Robert Falconer Part 19

'Ye maun pray yer lane, laddie. But oh be a guid lad, for ye're a' that I hae left; and gin ye gang wrang tu, ye'll bring doon my gray hairs wi'

sorrow to the grave. They're gray eneuch, and they're near eneuch to the grave, but gin ye turn oot weel, I'll maybe haud up my heid a bit yet.

But O Anerew! my son! my son! Would G.o.d I had died for thee!'

And the words of her brother in grief, the king of Israel, opened the floodgates of her heart, and she wept. Robert left her weeping, and closed the door quietly as if his dead father had been lying in the room.

He took his way up to his own garret, closed that door too, and sat down upon the floor, with his back against the empty bedstead.

There were no more castles to build now. It was all very well to say that he would not believe the news and would pray for his father, but he did believe them--enough at least to spoil the praying. His favourite employment, seated there, had hitherto been to imagine how he would grow a great man, and set out to seek his father, and find him, and stand by him, and be his son and servant. Oh! to have the man stroke his head and pat his cheek, and love him! One moment he imagined himself his indignant defender, the next he would be climbing on his knee, as if he were still a little child, and laying his head on his shoulder. For he had had no fondling his life long, and his heart yearned for it. But all this was gone now. A dreary time lay before him, with n.o.body to please, n.o.body to serve; with n.o.body to praise him. Grannie never praised him.

She must have thought praise something wicked. And his father was in misery, for ever and ever! Only somehow that thought was not quite thinkable. It was more the vanishing of hope from his own life than a sense of his father's fate that oppressed him.

He cast his eyes, as in a hungry despair, around the empty room--or, rather, I should have said, in that faintness which makes food at once essential and loathsome; for despair has no proper hunger in it. The room seemed as empty as his life. There was nothing for his eyes to rest upon but those bundles and bundles of dust-browned papers on the shelves before him. What were they all about? He understood that they were his father's: now that he was dead, it would be no sacrilege to look at them. n.o.body cared about them. He would see at least what they were. It would be something to do in this dreariness.

Bills and receipts, and everything ephemeral--to feel the interest of which, a man must be a poet indeed--was all that met his view. Bundle after bundle he tried, with no better success. But as he drew near the middle of the second shelf, upon which they lay several rows deep, he saw something dark behind, hurriedly displaced the packets between, and drew forth a small workbox. His heart beat like that of the prince in the fairy-tale, when he comes to the door of the Sleeping Beauty. This at least must have been hers. It was a common little thing, probably a childish possession, and kept to hold trifles worth more than they looked to be. He opened it with bated breath. The first thing he saw was a half-finished reel of cotton--a pirn, he called it. Beside it was a gold thimble. He lifted the tray. A lovely face in miniature, with dark hair and blue eyes, lay looking earnestly upward. At the lid of this coffin those eyes had looked for so many years! The picture was set all round with pearls in an oval ring. How Robert knew them to be pearls he could not tell, for he did not know that he had ever seen any pearls before, but he knew they were pearls, and that pearls had something to do with the New Jerusalem. But the sadness of it all at length overpowered him, and he burst out crying. For it was awfully sad that his mother's portrait should be in his own mother's box.

He took a bit of red tape off a bundle of the papers, put it through the eye of the setting, and hung the picture round his neck, inside his clothes, for grannie must not see it. She would take that away as she had taken his fiddle. He had a nameless something now for which he had been longing for years.

Looking again in the box, he found a little bit of paper, discoloured with antiquity, as it seemed to him, though it was not so old as himself. Unfolding it he found written upon it a well-known hymn, and at the bottom of the hymn, the words: 'O Lord! my heart is very sore.'--The treasure upon Robert's bosom was no longer the symbol of a mother's love, but of a woman's sadness, which he could not reach to comfort. In that hour, the boy made a great stride towards manhood. Doubtless his mother's grief had been the same as grannie's--the fear that she would lose her husband for ever. The hourly fresh griefs from neglect and wrong did not occur to him; only the never never more. He looked no farther, took the portrait from his neck and replaced it with the paper, put the box back, and walled it up in solitude once more with the dusty bundles. Then he went down to his grandmother, sadder and more desolate than ever.

He found her seated in her usual place. Her New Testament, a large-print octavo, lay on the table beside her unopened; for where within those boards could she find comfort for a grief like hers? That it was the will of G.o.d might well comfort any suffering of her own, but would it comfort Andrew? and if there was no comfort for Andrew, how was Andrew's mother to be comforted?

