

"It is impossible for the lost to be saved," answered David, with a somber confidence; "only the elect, predestined to salvation."

"And the rest of mankind, David? what of them?"

"G.o.d has been pleased to ordain them to wrath, that his justice may be satisfied and glorified."

"David, who made thee such a G.o.d as this? Where did thee learn about him? How can thee love him?"

"It is in the Confession of Faith. And, oh, John Priestly, I do love him! Yes, I love him, though he has hid his face from me and, I fear, cast me off forever."

"Dear heart," said John, "thee is wronging thy best Friend."

"If I could think so! Oh, if I could think so!"

"Well, then, as we are inquiring after G.o.d, and nothing less, is it not fair to take him at his own word?"

David looked inquiringly at John, but made no answer.

"I mean, will it not be more just to believe what G.o.d says of himself than to believe what men,--priests,--long ago dead, have said about him?"

"I think that."

Then, one after another, the golden verses, full of G.o.d's love, dropped from John's lips in a gracious shower. And David was amazed, and withal a little troubled. John was breaking up all his foundations for time and for eternity. He was using the Scriptures to grind to powder the whole visible church as David understood it.

It was a kind of spiritual s.h.i.+pwreck. His slow nature took fire gradually, and then burned fiercely. Weak as he was, he could not sit still. John Priestly was either a voice in the wilderness crying "Peace!" and "Blessing!" to him, or he was the voice of a false prophet crying "Peace!" where there was no peace. He looked into the face of this new preacher, frank and glowing as it was, with inquiry not unmixed with suspicion.

"Well, then," he cried, "if these things be so, let G.o.d speak to me.

Bring me a Bible with large letters. I want to see these words with my eyes, and touch them with my fingers."

The conversation thus begun was constantly continued, and David searched the Scriptures from morning to night. Often, as the spring grew fairer and warmer, the two young men sat in the garden with the Bible between them; and while the suns.h.i.+ne fell brightly on its pages they reasoned together of fate and free will, and of that divine mercy which is from everlasting to everlasting. For where young men have leisure spiritual things employ them much more frequently than is supposed. Indeed, it is the young who are most earnestly troubled about the next life; the middle-aged are too busy with this one, and the aged do not speculate, because they will soon know.

Thus, daily, little by little, through inlets and broader ways known only to G.o.d and himself, the light grew and grew unto perfect day, and flooded not only the great hills and promontories of his soul, but also shone into all its secret caves and gloomy valleys and lonely places. Then David knew how blind and ignorant he had been; then he was penetrated with loving amazement, and humbled to the dust with a sense of the wrong he had done the Father of his spirit; and he locked himself in his room, and fell down on his face before his G.o.d. But into that awful communion, in which so much was confessed and so much forgiven, it is not lawful to inquire.

XI

THE LOWEST h.e.l.l

After this the thought of Nanna became an irresistible longing. He could not be happy until she sat in the suns.h.i.+ne of G.o.d'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 pa.s.sion. "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 G.o.d, 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-fis.h.i.+ng, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 fis.h.i.+ng-smacks hanging to the rus.h.i.+ng sides of foaming mountains. He described the h.o.a.ry 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 pa.s.sed 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 wors.h.i.+p a G.o.d who was supposed to d.a.m.n 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 G.o.d! 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 G.o.d should have created this beautiful world as a nursery for h.e.l.l! 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 G.o.d."

"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 G.o.d, and of his honorable, true, and only Son Christ Jesus."

"I will listen, if G.o.d will speak."

"Never thee mind catechisms and creeds and confessions. The Word of G.o.d 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."