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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Robert Falconer, by George MacDonald
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Robert Falconer
+
+Author: George MacDonald
+
+Posting Date: December 31, 2008 [EBook #2561]
+Release Date: March, 2001
+[Last updated: June 29, 2012]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT FALCONER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by John Bechard
+
+
+
+
+
+ROBERT FALCONER
+
+By George Macdonald
+
+
+
+
+Note from electronic text creator: I have compiled a glossary with
+definitions of most of the Scottish words found in this work and placed
+it at the end of this electronic text. This glossary does not belong to
+the original work, but is designed to help with the conversations and
+references in Broad Scots found in this work. A further explanation of
+this list can be found towards the end of this document, preceding the
+glossary.
+
+Any notes that I have made in the text (e.g. relating to Greek words in
+the text) have been enclosed in {} brackets.
+
+
+
+     TO
+
+     THE MEMORY
+
+     OF THE MAN WHO
+
+     STANDS HIGHEST IN THE ORATORY
+
+     OF MY MEMORY,
+
+     ALEXANDER JOHN SCOTT,
+
+     I, DARING, PRESUME TO DEDICATE THIS BOOK.
+
+
+
+
+
+PART I.--HIS BOYHOOD.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. A RECOLLECTION.
+
+Robert Falconer, school-boy, aged fourteen, thought he had never seen
+his father; that is, thought he had no recollection of having ever seen
+him. But the moment when my story begins, he had begun to doubt whether
+his belief in the matter was correct. And, as he went on thinking, he
+became more and more assured that he had seen his father somewhere about
+six years before, as near as a thoughtful boy of his age could judge
+of the lapse of a period that would form half of that portion of his
+existence which was bound into one by the reticulations of memory.
+
+For there dawned upon his mind the vision of one Sunday afternoon. Betty
+had gone to church, and he was alone with his grandmother, reading
+The Pilgrim's Progress to her, when, just as Christian knocked at the
+wicket-gate, a tap came to the street door, and he went to open it.
+There he saw a tall, somewhat haggard-looking man, in a shabby
+black coat (the vision gradually dawned upon him till it reached the
+minuteness of all these particulars), his hat pulled down on to his
+projecting eyebrows, and his shoes very dusty, as with a long journey
+on foot--it was a hot Sunday, he remembered that--who looked at him very
+strangely, and without a word pushed him aside, and went straight into
+his grandmother's parlour, shutting the door behind him. He followed,
+not doubting that the man must have a right to go there, but questioning
+very much his right to shut him out. When he reached the door, however,
+he found it bolted; and outside he had to stay all alone, in the
+desolate remainder of the house, till Betty came home from church.
+
+He could even recall, as he thought about it, how drearily the afternoon
+had passed. First he had opened the street door, and stood in it. There
+was nothing alive to be seen, except a sparrow picking up crumbs, and he
+would not stop till he was tired of him. The Royal Oak, down the street
+to the right, had not even a horseless gig or cart standing before it;
+and King Charles, grinning awfully in its branches on the signboard, was
+invisible from the distance at which he stood. In at the other end of
+the empty street, looked the distant uplands, whose waving corn and
+grass were likewise invisible, and beyond them rose one blue truncated
+peak in the distance, all of them wearily at rest this weary Sabbath
+day. However, there was one thing than which this was better, and that
+was being at church, which, to this boy at least, was the very fifth
+essence of dreariness.
+
+He closed the door and went into the kitchen. That was nearly as bad.
+The kettle was on the fire, to be sure, in anticipation of tea; but the
+coals under it were black on the top, and it made only faint efforts,
+after immeasurable intervals of silence, to break into a song, giving
+a hum like that of a bee a mile off, and then relapsing into hopeless
+inactivity. Having just had his dinner, he was not hungry enough to find
+any resource in the drawer where the oatcakes lay, and, unfortunately,
+the old wooden clock in the corner was going, else there would have been
+some amusement in trying to torment it into demonstrations of life, as
+he had often done in less desperate circumstances than the present. At
+last he went up-stairs to the very room in which he now was, and sat
+down upon the floor, just as he was sitting now. He had not even brought
+his Pilgrim's Progress with him from his grandmother's room. But,
+searching about in all holes and corners, he at length found Klopstock's
+Messiah translated into English, and took refuge there till Betty came
+home. Nor did he go down till she called him to tea, when, expecting to
+join his grandmother and the stranger, he found, on the contrary, that
+he was to have his tea with Betty in the kitchen, after which he again
+took refuge with Klopstock in the garret, and remained there till it
+grew dark, when Betty came in search of him, and put him to bed in the
+gable-room, and not in his usual chamber. In the morning, every trace of
+the visitor had vanished, even to the thorn stick which he had set down
+behind the door as he entered.
+
+All this Robert Falconer saw slowly revive on the palimpsest of his
+memory, as he washed it with the vivifying waters of recollection.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. A VISITOR.
+
+It was a very bare little room in which the boy sat, but it was
+his favourite retreat. Behind the door, in a recess, stood an empty
+bedstead, without even a mattress upon it. This was the only piece of
+furniture in the room, unless some shelves crowded with papers tied up
+in bundles, and a cupboard in the wall, likewise filled with papers,
+could be called furniture. There was no carpet on the floor, no windows
+in the walls. The only light came from the door, and from a small
+skylight in the sloping roof, which showed that it was a garret-room.
