“Well, then, being Matilda, no one would have thought of contradicting her; for she gives much money to the kirk and the societies, and has left all she has to free slaves. No; there was nothing to be done but to thole and be quiet.”
“There might be some excuse for being quiet when Vala was not in danger, but when her life was going, why did you not send for the minister?”
“This is what happened; for, David, God’s will must be done. No one came here but the doctor. On the second day he said, ‘She is not very sick.’ At his next visit he said, ‘She will die.’ Then I told him the child was not baptized, and prayed him to go for the minister. And he said he would certainly do so. But he was called here and there, and he forgot that day; and the next morning very early he went to the manse, and the minister had gone away; and the great storm kept him away for three days; so when he got back the message had been overlaid by many others.”
“O Nanna! Nanna!”
“Yes, it was so. After the storm the doctor came again, and Vala was dying. And then he rode like a man riding for his life, and spoke very angrily to the minister, who was not to blame at all, and the minister was hurt at his words; but he came that afternoon, and it was too late.”
“O Nanna! O Vala! Vala! Vala!”
“So the minister was angry with me for my delays, and he spoke the hard truth to me, and every word went to my soul like a sword. I thought I should die that night, and I longed to die. There was no friend to say to me one word of comfort, and I did not dare to pray. I was feared God would ask me, ‘Where is your child?’ O David, what for at all did God make us? For this life is full of sorrow, and it is little comfort to be told that there is a worse one after it.”
David took her hand, and a tear dropped upon her slender brown fingers; but he did not answer her question. Indeed, he could not. The same bewildering inquiry had haunted his own sad life. So much sorrow and pain, and at the end perhaps to be “hardly saved,” while all around innumerable souls were going down, without hope or helper, to eternal wrath! What for at all had God made man for such a fate?
For that he had not made man for such ends was a fact outside their understandings, even as a possibility; and its very suggestion at this hour would have appeared to both an impiety of the worst kind. So they consoled each other in the only way possible to souls at once so miserable and so submissive. With clasped hands they wept together over the inscrutable fate which had set them so hard a lesson to learn as life, with so little light to learn it by.
Natural events deepened the gloom of this spiritual thraldom. Storms of unusual severity swept over the bare, brown land, and the fishing was not only dangerous, but often impossible. But David regarded frost and snow, stormy winds and raging seas, poverty, pestilence, and death, as part of the eternal necessity pursuing its never-ending work through discord and imperfection. When there was a possibility of casting the fifty fathoms of ling-lines, David and his helpers were sure to venture out; when it was clearly impossible, he went to Nanna’s and sat with her.