Robert Falconer

But now Mary St. John was thoroughly interested in the strange boy whose growing musical pinions were ever being clipped by the shears of unsympathetic age and crabbed religion, and the idea of doing something for him to make up for the injustice of his grandmother awoke in her a slight glow of that interest in life which she sought only in doing good. But although ere long she came to love the boy very truly, and although Shargar’s life was bound up in the favour of Robert, yet neither stooping angel nor foot-following dog ever loved the lad with the love of that old grandmother, who would for him have given herself to the fire to which she had doomed his greatest delight.

For some days Robert worked hard at his lessons, for he had nothing else to do. Life was very gloomy now. If he could only go to sea, or away to keep sheep on the stormy mountains! If there were only some war going on, that he might list! Any fighting with the elements, or with the oppressors of the nations, would make life worth having, a man worth being. But God did not heed. He leaned over the world, a dark care, an immovable fate, bearing down with the weight of his presence all aspiration, all budding delights of children and young persons: all must crouch before him, and uphold his glory with the sacrificial death of every impulse, every admiration, every lightness of heart, every bubble of laughter. Or—which to a mind like Robert’s was as bad—if he did not punish for these things, it was because they came not within the sphere of his condescension, were not worth his notice: of sympathy could be no question.

But this gloom did not last long. When souls like Robert’s have been ill-taught about God, the true God will not let them gaze too long upon the Moloch which men have set up to represent him. He will turn away their minds from that which men call him, and fill them with some of his own lovely thoughts or works, such as may by degrees prepare the way for a vision of the Father.

One afternoon Robert was passing the soutar’s shop. He had never gone near him since his return. But now, almost mechanically, he went in at the open door.

‘Weel, Robert, ye are a stranger. But what’s the maitter wi’ ye? Faith! yon was an ill plisky ye played me to brak into my chop an’ steal the bonnie leddy.’

‘Sandy,’ said Robert, solemnly, ‘ye dinna ken what ye hae dune by that trick ye played me. Dinna ever mention her again i’ my hearin’.’

‘The auld witch hasna gotten a grup o’ her again?’ cried the shoemaker, starting half up in alarm. ‘She cam here to me aboot the shune, but I reckon I sortit her!’

‘I winna speir what ye said,’ returned Robert. ‘It’s no maitter noo.’

And the tears rose to his eyes. His bonny lady!

‘The Lord guide ‘s!’ exclaimed the soutar. ‘What is the maitter wi’ the bonnie leddy?’

‘There’s nae bonnie leddy ony mair. I saw her brunt to death afore my verra ain een.’

The shoemaker sprang to his feet and caught up his paring knife.

‘For God’s sake, say ‘at yer leein’!’ he cried.

‘I wish I war leein’,’ returned Robert.

The soutar uttered a terrible oath, and swore—

‘I’ll murder the auld—.’ The epithet he ended with is too ugly to write.

‘Daur to say sic a word in ae breath wi’ my grannie,’ cried Robert, snatching up the lapstone, ‘an’ I’ll brain ye upo’ yer ain shop-flure.’

Sandy threw the knife on his stool, and sat down beside it. Robert dropped the lapstone. Sandy took it up and burst into tears, which before they were half down his face, turned into tar with the blackness of the same.

‘I’m an awfu’ sinner,’ he said, ‘and vengeance has owerta’en me. Gang oot o’ my chop! I wasna worthy o’ her. Gang oot, I say, or I’ll kill ye.’

Robert went. Close by the door he met Miss St. John. He pulled off his cap, and would have passed her. But she stopped him.

‘I am going for a walk a little way,’ she said. ‘Will you go with me?’

She had come out in the hope of finding him, for she had seen him go up the street.

‘That I wull,’ returned Robert, and they walked on together.

When they were beyond the last house, Miss St. John said,

‘Would you like to play on the piano, Robert?’

‘Eh, mem!’ said Robert, with a deep suspiration. Then, after a pause: ‘But duv ye think I cud?’

