Robert Falconer Part 24

'Gin ye binna pleased wi' me, mem,' he said, 'I canna bide ye to gang on wi' siccan a job 's that.'

How Miss St. John could have understood him, I cannot think; but she did.

'Oh! very well,' she answered, smiling. 'Just as you please. Perhaps you had better take this piece of plaster to Betty, and ask her to finish the dressing for you.'

Robert took the plaster mechanically, and, sick at heart and speechless, rose to go, forgetting even his bonny leddy in his grief.

'You had better take your violin with you,' said Miss St. John, urged to the cruel experiment by a strong desire to see what the strange boy would do.

He turned. The tears were streaming down his odd face. They went to her heart, and she was bitterly ashamed of herself.

'Come along. Do sit down again. I only wanted to see what you would do.

I am very sorry,' she said, in a tone of kindness such as Robert had never imagined.

He sat down instantly, saying,

'Eh, mem! it's sair to bide;' meaning, no doubt, the conflict between his inclination to tell her all, and his duty to be silent.

The dressing was soon finished, his hair combed down over it, and Robert looking once more respectable.

'Now, I think that will do,' said his nurse.

'Eh, thank ye, mem!' answered Robert, rising. 'Whan I'm able to play upo' the fiddle as weel 's ye play upo' the piana, I'll come and play at yer window ilka nicht, as lang 's ye like to hearken.'

She smiled, and he was satisfied. He did not dare again ask her to play to him. But she said of herself, 'Now I will play something to you, if you like,' and he resumed his seat devoutly.

When she had finished a lovely little air, which sounded to Robert like the touch of her hands, and her breath on his forehead, she looked round, and was satisfied, from the rapt expression of the boy's countenance, that at least he had plenty of musical sensibility. As if despoiled of volition, he stood motionless till she said,

'Now you had better go, or Betty will miss you.'

Then he made her a bow in which awkwardness and grace were curiously mingled, and taking up his precious parcel, and holding it to his bosom as if it had been a child for whom he felt an access of tenderness, he slowly left the room and the house.

Not even to Shargar did he communicate his adventure. And he went no more to the deserted factory to play there. Fate had again interposed between him and his bonny leddy.

When he reached Bodyfauld he fancied his grandmother's eyes more watchful of him than usual, and he strove the more to resist the weariness, and even faintness, that urged him to go to bed. Whether he was able to hide as well a certain trouble that clouded his spirit I doubt. His wound he did manage to keep a secret, thanks to the care of Miss St. John, who had dressed it with court-plaster.

When he woke the next morning, it was with the consciousness of having seen something strange the night before, and only when he found that he was not in his own room at his grandmother's, was he convinced that it must have been a dream and no vision. For in the night, he had awaked there as he thought, and the moon was shining with such clearness, that although it did not shine into his room, he could see the face of the clock, and that the hands were both together at the top. Close by the clock stood the bureau, with its end against the part.i.tion forming the head of his grannie's bed.

All at once he saw a tall man, in a blue coat and bright b.u.t.tons, about to open the lid of the bureau. The same moment he saw a little elderly man in a brown coat and a brown wig, by his side, who sought to remove his hand from the lock. Next appeared a huge stalwart figure, in shabby old tartans, and laid his hand on the head of each. But the wonder widened and grew; for now came a stately Highlander with his broadsword by his side, and an eagle's feather in his bonnet, who laid his hand on the other Highlander's arm.

When Robert looked in the direction whence this last had appeared, the head of his grannie's bed had vanished, and a wild hill-side, covered with stones and heather, sloped away into the distance. Over it pa.s.sed man after man, each with an ancestral air, while on the gray sea to the left, galleys covered with Nors.e.m.e.n tore up the white foam, and dashed one after the other up to the strand. How long he gazed, he did not know, but when he withdrew his eyes from the extended scene, there stood the figure of his father, still trying to open the lid of the bureau, his grandfather resisting him, the blind piper with his hand on the head of both, and the stately chief with his hand on the piper's arm. Then a mist of forgetfulness gathered over the whole, till at last he awoke and found himself in the little wooden chamber at Bodyfauld, and not in the visioned room. Doubtless his loss of blood the day before had something to do with the dream or vision, whichever the reader may choose to consider it. He rose, and after a good breakfast, found himself very little the worse, and forgot all about his dream, till a circ.u.mstance which took place not long after recalled it vividly to his mind.

The enchantment of Bodyfauld soon wore off. The boys had no time to enter into the full enjoyment of country ways, because of those weary lessons, over the getting of which Mrs. Falconer kept as strict a watch as ever; while to Robert the evening journey, his violin and Miss St.

John left at Rothieden, grew more than tame. The return was almost as happy an event to him as the first going. Now he could resume his lessons with the soutar.

With Shargar it was otherwise. The freedom for so much longer from Mrs.

Falconer's eyes was in itself so much of a positive pleasure, that the walk twice a day, the fresh air, and the scents and sounds of the country, only came in as supplementary. But I do not believe the boy even then had so much happiness as when he was beaten and starved by his own mother. And Robert, growing more and more absorbed in his own thoughts and pursuits, paid him less and less attention as the weeks went on, till Shargar at length judged it for a time an evil day on which he first had slept under old Ronald Falconer's kilt.