Yet G.o.d had given his first-born to save his brethren: how could he be pleased that she should dry her tears and be comforted? True, some awful unknown force of a necessity with which G.o.d could not cope came in to explain it; but this did not make G.o.d more kind, for he knew it all every time he made a man; nor man less sorrowful, for G.o.d would have his very mother forget him, or, worse still, remember him and be happy.

'Read a chapter till me, laddie,' she said.

Robert opened and read till he came to the words: 'I pray not for the world.'

'He was o' the world,' said the old woman; 'and gin Christ wadna pray for him, what for suld I?'

Already, so soon after her son's death, would her theology begin to harden her heart. The strife which results from believing that the higher love demands the suppression of the lower, is the most fearful of all discords, the absolute love slaying love--the house divided against itself; one moment all given up for the will of Him, the next the human tenderness rushing back in a flood. Mrs. Falconer burst into a very agony of weeping. From that day, for many years, the name of her lost Andrew never pa.s.sed her lips in the hearing of her grandson, and certainly in that of no one else.

But in a few weeks she was more cheerful. It is one of the mysteries of humanity that mothers in her circ.u.mstances, and holding her creed, do regain not merely the faculty of going on with the business of life, but, in most cases, even cheerfulness. The infinite Truth, the Love of the universe, supports them beyond their consciousness, coming to them like sleep from the roots of their being, and having nothing to do with their opinions or beliefs. And hence spring those comforting subterfuges of hope to which they all fly. Not being able to trust the Father entirely, they yet say: 'Who can tell what took place at the last moment? Who can tell whether G.o.d did not please to grant them saving faith at the eleventh hour?'--that so they might pa.s.s from the very gates of h.e.l.l, the only place for which their life had fitted them, into the bosom of love and purity! This G.o.d could do for all: this for the son beloved of his mother perhaps he might do!

O rebellious mother heart! dearer to G.o.d than that which beats laboriously solemn under Genevan gown or Lutheran surplice! if thou wouldst read by thine own large light, instead of the glimmer from the phosph.o.r.escent brains of theologians, thou mightst even be able to understand such a simple word as that of the Saviour, when, wishing his disciples to know that he had a nearer regard for them as his brethren in holier danger, than those who had not yet partaken of his light, and therefore praying for them not merely as human beings, but as the human beings they were, he said to his Father in their hearing: 'I pray not for the world, but for them,'--not for the world now, but for them--a meaningless utterance, if he never prayed for the world; a word of small meaning, if it was not his very wont and custom to pray for the world--for men as men. Lord Christ! not alone from the pains of h.e.l.l, or of conscience--not alone from the outer darkness of self and all that is mean and poor and low, do we fly to thee; but from the anger that arises within us at the wretched words spoken in thy name, at the degradation of thee and of thy Father in the mouths of those that claim especially to have found thee, do we seek thy feet. Pray thou for them also, for they know not what they do.

CHAPTER XIV. MARY ST. JOHN.

After this, day followed day in calm, dull progress. Robert did not care for the games through which his school-fellows forgot the little they had to forget, and had therefore few in any sense his companions. So he pa.s.sed his time out of school in the society of his grandmother and Shargar, except that spent in the garret, and the few hours a week occupied by the lessons of the shoemaker. For he went on, though half-heartedly, with those lessons, given now upon Sandy's redeemed violin which he called his old wife, and made a little progress even, as we sometimes do when we least think it.

He took more and more to brooding in the garret; and as more questions presented themselves for solution, he became more anxious to arrive at the solution, and more uneasy as he failed in satisfying himself that he had arrived at it; so that his brain, which needed quiet for the true formation of its substance, as a cooling liquefaction or an evaporating solution for the just formation of its crystals, became in danger of settling into an abnormal arrangement of the cellular deposits.

I believe that even the new-born infant is, in some of his moods, already grappling with the deepest metaphysical problems, in forms infinitely too rudimental for the understanding of the grown philosopher--as far, in fact, removed from his ken on the one side, that of intelligential beginning, the germinal subjective, as his abstrusest speculations are from the final solutions of absolute ent.i.ty on the other. If this be the case, it is no wonder that at Robert's age the deepest questions of his coming manhood should be in active operation, although so surrounded with the yoke of common belief and the sh.e.l.l of accredited authority, that the embryo faith, which in minds like his always takes the form of doubt, could not be defined any more than its existence could be disproved. I have given a hint at the tendency of his mind already, in the fact that one of the most definite inquiries to which he had yet turned his thoughts was, whether G.o.d would have mercy upon a repentant devil. An ordinary puzzle had been--if his father were to marry again, and it should turn out after all that his mother was not dead, what was his father to do? But this was over now. A third was, why, when he came out of church, sunshine always made him miserable, and he felt better able to be good when it rained or snowed hard. I might mention the inquiry whether it was not possible somehow to elude the omniscience of G.o.d; but that is a common question with thoughtful children, and indicates little that is characteristic of the individual.