‘There’s no fear of that. Let me see your hands.’

‘They’re some black, I doobt, mem,’ he remarked, rubbing them hard upon his trowsers before he showed them; ‘for I was amaist cawin’ oot the brains o’ Dooble Sanny wi’ his ain lapstane. He’s an ill-tongued chield. But eh! mem, ye suld hear him play upo’ the fiddle! He’s greitin’ his een oot e’en noo for the bonnie leddy.’

Not discouraged by her inspection of his hands, black as they were, Miss St. John continued,

‘But what would your grandmother say?’ she asked.

‘She maun ken naething aboot it, mem. I can-not tell her a’thing. She wad greit an’ pray awfu’, an’ lock me up, I daursay. Ye see, she thinks a’ kin’ o’ music ‘cep’ psalm-singin’ comes o’ the deevil himsel’. An’ I canna believe that. For aye whan I see onything by ordinar bonnie, sic like as the mune was last nicht, it aye gars me greit for my brunt fiddle.’

‘Well, you must come to me every day for half-an-hour at least, and I will give you a lesson on my piano. But you can’t learn by that. And my aunt could never bear to hear you practising. So I’ll tell you what you must do. I have a small piano in my own room. Do you know there is a door from your house into my room?’

‘Ay,’ said Robert. ‘That hoose was my father’s afore your uncle bought it. My father biggit it.’

‘Is it long since your father died?’

‘I dinna ken.’

‘Where did he die?’

‘I dinna ken.’

‘Do you remember it?’

‘No, mem.’

‘Well, if you will come to my room, you shall practise there. I shall be down-stairs with my aunt. But perhaps I may look up now and then, to see how you are getting on. I will leave the door unlocked, so that you can come in when you like. If I don’t want you, I will lock the door. You understand? You mustn’t be handling things, you know.’

‘’Deed, mem, ye may lippen (trust) to me. But I’m jist feared to lat ye hear me lay a finger upo’ the piana, for it’s little I cud do wi’ my fiddle, an’, for the piana! I’m feart I’ll jist scunner (disgust) ye.’

‘If you really want to learn, there will be no fear of that,’ returned Miss St. John, guessing at the meaning of the word scunner. ‘I don’t think I am doing anything wrong,’ she added, half to herself, in a somewhat doubtful tone.

‘’Deed no, mem. Ye’re jist an angel unawares. For I maist think sometimes that my grannie ‘ll drive me wud (mad); for there’s naething to read but guid buiks, an’ naething to sing but psalms; an’ there’s nae fun aboot the hoose but Betty; an’ puir Shargar’s nearhan’ dementit wi’ ‘t. An’ we maun pray till her whether we will or no. An’ there’s no comfort i’ the place but plenty to ate; an’ that canna be guid for onybody. She likes flooers, though, an’ wad like me to gar them grow; but I dinna care aboot it: they tak sic a time afore they come to onything.’

Then Miss St. John inquired about Shargar, and began to feel rather differently towards the old lady when she had heard the story. But how she laughed at the tale, and how light-hearted Robert went home, are neither to be told.

The next Sunday, the first time for many years, Dooble Sanny was at church with his wife, though how much good he got by going would be a serious question to discuss.

CHAPTER XXV. THE GATES OF PARADISE

Robert had his first lesson the next Saturday afternoon. Eager and undismayed by the presence of Mrs. Forsyth, good-natured and contemptuous—for had he not a protecting angel by him?—he hearkened for every word of Miss St. John, combated every fault, and undermined every awkwardness with earnest patience. Nothing delighted Robert so much as to give himself up to one greater. His mistress was thoroughly pleased, and even Mrs. Forsyth gave him two of her soft finger tips to do something or other with—Robert did not know what, and let them go.