+Nor did much light come from the open door, for there was no window on
+the walled stair to which it opened; only opposite the door a few steps
+led up into another garret, larger, but with a lower roof, unceiled,
+and perforated with two or three holes, the panes of glass filling which
+were no larger than the small blue slates which covered the roof: from
+these panes a little dim brown light tumbled into the room where the boy
+sat on the floor, with his head almost between his knees, thinking.
+
+But there was less light than usual in the room now, though it was
+only half-past two o'clock, and the sun would not set for more than
+half-an-hour yet; for if Robert had lifted his head and looked up, it
+would have been at, not through, the skylight. No sky was to be seen. A
+thick covering of snow lay over the glass. A partial thaw, followed
+by frost, had fixed it there--a mass of imperfect cells and confused
+crystals. It was a cold place to sit in, but the boy had some faculty
+for enduring cold when it was the price to be paid for solitude. And
+besides, when he fell into one of his thinking moods, he forgot, for
+a season, cold and everything else but what he was thinking about--a
+faculty for which he was to be envied.
+
+If he had gone down the stair, which described half the turn of a screw
+in its descent, and had crossed the landing to which it brought him,
+he could have entered another bedroom, called the gable or rather ga'le
+room, equally at his service for retirement; but, though carpeted
+and comfortably furnished, and having two windows at right angles,
+commanding two streets, for it was a corner house, the boy preferred
+the garret-room--he could not tell why. Possibly, windows to the streets
+were not congenial to the meditations in which, even now, as I have
+said, the boy indulged.
+
+These meditations, however, though sometimes as abstruse, if not so
+continuous, as those of a metaphysician--for boys are not unfrequently
+more given to metaphysics than older people are able or, perhaps,
+willing to believe--were not by any means confined to such subjects:
+castle-building had its full share in the occupation of those lonely
+hours; and for this exercise of the constructive faculty, what he
+knew, or rather what he did not know, of his own history gave him
+scope enough, nor was his brain slow in supplying him with material
+corresponding in quantity to the space afforded. His mother had been
+dead for so many years that he had only the vaguest recollections of her
+tenderness, and none of her person. All he was told of his father was
+that he had gone abroad. His grandmother would never talk about him,
+although he was her own son. When the boy ventured to ask a question
+about where he was, or when he would return, she always replied--'Bairns
+suld haud their tongues.' Nor would she vouchsafe another answer to any
+question that seemed to her from the farthest distance to bear down upon
+that subject. 'Bairns maun learn to haud their tongues,' was the sole
+variation of which the response admitted. And the boy did learn to hold
+his tongue. Perhaps he would have thought less about his father if he
+had had brothers or sisters, or even if the nature of his grandmother
+had been such as to admit of their relationship being drawn closer--into
+personal confidence, or some measure of familiarity. How they stood with
+regard to each other will soon appear.
+
+Whether the visions vanished from his brain because of the thickening of
+his blood with cold, or he merely acted from one of those undefined and
+inexplicable impulses which occasion not a few of our actions, I cannot
+tell, but all at once Robert started to his feet and hurried from the
+room. At the foot of the garret stair, between it and the door of the
+gable-room already mentioned, stood another door at right angles to
+both, of the existence of which the boy was scarcely aware, simply
+because he had seen it all his life and had never seen it open. Turning
+his back on this last door, which he took for a blind one, he went down
+a short broad stair, at the foot of which was a window. He then turned
+to the left into a long flagged passage or transe, passed the kitchen
+door on the one hand, and the double-leaved street door on the other;
+but, instead of going into the parlour, the door of which closed the
+transe, he stopped at the passage-window on the right, and there stood
+looking out.
+
+What might be seen from this window certainly could not be called a very
+pleasant prospect. A broad street with low houses of cold gray stone
+is perhaps as uninteresting a form of street as any to be found in the
+world, and such was the street Robert looked out upon. Not a single
+member of the animal creation was to be seen in it, not a pair of eyes
+to be discovered looking out at any of the windows opposite. The sole
+motion was the occasional drift of a vapour-like film of white powder,
+which the wind would lift like dust from the snowy carpet that covered
+the street, and wafting it along for a few yards, drop again to its
+repose, till another stronger gust, prelusive of the wind about to
+rise at sun-down,--a wind cold and bitter as death--would rush over the
+street, and raise a denser cloud of the white water-dust to sting the
+face of any improbable person who might meet it in its passage. It was a
+keen, knife-edged frost, even in the house, and what Robert saw to make
+him stand at the desolate window, I do not know, and I believe he could
+not himself have told. There he did stand, however, for the space of
+five minutes or so, with nothing better filling his outer eyes at least
+than a bald spot on the crown of the street, whence the wind had swept
+away the snow, leaving it brown and bare, a spot of March in the middle
+of January.
+
+He heard the town drummer in the distance, and let the sound invade his
+passive ears, till it crossed the opening of the street, and vanished
+'down the town.'
+
+'There's Dooble Sanny,' he said to himself--'wi' siccan cauld han's,
+'at he's playin' upo' the drum-heid as gin he was loupin' in a bowie
+(leaping in a cask).'
+
+Then he stood silent once more, with a look as if anything would be
+welcome to break the monotony.