CHAPTER XVIII. NATURE PUTS IN A CLAIM.

Before the day of return arrived, Robert had taken care to remove the violin from his bedroom, and carry it once more to its old retreat in Shargar's garret. The very first evening, however, that grannie again spent in her own arm-chair, he hied from the house as soon as it grew dusk, and made his way with his brown-paper parcel to Sandy Elshender's.

Entering the narrow pa.s.sage from which his shop door opened, and hearing him hammering away at a sole, he stood and unfolded his treasure, then drew a low sigh from her with his bow, and awaited the result. He heard the lap-stone fall thundering on the floor, and, like a spider from his cavern, Dooble Sanny appeared in the door, with the bend-leather in one hand, and the hammer in the other.

'Lordsake, man! hae ye gotten her again? Gie's a grup o' her!' he cried, dropping leather and hammer.

'Na, na,' returned Robert, retreating towards the outer door. 'Ye maun sweir upo' her that, whan I want her, I sall hae her ohn demur, or I sanna lat ye lay roset upo' her.'

'I swear 't, Robert; I sweir 't upo' her,' said the soutar hurriedly, stretching out both his hands as if to receive some human being into his embrace.

Robert placed the violin in those grimy hands. A look of heavenly delight dawned over the hirsute and dirt-besmeared countenance, which drooped into tenderness as he drew the bow across the instrument, and wiled from her a thin wail as of sorrow at their long separation. He then retreated into his den, and was soon sunk in a trance, deaf to everything but the violin, from which no entreaties of Robert, who longed for a lesson, could rouse him; so that he had to go home grievously disappointed, and unrewarded for the risk he had run in venturing the stolen visit.

Next time, however, he fared better; and he contrived so well that, from the middle of June to the end of August, he had two lessons a week, mostly upon the afternoons of holidays. For these his master thought himself well paid by the use of the instrument between. And Robert made great progress.

Occasionally he saw Miss St. John in the garden, and once or twice met her in the town; but her desire to find in him a pupil had been greatly quenched by her unfortunate conjecture as to the cause of his accident.

She had, however, gone so far as to mention the subject to her aunt, who a.s.sured her that old Mrs. Falconer would as soon consent to his being taught gambling as music. The idea, therefore, pa.s.sed away; and beyond a kind word or two when she met him, there was no further communication between them. But Robert would often dream of waking from a swoon, and finding his head lying on her lap, and her lovely face bending over him full of kindness and concern.

By the way, Robert cared nothing for poetry. Virgil was too troublesome to be enjoyed; and in English he had met with nothing but the dried leaves and gum-flowers of the last century. Miss Letty once lent him The Lady of the Lake; but before he had read the first canto through, his grandmother laid her hands upon it, and, without saying a word, dropped it behind a loose skirting-board in the pantry, where the mice soon made it a ruin sad to behold. For Miss Letty, having heard from the woful Robert of its strange disappearance, and guessing its cause, applied to Mrs. Falconer for the volume; who forthwith, the tongs aiding, extracted it from its hole, and, without shade of embarra.s.sment, held it up like a drowned kitten before the eyes of Miss Letty, intending thereby, no doubt, to impress her with the fate of all seducing spirits that should attempt an entrance into her kingdom: Miss Letty only burst into merry laughter over its fate. So the lode of poetry failed for the present from Robert's life. Nor did it matter much; for had he not his violin?

I have, I think, already indicated that his grandfather had been a linen manufacturer. Although that trade had ceased, his family had still retained the bleachery belonging to it, commonly called the bleachfield, devoting it now to the service of those large calico manufactures which had ruined the trade in linen, and to the whitening of such yarn as the country housewives still spun at home, and the webs they got woven of it in private looms. To Robert and Shargar it was a wondrous pleasure when the pile of linen which the week had acc.u.mulated at the office under the ga'le-room, was on Sat.u.r.day heaped high upon the base of a broad-wheeled cart, to get up on it and be carried to the said bleachfield, which lay along the bank of the river. Soft laid and high-borne, gazing into the blue sky, they traversed the streets in a holiday triumph; and although, once arrived, the manager did not fail to get some labour out of them, yet the store of amus.e.m.e.nt was endless. The great wheel, which drove the whole machinery; the plash-mill, or, more properly, wauk-mill--a word Robert derived from the resemblance of the mallets to two huge feet, and of their motion to walking--with the water plashing and squirting from the blows of their heels; the beatles thundering in arpeggio upon the huge cylinder round which the white cloth was wound--each was haunted in its turn and season. The pleasure of the water itself was inexhaustible.

Here sweeping in a ma.s.s along the race; there divided into branches and hurrying through the walls of the various houses; here sliding through a wooden channel across the floor to fall into the river in a half-concealed cataract, there bubbling up through the bottom of a huge wooden cave or vat, there resting placid in another; here gurgling along a spout; there flowing in a narrow ca.n.a.l through the green expanse of the well-mown bleachfield, or lifted from it in narrow curved wooden scoops, like fairy canoes with long handles, and flung in showers over the outspread yarn--the water was an endless delight.

