Robert Falconer Part 36

The next day being Sat.u.r.day, Robert set out for Bodyfauld, taking the violin with him. He went alone, for he was in no mood for Shargar's company. It was a fine spring day, the woods were budding, and the fragrance of the larches floated across his way. There was a lovely sadness in the sky, and in the motions of the air, and in the scent of the earth--as if they all knew that fine things were at hand which never could be so beautiful as those that had gone away. And Robert wondered how it was that everything should look so different. Even Bodyfauld seemed to have lost its enchantment, though his friends were as kind as ever. Mr. Lammie went into a rage at the story of the lost violin, and Miss Lammie cried from sympathy with Robert's distress at the fate of his bonny leddy. Then he came to the occasion of his visit, which was to beg Mr. Lammie, when next he went to Aberdeen, to take the soutar's fiddle, and get what he could for it, to help his widow.

'Poor Sanny!' said Robert, 'it never cam' intil 's heid to sell her, nae mair nor gin she had been the auld wife 'at he ca'd her.'

Mr. Lammie undertook the commission; and the next time he saw Robert, handed him ten pounds as the result of the negotiation. It was all Robert could do, however, to get the poor woman to take the money. She looked at it with repugnance, almost as if it had been the price of blood. But Robert having succeeded in overcoming her scruples, she did take it, and therewith provide a store of sweeties, and reels of cotton, and tobacco, for sale in Sanny's workshop. She certainly did not make money by her merchandise, for her anxiety to be honest rose to the absurd; but she contrived to live without being reduced to prey upon her own gingerbread and rock.

CHAPTER IV. THE ABERDEEN GARRET.

Miss St. John had long since returned from her visit, but having heard how much Robert was taken up with his dying friend, she judged it better to leave her intended proposal of renewing her lessons alone for the present. Meeting him, however, soon after Alexander's death, she introduced the subject, and Robert was enraptured at the prospect of the re-opening of the gates of his paradise. If he did not inform his grandmother of the fact, neither did he attempt to conceal it; but she took no notice, thinking probably that the whole affair would be effectually disposed of by his departure. Till that period arrived, he had a lesson almost every evening, and Miss St. John was surprised to find how the boy had grown since the door was built up. Robert's grat.i.tude grew into a kind of worship.

The evening before his departure for Bodyfauld--whence his grandmother had arranged that he should start for Aberdeen, in order that he might have the company of Mr. Lammie, whom business drew thither about the same time--as he was having his last lesson, Mrs. Forsyth left the room.

Thereupon Robert, who had been dejected all day at the thought of the separation from Miss St. John, found his heart beating so violently that he could hardly breathe. Probably she saw his emotion, for she put her hand on the keys, as if to cover it by showing him how some movement was to be better effected. He seized her hand and lifted it to his lips.

But when he found that instead of s.n.a.t.c.hing it away, she yielded it, nay gently pressed it to his face, he burst into tears, and dropped on his knees, as if before a G.o.ddess.

'Hush, Robert! Don't be foolish,' she said, quietly and tenderly. 'Here is my aunt coming.'

The same moment he was at the piano again, playing My Bonny Lady Ann, so as to astonish Miss St. John, and himself as well. Then he rose, bade her a hasty good-night, and hurried away.

A strange conflict arose in his mind at the prospect of leaving the old place, on every house of whose streets, on every swell of whose surrounding hills he left the clinging shadows of thought and feeling.

A faintly purpled mist arose, and enwrapped all the past, changing even his grayest troubles into tales of fairyland, and his deepest griefs into songs of a sad music. Then he thought of Shargar, and what was to become of him after he was gone. The lad was paler and his eyes were redder than ever, for he had been weeping in secret. He went to his grandmother and begged that Shargar might accompany him to Bodyfauld.

'He maun bide at hame an' min' his beuks,' she answered; 'for he winna hae them that muckle langer. He maun be doin' something for himsel'.'