+
+While he stood a gentle timorous tap came to the door, so gentle indeed
+that Betty in the kitchen did not hear it, or she, tall and Roman-nosed
+as she was, would have answered it before the long-legged dreamer could
+have reached the door, though he was not above three yards from it.
+In lack of anything better to do, Robert stalked to the summons. As he
+opened the door, these words greeted him:
+
+'Is Robert at--eh! it's Bob himsel'! Bob, I'm byous (exceedingly)
+cauld.'
+
+'What for dinna ye gang hame, than?'
+
+'What for wasna ye at the schuil the day?'
+
+'I spier ae queston at you, and ye answer me wi' anither.'
+
+'Weel, I hae nae hame to gang till.'
+
+'Weel, and I had a sair heid (a headache). But whaur's yer hame gane
+till than?'
+
+'The hoose is there a' richt, but whaur my mither is I dinna ken. The
+door's lockit, an' Jeames Jaup, they tell me 's tane awa' the key. I
+doobt my mither's awa' upo' the tramp again, and what's to come o' me,
+the Lord kens.'
+
+'What's this o' 't?' interposed a severe but not unmelodious voice,
+breaking into the conversation between the two boys; for the parlour
+door had opened without Robert's hearing it, and Mrs. Falconer, his
+grandmother, had drawn near to the speakers.
+
+'What's this o' 't?' she asked again. 'Wha's that ye're conversin' wi'
+at the door, Robert? Gin it be ony decent laddie, tell him to come in,
+and no stan' at the door in sic a day 's this.'
+
+As Robert hesitated with his reply, she looked round the open half
+of the door, but no sooner saw with whom he was talking than her
+tone changed. By this time Betty, wiping her hands in her apron, had
+completed the group by taking her stand in the kitchen door.
+
+'Na, na,' said Mrs. Falconer. 'We want nane sic-like here. What does
+he want wi' you, Robert? Gie him a piece, Betty, and lat him gang.--Eh,
+sirs! the callant hasna a stockin'-fit upo' 'im--and in sic weather!'
+
+For, before she had finished her speech, the visitor, as if in terror of
+her nearer approach, had turned his back, and literally showed her, if
+not a clean pair of heels, yet a pair of naked heels from between the
+soles and uppers of his shoes: if he had any stockings at all, they
+ceased before they reached his ankles.
+
+'What ails him at me?' continued Mrs. Falconer, 'that he rins as gin I
+war a boodie? But it's nae wonner he canna bide the sicht o' a decent
+body, for he's no used till 't. What does he want wi' you, Robert?'
+
+But Robert had a reason for not telling his grandmother what the boy
+had told him: he thought the news about his mother would only make her
+disapprove of him the more. In this he judged wrong. He did not know his
+grandmother yet.
+
+'He's in my class at the schuil,' said Robert, evasively.
+
+'Him? What class, noo?'
+
+Robert hesitated one moment, but, compelled to give some answer, said,
+with confidence,
+
+'The Bible-class.'
+
+'I thocht as muckle! What gars ye play at hide and seek wi' me? Do ye
+think I dinna ken weel eneuch there's no a lad or a lass at the schuil
+but 's i' the Bible-class? What wants he here?'
+
+'Ye hardly gae him time to tell me, grannie. Ye frichtit him.'
+
+'Me fricht him! What for suld I fricht him, laddie? I'm no sic ferlie
+(wonder) that onybody needs be frichtit at me.'
+
+The old lady turned with visible, though by no means profound offence
+upon her calm forehead, and walking back into her parlour, where Robert
+could see the fire burning right cheerily, shut the door, and left him
+and Betty standing together in the transe. The latter returned to the
+kitchen, to resume the washing of the dinner-dishes; and the former
+returned to his post at the window. He had not stood more than half a
+minute, thinking what was to be done with his school-fellow deserted
+of his mother, when the sound of a coach-horn drew his attention to
+the right, down the street, where he could see part of the other street
+which crossed it at right angles, and in which the gable of the house
+stood. A minute after, the mail came in sight--scarlet, spotted with
+snow--and disappeared, going up the hill towards the chief hostelry of
+the town, as fast as four horses, tired with the bad footing they had
+had through the whole of the stage, could draw it after them. By this
+time the twilight was falling; for though the sun had not yet set, miles
+of frozen vapour came between him and this part of the world, and his
+light was never very powerful so far north at this season of the year.
+
+Robert turned into the kitchen, and began to put on his shoes. He had
+made up his mind what to do.
+
+'Ye're never gaein' oot, Robert?' said Betty, in a hoarse tone of
+expostulation.
+
+''Deed am I, Betty. What for no?'
+
+'You 'at's been in a' day wi' a sair heid! I'll jist gang benn the hoose
+and tell the mistress, and syne we'll see what she'll please to say till
+'t.'
+
+'Ye'll do naething o' the kin', Betty. Are ye gaein' to turn clash-pyet
+(tell-tale) at your age?'
+
+'What ken ye aboot my age? There's never a man-body i' the toon kens
+aught aboot my age.'
+
+'It's ower muckle for onybody to min' upo' (remember), is 't, Betty?'
+
+'Dinna be ill-tongued, Robert, or I'll jist gang benn the hoose to the
+mistress.'
