Liot is in the shelter of Gods hand; he need not fear what you can do to him. He can prove you liar far easier than you can prove him murderer. On the last day of Beles life Liot was at sea all day, and there were three men with him. He spent the evening with John Twatt and myself, and then sat until the midnight with Paul Borson.
For all that, he was with Bele Trenby! I know it! My heart tells me so.
Your heart has often lied to you before this. I see, however, that our talk had better come to an end once for all. I will never come here again.
I shall be the happier for that. Why did you come at this time?
I thought that you were in trouble about Bele. I was sorry for you. I wished to be friends with every one before I married.
I want no pity; I want vengeance; and from here or there I will compass it. While my head is above the mold there is no friendship possible between usno, nor after it. Do you think that Bele is out of your way because he is out of the body? He is now nearer to you than your hands or feet. And let Liot Borson look to himself. The old thralls curse was evil enough, but Bele Trenby will make it measureless.
Such words are like the rest of your lying; I will not fear them, since God is himself, and he shall rule the life Liot and I will lead together. When a girl is near her bridal every one but you will give her a blessing. I think you have no heart; surely you never loved any one.
I have lovedyes! Then she stood up and cried passionately: Begone! I will speak no more to youonly this: ask Liot Borson what was the ending of Bele Trenby.
She was the incarnation of rage and accusation, and Karen almost fled from her presence. Her first impulse was to go to Liot with the story of the interview, but her second was a positive withdrawal of it. It was the eve of her bridal day, and the house was already full of strangers. Paul Borson was spending his money freely for the wedding-feast. In the morning she was to become Liots wife. How could she bring contention where there should be only peace and good-will?
Besides, Liot had told her it was useless to visit Matilda; he had even urged her not to do so, for all Lerwick knew how bitterly she was lamenting the loss of her adopted son Bele; and Liot had said plainly to Karen: As for her good-will, there is more hope of the dead; let her alone. As she remembered these words a cold fear invaded Karens heart; it turned her sick even to dismiss it. What if Liot did know the ending of Bele! She recalled with a reluctant shiver his altered behavior, his long silences, his gloomy restlessness, the frequent breath of some icy separation between them. If Matilda was right in any measureif Liot knew! Merciful God, if Liot had had any share in the matter! She could not face him with such a thought in her heart. She ran down to the sea-shore, and hid herself in a rocky shelter, and tried to think the position down to the bottom.
It was all a chaos of miserable suspicion, and at last she concluded that her fear and doubt came entirely from Matildas wicked assertions. She would not admit that they had found in her heart a condition ready to receive them. She said: I will not again think of the evil words; it is a wrong to Liot. I will not tell them to him; he would go to Matilda, and there would be more trouble, and the why and the wherefore spread abroad; and God knows how the wicked thought grows.
Then she stooped and bathed her eyes and face in the cold salt water, and afterward walked slowly back to Paul Borsons. The house was full of company and merry-making, and she was forced to fall into the mood expected from her. Women do such things by supreme efforts beyond the power of men. And Karens smiles showed nothing of the shadow behind them, even when Liot questioned her about her visit.
She is a bad woman, Liot, answered Karen, and she said many temper-trying words.
That is what I looked for, Karen. It is her way about all things to scold and storm her utmost. Does she trouble you, dear one?
I will not be word-sick for her. There is, as you said, no love lost between us, and I shall not care a rap for her anger. Thanks to the Best, we can live without her. And in this great trust she laid her hand in Liots, and all shadows fled away.
It was then a lovely night, bright with rosy auroras; but before morning there was a storm. The bridal march to the kirk had to be given up, and, hooded and cloaked, the company went to the ceremony as they best could. There was no note of music to step to; it was hard enough to breast the gusty, rattling showers, and the whole landscape was a little tragedy of wind and rain, of black, tossing seas and black, driving clouds. Many who were not at the bridal shook their heads at the storm-drenched wedding-guests, and predicted an unhappy marriage; and a few ventured to assert that Matilda Sabiston had been seen going to the spaewife Asta. And what for, they asked, but to buy charms for evil weather?
