“Is a hell indeed! In this case, Nanna, it is a hell of their own making. They got the fever in a dance-house at Rotterdam. Sinclair knew of its presence, and laughed it to scorn. It was his mate who told the doctor so. Also, Nanna, there is Vala.”
She went swiftly to the side of the sleeping child, and she was sure there was a change in her. David would not acknowledge it, but in forty-eight hours the signs of the fatal scourge were unmistakable. Then Nanna’s house was marked and isolated, and she sat down to watch her dying child.
VIII
THE JUSTIFICATION OF DEATH
During the awful days of Vala’s dying no one came near Nanna. She watched her child night and day, and saw it go out into the darkness that girds our life around, in unutterable desolation of soul. From the first Vala was unconscious, and she went away without a word or token of comfort to the despairing mother. There was unspeakable suffering and decay, and then the little breathing-house in which Vala had sojourned a short space was suddenly vacant. For a moment Nanna stood on the border-lands of being, where life hardly draws breath. A little more, and she would have pushed apart the curtains that divide us from that spiritual world which lies so close and which may claim us at any moment. A little more, and she would, in her loving agony, have pressed beyond manifestations to that which is ineffable and nameless.
But at the last moment the flesh-and-blood conductor of spirit failed; a great weakness and weariness made her passive under the storm of sorrow that drove like rain to the roots of her life. When she was able to move, Vala lay sad and still. All was over, and Nanna stood astonished, smitten, dismayed, on a threshold she could not pass. The Eternal had given, and it was a gift; he had taken away, and it was an immeasurable loss, and she could not say, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” She was utterly desolate; and when she washed for the last time the little feet that had never trod the moor or street or house, she thought her heart would break. Who had led them through the vast spaces of the constellations? Whither had they been led? There was no answer to her moaning question. She looked from her dead Vala to God, and all was darkness. She could not see him.
It was a hurried burial in a driving storm. The sea rolled in fateful billows, the winds whistled loud and shrill, the rain soaked Nanna through and through. Two or three of her neighbors followed afar off; they wished her to see they were not oblivious of her grief and loss, but they dared not break the ordinance of town and kirk and voluntarily and without urgent reason come in contact with the contagion; for the island not many years previously had been almost decimated by the same scourge, and every man and woman was the guardian, not only of his or her own life, but of the lives of the community.
Nanna understood this. She saw the dark, cloaked figures of her friends standing in the storm at a distance, and she knew the meaning of their upraised hands; but she had no heart to answer the signal of sympathy. Alone, she stood by the small open grave and saw it filled. The rain beat on it, and she was glad that it beat on her. It was with difficulty, and only with some affected anger, the two men who had buried the child got her to return to her home.
How vacant it was! How unspeakably lonely! The stormy dreariness outside the cot, the atmosphere of sorrow and loss within it, were depressing beyond words. And what can be said of the loneliness and sorrow within the soul? But in every bitter cup there is one drop bitterest of all; and in Nanna’s case this was David’s neglect and apparent desertion. She had received no message from him, nor had he come near her in all her trouble. Truly, he must have broken the law to do so; but Nanna was sure no town ordinance would have kept her from David’s side in such an hour, and she despised that obedience to law which could teach him such cowardly neglect.
Day after day passed, and he came not. The fever was by this time in all the cottages around her, and the little hamlet was a plague-spot that every one avoided. But, for all that, Nanna’s heart condemned her cousin. She tried him by her own feelings, and found him guilty of unpardonable selfishness and neglect. And oh, how dreary are those waste places left by the loved who have deserted us! With what bitter tears we water them! Vala and David had been her last tie to love and happiness. “Thank God,” she cried out in her misery, “it can only be broken once!”