+
+'Betty, wha began wi' bein' ill-tongued? Gin ye tell my grandmither that
+I gaed oot the nicht, I'll gang to the schuilmaister o' Muckledrum, and
+get a sicht o' the kirstenin' buik; an' gin yer name binna there, I'll
+tell ilkabody I meet 'at oor Betty was never kirstened; and that'll be a
+sair affront, Betty.'
+
+'Hoot! was there ever sic a laddie!' said Betty, attempting to laugh
+it off. 'Be sure ye be back afore tay-time, 'cause yer grannie 'ill be
+speirin' efter ye, and ye wadna hae me lee aboot ye?'
+
+'I wad hae naebody lee about me. Ye jist needna lat on 'at ye hear
+her. Ye can be deif eneuch when ye like, Betty. But I s' be back afore
+tay-time, or come on the waur.'
+
+Betty, who was in far greater fear of her age being discovered than of
+being unchristianized in the search, though the fact was that she knew
+nothing certain about the matter, and had no desire to be enlightened,
+feeling as if she was thus left at liberty to hint what she
+pleased,--Betty, I say, never had any intention of going 'benn the hoose
+to the mistress.' For the threat was merely the rod of terror which she
+thought it convenient to hold over the back of the boy, whom she always
+supposed to be about some mischief except he were in her own presence
+and visibly reading a book: if he were reading aloud, so much the
+better. But Robert likewise kept a rod for his defence, and that was
+Betty's age, which he had discovered to be such a precious secret that
+one would have thought her virtue depended in some cabalistic manner
+upon the concealment of it. And, certainly, nature herself seemed to
+favour Betty's weakness, casting such a mist about the number of
+her years as the goddesses of old were wont to cast about a wounded
+favourite; for some said Betty was forty, others said she was
+sixty-five, and, in fact, almost everybody who knew her had a different
+belief on the matter.
+
+By this time Robert had conquered the difficulty of induing boots as
+hard as a thorough wetting and as thorough a drying could make them, and
+now stood prepared to go. His object in setting out was to find the boy
+whom his grandmother had driven from the door with a hastier and
+more abject flight than she had in the least intended. But, if his
+grandmother should miss him, as Betty suggested, and inquire where he
+had been, what was he to say? He did not mind misleading his grannie,
+but he had a great objection to telling her a lie. His grandmother
+herself delivered him from this difficulty.
+
+'Robert, come here,' she called from the parlour door. And Robert
+obeyed.
+
+'Is 't dingin' on, Robert?' she asked.
+
+'No, grannie; it's only a starnie o' drift.'
+
+The meaning of this was that there was no fresh snow falling, or beating
+on, only a little surface snow blowing about.
+
+'Weel, jist pit yer shune on, man, and rin up to Miss Naper's upo' the
+Squaur, and say to Miss Naper, wi' my compliments, that I wad be sair
+obleeged till her gin she wad len' me that fine receipt o' hers for
+crappit heids, and I'll sen' 't back safe the morn's mornin'. Rin, noo.'
+
+This commission fell in admirably with Robert's plans, and he started at
+once.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. THE BOAR'S HEAD.
+
+Miss Napier was the eldest of three maiden sisters who kept the
+principal hostelry of Rothieden, called The Boar's Head; from which, as
+Robert reached the square in the dusk, the mail-coach was moving away
+with a fresh quaternion of horses. He found a good many boxes standing
+upon the pavement close by the archway that led to the inn-yard,
+and around them had gathered a group of loungers, not too cold to be
+interested. These were looking towards the windows of the inn, where the
+owner of the boxes had evidently disappeared.
+
+'Saw ye ever sic a sicht in oor toon afore!' said Dooble Sanny, as
+people generally called him, his name being Alexander Alexander,
+pronounced, by those who chose to speak of him with the ordinary respect
+due from one mortal to another, Sandy Elshender. Double Sandy was
+a soutar, or shoemaker, remarkable for his love of sweet sounds and
+whisky. He was, besides, the town-crier, who went about with a drum at
+certain hours of the morning and evening, like a perambulating clock,
+and also made public announcements of sales, losses, &c.; for the
+rest--a fierce, fighting fellow when in anger or in drink, which latter
+included the former.
+
+'What's the sicht, Sandy?' asked Robert, coming up with his hands in the
+pockets of his trowsers.
+
+'Sic a sicht as ye never saw, man,' returned Sandy; 'the bonniest leddy
+ever man set his ee upo'. I culd na hae thocht there had been sic a
+woman i' this warl'.'
+
+'Hoot, Sandy!' said Robert, 'a body wad think she was tint (lost) and ye
+had the cryin' o' her. Speyk laicher, man; she'll maybe hear ye. Is she
+i' the inn there?'
+
+'Ay is she,' answered Sandy. 'See sic a warl' o' kists as she's brocht
+wi' her,' he continued, pointing towards the pile of luggage. 'Saw ye
+ever sic a bourach (heap)? It jist blecks (beats) me to think what ae
+body can du wi' sae mony kists. For I mayna doobt but there's something
+or ither in ilka ane o' them. Naebody wad carry aboot toom (empty) kists
+wi' them. I cannot mak' it oot.'