All such dark predictions, however, appeared to be negatived by actual facts. No man in Lerwick was so happy as Liot Borson. The home he had built Karen made a marvel of neatness and even beauty; it was always spotless and tidy, and full of bits of bright colorgay patchwork and crockery, and a snow-white hearth with its glow of fiery peat. Always she was ready to welcome him home with a loving kiss and all the material comforts his toil required. And they loved each other! When that has been said, what remains unsaid? It covers the whole ground of earthly happiness.
How the first shadow crossed the threshold of this happy home neither Liot nor Karen could tell; it came without observation. It was in the air, and entered as subtly and as silently. Liot noticed it first. It began with the return of Brent. When he gave Bele the piece of cloth and the gold brooch for his wife, he was on the point of leaving Amsterdam for Java. Fever and various other things delayed his return, but in the end he came back to Lerwick and began to talk about Bele. For Auda, reticent until her husbands return, then told him of Beles visit; and one speculation grew on the top of another until something like the truth was in all mens minds, even though it was not spoken. Liot saw the thought forming in eyes that looked at him; he felt it in little reluctances of his mates, and heard it, or thought he heard it, in their voices. He took home with him the unhappy hesitation or misgiving, and watched to see if it would touch the consciousness of Karen. The loving wife, just approaching the perilous happiness of maternity, kept asking herself, What is it? What is it? And the answer was ever the samethe accusing words that Matilda Sabiston had said, and the quick, sick terror of heart they had awakened.
On Christmas day Karen had a son, a child of extraordinary beauty, that brought his soul into the world with him. The women said that his eyes instantly followed the light, and that his birth-cry passed into a smile. Liot was solemnly and silently happy. He sat for hours holding his wifes hand and watching the little lad sleeping so sweetly after his first hard travail; for the birth of this child meant to Liot far more than any mortal comprehended. He knew himself to be of religiously royal ancestry, and the covenant of God to such ran distinctly, To you and your children. So, then, if God had refused him children, he would certainly have believed that for his sin in regard to Bele Trenby the covenant between God and the Borsons was broken. This fair babe was a renewal of it. He took him in his arms with a prayer of inexpressible thanksgiving. He kissed the child, and called him David with the kiss, and said to his soul, The Lord hath accepted my contrition.
For some weeks this still and perfect happiness continued. The days were dark and stormy, and the nights long; but in Liots home there was the sunlight of a womans face and the music of a babys voice. The early spring brought the first anxiety, for it brought with it no renewal of Karens health and strength. She had the look of a leaf that is just beginning to droop upon its stem, and Liot watched her from day to day with a sick anxiety. He made her go to sea with him, and laughed with joy when the keen winds brought back the bright color to her cheeks. But it was only a momentary flush, bought at far too great a price of vitality. In a few weeks she could not pay the price, and the heat of the summer prostrated her. She had drooped in the spring; in the autumn she faded away. When Christmas came again there was no longer any hope left in Liots broken heart; he knew she was dying. Night and day he was at her side, there was so much to say to each other; for only God knew how long they were to be parted, or in what place of his great universe they should meet again.
At the end of February it had come to this acknowledgment between them. Sometimes Liot sat with dry eyes, listening to Karens sweet hopes of their reunion; sometimes he laid his head upon her pillow and wept such tears as leave life ever afterward dry at its source. And the root of this bitterness was Bele Trenby. If it had not been for this man Liot could have shared his wifes hopes and said farewell to her with the thought of heaven in his heart; but the very memory of Bele sank him below the tide of hope. God was even then entering into judgment with him, and what if he should not be able to endure unto the end, and so win, though hardly, a painful acceptance? In every phase and form such thoughts haunted the wretched man continually. And surely Karen divined it, for all her sweet efforts were to fill his heart with a loving looking forward to their meeting, and a confident trust in Gods everlasting mercy.
One stormy night in March she woke from a deep slumber and called Liot. Her voice had that penetrating intelligence of the dying which never deceives, and Liot knew instantly that the hour for parting had come. He took her hands and murmured in tones of anguish, O Karen, Karen! wife of my soul!
She drew him closer, and said with the eagerness of one in great haste, Oh, my dear one, I shall soon be nearer to God than you. At his feet I will pray. Tell metell me quick, what shall I ask for you? Liot, dear one, tell me!
