On the Way to Nanna's Cottage 223

"Went in and out among his Mates" 237

PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE

Book First

LIOT BORSON

BOOK FIRST

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. The Weaving of Doom 3

II. Jealousy Cruel as the Grave 23

III. A Sentence for Life 44

IV. The Door Wide Open 62

PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE

I

THE WEAVING OF DOOM

In the early part of this century there lived at Lerwick, in the
Shetland Islands, a man called Liot Borson. He was no ignoble man;
through sea-fishers and sea-fighters he counted his forefathers
in an unbroken line back to the great Norwegian Bor, while his
own life was full of perilous labor and he was off to sea every day
that a boat could swim. Liot was the outcome of the most vivid and
masterful form of paganism and the most vital and uncompromising
form of Christianity. For nearly eight hundred years the Borsons had
been christened, but who can deliver a man from his ancestors? Bor
still spoke to his son through the stirring stories of the sagas, and
Liot knew the lives of Thord and Odd, of Gisli and the banded men,
and the tremendous drama of Nial and his sons, just as well as he
knew the histories of the prophets and heroes of his Old Testament.
It is true that he held the former with a kind of reservation, and
that he gave to the latter a devout and passionate faith, but this
faith was not always potential. There were hours in Liot's life when
he was still a pagan, when he approved the swift, personal vengeance
which Odin enjoined and Christ forbade--hours in which he felt
himself to be the son of the man who had carried his gods and his
home to uninhabited Iceland rather than take cross-marking for
the meek and lowly Jesus.

In his youth--before his great sorrow came to him--he had but little
trouble from this subcharacter. Of all the men in Lerwick, he knew
best the king stories and the tellings-up of the ancients; and when
the boats with bare spars rocked idly on the summer seas waiting
for the shoal, or the men and women were gathered together to pass
the long winter nights, Liot was eagerly sought after. Then, as the
women knit and the men sat with their hands clasped upon their
heads, Liot stood in their midst and told of the wayfarings and
doings of the Borsons, who ha