+
+The boxes might well surprise Sandy, if we may draw any conclusions
+from the fact that the sole implement of personal adornment which he
+possessed was two inches of a broken comb, for which he had to search
+when he happened to want it, in the drawer of his stool, among awls,
+lumps of rosin for his violin, masses of the same substance wrought into
+shoemaker's wax for his ends, and packets of boar's bristles, commonly
+called birse, for the same.
+
+'Are thae a' ae body's?' asked Robert.
+
+'Troth are they. They're a' hers, I wat. Ye wad hae thocht she had been
+gaein' to The Bothie; but gin she had been that, there wad hae been a
+cairriage to meet her,' said Crookit Caumill, the ostler.
+
+The Bothie was the name facetiously given by Alexander, Baron Rothie,
+son of the Marquis of Boarshead, to a house he had built in the
+neighbourhood, chiefly for the accommodation of his bachelor friends
+from London during the shooting-season.
+
+'Haud yer tongue, Caumill,' said the shoemaker. 'She's nae sic cattle,
+yon.'
+
+'Haud up the bit bowat (stable-lantern), man, and lat Robert here see
+the direction upo' them. Maybe he'll mak' something o't. He's a fine
+scholar, ye ken,' said another of the bystanders.
+
+The ostler held the lantern to the card upon one of the boxes, but
+Robert found only an M., followed by something not very definite, and a
+J., which might have been an I., Rothieden, Driftshire, Scotland.
+
+As he was not immediate with his answer, Peter Lumley, one of the
+group, a lazy ne'er-do-weel, who had known better days, but never better
+manners, and was seldom quite drunk, and seldomer still quite sober,
+struck in with,
+
+'Ye dinna ken a' thing yet, ye see, Robbie.'
+
+From Sandy this would have been nothing but a good-humoured attempt at
+facetiousness. From Lumley it meant spite, because Robert's praise was
+in his ears.
+
+'I dinna preten' to ken ae hair mair than ye do yersel', Mr. Lumley;
+and that's nae sayin' muckle, surely,' returned Robert, irritated at his
+tone more than at his words.
+
+The bystanders laughed, and Lumley flew into a rage.
+
+'Haud yer ill tongue, ye brat,' he said. 'Wha' are ye to mak' sic
+remarks upo' yer betters? A'body kens yer gran'father was naething but
+the blin' piper o' Portcloddie.'
+
+This was news to Robert--probably false, considering the quarter whence
+it came. But his mother-wit did not forsake him.
+
+'Weel, Mr. Lumley,' he answered, 'didna he pipe weel? Daur ye tell me
+'at he didna pipe weel?--as weel's ye cud hae dune 't yersel', noo, Mr.
+Lumley?'
+
+The laugh again rose at Lumley's expense, who was well known to have
+tried his hand at most things, and succeeded in nothing. Dooble Sanny
+was especially delighted.
+
+'De'il hae ye for a de'il's brat! 'At I suld sweer!' was all Lumley's
+reply, as he sought to conceal his mortification by attempting to join
+in the laugh against himself. Robert seized the opportunity of turning
+away and entering the house.
+
+'That ane's no to be droont or brunt aither,' said Lumley, as he
+disappeared.
+
+'He'll no be hang't for closin' your mou', Mr. Lumley,' said the
+shoemaker.
+
+Thereupon Lumley turned and followed Robert into the inn.
+
+Robert had delivered his message to Miss Napier, who sat in an arm-chair
+by the fire, in a little comfortable parlour, held sacred by all about
+the house. She was paralytic, and unable to attend to her guests
+further than by giving orders when anything especial was referred to her
+decision. She was an old lady--nearly as old as Mrs. Falconer--and wore
+glasses, but they could not conceal the kindness of her kindly eyes.
+Probably from giving less heed to a systematic theology, she had nothing
+of that sternness which first struck a stranger on seeing Robert's
+grandmother. But then she did not know what it was to be contradicted;
+and if she had been married, and had had sons, perhaps a sternness not
+dissimilar might have shown itself in her nature.
+
+'Noo ye maunna gang awa' till ye get something,' she said, after taking
+the receipt in request from a drawer within her reach, and laying it
+upon the table. But ere she could ring the bell which stood by her side,
+one of her servants came in.
+
+'Please, mem,' she said, 'Miss Letty and Miss Lizzy's seein' efter the
+bonny leddy; and sae I maun come to you.'
+
+'Is she a' that bonny, Meg?' asked her mistress.
+
+'Na, na, she's nae sae fearsome bonny; but Miss Letty's unco ta'en wi'
+her, ye ken. An' we a' say as Miss Letty says i' this hoose. But that's
+no the pint. Mr. Lumley's here, seekin' a gill: is he to hae't?'
+
+'Has he had eneuch already, do ye think, Meg?'
+
+'I dinna ken aboot eneuch, mem; that's ill to mizzer; but I dinna think
+he's had ower muckle.'
+
+'Weel, lat him tak' it. But dinna lat him sit doon.'
+
+'Verra weel, mem,' said Meg, and departed.
+
+'What gars Mr. Lumley say 'at my gran'father was the blin' piper o'
+Portcloddie? Can ye tell me, Miss Naper?' asked Robert.
+
+'Whan said he that, Robert?'
+
+'Jist as I cam in.'
+
+Miss Napier rang the bell. Another maid appeared.
