Robert Falconer Part 63

CHAPTER I. IN THE DESERT.

A life lay behind Robert Falconer, and a life lay before him. He stood on a shoal between.

The life behind him was in its grave. He had covered it over and turned away. But he knew it would rise at night.

The life before him was not yet born; and what should issue from that dull ghastly unrevealing fog on the horizon, he did not care. Thither the tide setting eastward would carry him, and his future must be born.

All he cared about was to leave the empty garments of his dead behind him--the sky and the fields, the houses and the gardens which those dead had made alive with their presence. Travel, motion, ever on, ever away, was the sole impulse in his heart. Nor had the thought of finding his father any share in his restlessness.

He told his grandmother that he was going back to Aberdeen. She looked in his face with surprise, but seeing trouble there, asked no questions.

As if walking in a dream, he found himself at Dr. Anderson's door.

'Why, Robert,' said the good man, 'what has brought you back? Ah! I see.

Poor Ericson! I am very sorry, my boy. What can I do for you?'

'I can't go on with my studies now, sir,' answered Robert. 'I have taken a great longing for travel. Will you give me a little money and let me go?'

'To be sure I will. Where do you want to go?'

'I don't know. Perhaps as I go I shall find myself wanting to go somewhere. You're not afraid to trust me, are you, sir?'

'Not in the least, Robert. I trust you perfectly. You shall do just as you please.--Have you any idea, how much money you will want?'

'No. Give me what you are willing I should spend: I will go by that.'

'Come along to the bank then. I will give you enough to start with.

Write at once when you want more. Don't be too saving. Enjoy yourself as well as you can. I shall not grudge it.'

Robert smiled a wan smile at the idea of enjoying himself. His friend saw it, but let it pa.s.s. There was no good in persuading a man whose grief was all he had left, that he must ere long part with that too.

That would have been in lowest deeps of sorrow to open a yet lower deep of horror. But Robert would have refused, and would have been right in refusing to believe with regard to himself what might be true in regard to most men. He might rise above his grief; he might learn to contain his grief; but lose it, forget it?--never.

He went to bid Shargar farewell. As soon as he had a glimpse of what his friend meant, he burst out in an agony of supplication.

'Tak me wi' ye, Robert,' he cried. 'Ye're a gentleman noo. I'll be yer man. I'll put on a livery coat, an' gang wi' ye. I'll awa' to Dr.

Anderson. He's sure to lat me gang.'

'No, Shargar,' said Robert, 'I can't have you with me. I've come into trouble, Shargar, and I must fight it out alone.'

'Ay, ay; I ken. Puir Mr. Ericson!'

'There's nothing the matter with Mr. Ericson. Don't ask me any questions. I've said more to you now than I've said to anybody besides.'

'That is guid o' you, Robert. But am I never to see ye again?'

'I don't know. Perhaps we may meet some day.'

'Perhaps is nae muckle to say, Robert,' protested Shargar.

'It's more than can be said about everything, Shargar,' returned Robert, sadly.

'Weel, I maun jist tak it as 't comes,' said Shargar, with a despairing philosophy derived from the days when his mother thrashed him. 'But, eh!

Robert, gin it had only pleased the Almichty to sen' me into the warl'

in a some respectable kin' o' a fashion!'

'Wi' a chance a' gaein' aboot the country like that curst villain yer brither, I suppose?' retorted Robert, rousing himself for a moment.

'Na, na,' responded Shargar. 'I'll stick to my ain mither. She never learned me sic tricks.'

'Do ye that. Ye canna compleen o' G.o.d. It's a' richt as far 's ye're concerned. Gin he dinna something o' ye yet, it'll be your wyte, no his, I'm thinkin'.'

They walked to Dr. Anderson's together, and spent the night there. In the morning Robert got on the coach for Edinburgh.

I cannot, if I would, follow him on his travels. Only at times, when the conversation rose in the dead of night, by some Jacob's ladder of blessed ascent, into regions where the heart of such a man could open as in its own natural clime, would a few words cause the clouds that enveloped this period of his history to dispart, and grant me a peep into the phantasm of his past. I suspect, however, that much of it left upon his mind no recallable impressions. I suspect that much of it looked to himself in the retrospect like a painful dream, with only certain objects and occurrences standing prominent enough to clear the moonlight mist enwrapping the rest.

What the precise nature of his misery was I shall not even attempt to conjecture. That would be to intrude within the holy place of a human heart. One thing alone I will venture to affirm--that bitterness against either of his friends, whose spirits rushed together and left his outside, had no place in that n.o.ble nature. His fate lay behind him, like the birth of Shargar, like the death of Ericson, a decree.

I do not even know in what direction he first went. That he had seen many cities and many countries was apparent from glimpses of ancient streets, of mountain-marvels, of strange constellations, of things in heaven and earth which no one could have seen but himself, called up by the magic of his words. A silent man in company, he talked much when his hour of speech arrived. Seldom, however, did he narrate any incident save in connection with some truth of human nature, or fact of the universe.

