Part 9 (1/2)
He watched her sing her child to sleep, and he sat down with her on the door-step, and they talked softly together of death and of judgment to come. And the women from the other huts gradually joined them, and the soft Shetland night glorified the somber land and the mysterious sea, until at last David rose and said he must go back to Lerwick, for the day was over.
A strange day it had been to him; but he was too primitive to attempt any reasoning about its events. When he left Nanna's he was under that strong excitement which makes a man walk as if he were treading upon the void, and there was a hot confusion in his thoughts and feelings. He stepped rapidly, and the stillness of the lovely night did not soothe or reason with him. As he approached the town he saw the fis.h.i.+ng-boats leaving the harbor, and in the fairy light they looked like living things with outspread wings. Two fishers were standing at a house door with a woman, who was filling a gla.s.s. She held it aloft a moment, and then gave it to one with the words: ”Death to the heads that wear no hair!”
”The herring and the halibut, the haddock and the sole,” answered the man; and he drank a little, and pa.s.sed it to his comrade. Then up the street they hurried like belated men; and David felt the urging of accustomed work, and a sense of delinquency in his purposeless hands.
He found Barbara waiting. She knew that he would not stay at Nanna Sinclair's, and she had prepared the room of her absent son for him.
”If he can pay one s.h.i.+lling a day, it will be a G.o.dsend to me,” she thought; and when she told David so he answered, ”That is a little matter, and no doubt there will be good between us.”
He saw then that the window was open, and the sea-water lippering nearly to the sill of it; and he took off his bonnet, and sat down, and let the cool breeze blow upon his hot brow. It was near midnight, but what then? David had never been more awake in all his life--yes, awake to his finger-tips. Yet for half an hour he sat by the window and never opened his mouth; and Barbara sat on the hearth, and raked the smoldering peats together, and kept a like silence. She was well used to talk with her own thoughts, and to utter words was no necessity to Barbara Traill; but she knew what David was thinking of, and she was quite prepared for the first word which parted his set lips.
”Is my cousin Nanna a widow?”
”No.”
”Where, then, is her husband?”
”Who can tell? He is gone away from Shetland, and no one is sorry for that.”
”One thing is sure--Nanna is poor, and she is in trouble. How comes that? Who is to blame in the matter?”
”Nicol Sinclair--he, and he only. Sorrow and suffering and ill luck of all kinds he has brought her, and there is no help for it.”
”No help for it! I shall see about that.”
”You had best let Nicol Sinclair alone. He is one of the worst of men, a son of the devil--no, the very devil himself. And he has your kinswoman Matilda Sabiston at his back. All the ill he does to Nanna he does to please her. To be sure, the guessing is not all that way, but yet most people think Matilda is much to blame.”
”How came Nanna Borson to marry such a man? Was not her father alive?
Had she no brothers to stand between her and this son of the Evil One?”
”When Nanna Borson took hold of Nicol Sinclair for a husband she thought she had taken hold of heaven; and he was not unkind to her until after the drowning of her kin. Then he took her money and traded with it to Holland, and lost it all there, and came back bare and empty-handed. And when he entered his home there was the baby girl, and Nanna out of her mind with fever and like to die, and not able to say a word this way or that. And Nicol wanted money, and he went to Matilda Sabiston and he got what he wanted; but what was then said no one knows, for ever since he has hated the Borsons, root and branch, and his own wife and child have borne the weight of it. That is not all.”
”Tell me all, then; but make no more of it than it is worth.”
”There is little need to do that. Before Nanna was strong again he sold the house which Paul Borson had given to her as a marriage present. He sold also all the plenis.h.i.+ng, and whatever else he could lay his hands on. Then he set sail; but there was little s.p.a.ce between two bad deeds, for no sooner was he home again than he took the money Paul Borson had put in the bank for his daughter, and when no one saw him--in the night-time--he slipped away with a sound skin, the devil knows where he went to.”
”Were there no men in Lerwick at that time?”
”Many men were in Lerwick--men, too, who never get to their feet for nothing; and no man was so well hated as Nicol Sinclair. But Nanna said: 'I have had sorrow enough. If you touch him you touch me ten-fold. He has threatened me and the child with measureless evil if I say this or that against anything he does.' And as every one knows, when Nicol is angry the earth itself turns inside out before him.”
”I do not fear him a jot--not I!”
”If you had ever seen him swaggering and rolling from one day into another, if you had ever seen him stroking his bare arms and peering round with wicked eyes for some one to ease him of his temper, you would not say such words.”
”I will not call my words back for much more than that, and I will follow up this quarrel.”
”If you are foolish, you may do so; if you are wise, you will be neither for nor against Nicol Sinclair. There is a wide and a safe way between these two. Let me tell you, Nanna's life lies in it. I have not yet told you all.”
”Speak the last word, then.”