“If I do love you!” she interrupted. “I love none but you. You are heart of my heart and soul of my soul. I hear you coming when you are half a mile away. I have no joy but when you are beside me. I shall die of grief if you leave me in anger. I would count it heaven and earth to be your wife, but I dare not! I dare not!”
She was sobbing piteously when she ended this protestation, and David comforted her with caresses and tender words. “What fears you, Nanna?” he asked. “Oh, my dear, what fears you?”
“This is what I fear,” she answered, freeing herself from his embrace, and looking steadily at him. “This is what I fear, David. If we were married I might have another child–I might have many children.”
Then he clasped her hand tightly, for he began to see where Nanna was leading him, as she continued with slow solemnity:
“Can you, can the minister, can any human being, give me assurance they will be elect children? If you can, I will be your wife to-morrow. If you cannot, as the God of my father lives, I will not bring sons and daughters into life for sin and sorrow here, and for perdition hereafter. The devil shall not so use my body! To people hell? No; I will not–not even for your love, David!”
Her words, so passionate and positive, moved him deeply. He was the old David again–the light, the gladness, all but the tender, mournful love of the past, gone from his face. He held both her hands, and he looked down at them lying in his own as he answered:
“Both of us are His children, Nanna. We are His by generations and by covenant. He has promised mercy to such. Well, then, we may have a reasonable hope–”
“Hope! No, no, David! I must have something better than hope. I hoped for Vala, and my hope has been my hell. And as for the child–my God! where is the child?”
“We love God, Nanna, and the children of the righteous–”
“Are no safer than the children of the wicked, David. I have thought of this continually. There was John Beaton’s son; he killed a man, and died on the gallows-tree, to the shame and the heartbreak of his good father and mother. The lad had been baptized, too,–given to God when he drew his first breath,–and God must have rejected him. Minister Stuart’s son forged a note, and was sent with felons across the sea. His father and mother had prayed for him all the days of his life; he was brought to the kirk and given to God in baptism; and God must have rejected him also. Think of good Stephen and Anna Blair’s children. Their daughter’s name cannot be spoken any more, and their sons are bringing down their gray hairs with sorrow to the grave–with sorrow and shame too. Go through the whole kirk, the whole town, the islands themselves, and you will be forced to say, David, that it is the children of the righteous that go to the devil.”