I do know that the first thing he always did on reaching any new place was to visit the church with the loftiest spire; but he never looked into the church itself until he had left the earth behind him as far as that church would afford him the possibility of ascent. Breathing the air of its highest region, he found himself vaguely strengthened, yes comforted. One peculiar feeling he had, into which I could enter only upon happy occasion, of the presence of G.o.d in the wind. He said the wind up there on the heights of human aspiration always made him long and pray. Asking him one day something about his going to church so seldom, he answered thus:

'My dear boy, it does me ten times more good to get outside the spire than to go inside the church. The spire is the most essential, and consequently the most neglected part of the building. It symbolizes the aspiration without which no man's faith can hold its own. But the effort of too many of her priests goes to conceal from the worshippers the fact that there is such a stair, with a door to it out of the church. It looks as if they feared their people would desert them for heaven. But I presume it arises generally from the fact that they know of such an ascent themselves, only by hearsay. The knowledge of G.o.d is good, but the church is better!'

'Could it be,' I ventured to suggest, 'that, in order to ascend, they must put off the priests' garments?'

'Good, my boy!' he answered. 'All are priests up there, and must be clothed in fine linen, clean and white--the righteousness of saints--not the imputed righteousness of another,--that is a lying doctrine--but their own righteousness which G.o.d has wrought in them by Christ.' I never knew a man in whom the inward was so constantly clothed upon by the outward, whose ordinary habits were so symbolic of his spiritual tastes, or whose enjoyment of the sight of his eyes and the hearing of his ears was so much informed by his highest feelings. He regarded all human affairs from the heights of religion, as from their church-spires he looked down on the red roofs of Antwerp, on the black roofs of Cologne, on the gray roofs of Strasburg, or on the brown roofs of Basel--uplifted for the time above them, not in dissociation from them.

On the base of the missing twin-spire at Strasburg, high over the roof of the church, stands a little cottage--how strange its white muslin window-curtains look up there! To the day of his death he cherished the fancy of writing a book in that cottage, with the grand city to which London looks a modern mushroom, its thousand roofs with row upon row of windows in them--often five garret stories, one above the other, and its thickets of multiform chimneys, the thrones and procreant cradles of the storks, marvellous in history, habit, and dignity--all below him.

He was taken ill at Valence and lay there for a fortnight, oppressed with some kind of low fever. One night he awoke from a refreshing sleep, but could not sleep again. It seemed to him afterwards as if he had lain waiting for something. Anyhow something came. As it were a faint musical rain had invaded his hearing; but the night was clear, for the moon was shining on his window-blind. The sound came nearer, and revealed itself a delicate tinkling of bells. It drew nearer still and nearer, growing in sweet fulness as it came, till at length a slow torrent of tinklings went past his window in the street below. It was the flow of a thousand little currents of sound, a gliding of silvery threads, like the talking of water-ripples against the side of a barge in a slow ca.n.a.l--all as soft as the moonlight, as exquisite as an odour, each sound tenderly truncated and dull. A great mult.i.tude of sheep was shifting its quarters in the night, whence and whither and why he never knew. To his heart they were the messengers of the Most High. For into that heart, soothed and attuned by their thin harmony, not on the wind that floated without breaking their lovely message, but on the ripples of the wind that bloweth where it listeth, came the words, unlooked for, their coming unheralded by any mental premonition, 'My peace I give unto you.' The sounds died slowly away in the distance, fainting out of the air, even as they had grown upon it, but the words remained.

In a few moments he was fast asleep, comforted by pleasure into repose; his dreams were of gentle self-consoling griefs; and when he awoke in the morning--'My peace I give unto you,' was the first thought of which he was conscious. It may be that the sound of the sheep-bells made him think of the shepherds that watched their flocks by night, and they of the mult.i.tude of the heavenly host, and they of the song--'On earth peace': I do not know. The important point is not how the words came, but that the words remained--remained until he understood them, and they became to him spirit and life.

He soon recovered strength sufficiently to set out again upon his travels, great part of which he performed on foot. In this way he reached Avignon. Pa.s.sing from one of its narrow streets into an open place in the midst, all at once he beheld, towering above him, on a height that overlooked the whole city and surrounding country, a great crucifix. The form of the Lord of Life still hung in the face of heaven and earth. He bowed his head involuntarily. No matter that when he drew nearer the power of it vanished. The memory of it remained with its first impression, and it had a share in what followed.

He made his way eastward towards the Alps. As he walked one day about noon over a desolate heath-covered height, reminding him not a little of the country of his childhood, the silence seized upon him. In the midst of the silence arose the crucifix, and once more the words which had often returned upon him sounded in the ears of the inner hearing, 'My peace I give unto you.' They were words he had known from the earliest memorial time. He had heard them in infancy, in childhood, in boyhood, in youth: now first in manhood it flashed upon him that the Lord did really mean that the peace of his soul should be the peace of their souls; that the peace wherewith his own soul was quiet, the peace at the very heart of the universe, was henceforth theirs--open to them, to all the world, to enter and be still. He fell upon his knees, bowed down in the birth of a great hope, held up his hands towards heaven, and cried, 'Lord Christ, give me thy peace.'