Ask that I may be forgiven all my sins.
Is there one great sin, dear one? Oh, tell me nowone about Bele Trenby? Speak quickly, Liot. Did you see him die?
I did, but I hurt him not.
He went into the moss?
Yes.
You could have saved him and did not?
If I had spoken in time; there was but a single momentI know not what prevented me. O Karen, I have suffered! I have suffered a thousand deaths!
My dear one, I have known it. Now we will pray togetherI in heaven, thou on earth. Fear not, dear, dear Liot; he spareth all; they are his. The Lord is the lover of souls.
These were her last words. With clasped hands and wide-open eyes she lay still, watching and listening, ready to follow when beckoned, and looking with fixed vision, as if seeing things invisible, into the darkness she was about to penetrate. Steeped to his lips in anguish, Liot stood motionless until a dying breath fluttered through the room; and he knew by his sudden sense of loss and loneliness that she was gone, and that for this life he was alone forevermore.
III
A SENTENCE FOR LIFE
All Lerwick had been anticipating the death of Karen, but when it came there was a shock. She was so young and so well loved, besides which her affectionate heart hid a great spirit; and there was a general hope that for her husbands and childs sake she would hold on to life. For, in spite of all reasoning, there remains deep in the heart of man a sense of mastery over his own destinya conviction that we do not die until we are willing to die. We resign our spirits; we commit them to our Creator; we give up the ghost; and it did not seem possible to the wives and mothers of Lerwick that Karen would give up living. Her mortality was so finely blended with her immortality, it was hard to believe in such early dissolution. Alas! the finer the nature, the more readily it is fretted to decay by underlying wrong or doubt. When Matilda Sabiston drove Karen down to the sea-shore on the day before her bridal she really gave her the death-blow.
For Karen needed more than the bread and love of mortal life to sustain her. She belonged to that high order of human beings who require a sure approval of conscience even for their physical health, and whose house of life, wanting this fine cement, easily falls to dissolution. Did she, then, doubt her husband? Did she believe Matildas accusations to be true? Karen asked herself these questions very often, and always answered them with strong assurances of Liots innocence; but nevertheless they became part of her existence. No mental decisions, nor even actual words, could drive them from the citadel they had entered. Though she never mentioned the subject to Liot, though she watched herself continually lest any such doubts should darken her smiles or chill her love, yet they insensibly impregnated the house in which they dwelt with her. Liot could not say he felt them here or there, but they were all-pervading.
Karen withered in their presence, and Liots denser soul would eventually have become sick with the same influence. It was, therefore, no calamity that spared their love such a tragic trial, and if Liot had been a man of clearer perceptions he would have understood that it was not in anger, but in mercy to both of them, that Karen had been removed to paradise. Her last words, however, had partially opened his spiritual vision. He saw what poison had defiled the springs of her life, and he knew instinctively that Matilda Sabiston was the enemy that had done the deed.
It was, therefore, little wonder that he sent her no notice of her nieces death. And, indeed, Matilda heard of it first through the bellman calling the funeral hour through the town. The day was of the stormiest, and many remembered how steadily storm and gust had attended all the great events of Karens short life. She had been born in the tempest which sent her father to the bottom of the sea, and she herself, in coming from Yell to Lerwick, had barely escaped shipwreck. Her bridal garments had been drenched with rain, and on the day set for her babys christening there was one of the worst of snow-storms. Indeed, many said that it was the wetting she received on that occasion which had developed the wasting that killed her. The same turmoil of the elements marked her burial day. A cold northeast wind drove through the wet streets, and the dreary monotony of the outside world was unspeakable.
But Matilda Sabiston looked through her dim windows without any sense of the weathers depressing influencethe storm of anger in her heart was so much more imperative. She waited impatiently for the hour appointed for the funeral, and then threw over her head and shoulders a large hood and cloak of blue flannel. She did not realize that the wind blew them backward, that her gray hairs were dripping and disarranged, and her clothing storm-draggled and unsuitable for the occasion; her one thought was to reach Liots house about the time when the funeral guests were all assembled. She lifted the latch and entered the crowded room like a bad fate. Every one ceased whispering and looked at her.