The bride by this time was sobbing, and Peter’s heart evidently softened. So leaving the pair to seal their reconciliation in this favourable mood, the good minister and I mounted our horses, and rode off without further parley.
We were just turning the corner of the loan to regain the high road, when a woman from a cottage in an adjoining field came running to intercept us. There was in her look a wildness bordering on distraction, but it was evidently of no painful kind. She seemed like one not recovered from the first shock of some delightful surprise, too much for the frail fabric of mortality to bear without tottering to its very foundations. The minister checked his horse, whose bridle she grasped convulsively, panting partly from fatigue and more from emotion, endeavouring, but vainly, to give utterance to the tidings with which her bosom laboured. Twice she looked up, shook her head, and was silent; then with a strong effort faltered out,—
“He’s come back!—the Lord be praised for it!”
“Who is come back, Jenny?” said the pastor, in the deepest tone of sympathy,—“Is it little Andrew, ye mean?”
“Andrew!” echoed the matron, with an expression of contempt, which at any other time this favourite grandchild would have been very far from calling forth—“Andrew!—Andrew’s father, I mean my ain first-born son Jamie, that I wore mournings for till they would wear nae langer, and thought lying fifty fathoms down in solid ice, in yon wild place Greenland, or torn to pieces wi’ savage bears, like the mocking bairns in Scripture,—he’s yonder!” said she, wildly pointing to the house; “he’s yonder, living, and living like; and oh, gin ye wad come, and maybe speak a word in season to us, we might be better able to praise the Lord, as is His due.”
We turned our horses’ heads, and followed her as she ran, or rather flew, towards the cottage with the instinct of some animal long separated from its offspring. The little boy before mentioned ran out to hold our horses, and whispered as the minister stooped to stroke his head, “Daddy’s come hame frae the sea.”
The scene within the cottage baffles description. The old mother, exhausted with her exertion, had sunk down beside her son on the edge of the bed on which he was sitting, where his blind and bed-rid father lay, and clasped his withered hands in speechless prayer. His lips continued to move, unconscious of our presence, and ever and anon he stretched forth a feeble arm to ascertain the actual vicinity of his long-mourned son. On a low stool, before the once gay and handsome, but now frost-nipt and hunger-worn mariner, sat his young wife, her hand firmly clasped in his, her fixed eye riveted on his countenance, giving no other sign of life than a convulsive pressure of the former, or a big drop descending unwiped from the latter; while her unemployed hand was plucking quite mechanically the badge of widowhood from her duffle cloak, which (having just reached home as her husband knocked at his father’s door) was yet lying across her knee.
The poor sailor gazed on all around him with somewhat of a bewildered air, but most of all upon a rosy creature between his knees, of about a year and a half old, born just after his departure, and who had only learned the sad word “Daddy,” from the childish prattle of his older brother Andrew, and his sisters. Of these, one had been summoned, wild and barelegged, from the herding, the other, meek and modest, from the village school. The former, idle and intractable, half shrunk in fear of her returned parent’s well-remembered strictness; the other, too young not to have forgotten his person, only wondered whether this was the Father in heaven of whom she had heard so often. She did not think it could be so, for there was no grief or trouble there, and this father looked as if he had seen much of both.
Such was the group to whose emotions, almost too much for human nature, our entrance gave a turn.
“Jamie,” said the good pastor (gently pressing the still united hands of the mariner and his faithful Annie), “you are welcome back from the gates of death and the perils of the deep. Well is it said, that they who go down to the sea in ships see more of the wonders of the Lord than other men; but it was not from storm and tempests alone that you have been delivered,—cold and famine, want and nakedness—wild beasts to devour, and darkness to dismay;—these have been around your dreary path—but He that was with you was mightier than all that were against you; and you are returned a living man to tell the wondrous tale. Let us praise the Lord, my friends, for His goodness, and His wonderful works to the children of men.” We all knelt down and joined in the brief but fervent prayer that followed. The stranger’s heartfelt sigh of sympathy mingled with the pastor’s pious orisons, with the feeble accents of decrepitude, the lisp of wondering childhood, the soul-felt piety of rescued manhood, and the deep, unutterable gratitude of a wife and mother’s heart!