About eight o’clock that same evening, his heart beating like a captured bird’s, he crept from grannie’s parlour, past the kitchen, and up the low stair to the mysterious door. He had been trying for an hour to summon up courage to rise, feeling as if his grandmother must suspect where he was going. Arrived at the barrier, twice his courage failed him; twice he turned and sped back to the parlour. A third time he made the essay, a third time stood at the wondrous door—so long as blank as a wall to his careless eyes, now like the door of the magic Sesame that led to the treasure-cave of Ali Baba. He laid his hand on the knob, withdrew it, thought he heard some one in the transe, rushed up the garret stair, and stood listening, hastened down, and with a sudden influx of determination opened the door, saw that the trap was raised, closed the door behind him, and standing with his head on the level of the floor, gazed into the paradise of Miss St. John’s room. To have one peep into such a room was a kind of salvation to the half-starved nature of the boy. All before him was elegance, richness, mystery. Womanhood radiated from everything. A fire blazed in the chimney. A rug of long white wool lay before it. A little way off stood the piano. Ornaments sparkled and shone upon the dressing-table. The door of a wardrobe had swung a little open, and discovered the sombre shimmer of a black silk dress. Something gorgeously red, a China crape shawl, hung glowing beyond it. He dared not gaze any longer. He had already been guilty of an immodesty. He hastened to ascend, and seated himself at the piano.

Let my reader aid me for a moment with his imagination—reflecting what it was to a boy like Robert, and in Robert’s misery, to open a door in his own meagre dwelling and gaze into such a room—free to him. If he will aid me so, then let him aid himself by thinking that the house of his own soul has such a door into the infinite beauty, whether he has yet found it or not.

‘Just think,’ Robert said to himself, ‘o’ me in sic a place! It’s a pailace. It’s a fairy pailace. And that angel o’ a leddy bides here, and sleeps there! I wonner gin she ever dreams aboot onything as bonny ‘s hersel’!’

Then his thoughts took another turn.

‘I wonner gin the room was onything like this whan my mamma sleepit in ‘t? I cudna hae been born in sic a gran’ place. But my mamma micht hae weel lien here.’

The face of the miniature, and the sad words written below the hymn, came back upon him, and he bowed his head upon his hands. He was sitting thus when Miss St. John came behind him, and heard him murmur the one word Mamma! She laid her hand on his shoulder. He started and rose.

‘I beg yer pardon, mem. I hae no business to be here, excep’ to play. But I cudna help thinkin’ aboot my mother; for I was born in this room, mem. Will I gang awa’ again?’

He turned towards the door.

‘No, no,’ said Miss St. John. ‘I only came to see if you were here. I cannot stop now; but to-morrow you must tell me about your mother. Sit down, and don’t lose any more time. Your grandmother will miss you. And then what would come of it?’

Thus was this rough diamond of a Scotch boy, rude in speech, but full of delicate thought, gathered under the modelling influences of the finished, refined, tender, sweet-tongued, and sweet-thoughted Englishwoman, who, if she had been less of a woman, would have been repelled by his uncouthness; if she had been less of a lady, would have mistaken his commonness for vulgarity. But she was just, like the type of womankind, a virgin-mother. She saw the nobility of his nature through its homely garments, and had been, indeed, sent to carry on the work from which his mother had been too early taken away.

‘There’s jist ae thing mem, that vexes me a wee, an’ I dinna ken what to think aboot it,’ said Robert, as Miss St. John was leaving the room. ‘Maybe ye cud bide ae minute till I tell ye.’

‘Yes, I can. What is it?’

‘I’m nearhan’ sure that whan I lea’ the parlour, grannie ‘ill think I’m awa’ to my prayers; and sae she’ll think better o’ me nor I deserve. An’ I canna bide that.’

‘What should make you suppose that she will think so?’

‘Fowk kens what ane anither’s aboot, ye ken, mem.’

‘Then she’ll know you are not at your prayers.’

‘Na. For sometimes I div gang to my prayers for a whilie like, but nae for lang, for I’m nae like ane o’ them ‘at he wad care to hear sayin’ a lang screed o’ a prayer till ‘im. I hae but ae thing to pray aboot.’

‘And what’s that, Robert?’

One of his silences had seized him. He looked confused, and turned away.

‘Never mind,’ said Miss St. John, anxious to relieve him, and establish a comfortable relation between them; ‘you will tell me another time.’

‘I doobt no, mem,’ answered Robert, with what most people would think an excess of honesty.

But Miss St. John made a better conjecture as to his apparent closeness.

‘At all events,’ she said, ‘don’t mind what your grannie may think, so long as you have no wish to make her think it. Good-night.’

Had she been indeed an angel from heaven, Robert could not have worshipped her more. And why should he? Was she less God’s messenger that she had beautiful arms instead of less beautiful wings?

He practised his scales till his unaccustomed fingers were stiff, then shut the piano with reverence, and departed, carefully peeping into the disenchanted region without the gates to see that no enemy lay in wait for him as he passed beyond them. He closed the door gently; and in one moment the rich lovely room and the beautiful lady were behind him, and before him the bare stair between two white-washed walls, and the long flagged transe that led to his silent grandmother seated in her arm-chair, gazing into the red coals—for somehow grannie’s fire always glowed, and never blazed—with her round-toed shoes pointed at them from the top of her little wooden stool. He traversed the stair and the transe, entered the parlour, and sat down to his open book as though nothing had happened. But his grandmother saw the light in his face, and did think he had just come from his prayers. And she blessed God that he had put it into her heart to burn the fiddle.

The next night Robert took with him the miniature of his mother, and showed it to Miss St. John, who saw at once that, whatever might be his present surroundings, his mother must have been a lady. A certain fancied resemblance in it to her own mother likewise drew her heart to the boy. Then Robert took from his pocket the gold thimble, and said,

‘This thimmel was my mamma’s. Will ye tak it, mem, for ye ken it’s o’ nae use to me.’

Miss St. John hesitated for a moment.

‘I will keep it for you, if you like,’ she said, for she could not bear to refuse it.

‘Na, mem; I want ye to keep it to yersel’; for I’m sure my mamma wad hae likit you to hae ‘t better nor ony ither body.’

‘Well, I will use it sometimes for your sake. But mind, I will not take it from you; I will only keep it for you.’

‘Weel, weel, mem; gin ye’ll keep it till I speir for ‘t, that’ll du weel eneuch,’ answered Robert, with a smile.

He laboured diligently; and his progress corresponded to his labour. It was more than intellect that guided him: Falconer had genius for whatever he cared for.

Meantime the love he bore his teacher, and the influence of her beauty, began to mould him, in his kind and degree, after her likeness, so that he grew nice in his person and dress, and smoothed the roughness and moderated the broadness of his speech with the amenities of the English which she made so sweet upon her tongue. He became still more obedient to his grandmother, and more diligent at school; gathered to himself golden opinions without knowing it, and was gradually developing into a rustic gentleman.

Nor did the piano absorb all his faculties. Every divine influence tends to the rounded perfection of the whole. His love of Nature grew more rapidly. Hitherto it was only in summer that he had felt the presence of a power in her and yet above her: in winter, now, the sky was true and deep, though the world was waste and sad; and the tones of the wind that roared at night about the goddess-haunted house, and moaned in the chimneys of the lowly dwelling that nestled against it, woke harmonies within him which already he tried to spell out falteringly. Miss St. John began to find that he put expressions of his own into the simple things she gave him to play, and even dreamed a little at his own will when alone with the passive instrument. Little did Mrs. Falconer think into what a seventh heaven of accursed music she had driven her boy.

But not yet did he tell his friend, much as he loved and much as he trusted her, the little he knew of his mother’s sorrows and his father’s sins, or whose the hand that had struck him when she found him lying in the waste factory.

For a time almost all his trouble about God went from him. Nor do I think that this was only because he rarely thought of him at all: God gave him of himself in Miss St. John. But words dropped now and then from off the shelves where his old difficulties lay, and they fell like seeds upon the heart of Miss St. John, took root, and rose in thoughts: in the heart of a true woman the talk of a child even will take life.

One evening Robert rose from the table, not unwatched of his grandmother, and sped swiftly and silently through the dark, as was his custom, to enter the chamber of enchantment. Never before had his hand failed to alight, sure as a lark on its nest, upon the brass handle of the door that admitted him to his paradise. It missed it now, and fell on something damp, and rough, and repellent instead. Horrible, but true suspicion! While he was at school that day, his grandmother, moved by what doubt or by what certainty she never revealed, had had the doorway walled up. He felt the place all over. It was to his hands the living tomb of his mother’s vicar on earth.

He returned to his book, pale as death, but said never a word. The next day the stones were plastered over.

Thus the door of bliss vanished from the earth. And neither the boy nor his grandmother ever said that it had been.

PART II.—HIS YOUTH

CHAPTER I. ROBERT KNOCKS—AND THE DOOR IS NOT OPENED

The remainder of that winter was dreary indeed. Every time Robert went up the stair to his garret, he passed the door of a tomb. With that gray mortar Mary St. John was walled up, like the nun he had read of in the Marmion she had lent him. He might have rung the bell at the street door, and been admitted into the temple of his goddess, but a certain vague terror of his grannie, combined with equally vague qualms of conscience for having deceived her, and the approach in the far distance of a ghastly suspicion that violins, pianos, moonlight, and lovely women were distasteful to the over-ruling Fate, and obnoxious to the vengeance stored in the gray cloud of his providence, drove him from the awful entrance of the temple of his Isis.

Nor did Miss St. John dare to make any advances to the dreadful old lady. She would wait. For Mrs. Forsyth, she cared nothing about the whole affair. It only gave her fresh opportunity for smiling condescensions about ‘poor Mrs. Falconer.’ So Paradise was over and gone.

But though the loss of Miss St. John and the piano was the last blow, his sorrow did not rest there, but returned to brood over his bonny lady. She was scattered to the winds. Would any of her ashes ever rise in the corn, and moan in the ripening wind of autumn? Might not some atoms of the bonny leddy creep into the pines on the hill, whose ‘soft and soul-like sounds’ had taught him to play the Flowers of the Forest on those strings which, like the nerves of an amputated limb, yet thrilled through his being? Or might not some particle find its way by winds and waters to sycamore forest of Italy, there creep up through the channels of its life to some finely-rounded curve of noble tree, on the side that ever looks sunwards, and be chosen once again by the violin-hunter, to be wrought into a new and fame-gathering instrument?

Could it be that his bonny lady had learned her wondrous music in those forests, from the shine of the sun, and the sighing of the winds through the sycamores and pines? For Robert knew that the broad-leaved sycamore, and the sharp, needle-leaved pine, had each its share in the violin. Only as the wild innocence of human nature, uncorrupted by wrong, untaught by suffering, is to that nature struggling out of darkness into light, such and so different is the living wood, with its sweetest tones of obedient impulse, answering only to the wind which bloweth where it listeth, to that wood, chosen, separated, individualized, tortured into strange, almost vital shape, after a law to us nearly unknown, strung with strings from animal organizations, and put into the hands of man to utter the feelings of a soul that has passed through a like history. This Robert could not yet think, and had to grow able to think it by being himself made an instrument of God’s music.

What he could think was that the glorious mystery of his bonny leddy was gone for ever—and alas! she had no soul. Here was an eternal sorrow. He could never meet her again. His affections, which must live for ever, were set upon that which had passed away. But the child that weeps because his mutilated doll will not rise from the dead, shall yet find relief from his sorrow, a true relief, both human and divine. He shall know that that which in the doll made him love the doll, has not passed away. And Robert must yet be comforted for the loss of his bonny leddy. If she had had a soul, nothing but her own self could ever satisfy him. As she had no soul, another body might take her place, nor occasion reproach of inconstancy.

But, in the meantime, the shears of Fate having cut the string of the sky-soaring kite of his imagination, had left him with the stick in his hand. And thus the rest of that winter was dreary enough. The glow was out of his heart; the glow was out of the world. The bleak, kindless wind was hissing through those pines that clothed the hill above Bodyfauld, and over the dead garden, where in the summer time the rose had looked down so lovingly on the heartsease. If he had stood once more at gloaming in that barley-stubble, not even the wail of Flodden-field would have found him there, but a keen sense of personal misery and hopeless cold. Was the summer a lie?

Not so. The winter restrains, that the summer may have the needful time to do its work well; for the winter is but the sleep of summer.

Now in the winter of his discontent, and in Nature finding no help, Robert was driven inwards—into his garret, into his soul. There, the door of his paradise being walled up, he began, vaguely, blindly, to knock against other doors—sometimes against stone-walls and rocks, taking them for doors—as travel-worn, and hence brain-sick men have done in a desert of mountains. A door, out or in, he must find, or perish.

It fell, too, that Miss St. John went to visit some friends who lived in a coast town twenty miles off; and a season of heavy snow followed by frost setting in, she was absent for six weeks, during which time, without a single care to trouble him from without, Robert was in the very desert of desolation. His spirits sank fearfully. He would pass his old music-master in the street with scarce a recognition, as if the bond of their relation had been utterly broken, had vanished in the smoke of the martyred violin, and all their affection had gone into the dust-heap of the past.

Dooble Sanny’s character did not improve. He took more and more whisky, his bouts of drinking alternating as before with fits of hopeless repentance. His work was more neglected than ever, and his wife having no money to spend even upon necessaries, applied in desperation to her husband’s bottle for comfort. This comfort, to do him justice, he never grudged her; and sometimes before midday they would both be drunk—a condition expedited by the lack of food. When they began to recover, they would quarrel fiercely; and at last they became a nuisance to the whole street. Little did the whisky-hating old lady know to what god she had really offered up that violin—if the consequences of the holocaust can be admitted as indicating the power which had accepted it.

But now began to appear in Robert the first signs of a practical outcome of such truth as his grandmother had taught him, operating upon the necessities of a simple and earnest nature. Reality, however lapt in vanity, or even in falsehood, cannot lose its power. It is—the other is not. She had taught him to look up—that there was a God. He would put it to the test. Not that he doubted it yet: he only doubted whether there was a hearing God. But was not that worse? It was, I think. For it is of far more consequence what kind of a God, than whether a God or no. Let not my reader suppose I think it possible there could be other than a perfect God—perfect—even to the vision of his creatures, the faith that supplies the lack of vision being yet faithful to that vision. I speak from Robert’s point of outlook. But, indeed, whether better or worse is no great matter, so long as he would see it or what there was. He had no comfort, and, without reasoning about it, he felt that life ought to have comfort—from which point he began to conclude that the only thing left was to try whether the God in whom his grandmother believed might not help him. If the God would but hear him, it was all he had yet learned to require of his Godhood. And that must ever be the first thing to require. More demands would come, and greater answers he would find. But now—if God would but hear him! If he spoke to him but one kind word, it would be the very soul of comfort; he could no more be lonely. A fountain of glad imaginations gushed up in his heart at the thought. What if, from the cold winter of his life, he had but to open the door of his garret-room, and, kneeling by the bare bedstead, enter into the summer of God’s presence! What if God spoke to him face to face! He had so spoken to Moses. He sought him from no fear of the future, but from present desolation; and if God came near to him, it would not be with storm and tempest, but with the voice of a friend. And surely, if there was a God at all, that is, not a power greater than man, but a power by whose power man was, he must hear the voice of the creature whom he had made, a voice that came crying out of the very need which he had created. Younger people than Robert are capable of such divine metaphysics. Hence he continued to disappear from his grandmother’s parlour at much the same hour as before. In the cold, desolate garret, he knelt and cried out into that which lay beyond the thought that cried, the unknowable infinite, after the God that may be known as surely as a little child knows his mysterious mother. And from behind him, the pale-blue, star-crowded sky shone upon his head, through the window that looked upwards only.