+
+'Sen' Meg here direckly.'
+
+Meg came, her eyes full of interrogation.
+
+'Dinna gie Lumley a drap. Set him up to insult a young gentleman at my
+door-cheek! He s' no hae a drap here the nicht. He's had ower muckle,
+Meg, already, an' ye oucht to hae seen that.'
+
+''Deed, mem, he 's had mair than ower muckle, than; for there's anither
+gill ower the thrapple o' 'm. I div my best, mem, but, never tastin'
+mysel', I canna aye tell hoo muckle 's i' the wame o' a' body 'at comes
+in.'
+
+'Ye're no fit for the place, Meg; that's a fac'.'
+
+At this charge Meg took no offence, for she had been in the place for
+twenty years. And both mistress and maid laughed the moment they parted
+company.
+
+'Wha's this 'at's come the nicht, Miss Naper, 'at they're sae ta'en
+wi'?' asked Robert.
+
+'Atweel, I dinna ken yet. She's ower bonnie by a' accoonts to be gaein'
+about her lane (alone). It's a mercy the baron's no at hame. I wad hae
+to lock her up wi' the forks and spunes.'
+
+'What for that?' asked Robert.
+
+But Miss Napier vouchsafed no further explanation. She stuffed his
+pockets with sweet biscuits instead, dismissed him in haste, and rang
+the bell.
+
+'Meg, whaur hae they putten the stranger-leddy?'
+
+'She's no gaein' to bide at our hoose, mem.'
+
+'What say ye, lass? She's never gaein' ower to Lucky Happit's, is she?'
+
+'Ow na, mem. She's a leddy, ilka inch o' her. But she's some sib
+(relation) to the auld captain, and she's gaein' doon the street as
+sune's Caumill's ready to tak her bit boxes i' the barrow. But I doobt
+there'll be maist three barrowfu's o' them.'
+
+'Atweel. Ye can gang.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. SHARGAR.
+
+Robert went out into the thin drift, and again crossing the wide
+desolate-looking square, turned down an entry leading to a kind of
+court, which had once been inhabited by a well-to-do class of the
+townspeople, but had now fallen in estimation. Upon a stone at the door
+of what seemed an outhouse he discovered the object of his search.
+
+'What are ye sittin' there for, Shargar?'
+
+Shargar is a word of Gaelic origin, applied, with some sense of the
+ridiculous, to a thin, wasted, dried-up creature. In the present case
+it was the nickname by which the boy was known at school; and, indeed,
+where he was known at all.
+
+'What are ye sittin' there for, Shargar? Did naebody offer to tak ye
+in?'
+
+'Na, nane o' them. I think they maun be a' i' their beds. I'm most
+dreidfu' cauld.'
+
+The fact was, that Shargar's character, whether by imputation from
+his mother, or derived from his own actions, was none of the best. The
+consequence was, that, although scarcely one of the neighbours would
+have allowed him to sit there all night, each was willing to wait yet
+a while, in the hope that somebody else's humanity would give in first,
+and save her from the necessity of offering him a seat by the fireside,
+and a share of the oatmeal porridge which probably would be scanty
+enough for her own household. For it must be borne in mind that all
+the houses in the place were occupied by poor people, with whom the
+one virtue, Charity, was, in a measure, at home, and amidst many sins,
+cardinal and other, managed to live in even some degree of comfort.
+
+'Get up, than, Shargar, ye lazy beggar! Or are ye frozen to the
+door-stane? I s' awa' for a kettle o' bilin' water to lowse ye.'
+
+'Na, na, Bob. I'm no stucken. I'm only some stiff wi' the cauld; for
+wow, but I am cauld!' said Shargar, rising with difficulty. 'Gie 's a
+haud o' yer han', Bob.'
+
+Robert gave him his hand, and Shargar was straightway upon his feet.
+
+'Come awa' noo, as fest and as quaiet 's ye can.'
+
+'What are ye gaein' to du wi' me, Bob?'
+
+'What's that to you, Shargar?'
+
+'Naything. Only I wad like to ken.'
+
+'Hae patience, and ye will ken. Only mind ye do as I tell ye, and dinna
+speik a word.'
+
+Shargar followed in silence.
+
+On the way Robert remembered that Miss Napier had not, after all, given
+him the receipt for which his grandmother had sent him. So he returned
+to The Boar's Head, and, while he went in, left Shargar in the archway,
+to shiver, and try in vain to warm his hands by the alternate plans of
+slapping them on the opposite arms, and hiding them under them.
+
+When Robert came out, he saw a man talking to him under the lamp.
+The moment his eyes fell upon the two, he was struck by a resemblance
+between them. Shargar was right under the lamp, the man to the side of
+it, so that Shargar was shadowed by its frame, and the man was in its
+full light. The latter turned away, and passing Robert, went into the
+inn.
+
+'Wha's that?' asked Robert.
+
+'I dinna ken,' answered Shargar. 'He spak to me or ever I kent he was
+there, and garred my hert gie sic a loup 'at it maist fell into my
+breeks.'
+
+'And what said he to ye?'
+
+'He said was the deevil at my lug, that I did naething but caw my han's
+to bits upo' my shoothers.'
+
+'And what said ye to that?'
+
+'I said I wissed he was, for he wad aiblins hae some spare heat aboot
+him, an' I hadna freely (quite) eneuch.'
