“If there is no room for me in my cousin’s house I will come back to you.”
So Barbara walked with him to the end of the street, and pointed out a little group of huts on the distant moor.
“Go into the first one,” she said; “it is Nanna Sinclair’s. And be sure and keep to the trodden path, for outside of it there are bogs that no man knows the bottom of.”
Then David went forward alone, and his heart fell, and a somber look crept like a cloud over his face. This was not the home-coming he had anticipated–this poor meal at a stranger’s fireside. He had been led to think that his cousin Paul had a large house and the touch of money-getting. “He and his will be well off,” Liot had affirmed more than once. And one day, while he yet could stand in the door of his hut, he had looked longingly northward and said, “Oh, if I could win home again! Paul would make a fourteen days’ feast to welcome me.”
The very vagueness of these remarks had given strength to David’s imagination. He had hoped for things larger than his knowledge, and he had quite forgotten to take into his calculations the fact that as the years wear on they wear out love and life, and leave little but graves behind them. At this hour he felt his destiny to be hard and unlovely, and the text learned as one of the pillars of his faith, “Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated,” forced itself upon his reflection. A deadly fear came into his heart that the Borsons were among these hated ones. Why else did God pursue them with such sufferings and fatalities? And what could he do to propitiate this unfriendly Deity?
His road was upon the top of the cliff, over a moor covered with peat-bogs and withered heather. The sea was below him, and a long, narrow lake lay silent and motionless among the dangerous moss–a lake so old and dead-looking that it might have been the shadow of a lake that once was. Nothing green was near it, and no birds were tempted by its sullen waters; yet untold myriads of sea-birds floated and wheeled between sea and sky, and their hungry, melancholy cries and the desolate landscape stimulated and colored David’s sad musings, though he was quite unaware of their influence.
When he came to the group of huts, he paused a moment. They were the abodes of poverty; there was none better than the rest. But Barbara had said that Nanna’s was the first one, and he went slowly toward it. No one appeared, though the door stood wide open; but when he reached the threshold he could see Nanna sitting within. She was busily braiding the fine Tuscan straw for which Shetland was then famous, and her eyes were so intently following her rapid fingers that it was unlikely she had seen him coming. Indeed, she did not raise them at once, for it was necessary to leave her work at a certain point; and in that moment’s delay David looked with a breathless wonder at the woman before him.
She was sitting, and yet even sitting she was majestic. Her face was large, but perfectly oval, and fair as a lily; her bright-brown hair was parted, passed smoothly behind the ears, and beautifully braided. Serenity and an unalterable calm gave to the young face something of the fixity of marble; but as David spoke she let her eyes fall upon a little child at her feet, and then lifted them to him with a smile as radiant and life-giving as sunshine.
“Who are you?” she asked, as she took her babe in her arms and went toward David.
“I am your far-cousin David Borson.”