Winter Evening Tales

“It is the King’s highway that we are in; and know this, His messengers are on it.  They who have ears to hear will hear; and He opens the eyes of some, and they see things not to be lightly spoken of.”

It was John Balmuto who said these words to me.  John was a Shetlander, and for forty years he had gone to the Arctic seas with the whale boats.  Then there had come to him a wonderful experience.  He had been four days and nights alone with God upon the sea, among mountains of ice reeling together in perilous madness, and with little light but the angry flush of the aurora.  Then, undoubtedly, was born that strong faith in the Unseen which made him an active character in the facts I am going to relate.

After his marvelous salvation, he devoted his life to the service of God by entering that remarkable body of lay evangelists attached to the Presbyterian Church in Highland parishes, called “The Men,” and he became noted throughout the Hebrides for his labors, and for his knowledge of the Scriptures.

Circumstances, that summer, had thrown us together; I, a young woman, just entering an apparently fortunate life; he, an aged saint, standing on the borderland of eternity.  And we were sitting together, in the gray summer gloaming, when he said to me, “Thou art silent to-night.  What hast thou, then, on thy mind?”

“I had a strange dream.  I cannot shake off its influence.  Of course it is folly, and I don’t believe in dreams at all.”  And it was then he said to me, “It is the King’s highway that we are in, and know this, His messengers are on it.”

“But it was only a dream.”

“Well, God speaks to His children ’in dreams, and by the oracles that come in darkness.’”

“He used to do so.”

“Wilt thou then say that He has ceased so to speak to men?  Now, I will tell thee a thing that happened; I will tell thee just the bare facts; I will put nothing to, nor take anything away from them.

“’Tis, five years ago the first day of last June.  I was in Stornoway in the Lews, and I was going to the Gairloch Preachings.  It was rough, cheerless weather, and all the fishing fleet were at anchor for the night, with no prospect of a fishing.  The fishers were sitting together talking over the bad weather, but, indeed, without that bitterness that I have heard from landsmen when it would be the same trouble with them.  So I gathered them into Donald Brae’s cottage, and we had a very good hour.  I noticed a stranger in the corner of the room, and some one told me he was one of those men who paint pictures, and I saw that he was busy with a pencil and paper even while we were at the service.  But the next day I left for the Preachings, and I thought no more of him, good or bad.

“On the first of September I was in Oban.  I had walked far and was very tired, but I went to John MacNab’s cottage, and, after I had eat my kippered herring and drank my tea, I felt better.  Then I talked with John about the resurrection of the body, for he was in a tribulation of thoughts and doubts as to whether our Lord had a permanent humanity or not.

“And I said to him, John, Christ redeemed our whole nature, and it is this way:  the body being ransomed, as well as the spirit, by no less a price than the body of Christ, shall be equally cleansed and glorified.  Now, then, after I had gone to my room, I was sitting thinking of these things, and of no other things whatever.  There was not a sound but that of the waves breaking among the rocks, and drawing the tinkling pebbles down the beach after them.  Then the ears of my spiritual body were opened, and I heard these words, ’I will go with thee to Glasgow!’ Instead of saying to the heavenly message, ‘I am ready!’ I began to argue with myself thus:  ’Whatever for should I go to Glasgow?  I know not anyone there.  No one knows me.  I have duties at Portsee not to be left.  I have no money for such a journey—­’

“I fell asleep to such thoughts.  Then I dreamed of—­or I saw—­a woman fair as the daughters of God, and she said, ’I will go with thee to Glasgow!’ With a strange feeling of being hurried and pressed I awoke—­wide awake, and without any conscious will of my own, I answered, ‘I am ready.  I am ready now.’

“As I left the cottage it was striking twelve, and I wondered what means of reaching Glasgow I should find at midnight.  But I walked straight to the pier, and there was a small steamer with her steam up.  She was blowing her whistle impatiently, and when the skipper saw me coming, he called to me, in a passion, ’Well, then, is it all night I shall wait for thee?’

“I soon perceived that there was a mistake, and that it was not John Balmuto he had been instructed to wait for.  But I heeded not that; I was under orders I durst not disobey.  She was a trading steamer, with a perishable cargo of game and lobsters, and so she touched at no place whatever till we reached Glasgow.  One of her passengers was David MacPherson of Harris, a very good man, who had known me in my visitations.  He was going to Glasgow as a witness in a case to be tried between the Harris fishers and their commission house in Glasgow.

“As we walked together from the steamer, he said to me, ’Let us go round by the court house, John, and I’ll find out when I’ll be required.’  That was to my mind; I did not feel as if I could go astray, whatever road was taken, and I turned with him the way he desired to go.  He found the lawyer who needed him in the court house, and while they talked together I went forward and listened to the case that was in hand.

“It was a trial for murder, and I could not keep my eyes off the young man who was charged with the crime.  He seemed to be quite broken down with shame and sorrow.  Before MacPherson called me the court closed and the constables took him away.  As he passed me our eyes met, and my heart dirled and burned, and I could not make out whatever would be the matter with me.  All night his face haunted me.  I was sure I had seen it some place; and besides it would blend itself with the dream which had brought me to Glasgow.