So the next morning the boys parted--Shargar to school, and Robert to Bodyfauld--Shargar left behind with his desolation, his sun gone down in a west that was not even stormy, only gray and hopeless, and Robert moving towards an east which reflected, like a faint prophecy, the west behind him tinged with love, death, and music, but mingled the colours with its own saffron of coming dawn.

When he reached Bodyfauld he marvelled to find that all its glory had returned. He found Miss Lammie busy among the rich yellow pools in her dairy, and went out into the garden, now in the height of its summer.

Great cabbage roses hung heavy-headed splendours towards purple-black heartseases, and thin-filmed silvery pods of honesty; tall white lilies mingled with the blossoms of currant bushes, and at their feet the narcissi of old cla.s.sic legend pressed their warm-hearted paleness into the plebeian thicket of the many-striped gardener's garters. It was a lovely type of a commonwealth indeed, of the garden and kingdom of G.o.d.

His whole mind was flooded with a sense of sunny wealth. The farmer's neglected garden blossomed into higher glory in his soul. The bloom and the richness and the use were all there; but instead of each flower was a delicate ethereal sense or feeling about that flower. Of these how gladly would he have gathered a posy to offer Miss St. John! but, alas! he was no poet; or rather he had but the half of the poet's inheritance--he could see: he could not say. But even if he had been full of poetic speech, he would yet have found that the half of his posy remained ungathered, for although we have speech enough now to be 'cousin to the deed,' as Chaucer says it must always be, we have not yet enough speech to cousin the tenth part of our feelings. Let him who doubts recall one of his own vain attempts to convey that which made the oddest of dreams entrancing in loveliness--to convey that aroma of thought, the conscious absence of which made him a fool in his own eyes when he spoke such silly words as alone presented themselves for the service. I can no more describe the emotion aroused in my mind by a gray cloud parting over a gray stone, by the smell of a sweetpea, by the sight of one of those long upright pennons of striped gra.s.s with the homely name, than I can tell what the glory of G.o.d is who made these things. The man whose poetry is like nature in this, that it produces individual, incommunicable moods and conditions of mind--a sense of elevated, tender, marvellous, and evanescent existence, must be a poet indeed. Every dawn of such a feeling is a light-brushed bubble rendering visible for a moment the dark unknown sea of our being which lies beyond the lights of our consciousness, and is the stuff and region of our eternal growth. But think what language must become before it will tell dreams!--before it will convey the delicate shades of fancy that come and go in the brain of a child!--before it will let a man know wherein one face differeth from another face in glory! I suspect, however, that for such purposes it is rather music than articulation that is needful--that, with a hope of these finer results, the language must rather be turned into music than logically extended.

The next morning he awoke at early dawn, hearing the birds at his window. He rose and went out. The air was clear and fresh as a new-made soul. Bars of mottled cloud were bent across the eastern quarter of the sky, which lay like a great ethereal ocean ready for the launch of the ship of glory that was now gliding towards its edge. Everything was waiting to conduct him across the far horizon to the south, where lay the stored-up wonder of his coming life. The lark sang of something greater than he could tell; the wind got up, whispered at it, and lay down to sleep again; the sun was at hand to bathe the world in the light and gladness alone fit to typify the radiance of Robert's thoughts. The clouds that formed the sh.o.r.e of the upper sea were already burning from saffron into gold. A moment more and the first insupportable sting of light would shoot from behind the edge of that low blue hill, and the first day of his new life would be begun. He watched, and it came. The well-spring of day, fresh and exuberant as if now first from the holy will of the Father of Lights, gushed into the basin of the world, and the world was more glad than tongue or pen can tell. The supernal light alone, dawning upon the human heart, can exceed the marvel of such a sunrise.

And shall life itself be less beautiful than one of its days? Do not believe it, young brother. Men call the shadow, thrown upon the universe where their own dusky souls come between it and the eternal sun, life, and then mourn that it should be less bright than the hopes of their childhood. Keep thou thy soul translucent, that thou mayest never see its shadow; at least never abuse thyself with the philosophy which calls that shadow life. Or, rather would I say, become thou pure in heart, and thou shalt see G.o.d, whose vision alone is life.