He said no more, but rose, caught up his stick, and strode forward, thinking.

He had learned what the sentence meant; what that was of which it spoke he had not yet learned. The peace he had once sought, the peace that lay in the smiles and tenderness of a woman, had 'overcome him like a summer cloud,' and had pa.s.sed away. There was surely a deeper, a wider, a grander peace for him than that, if indeed it was the same peace wherewith the king of men regarded his approaching end, that he had left as a heritage to his brothers. Suddenly he was aware that the earth had begun to live again. The hum of insects arose from the heath around him; the odour of its flowers entered his dulled sense; the wind kissed him on the forehead; the sky domed up over his head; and the clouds veiled the distant mountain tops like the smoke of incense ascending from the altars of the worshipping earth. All Nature began to minister to one who had begun to lift his head from the baptism of fire. He had thought that Nature could never more be anything to him; and she was waiting on him like a mother. The next moment he was offended with himself for receiving ministrations the reaction of whose loveliness might no longer gather around the form of Mary St. John. Every wavelet of scent, every toss of a flower's head in the breeze, came with a sting in its pleasure--for there was no woman to whom they belonged. Yet he could not shut them out, for G.o.d and not woman is the heart of the universe.

Would the day ever come when the loveliness of Mary St. John, felt and acknowledged as never before, would be even to him a joy and a thanksgiving? If ever, then because G.o.d is the heart of all.

I do not think this mood, wherein all forms of beauty sped to his soul as to their own needful centre, could have lasted over many miles of his journey. But such delicate inward revelations are none the less precious that they are evanescent. Many feelings are simply too good to last--using the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is generally used, expressing the conviction that G.o.d is a hard father, fond of disappointing his children, but to express the fact that intensity and endurance cannot yet coexist in the human economy. But the virtue of a mood depends by no means on its immediate presence. Like any other experience, it may be believed in, and, in the absence which leaves the mind free to contemplate it, work even more good than in its presence.

At length he came in sight of the Alpine regions. Far off, the heads of the great mountains rose into the upper countries of cloud, where the snows settled on their stony heads, and the torrents ran out from beneath the frozen ma.s.s to gladden the earth below with the faith of the lonely hills. The mighty creatures lay like grotesque animals of a far-off t.i.tanic time, whose dead bodies had been first withered into stone, then worn away by the storms, and covered with shrouds and palls of snow, till the outlines of their forms were gone, and only rough shapes remained like those just blocked out in the sculptor's marble, vaguely suggesting what the creatures had been, as the corpse under the sheet of death is like a man. He came amongst the valleys at their feet, with their blue-green waters hurrying seawards--from stony heights of air into the ma.s.s of 'the restless wavy plain'; with their sides of rock rising in gigantic terrace after terrace up to the heavens; with their scaling pines, erect and slight, cone-head aspiring above cone-head, ambitious to clothe the bare ma.s.s with green, till failing at length in their upward efforts, the savage rock shot away and beyond and above them, the white and blue glaciers clinging cold and cruel to their ragged sides, and the dead blank of whiteness covering their final despair. He drew near to the lower glaciers, to find their awful abysses tremulous with liquid blue, a blue tender and profound as if fed from the reservoir of some hidden sky intenser than ours; he rejoiced over the velvety fields dotted with the toy-like houses of the mountaineers; he sat for hours listening by the side of their streams; he grew weary, felt oppressed, longed for a wider outlook, and began to climb towards a mountain village of which he had heard from a traveller, to find solitude and freedom in an air as lofty as if he climbed twelve of his beloved cathedral spires piled up in continuous ascent.

After ascending for hours in zigzags through pine woods, where the only sound was of the little streams trotting down to the valley below, or the distant hush of some thin waterfall, he reached a level, and came out of the woods. The path now led along the edge of a precipice descending sheer to the uppermost terrace of the valley he had left. The valley was but a cleft in the ma.s.s of the mountain: a little way over sank its other wall, steep as a plumb-line could have made it, of solid rock. On his right lay green fields of clover and strange gra.s.ses. Ever and anon from the cleft steamed up great blinding clouds of mist, which now wandered about over the nations of rocks on the mountain side beyond the gulf, now wrapt himself in their bewildering folds. In one moment the whole creation had vanished, and there seemed scarce existence enough left for more than the following footstep; the next, a mighty mountain stood in front, crowned with blinding snow, an awful fact; the lovely heavens were over his head, and the green sod under his feet; the gra.s.shoppers chirped about him, and the gorgeous b.u.t.terflies flew. From regions far beyond came the bells of the kine and the goats. He reached a little inn, and there took up his quarters.

I am able to be a little minute in my description, because I have since visited the place myself. Great heights rise around it on all sides. It stands as between heaven and h.e.l.l, suspended between peaks and gulfs.