“I heard tell,” answered David. “How did she go?”
“Like herself–grim and steadfast to the last. She would not take to her bed; she met death in her chair. When the doctor told her Death was in the room, she stood up, and welcomed him to her house, and said, ‘I have long been waiting for your release.’ I tried to talk to her, but she told me to my face that I had nothing to do with her soul. ‘If I am lost, I am lost,’ she said; ‘and if I am chosen, who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect?’ She said she believed herself to be the child of God, and that, though she had made some sore stumbles and been fractious and ill to guide, she had done no worse than many of his well-loved bairns, and she expected no worse welcome home. ‘I have been long away, minister,’ she sighed, ‘getting on to a century away, and I’ll be glad to win home again.’ And those were her last words.”
“God be merciful to her! In this world, I think, she was an unjust and cruel woman.”
“She was so, then, without moral disquietude. The sin had got into her soul, and she was comfortable with it. God is her judge. He only knew her aright. She left her money wisely and for good ends.”
“I heard tell, to the kirk and the societies and the freedom fund. Yet she had kinsfolk in the Orkneys.”
“They are all very rich. They went to lawyers about her property, but Mistress Sabiston had made all too fast and sure for any one to alter. She was a woman that would have her way, dead or alive.”
“Well, then, this time, it seems, her way is a good way.”
After this David settled his life very much on the old lines. He went to live in Nanna’s cottage, and returned to the boats and the fishing with Groat’s sons. As for his higher duty, that vocation that had come to him on that blessed night when God opened his mouth and he spoke wonderful and gracious things of his law, he was never for a moment recreant to it. But the kingdom of God frequently comes without observation. To preach a sermon, that was a thing far outside David’s possibilities. The power of the church, and its close and exclusive privileges, were at that day in Shetland papal in prerogative. David never dreamed of encroaching on them; nor, indeed, would public opinion have permitted him to do so.
As it was, there grew gradually a feeling of unrest about David. Though he was humble and devout in all kirk exercises, it was known that the people gathered round him not only in his own cottage, but at Groat’s and Barbara Traill’s, and that he spoke to them of the everlasting gospel as never man had spoken before to them. It was known that when the boats lay stilly rocking on the water, waiting for the “take,” David, sitting among his mates, reasoned with them on the love of God, until every face of clay flushed with a radiance quite different from mere color–a radiance that was a direct spiritual emanation, a shining of the soul through mere matter. And as these men were all theologians in a measure, with their “creed” and “evidences” at their tongues’ end, it was a wonderful joy to watch their doubts, like the needle verging to the pole, tremble and tremble into certainty.