“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.”