“In the morning I was early at the court house and I saw the prisoner brought in.  There was the most marvelous change in his looks.  He walked like a man who has lost fear, and his face was quite calm.  But now it troubled me more than ever.  Whatever had I to do with the young man?  Yet I could not bear to leave him.

“I listened and found out that he was accused of murdering his uncle.  They had been traveling together and were known to have been at Ullapool on the thirtieth of May.  On the first of June the elder man was found in a lonely place near Oban, dead, and, without doubt, from violence.  The chain of circumstantial evidence against his nephew was very strong.  To judge by it I would have said myself to him, ’Thou art certainly guilty.’

“On the other side the young man declared that he had quarreled with his uncle at Ullapool and left him clandestinely.  He had then taken passage in a Manx fishing smack which was going to the Lews, but he had forgotten the name of the smack.  He was not even certain if the boat was Manx.  The landlord of the inn, at which he said he stayed when in the Lews, did not remember him.  ‘A thing not to be expected,’ he told the jury, ’for in the summer months, what with visitors, and what with the fishers, a face in Stornoway was like a face on a crowded street.  The young man might have been there’—­

“The word Stornoway made the whole thing clear to me.  The prisoner was the man I had noticed with a pencil and paper among the fishers in Donald Brae’s cottage.  Yes, indeed he was!  I knew then why I had been sent to Glasgow.  I walked quickly to the bar, and lifting my bonnet from my head, I said to the judge, ’My lord, the prisoner was in Stornoway on the first of June.  I saw him there!’

“He gave a great cry of joy and turned to me; and in a moment he called out:  ’You are the man who read the Bible to the fishers.  I remember you.  I have your likeness among my drawings.’  And I said, ‘I am the man.’

“Then my lord, the judge, made them swear me, and he said they would hear my evidence.  For one moment I was a coward.  I thought I would hide God’s share in the deliverance, lest men should doubt my whole testimony.  The next, I was telling the true story:  how I had been called at midnight—­twice called; how I had found Evan Conochie’s boat waiting for me; how on the boat I had met David MacPherson, and been brought to the court house by him, having no intention or plan of my own in the matter.

“And there was a great awe in the room as I spoke.  Every one believed what I said, and my lord asked for the names of the fishers who were present in Donald Brae’s cottage on the night of the first of June.  Very well, then, I could give many of them, and they were sent for, and the lad was saved, thank God Almighty!”

“How do you explain it, John?”

“No, I will not try to explain it; for it is not to be hoped that anyone can explain by human reason the things surpassing human reason.”

“Do you know what became of the young man?”

“I will tell thee about him.  He is a very rich young man, and the only child of a widow, known like Dorcas of old for her great goodness to the Lord’s poor.  But when his mother died it did not go well and peaceably between him and his uncle; and it is true that he left him at Ullapool without a word.  Well, then, he fell into this sore strait, and it seemed as if all hope of proving his innocence was over.

“But that very night on which I saw him first, he dreamed that his mother came to him in his cell and she comforted him and told him, ‘To-morrow, surely, thy deliverer shall speak for thee.’  He never doubted the heavenly vision.  ‘How could I?’ he asked me.  ’My mother never deceived me in life; would she come to me, even in a dream, to tell me a lie?  Ah, no!’”

“Is he still alive?”

“God preserve him for many a year yet!  I’ll only require to speak his name”—­and when he had done so, I knew the secret spring of thankfulness that fed the never-ceasing charity of one great, good man.

“And yet, John,” I urged, “how can spirit speak with spirit?”

“‘How?’ I will tell thee, that word ‘how’ has no business in the mouth of a child of God.  When I was a boy, who had dreamed ‘how’ men in London might speak with men in Edinburgh through the air, invisible and unheard?  That is a matter of trade now.  Can thou imagine what subtle secret lines there may be between the spiritual world and this world?”

“But dreams, John?”

“Well, then, dreams.  Take the dream life out of thy Bible and, oh, how much thou wilt lose!  All through it this side of the spiritual world presses close on the human side.  I thank God for it.  Yes, indeed!  Many things I hear and see which say to me that Christians now have a kind of shame in what is mystical or supernatural.  But thou be sure of this—­the supernaturalism of the Bible, and of every Christian life is not one of the difficulties of our faith, it is the foundation of our faith.  The Bible is a supernatural book, the law of a supernatural religion; and to part with this element is to lose out of it the flavor of heaven, and the hope of immortality.  Yes, indeed!”

This conversation occurred thirty years ago.  Two years since, I met the man who had experienced such a deliverance, and he told me again the wonderful story, and showed me the pencil sketch which he had made of John Balmuto in Donald Brae’s cottage.  He had painted from it a grand picture of his deliverer, wearing the long black camlet cloak and head-kerchief of the order of evangelists to which he belonged.  I stood reverently before the commanding figure, with its inspired eyes and rapt expression; for, during those thirty years, I also had learned that it was only those

    Who ne’er the mournful midnight hours
    Weeping upon their bed have sate,
    Who know you not, Ye Heavenly Powers.