It is strange how some individual broidery or figure upon Nature's garment will delight a boy long before he has ever looked Nature in the face, or begun to love herself. But Robert was soon to become dimly conscious of a life within these things--a life not the less real that its operations on his mind had been long unrecognized.

On the gra.s.sy bank of the gently-flowing river, at the other edge of whose level the little ca.n.a.l squabbled along, and on the gra.s.sy brae which rose immediately from the ca.n.a.l, were stretched, close beside each other, with scarce a stripe of green betwixt, the long white webs of linen, fastened down to the soft mossy ground with wooden pegs, whose tops were twisted into their edges. Strangely would they billow in the wind sometimes, like sea-waves, frozen and enchanted flat, seeking to rise and wallow in the wind with conscious depth and whelming ma.s.s. But generally they lay supine, saturated with light and its cleansing power.

Falconer's jubilation in the white and green of a little boat, as we lay, one bright morning, on the banks of the Thames between Richmond and Twickenham, led to such a description of the bleachfield that I can write about it as if I had known it myself.

One Sat.u.r.day afternoon in the end of July, when the westering sun was hotter than at midday, he went down to the lower end of the field, where the river was confined by a dam, and plunged from the bank into deep water. After a swim of half-an-hour, he ascended the higher part of the field, and lay down upon a broad web to bask in the sun. In his ears was the hush rather than rush of the water over the dam, the occasional murmur of a belt of trees that skirted the border of the field, and the dull continuous sound of the beatles at their work below, like a persistent growl of thunder on the horizon.

Had Robert possessed a copy of Robinson Crusoe, or had his grandmother not cast The Lady of the Lake, mistaking it for an idol, if not to the moles and the bats, yet to the mice and the black-beetles, he might have been lying reading it, blind and deaf to the face and the voice of Nature, and years might have pa.s.sed before a response awoke in his heart. It is good that children of faculty, as distinguished from capacity, should not have too many books to read, or too much of early lessoning. The increase of examinations in our country will increase its capacity and diminish its faculty. We shall have more compilers and reducers and fewer thinkers; more modifiers and completers, and fewer inventors.

He lay gazing up into the depth of the sky, rendered deeper and bluer by the ma.s.ses of white cloud that hung almost motionless below it, until he felt a kind of bodily fear lest he should fall off the face of the round earth into the abyss. A gentle wind, laden with pine odours from the sun-heated trees behind him, flapped its light wing in his face: the humanity of the world smote his heart; the great sky towered up over him, and its divinity entered his soul; a strange longing after something 'he knew not nor could name' awoke within him, followed by the pang of a sudden fear that there was no such thing as that which he sought, that it was all a fancy of his own spirit; and then the voice of Shargar broke the spell, calling to him from afar to come and see a great salmon that lay by a stone in the water. But once aroused, the feeling was never stilled; the desire never left him; sometimes growing even to a pa.s.sion that was relieved only by a flood of tears.

Strange as it may sound to those who have never thought of such things save in connection with Sundays and Bibles and churches and sermons, that which was now working in Falconer's mind was the first dull and faint movement of the greatest need that the human heart possesses--the need of the G.o.d-Man. There must be truth in the scent of that pine-wood: some one must mean it. There must be a glory in those heavens that depends not upon our imagination: some power greater than they must dwell in them. Some spirit must move in that wind that haunts us with a kind of human sorrow; some soul must look up to us from the eye of that starry flower. It must be something human, else not to us divine.

Little did Robert think that such was his need--that his soul was searching after One whose form was constantly presented to him, but as constantly obscured and made unlovely by the words without knowledge spoken in the religious a.s.semblies of the land; that he was longing without knowing it on the Sat.u.r.day for that from which on the Sunday he would be repelled without knowing it. Years pa.s.sed before he drew nigh to the knowledge of what he sought.

For weeks the mood broken by the voice of his companion did not return, though the forms of Nature were henceforth full of a pleasure he had never known before. He loved the gra.s.s; the water was more gracious to him; he would leave his bed early, that he might gaze on the clouds of the east, with their borders gold-blasted with sunrise; he would linger in the fields that the amber and purple, and green and red, of the sunset, might not escape after the sun unseen. And as long as he felt the mystery, the revelation of the mystery lay before and not behind him.

And Shargar--had he any soul for such things? Doubtless; but how could he be other than lives behind Robert? For the latter had ancestors--that is, he came of people with a mental and spiritual history; while the former had been born the birth of an animal; of a n.o.ble sire, whose family had for generations filled the earth with fire, famine, slaughter, and licentiousness; and of a wandering outcast mother, who blindly loved the fields and woods, but retained her affection for her offspring scarcely beyond the period while she suckled them. The love of freedom and of wild animals that she had given him, however, was far more precious than any share his male ancestor had borne in his mental const.i.tution. After his fashion he as well as Robert enjoyed the sun and the wind and the water and the sky; but he had sympathies with the salmon and the rooks and the wild rabbits even stronger than those of Robert.

CHAPTER XIX. ROBERT STEALS HIS OWN.