That he puzzled himself about the perpetual motion may pa.s.s for little likewise; but one thing which is worth mentioning, for indeed it caused him considerable distress, was, that in reading the Paradise Lost he could not help sympathizing with Satan, and feeling--I do not say thinking--that the Almighty was pompous, scarcely reasonable, and somewhat revengeful.

He was recognized amongst his school-fellows as remarkable for his love of fair-play; so much so, that he was their constant referee. Add to this that, notwithstanding his sympathy with Satan, he almost invariably sided with his master, in regard of any angry reflection or seditious movement, and even when unjustly punished himself, the occasional result of a certain backwardness in self-defence, never showed any resentment--a most improbable statement, I admit, but nevertheless true--and I think the rest of his character may be left to the gradual dawn of its historical manifestation.

He had long ere this discovered who the angel was that had appeared to him at the top of the stair upon that memorable night; but he could hardly yet say that he had seen her; for, except one dim glimpse he had had of her at the window as he pa.s.sed in the street, she had not appeared to him save in the vision of that night. During the whole winter she scarcely left the house, partly from the state of her health, affected by the sudden change to a northern climate, partly from the attention required by her aunt, to aid in nursing whom she had left the warmer south. Indeed, it was only to return the visits of a few of Mrs.

Forsyth's chosen, that she had crossed the threshold at all; and those visits were paid at a time when all such half-grown inhabitants as Robert were gathered under the leathery wing of Mr. Innes.

But long before the winter was over, Rothieden had discovered that the stranger, the English lady, Mary St. John, outlandish, almost heathenish as her lovely name sounded in its ears, had a power as altogether strange and new as her name. For she was not only an admirable performer on the pianoforte, but such a simple enthusiast in music, that the man must have had no music or little heart in him in whom her playing did not move all that there was of the deepest.

Occasionally there would be quite a small crowd gathered at night by the window of Mrs. Forsyth's drawing-room, which was on the ground-floor, listening to music such as had never before been heard in Rothieden.

More than once, when Robert had not found Sandy Elshender at home on the lesson-night, and had gone to seek him, he had discovered him lying in wait, like a fowler, to catch the sweet sounds that flew from the opened cage of her instrument. He leaned against the wall with his ear laid over the edge, and as near the window as he dared to put it, his rough face, gnarled and blotched, and hirsute with the stubble of neglected beard--his whole ursine face transfigured by the pa.s.sage of the sweet sounds through his chaotic brain, which they swept like the wind of G.o.d, when of old it moved on the face of the waters that clothed the void and formless world.

'Haud yer tongue!' he would say in a hoa.r.s.e whisper, when Robert sought to attract his attention; 'haud yer tongue, man, and hearken. Gin yon bonny leddy 'at yer grannie keeps lockit up i' the aumry war to tak to the piano, that's jist hoo she wad play. Lord, man! pit yer sowl i' yer lugs, an' hearken.'

The soutar was all wrong in this; for if old Mr. Falconer's violin had taken woman-shape, it would have been that of a slight, worn, swarthy creature, with wild black eyes, great and restless, a voice like a bird's, and thin fingers that clawed the music out of the wires like the quills of the old harpsichord; not that of Mary St. John, who was tall, and could not help being stately, was large and well-fashioned, as full of repose as Handel's music, with a contralto voice to make you weep, and eyes that would have seemed but for their maidenliness to be always ready to fold you in their lucid gray depths.

Robert stared at the soutar, doubting at first whether he had not been drinking. But the intoxication of music produces such a different expression from that of drink, that Robert saw at once that if he had indeed been drinking, at least the music had got above the drink. As long as the playing went on, Elshender was not to be moved from the window.

But to many of the people of Rothieden the music did not recommend the musician; for every sort of music, except the most unmusical of psalm-singing, was in their minds of a piece with 'dancin' an'

play-actin', an' ither warldly vainities an' abominations.' And Robert, being as yet more capable of melody than harmony, grudged to lose a lesson on Sandy's 'auld wife o' a fiddle' for any amount of Miss St.