+
+'Weel dune, Shargar! What said he to that?'
+
+'He leuch, and speirt gin I wad list, and gae me a shillin'.'
+
+'Ye didna tak it, Shargar?' asked Robert in some alarm.
+
+'Ay did I. Catch me no taking a shillin'!'
+
+'But they'll haud ye till 't.'
+
+'Na, na. I'm ower shochlin' (in-kneed) for a sodger. But that man was
+nae sodger.'
+
+'And what mair said he?'
+
+'He speirt what I wad do wi' the shillin'.'
+
+'And what said ye?'
+
+'Ow! syne ye cam' oot, and he gaed awa'.'
+
+'And ye dinna ken wha it was?' repeated Robert.
+
+'It was some like my brither, Lord Sandy; but I dinna ken,' said
+Shargar.
+
+By this time they had arrived at Yule the baker's shop.
+
+'Bide ye here,' said Robert, who happened to possess a few coppers,
+'till I gang into Eel's.'
+
+Shargar stood again and shivered at the door, till Robert came out with
+a penny loaf in one hand, and a twopenny loaf in the other.
+
+'Gie's a bit, Bob,' said Shargar. 'I'm as hungry as I am cauld.'
+
+'Bide ye still,' returned Robert. 'There's a time for a' thing, and your
+time 's no come to forgather wi' this loaf yet. Does na it smell fine?
+It's new frae the bakehoose no ten minutes ago. I ken by the fin' (feel)
+o' 't.'
+
+'Lat me fin' 't,' said Shargar, stretching out one hand, and feeling his
+shilling with the other.
+
+'Na. Yer han's canna be clean. And fowk suld aye eat clean, whether they
+gang clean or no.'
+
+'I'll awa' in an' buy ane oot o' my ain shillin',' said Shargar, in a
+tone of resolute eagerness.
+
+'Ye'll do naething o' the kin',' returned Robert, darting his hand at
+his collar. 'Gie me the shillin'. Ye'll want it a' or lang.'
+
+Shargar yielded the coin and slunk behind, while Robert again led the
+way till they came to his grandmother's door.
+
+'Gang to the ga'le o' the hoose there, Shargar, and jist keek roon' the
+neuk at me; and gin I whustle upo' ye, come up as quaiet 's ye can. Gin
+I dinna, bide till I come to ye.'
+
+Robert opened the door cautiously. It was never locked except at night,
+or when Betty had gone to the well for water, or to the butcher's or
+baker's, or the prayer-meeting, upon which occasions she put the key
+in her pocket, and left her mistress a prisoner. He looked first to the
+right, along the passage, and saw that his grandmother's door was shut;
+then across the passage to the left, and saw that the kitchen door was
+likewise shut, because of the cold, for its normal position was against
+the wall. Thereupon, closing the door, but keeping the handle in his
+hand, and the bolt drawn back, he turned to the street and whistled soft
+and low. Shargar had, in a moment, dragged his heavy feet, ready to part
+company with their shoes at any instant, to Robert's side. He bent his
+ear to Robert's whisper.
+
+'Gang in there, and creep like a moose to the fit o' the stair. I maun
+close the door ahin' 's,' said he, opening the door as he spoke.
+
+'I'm fleyt (frightened), Robert.'
+
+'Dinna be a fule. Grannie winna bite aff yer heid. She had ane till her
+denner, the day, an' it was ill sung (singed).'
+
+'What ane o'?'
+
+'A sheep's heid, ye gowk (fool). Gang in direckly.'
+
+Shargar persisted no longer, but, taking about four steps a minute,
+slunk past the kitchen like a thief--not so carefully, however, but
+that one of his soles yet looser than the other gave one clap upon the
+flagged passage, when Betty straightway stood in the kitchen door, a
+fierce picture in a deal frame. By this time Robert had closed the outer
+door, and was following at Shargar's heels.
+
+'What's this?' she cried, but not so loud as to reach the ears of Mrs.
+Falconer; for, with true Scotch foresight, she would not willingly call
+in another power before the situation clearly demanded it. 'Whaur's
+Shargar gaein' that gait?'
+
+'Wi' me. Dinna ye see me wi' him? I'm nae a thief, nor yet's Shargar.'
+
+'There may be twa opingons upo' that, Robert. I s' jist awa' benn to the
+mistress. I s' hae nae sic doin's i' my hoose.'
+
+'It's nae your hoose, Betty. Dinna lee.'
+
+'Weel, I s' hae nae sic things gang by my kitchie door. There, Robert!
+what'll ye mak' o' that? There's nae offence, there, I houp, gin it
+suldna be a'thegither my ain hoose. Tak Shargar oot o' that, or I s'
+awa' benn the hoose, as I tell ye.'
+
+Meantime Shargar was standing on the stones, looking like a terrified
+white rabbit, and shaking from head to foot with cold and fright
+combined.
+
+'I'll tak him oot o' this, but it's up the stair, Betty. An' gin ye gang
+benn the hoose aboot it, I sweir to ye, as sure 's death, I'll gang doon
+to Muckledrum upo' Setterday i' the efternune.'
+
+'Gang awa' wi' yer havers. Only gin the mistress speirs onything aboot
+it, what am I to say?'