Just as the sun rushed across the horizon he heard the tramp of a heavy horse in the yard, pa.s.sing from the stable to the cart that was to carry his trunk to the turnpike road, three miles off, where the coach would pa.s.s. Then Miss Lammie came and called him to breakfast, and there sat the farmer in his Sunday suit of black, already busy. Robert was almost too happy to eat; yet he had not swallowed two mouthfuls before the sun rose unheeded, the lark sang unheeded, and the roses sparkled with the dew that bowed yet lower their heavy heads, all unheeded. By the time they had finished, Mr. Lammie's gig was at the door, and they mounted and followed the cart. Not even the recurring doubt and fear that hollowness was at the heart of it all, for that G.o.d could not mean such reinless gladness, prevented the truth of the present joy from sinking deep into the lad's heart. In his mind he saw a boat moored to a rock, with no one on board, heaving on the waters of a rising tide, and waiting to bear him out on the sea of the unknown. The picture arose of itself: there was no paradise of the west in his imagination, as in that of a boy of the sixteenth century, to authorize its appearance. It rose again and again; the dew glittered as if the light were its own; the sun shone as he had never seen him shine before; the very mare that sped them along held up her head and stepped out as if she felt it the finest of mornings. Had she also a future, poor old mare? Might there not be a paradise somewhere? and if in the furthest star instead of next-door America, why, so much the more might the Atlantis of the nineteenth century surpa.s.s Manoa the golden of the seventeenth!

The gig and the cart reached the road together. One of the men who had accompanied the cart took the gig; and they were left on the road-side with Robert's trunk and box--the latter a present from Miss Lammie.

Their places had been secured, and the guard knew where he had to take them up. Long before the coach appeared, the notes of his horn, as like the colour of his red coat as the blindest of men could imagine, came echoing from the side of the heathery, stony hill under which they stood, so that Robert turned wondering, as if the chariot of his desires had been coming over the top of Drumsnaig, to carry him into a heaven where all labour was delight. But round the corner in front came the four-in-hand red mail instead. She pulled up gallantly; the wheelers lay on their hind quarters, and the leaders parted theirs from the pole; the boxes were hoisted up; Mr. Lammie climbed, and Robert scrambled to his seat; the horn blew; the coachman spake oracularly; the horses obeyed; and away went the gorgeous symbol of sovereignty careering through the submissive region. Nor did Robert's delight abate during the journey--certainly not when he saw the blue line of the sea in the distance, a marvel and yet a fact.

Mrs. Falconer had consulted the Misses Napier, who had many acquaintances in Aberdeen, as to a place proper for Robert, and suitable to her means. Upon this point Miss Letty, not without a certain touch of design, as may appear in the course of my story, had been able to satisfy her. In a small house of two floors and a garret, in the old town, Mr. Lammie took leave of Robert.

It was from a garret window still, but a storm-window now that Robert looked--eastward across fields and sand-hills, to the blue expanse of waters--not blue like southern seas, but slaty blue, like the eyes of northmen. It was rather dreary; the sun was shining from overhead now, casting short shadows and much heat; the dew was gone up, and the lark had come down; he was alone; the end of his journey was come, and was not anything very remarkable. His landlady interrupted his gaze to know what he would have for dinner, but he declined to use any discretion in the matter. When she left the room he did not return to the window, but sat down upon his box. His eye fell upon the other, a big wooden cube.

Of its contents he knew nothing. He would amuse himself by making inquisition. It was nailed up. He borrowed a screwdriver and opened it.

At the top lay a linen bag full of oatmeal; underneath that was a thick layer of oat-cake; underneath that two cheeses, a pound of b.u.t.ter, and six pots of jam, which ought to have tasted of roses, for it came from the old garden where the roses lived in such sweet companionship with the currant bushes; underneath that, &c.; and underneath, &c., a box which strangely recalled Shargar's garret, and one of the closets therein. With beating heart he opened it, and lo, to his marvel, and the restoration of all the fair day, there was the violin which Dooble Sanny had left him when he forsook her for--some one or other of the queer instruments of Fra Angelico's angels?

