“Nanna! Nanna!”
“It is the truth, David. How the good God can treat his bairns so, I know not; but you and I may also deserve his wrath in like manner. I am feared to hope different. O David, I am feared to be a mother again!”
“Nanna! Nanna! what can I say?”
“There is nothing to say. If I should meet Vala in that place where infants ‘earnestly desire to see and love God, and yet are not able to do so,’ I should cover my face before the child. If she blamed me, I should shiver in speechless agony; if she did not blame me, it would be still harder to bear. Were we only sure–but we are not sure.”
“We are not sure.” David repeated the words with a sad significance. Nanna’s argument, evolved from her own misery and illustrated by that misery, had been before David’s eyes for months. He could not escape from such reasoning and from such proof, and his whole life, education, and experience went to enforce the pitiful dilemma in which their love had placed them.
“It is His will, and we must bear it to the uttermost,” continued Nanna, with a sorrowful resignation.
“I am very wretched, Nanna.”
“So am I, David, very wretched indeed. I used to think monks and nuns, and such as made a merit of not marrying, were all wrong; maybe they are nearer right than we think for. Doubtless they have a tender conscience toward God, and a tender conscience is what he loves.”
Then David rose from Nanna’s side and walked rapidly to and fro in the room. Motion helped him to no solution of the tremendous difficulty. And Nanna’s patient face, her fixed outward gaze, the spiritual light of resolute decision in her eyes, gave to her appearance an austere beauty that made him feel as if this offering up of their love and all its earthly sweetness was a sacrifice already tied to the horns of the altar, and fully accepted.
Now, the law of duty lay very close to David’s thoughts; it was an ever-present consciousness, haunting his very being; but the sensual nature always shrinks away from it. David sat down and covered his face with his hands, and began to weep–to sob as strong men sob when their sorrow is greater than they can bear; as they never sob until the last drop, the bitterest drop of all, is added–the belief that God has forsaken them. This was the agony which tore David’s great, fond heart in two. It forced from him the first pitiful words of reproach against his God: