Robert Falconer

Ericson went on murmuring, but inarticulately now.

‘This won’t do at all, Robert, my boy,’ said Dr. Anderson. ‘You must not talk about such things with him, or indeed about anything. You must keep him as quiet as ever you can.’

‘I thocht he was comin’ till himsel’,’ returned Robert. ‘But I will tak care, I assure ye, doctor. Only I’m feared I may fa’ asleep the nicht, for I was dooms sleepy this mornin’.’

‘I will send Johnston as soon as I get home, and you must go to bed when he comes.’

‘’Deed, doctor, that winna do at a’. It wad be ower mony strange faces a’thegither. We’ll get Mistress Fyvie to luik till ‘im the day, an’ Shargar canna work the morn, bein’ Sunday. An’ I’ll gang to my bed for fear o’ doin’ waur, though I doobt I winna sleep i’ the daylicht.’

Dr. Anderson was satisfied, and went home—cogitating much. This boy, this cousin of his, made a vortex of good about him into which whoever came near it was drawn. He seemed at the same time quite unaware of anything worthy in his conduct. The good he did sprung from some inward necessity, with just enough in it of the salt of choice to keep it from losing its savour. To these cogitations of Dr. Anderson, I add that there was no conscious exercise of religion in it—for there his mind was all at sea. Of course I believe notwithstanding that religion had much, I ought to say everything, to do with it. Robert had not yet found in God a reason for being true to his fellows; but, if God was leading him to be the man he became, how could any good results of this leading be other than religion? All good is of God. Robert began where he could. The first table was too high for him; he began with the second. If a man love his brother whom he hath seen, the love of God whom he hath not seen, is not very far off. These results in Robert were the first outcome of divine facts and influences—they were the buds of the fruit hereafter to be gathered in perfect devotion. God be praised by those who know religion to be the truth of humanity—its own truth that sets it free—not binds, and lops, and mutilates it! who see God to be the father of every human soul—the ideal Father, not an inventor of schemes, or the upholder of a court etiquette for whose use he has chosen to desecrate the name of justice!

To return to Dr. Anderson. I have had little opportunity of knowing his history in India. He returned from it half-way down the hill of life, sad, gentle, kind, and rich. Whence his sadness came, we need not inquire. Some woman out in that fervid land may have darkened his story—darkened it wronglessly, it may be, with coldness, or only with death. But to return home without wife to accompany him or child to meet him,—to sit by his riches like a man over a fire of straws in a Siberian frost; to know that old faces were gone and old hearts changed, that the pattern of things in the heavens had melted away from the face of the earth, that the chill evenings of autumn were settling down into longer and longer nights, and that no hope lay any more beyond the mountains—surely this was enough to make a gentle-minded man sad, even if the individual sorrows of his history had gathered into gold and purple in the west. I say west advisedly. For we are journeying, like our globe, ever towards the east. Death and the west are behind us—ever behind us, and settling into the unchangeable.

It was natural that he should be interested in the fine promise of Robert, in whom he saw revived the hopes of his own youth, but in a nature at once more robust and more ideal. Where the doctor was refined, Robert was strong; where the doctor was firm with a firmness he had cultivated, Robert was imperious with an imperiousness time would mellow; where the doctor was generous and careful at once, Robert gave his mite and forgot it. He was rugged in the simplicity of his truthfulness, and his speech bewrayed him as altogether of the people; but the doctor knew the hole of the pit whence he had been himself digged. All that would fall away as the spiky shell from the polished chestnut, and be reabsorbed in the growth of the grand cone-flowering tree, to stand up in the sun and wind of the years a very altar of incense. It is no wonder, I repeat, that he loved the boy, and longed to further his plans. But he was too wise to overwhelm him with a cataract of fortune instead of blessing him with the merciful dew of progress.

‘The fellow will bring me in for no end of expense,’ he said, smiling to himself, as he drove home in his chariot. ‘The less he means it the more unconscionable he will be. There’s that Ericson—but that isn’t worth thinking of. I must do something for that queer protégé of his, though—that Shargar. The fellow is as good as a dog, and that’s saying not a little for him. I wonder if he can learn—or if he takes after his father the marquis, who never could spell. Well, it is a comfort to have something to do worth doing. I did think of endowing a hospital; but I’m not sure that it isn’t better to endow a good man than a hospital. I’ll think about it. I won’t say anything about Shargar either, till I see how he goes on. I might give him a job, though, now and then. But where to fall in with him—prowling about after jobs?’

He threw himself back in his seat, and laughed with a delight he had rarely felt. He was a providence watching over the boys, who expected nothing of him beyond advice for Ericson! Might there not be a Providence that equally transcended the vision of men, shaping to nobler ends the blocked-out designs of their rough-hewn marbles?

His thoughts wandered back to his friend the Brahmin, who died longing for that absorption into deity which had been the dream of his life: might not the Brahmin find the grand idea shaped to yet finer issues than his aspiration had dared contemplate?—might he not inherit in the purification of his will such an absorption as should intensify his personality?

CHAPTER IX. A HUMAN SOUL

Ericson lay for several weeks, during which time Robert and Shargar were his only nurses. They contrived, by abridging both rest and labour, to give him constant attendance. Shargar went to bed early and got up early, so as to let Robert have a few hours’ sleep before his classes began. Robert again slept in the evening, after Shargar came home, and made up for the time by reading while he sat by his friend. Mrs. Fyvie’s attendance was in requisition only for the hours when he had to be at lectures. By the greatest economy of means, consisting of what Shargar brought in by jobbing about the quay and the coach-offices, and what Robert had from Dr. Anderson for copying his manuscript, they contrived to procure for Ericson all that he wanted. The shopping of the two boys, in their utter ignorance of such delicacies as the doctor told them to get for him, the blunders they made as to the shops at which they were to be bought, and the consultations they held, especially about the preparing of the prescribed nutriment, afforded them many an amusing retrospect in after years. For the house was so full of lodgers, that Robert begged Mrs. Fyvie to give herself no trouble in the matter. Her conscience, however, was uneasy, and she spoke to Dr. Anderson; but he assured her that she might trust the boys. What cooking they could not manage, she undertook cheerfully, and refused to add anything to the rent on Shargar’s account.

Dr. Anderson watched everything, the two boys as much as his patient. He allowed them to work on, sending only the wine that was necessary from his own cellar. The moment the supplies should begin to fail, or the boys to look troubled, he was ready to do more. About Robert’s perseverance he had no doubt: Shargar’s faithfulness he wanted to prove.

Robert wrote to his grandmother to tell her that Shargar was with him, working hard. Her reply was somewhat cold and offended, but was inclosed in a parcel containing all Shargar’s garments, and ended with the assurance that as long as he did well she was ready to do what she could.

Few English readers will like Mrs. Falconer; but her grandchild considered her one of the noblest women ever God made; and I, from his account, am of the same mind. Her care was fixed

     To fill her odorous lamp with deeds of light,     And hope that reaps not shame.

And if one must choose between the how and the what, let me have the what, come of the how what may. I know of a man so sensitive, that he shuts his ears to his sister’s griefs, because it spoils his digestion to think of them.

One evening Robert was sitting by the table in Ericson’s room. Dr. Anderson had not called that day, and he did not expect to see him now, for he had never come so late. He was quite at his ease, therefore, and busy with two things at once, when the doctor opened the door and walked in. I think it is possible that he came up quietly with some design of surprising him. He found him with a stocking on one hand, a darning needle in the other, and a Greek book open before him. Taking no apparent notice of him, he walked up to the bedside, and Robert put away his work. After his interview with his patient was over, the doctor signed to him to follow him to the next room. There Shargar lay on the rug already snoring. It was a cold night in December, but he lay in his under-clothing, with a single blanket round him.

‘Good training for a soldier,’ said the doctor; ‘and so was your work a minute ago, Robert.’

‘Ay,’ answered Robert, colouring a little; ‘I was readin’ a bit o’ the Anabasis.’

The doctor smiled a far-off sly smile.

‘I think it was rather the Katabasis, if one might venture to judge from the direction of your labours.’

‘Weel,’ answered Robert, ‘what wad ye hae me do? Wad ye hae me lat Mr. Ericson gang wi’ holes i’ the heels o’ ‘s hose, whan I can mak them a’ snod, an’ learn my Greek at the same time? Hoots, doctor! dinna lauch at me. I was doin’ nae ill. A body may please themsel’s—whiles surely, ohn sinned.’

‘But it’s such waste of time! Why don’t you buy him new ones?’

‘’Deed that’s easier said than dune. I hae eneuch ado wi’ my siller as ‘tis; an’ gin it warna for you, doctor, I do not ken what wad come o’ ‘s; for ye see I hae no richt to come upo’ my grannie for ither fowk. There wad be nae en’ to that.’

‘But I could lend you the money to buy him some stockings.’

‘An’ whan wad I be able to pay ye, do ye think, doctor? In anither warl’ maybe, whaur the currency micht be sae different there wad be no possibility o’ reckonin’ the rate o’ exchange. Na, na.’

‘But I will give you the money if you like.’

‘Na, na. You hae dune eneuch already, an’ mony thanks. Siller’s no sae easy come by to be wastit, as lang’s a darn ‘ll do. Forbye, gin ye began wi’ his claes, ye wadna ken whaur to haud; for it wad jist be the new claith upo’ the auld garment: ye micht as weel new cleed him at ance.’

‘And why not if I choose, Mr. Falconer?’

‘Speir ye that at him, an’ see what ye’ll get—a luik ‘at wad fess a corbie (carrion crow) frae the lift (sky). I wadna hae ye try that. Some fowk’s poverty maun be han’let jist like a sair place, doctor. He canna weel compleen o’ a bit darnin’.—He canna tak that ill,’ repeated Robert, in a tone that showed he yet felt some anxiety on the subject; ‘but new anes! I wadna like to be by whan he fand that oot. Maybe he micht tak them frae a wuman; but frae a man body!—na, na; I maun jist darn awa’. But I’ll mak them dacent eneuch afore I hae dune wi’ them. A fiddler has fingers.’

The doctor smiled a pleased smile; but when he got into his carriage, again he laughed heartily.

The evening deepened into night. Robert thought Ericson was asleep. But he spoke.

‘Who is that at the street door?’ he said.

They were at the top of the house, and there was no window to the street. But Ericson’s senses were preternaturally acute, as is often the case in such illnesses.

‘I dinna hear onybody,’ answered Robert.

‘There was somebody,’ returned Ericson.

From that moment he began to be restless, and was more feverish than usual throughout the night.

Up to this time he had spoken little, was depressed with a suffering to which he could give no name—not pain, he said—but such that he could rouse no mental effort to meet it: his endurance was passive altogether. This night his brain was more affected. He did not rave, but often wandered; never spoke nonsense, but many words that would have seemed nonsense to ordinary people: to Robert they seemed inspired. His imagination, which was greater than any other of his fine faculties, was so roused that he talked in verse—probably verse composed before and now recalled. He would even pray sometimes in measured lines, and go on murmuring petitions, till the words of the murmur became undistinguishable, and he fell asleep. But even in his sleep he would speak; and Robert would listen in awe; for such words, falling from such a man, were to him as dim breaks of coloured light from the rainbow walls of the heavenly city.

‘If God were thinking me,’ said Ericson, ‘ah! But if he be only dreaming me, I shall go mad.’

Ericson’s outside was like his own northern clime—dark, gentle, and clear, with gray-blue seas, and a sun that seems to shine out of the past, and know nothing of the future. But within glowed a volcanic angel of aspiration, fluttering his half-grown wings, and ever reaching towards the heights whence all things are visible, and where all passions are safe because true, that is divine. Iceland herself has her Hecla.

Robert listened with keenest ear. A mist of great meaning hung about the words his friend had spoken. He might speak more. For some minutes he listened in vain, and was turning at last towards his book in hopelessness, when he did speak yet again: Robert’s ear soon detected the rhythmic motion of his speech.

     ‘Come in the glory of thine excellence;     Rive the dense gloom with wedges of clear light;     And let the shimmer of thy chariot wheels     Burn through the cracks of night.—So slowly, Lord,     To lift myself to thee with hands of toil,     Climbing the slippery cliff of unheard prayer!     Lift up a hand among my idle days—     One beckoning finger.  I will cast aside     The clogs of earthly circumstance, and run     Up the broad highways where the countless worlds     Sit ripening in the summer of thy love.’

Breathless for fear of losing a word, Robert yet remembered that he had seen something like these words in the papers Ericson had given him to read on the night when his illness began. When he had fallen asleep and silent, he searched and found the poem from which I give the following extracts. He had not looked at the papers since that night.

A PRAYER          O Lord, my God, how long     Shall my poor heart pant for a boundless joy?     How long, O mighty Spirit, shall I hear     The murmur of Truth’s crystal waters slide     From the deep caverns of their endless being,     But my lips taste not, and the grosser air     Choke each pure inspiration of thy will?          I would be a wind,     Whose smallest atom is a viewless wing,     All busy with the pulsing life that throbs     To do thy bidding; yea, or the meanest thing     That has relation to a changeless truth     Could I but be instinct with thee—each thought     The lightning of a pure intelligence,     And every act as the loud thunder-clap     Of currents warring for a vacuum.       Lord, clothe me with thy truth as with a robe.     Purge me with sorrow.  I will bend my head,     And let the nations of thy waves pass over,     Bathing me in thy consecrated strength.     And let the many-voiced and silver winds     Pass through my frame with their clear influence.     O save me—I am blind; lo! thwarting shapes     Wall up the void before, and thrusting out     Lean arms of unshaped expectation, beckon     Down to the night of all unholy thoughts.          I have seen     Unholy shapes lop off my shining thoughts,     Which I had thought nursed in thine emerald light;     And they have lent me leathern wings of fear,     Of baffled pride and harrowing distrust;     And Godhead with its crown of many stars,     Its pinnacles of flaming holiness,     And voice of leaves in the green summer-time,     Has seemed the shadowed image of a self.     Then my soul blackened; and I rose to find     And grasp my doom, and cleave the arching deeps     Of desolation.       O Lord, my soul is a forgotten well;     Clad round with its own rank luxuriance;     A fountain a kind sunbeam searches for,     Sinking the lustre of its arrowy finger     Through the long grass its own strange virtue5     Hath blinded up its crystal eye withal:     Make me a broad strong river coming down     With shouts from its high hills, whose rocky hearts     Throb forth the joy of their stability     In watery pulses from their inmost deeps,     And I shall be a vein upon thy world,     Circling perpetual from the parent deep.       O First and Last, O glorious all in all,     In vain my faltering human tongue would seek     To shape the vesture of the boundless thought,     Summing all causes in one burning word;     Give me the spirit’s living tongue of fire,     Whose only voice is in an attitude     Of keenest tension, bent back on itself     With a strong upward force; even as thy bow     Of bended colour stands against the north,     And, in an attitude to spring to heaven,     Lays hold of the kindled hills.          Most mighty One,     Confirm and multiply my thoughts of good;     Help me to wall each sacred treasure round     With the firm battlements of special action.     Alas my holy, happy thoughts of thee     Make not perpetual nest within my soul,     But like strange birds of dazzling colours stoop     The trailing glories of their sunward speed,     For one glad moment filling my blasted boughs     With the sunshine of their wings.          Make me a forest     Of gladdest life, wherein perpetual spring     Lifts up her leafy tresses in the wind.          Lo! now I see     Thy trembling starlight sit among my pines,     And thy young moon slide down my arching boughs     With a soft sound of restless eloquence.     And I can feel a joy as when thy hosts     Of trampling winds, gathering in maddened bands,     Roar upward through the blue and flashing day     Round my still depths of uncleft solitude.          Hear me, O Lord,     When the black night draws down upon my soul,     And voices of temptation darken down     The misty wind, slamming thy starry doors,     With bitter jests. ‘Thou fool!’ they seem to say     ‘Thou hast no seed of goodness in thee; all     Thy nature hath been stung right through and through.     Thy sin hath blasted thee, and made thee old.     Thou hadst a will, but thou hast killed it—dead—     And with the fulsome garniture of life     Built out the loathsome corpse.  Thou art a child     Of night and death, even lower than a worm.     Gather the skirts up of thy shadowy self,     And with what resolution thou hast left,     Fall on the damned spikes of doom.’          O take me like a child,     If thou hast made me for thyself, my God,     And lead me up thy hills.  I shall not fear     So thou wilt make me pure, and beat back sin     With the terrors of thine eye.          Lord hast thou sent     Thy moons to mock us with perpetual hope?     Lighted within our breasts the love of love,     To make us ripen for despair, my God?       Oh, dost thou hold each individual soul     Strung clear upon thy flaming rods of purpose?     Or does thine inextinguishable will     Stand on the steeps of night with lifted hand,     Filling the yawning wells of monstrous space     With mixing thought—drinking up single life     As in a cup? and from the rending folds     Of glimmering purpose, the gloom do all thy navied stars     Slide through the gloom with mystic melody,     Like wishes on a brow?  Oh, is my soul,     Hung like a dew-drop in thy grassy ways,     Drawn up again into the rack of change,     Even through the lustre which created it?     O mighty one, thou wilt not smite me through     With scorching wrath, because my spirit stands     Bewildered in thy circling mysteries.

Here came the passage Robert had heard him repeat, and then the following paragraph:

     Lord, thy strange mysteries come thickening down     Upon my head like snow-flakes, shutting out     The happy upper fields with chilly vapour.     Shall I content my soul with a weak sense     Of safety? or feed my ravenous hunger with     Sore-purged hopes, that are not hopes, but fears     Clad in white raiment?     I know not but some thin and vaporous fog,     Fed with the rank excesses of the soul,     Mocks the devouring hunger of my life     With satisfaction: lo! the noxious gas     Feeds the lank ribs of gaunt and ghastly death     With double emptiness, like a balloon,     Borne by its lightness o’er the shining lands,     A wonder and a laughter.       The creeds lie in the hollow of men’s hearts     Like festering pools glassing their own corruption:     The slimy eyes stare up with dull approval,     And answer not when thy bright starry feet     Move on the watery floors.       O wilt thou hear me when I cry to thee?     I am a child lost in a mighty forest;     The air is thick with voices, and strange hands     Reach through the dusk and pluck me by the skirts.     There is a voice which sounds like words from home,     But, as I stumble on to reach it, seems     To leap from rock to rock.  Oh! if it is     Willing obliquity of sense, descend,     Heal all my wanderings, take me by the hand,     And lead me homeward through the shadows.       Let me not by my wilful acts of pride     Block up the windows of thy truth, and grow     A wasted, withered thing, that stumbles on     Down to the grave with folded hands of sloth     And leaden confidence.

There was more of it, as my type indicates. Full of faults, I have given so much to my reader, just as it stood upon Ericson’s blotted papers, the utterance of a true soul ‘crying for the light.’ But I give also another of his poems, which Robert read at the same time, revealing another of his moods when some one of the clouds of holy doubt and questioning love which so often darkened his sky, did at length

     Turn forth her silver lining on the night:SONG     They are blind and they are dead:       We will wake them as we go;     There are words have not been said;       There are sounds they do not know.         We will pipe and we will sing—         With the music and the spring,         Set their hearts a wondering.     They are tired of what is old:       We will give it voices new;     For the half hath not been told       Of the Beautiful and True.         Drowsy eyelids shut and sleeping!         Heavy eyes oppressed with weeping!         Flashes through the lashes leaping!     Ye that have a pleasant voice,       Hither come without delay;     Ye will never have a choice       Like to that ye have to-day:         Round the wide world we will go,         Singing through the frost and snow,         Till the daisies are in blow.     Ye that cannot pipe or sing,       Ye must also come with speed;     Ye must come and with you bring       Weighty words and weightier deed:         Helping hands and loving eyes,         These will make them truly wise—         Then will be our Paradise.

As Robert read, the sweetness of the rhythm seized upon him, and, almost unconsciously, he read the last stanza aloud. Looking up from the paper with a sigh of wonder and delight—there was the pale face of Ericson gazing at him from the bed! He had risen on one arm, looking like a dead man called to life against his will, who found the world he had left already stranger to him than the one into which he had but peeped.

‘Yes,’ he murmured; ‘I could say that once. It’s all gone now. Our world is but our moods.’

He fell back on his pillow. After a little, he murmured again:

‘I might fool myself with faith again. So it is better not. I would not be fooled. To believe the false and be happy is the very belly of misery. To believe the true and be miserable, is to be true—and miserable. If there is no God, let me know it. I will not be fooled. I will not believe in a God that does not exist. Better be miserable because I am, and cannot help it.—O God!’

Yet in his misery, he cried upon God.

These words came upon Robert with such a shock of sympathy, that they destroyed his consciousness for the moment, and when he thought about them, he almost doubted if he had heard them. He rose and approached the bed. Ericson lay with his eyes closed, and his face contorted as by inward pain. Robert put a spoonful of wine to his lips. He swallowed it, opened his eyes, gazed at the boy as if he did not know him, closed them again, and lay still.