In a flutter of delight he sat down on his trunk again and played the most mournful of tunes. Two white pigeons, which had been talking to each other in the heat on the roof, came one on each side of the window and peeped into the room; and out between them, as he played, Robert saw the sea, and the blue sky above it. Is it any wonder that, instead of turning to the lying pages and contorted sentences of the Livy which he had already unpacked from his box, he forgot all about school, and college, and bursary, and went on playing till his landlady brought up his dinner, which he swallowed hastily that he might return to the spells of his enchantress!

CHAPTER V. THE COMPEt.i.tION.

I could linger with gladness even over this part of my hero's history.

If the school work was dry it was thorough. If that academy had no sweetly shadowing trees; if it did stand within a parallelogram of low stone walls, containing a roughly-gravelled court; if all the region about suggested hot stones and sand--beyond still was the sea and the sky; and that court, morning and afternoon, was filled with the shouts of eager boys, kicking the football with mad rushings to and fro, and sometimes with wounds and faintings--fit symbol of the equally resultless ambition with which many of them would follow the game of life in the years to come. Shock-headed Highland colts, and rough Lowland steers as many of them were, out of that group, out of the roughest of them, would emerge in time a few gentlemen--not of the type of your trim, self-contained, clerical exquisite--but large-hearted, courteous gentlemen, for whom a man may thank G.o.d. And if the master was stern and hard, he was true; if the pupils feared him, they yet cared to please him; if there might be found not a few more widely-read scholars than he, it would be hard to find a better teacher.

Robert leaned to the collar and laboured, not greatly moved by ambition, but much by the hope of the bursary and the college life in the near distance. Not unfrequently he would rush into the thick of the football game, fight like a maniac for one short burst, and then retire and look on. He oftener regarded than mingled. He seldom joined his fellows after school hours, for his work lay both upon his conscience and his hopes; but if he formed no very deep friendships amongst them, at least he made no enemies, for he was not selfish, and in virtue of the Celtic blood in him was invariably courteous. His habits were in some things altogether irregular. He never went out for a walk; but sometimes, looking up from his Virgil or his Latin version, and seeing the blue expanse in the distance breaking into white under the viewless wing of the summer wind, he would fling down his dictionary or his pen, rush from his garret, and fly in a straight line, like a sea-gull weary of lake and river, down to the waste sh.o.r.e of the great deep. This was all that stood for the Arabian Nights of moon-blossomed marvel; all the rest was Aberdeen days of Latin and labour.

Slowly the hours went, and yet the dreaded, hoped-for day came quickly.

The quadrangle of the stone-crowned college grew more awful in its silence and emptiness every time Robert pa.s.sed it; and the professors'

houses looked like the sentry-boxes of the angels of learning, soon to come forth and judge the feeble mortals who dared present a claim to their recognition. October faded softly by, with its keen fresh mornings, and cold memorial green-horizoned evenings, whose stars fell like the stray blossoms of a more heavenly world, from some ghostly wind of s.p.a.ce that had caught them up on its awful sh.o.r.eless sweep. November came, 'chill and drear,' with its heartless, hopeless nothingness; but as if to mock the poor compet.i.tors, rose, after three days of Scotch mist, in a lovely 'halcyon day' of 'St. Martin's summer,' through whose long shadows anxious young faces gathered in the quadrangle, or under the arcade, each with his Ainsworth's Dictionary, the sole book allowed, under his arm. But when the sacrist appeared and unlocked the public school, and the black-gowned professors walked into the room, and the door was left open for the candidates to follow, then indeed a great awe fell upon the a.s.sembly, and the lads crept into their seats as if to a trial for life before a bench of the incorruptible. They took their places; a portion of Robertson's History of Scotland was given them to turn into Latin; and soon there was nothing to be heard in the a.s.sembly but the turning of the leaves of dictionaries, and the scratching of pens constructing the first rough copy of the Latinized theme.