John's playing.

CHAPTER XV. ERIC ERICSON.

One gusty evening--it was of the last day in March--Robert well remembered both the date and the day--a bleak wind was driving up the long street of the town, and Robert was standing looking out of one of the windows in the gable-room. The evening was closing into night. He hardly knew how he came to be there, but when he thought about it he found it was play-Wednesday, and that he had been all the half-holiday trying one thing after another to interest himself withal, but in vain.

He knew nothing about east winds; but not the less did this dreary wind of the dreary March world prove itself upon his soul. For such a wind has a shadow wind along with it, that blows in the minds of men.

There was nothing genial, no growth in it. It killed, and killed most dogmatically. But it is an ill wind that blows n.o.body good. Even an east wind must bear some blessing on its ugly wings. And as Robert looked down from the gable, the wind was blowing up the street before it half-a-dozen footfaring students from Aberdeen, on their way home at the close of the session, probably to the farm-labours of the spring.

This was a glad sight, as that of the returning storks in Denmark.

Robert knew where they would put up, sought his cap, and went out. His grandmother never objected to his going to see Miss Napier; it was in her house that the weary men would this night rest.

It was not without reason that Lord Rothie had teased his hostess about receiving foot-pa.s.sengers, for to such it was her invariable custom to make some civil excuse, sending Meg or Peggy to show them over the way to the hostelry next in rank, a proceeding recognized by the inferior hostess as both just and friendly, for the good woman never thought of measuring The Star against The Boar's Head. More than one comical story had been the result of this law of The Boar's Head, unalterable almost as that of the Medes and Persians. I say almost, for to one cla.s.s of the footfaring community the official ice about the hearts of the three women did thaw, yielding pa.s.sage to a full river of hospitality and generosity; and that was the cla.s.s to which these wayfarers belonged.

Well may Scotland rejoice in her universities, for whatever may be said against their system--I have no complaint to make--they are divine in their freedom: men who follow the plough in the spring and reap the harvest in the autumn, may, and often do, frequent their sacred precincts when the winter comes--so fierce, yet so welcome--so severe, yet so blessed--opening for them the doors to yet harder toil and yet poorer fare. I fear, however, that of such there will be fewer and fewer, seeing one cla.s.s which supplied a portion of them has almost vanished from the country--that cla.s.s which was its truest, simplest, and n.o.blest strength--that cla.s.s which at one time rendered it something far other than ridicule to say that Scotland was pre-eminently a G.o.d-fearing nation--I mean the cla.s.s of cottars.

Of this cla.s.s were some of the footfaring company. But there were others of more means than the men of this lowly origin, who either could not afford to travel by the expensive coaches, or could find none to accommodate them. Possibly some preferred to walk. However this may have been, the various groups which at the beginning and close of the session pa.s.sed through Rothieden weary and footsore, were sure of a hearty welcome at The Boar's Head. And much the men needed it. Some of them would have walked between one and two hundred miles before completing their journey.

Robert made a circuit, and, fleet of foot, was in Miss Napier's parlour before the travellers made their appearance on the square. When they knocked at the door, Miss Letty herself went and opened it.

'Can ye tak 's in, mem?' was on the lips of their spokesman, but Miss Letty had the first word.

'Come in, come in, gentlemen. This is the first o' ye, and ye're the mair welcome. It's like seein' the first o' the swallows. An' sic a day as ye hae had for yer lang traivel!' she went on, leading the way to her sister's parlour, and followed by all the students, of whom the one that came hindmost was the most remarkable of the group--at the same time the most weary and downcast.

Miss Napier gave them a similar welcome, shaking hands with every one of them. She knew them all but the last. To him she involuntarily showed a more formal respect, partly from his appearance, and partly that she had never seen him before. The whisky-bottle was brought out, and all partook, save still the last. Miss Lizzie went to order their supper.

'Noo, gentlemen,' said Miss Letty, 'wad ony o' ye like to gang an'

change yer hose, and pit on a pair o' slippers?'

Several declined, saying they would wait until they had had their supper; the roads had been quite dry, &c., &c. One said he would, and another said his feet were blistered.

'Hoot awa'!' [2] exclaimed Miss Letty.--'Here, Peggy!' she cried, going to the door; 'tak a pail o' het watter up to the chackit room. Jist ye gang up, Mr. Cameron, and Peggy 'll see to yer feet.--Noo, sir, will ye gang to yer room an' mak yersel' comfortable?--jist as gin ye war at hame, for sae ye are.'