It was done. Four weary hours, nearly five, one or two of which pa.s.sed like minutes, the others as if each minute had been an hour, went by, and Robert, in a kind of desperation, after a final reading of the Latin, gave in his paper, and left the room. When he got home, he asked his landlady to get him some tea. Till it was ready he would take his violin. But even the violin had grown dull, and would not speak freely.

He returned to the torture--took out his first copy, and went over it once more. Horror of horrors! a maxie!--that is a maximus error. Mary Queen of Scots had been left so far behind in the beginning of the paper, that she forgot the rights of her s.e.x in the middle of it, and in the accusative of a future participle pa.s.sive--I do not know if more modern grammarians have a different name for the growth--had submitted to be dum, and her rightful dam was henceforth and for ever debarred.

He rose, rushed out of the house, down through the garden, across two fields and a wide road, across the links, and so to the moaning lip of the sea--for it was moaning that night. From the last bulwark of the sandhills he dropped upon the wet sands, and there he paced up and down--how long, G.o.d only, who was watching him, knew--with the low limitless form of the murmuring lip lying out and out into the sinking sky like the life that lay low and hopeless before him, for the want at most of twenty pounds a year (that was the highest bursary then) to lift him into a region of possible well-being. Suddenly a strange phenomenon appeared within him. The subject hitherto became the object to a new birth of consciousness. He began to look at himself. 'There's a sair bit in there,' he said, as if his own bosom had been that of another mortal.

'What's to be dune wi' 't? I doobt it maun bide it. Weel, the crater had better bide it quaietly, and no cry oot. Lie doon, an' haud yer tongue.

Soror tua haud meretrix est, ye brute!' He burst out laughing, after a doubtful and ululant fashion, I dare say; but he went home, took up his auld wife, and played 'Tullochgorum' some fifty times over, with extemporized variations.

The next day he had to translate a pa.s.sage from Tacitus; after executing which somewhat heartlessly, he did not open a Latin book for a whole week. The very sight of one was disgusting to him. He wandered about the New Town, along Union Street, and up and down the stairs that led to the lower parts, haunted the quay, watched the vessels, learned their forms, their parts and capacities, made friends with a certain Dutch captain whom he heard playing the violin in his cabin, and on the whole, notwithstanding the wretched prospect before him, contrived to spend the week with considerable enjoyment. Nor does an occasional episode of lounging hurt a life with any true claims to the epic form.

The day of decision at length arrived. Again the black-robed powers a.s.sembled, and again the hoping, fearing lads--some of them not lads, men, and mere boys--gathered to hear their fate. Name after name was called out;--a twenty pound bursary to the first, one of seventeen to the next, three or four of fifteen and fourteen, and so on, for about twenty, and still no Robert Falconer. At last, lagging wearily in the rear, he heard his name, went up listlessly, and was awarded five pounds. He crept home, wrote to his grandmother, and awaited her reply.

It was not long in coming; for although the carrier was generally the medium of communication, Miss Letty had contrived to send the answer by coach. It was to the effect that his grandmother was sorry that he had not been more successful, but that Mr. Innes thought it would be quite worth while to try again, and he must therefore come home for another year.

This was mortifying enough, though not so bad as it might have been.

Robert began to pack his box. But before he had finished it he shut the lid and sat upon it. To meet Miss St. John thus disgraced, was more than he could bear. If he remained, he had a chance of winning prizes at the end of the session, and that would more than repair his honour. The five pound bursars were privileged in paying half fees; and if he could only get some teaching, he could manage. But who would employ a bejan when a magistrand might be had for next to nothing? Besides, who would recommend him? The thought of Dr. Anderson flashed into his mind, and he rushed from the house without even knowing where he lived.

CHAPTER VI. DR. ANDERSON AGAIN.

At the Post-office he procured the desired information at once. Dr.

Anderson lived in Union Street, towards the western end of it.

Away went Robert to find the house. That was easy. What a grand house of smooth granite and wide approach it was! The great door was opened by a man-servant, who looked at the country boy from head to foot.

'Is the doctor in?' asked Robert.

'Yes.'

'I wad like to see him.'

'Wha will I say wants him?'

'Say the laddie he saw at Bodyfauld.'