+
+'Bide till she speirs. Auld Spunkie says, "Ready-made answers are aye to
+seek." And I say, Betty, hae ye a cauld pitawta (potato)?'
+
+'I'll luik and see. Wadna ye like it het up?'
+
+'Ow ay, gin ye binna lang aboot it.'
+
+Suddenly a bell rang, shrill and peremptory, right above Shargar's head,
+causing in him a responsive increase of trembling.
+
+'Haud oot o' my gait. There's the mistress's bell,' said Betty.
+
+'Jist bide till we're roon' the neuk and on to the stair,' said Robert,
+now leading the way.
+
+Betty watched them safe round the corner before she made for the
+parlour, little thinking to what she had become an unwilling accomplice,
+for she never imagined that more than an evening's visit was intended by
+Shargar, which in itself seemed to her strange and improper enough even
+for such an eccentric boy as Robert to encourage.
+
+Shargar followed in mortal terror, for, like Christian in The Pilgrim's
+Progress, he had no armour to his back. Once round the corner, two
+strides of three steps each took them to the top of the first stair,
+Shargar knocking his head in the darkness against the never-opened door.
+Again three strides brought them to the top of the second flight; and
+turning once more, still to the right, Robert led Shargar up the few
+steps into the higher of the two garrets.
+
+Here there was just glimmer enough from the sky to discover the hollow
+of a close bedstead, built in under the sloping roof, which served it
+for a tester, while the two ends and most of the front were boarded up
+to the roof. This bedstead fortunately was not so bare as the one in
+the other room, although it had not been used for many years, for an old
+mattress covered the boards with which it was bottomed.
+
+'Gang in there, Shargar. Ye'll be warmer there than upo' the door-step
+ony gait. Pit aff yer shune.'
+
+Shargar obeyed, full of delight at finding himself in such good
+quarters. Robert went to a forsaken press in the room, and brought out
+an ancient cloak of tartan, of the same form as what is now called an
+Inverness cape, a blue dress-coat, with plain gilt buttons, which shone
+even now in the all but darkness, and several other garments, amongst
+them a kilt, and heaped them over Shargar as he lay on the mattress. He
+then handed him the twopenny and the penny loaves, which were all his
+stock had reached to the purchase of, and left him, saying,--
+
+'I maun awa' to my tay, Shargar. I'll fess ye a cauld tawtie het again,
+gin Betty has ony. Lie still, and whatever ye do, dinna come oot o'
+that.'
+
+The last injunction was entirely unnecessary.
+
+'Eh, Bob, I'm jist in haven!' said the poor creature, for his skin began
+to feel the precious possibility of reviving warmth in the distance.
+
+Now that he had gained a new burrow, the human animal soon recovered
+from his fears as well. It seemed to him, in the novelty of the place,
+that he had made so many doublings to reach it, that there could be no
+danger of even the mistress of the house finding him out, for she could
+hardly be supposed to look after such a remote corner of her dominions.
+And then he was boxed in with the bed, and covered with no end of warm
+garments, while the friendly darkness closed him and his shelter all
+round. Except the faintest blue gleam from one of the panes in the roof,
+there was soon no hint of light anywhere; and this was only sufficient
+to make the darkness visible, and thus add artistic effect to the
+operation of it upon Shargar's imagination--a faculty certainly
+uneducated in Shargar, but far, very far from being therefore
+non-existent. It was, indeed, actively operative, although, like that
+of many a fine lady and gentleman, only in relation to such primary
+questions as: 'What shall we eat? And what shall we drink? And
+wherewithal shall we be clothed?' But as he lay and devoured the
+new 'white breid,' his satisfaction--the bare delight of his animal
+existence--reached a pitch such as even this imagination, stinted with
+poverty, and frost-bitten with maternal oppression, had never conceived
+possible. The power of enjoying the present without anticipation of the
+future or regard of the past, is the especial privilege of the animal
+nature, and of the human nature in proportion as it has not been
+developed beyond the animal. Herein lies the happiness of cab horses and
+of tramps: to them the gift of forgetfulness is of worth inestimable.
+Shargar's heaven was for the present gained.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. THE SYMPOSIUM.
+
+Robert had scarcely turned out of the square on his way to find Shargar,
+when a horseman entered it. His horse and he were both apparently black
+on one side and gray on the other, from the snow-drift settling to
+windward. The animal looked tired, but the rider sat as easy as if he
+were riding to cover. The reins hung loose, and the horse went in a
+straight line for The Boar's Head, stopping under the archway only when
+his master drew bridle at the door of the inn.
+
+At that moment Miss Letty was standing at the back of Miss Napier's
+chair, leaning her arms upon it as she talked to her. This was her way
+of resting as often as occasion arose for a chat with her elder sister.
+Miss Letty's hair was gathered in a great knot at the top of her head,
+and little ringlets hung like tendrils down the sides of her face, the
+benevolence of which was less immediately striking than that of her
+sister's, because of the constant play of humour upon it, especially
+about the mouth. If a spirit of satire could be supposed converted into
+something Christian by an infusion of the tenderest loving-kindness
+and humanity, remaining still recognizable notwithstanding that all its
+bitterness was gone, such was the expression of Miss Letty's mouth. It
+was always half puckered as if in resistance to a comic smile, which
+showed itself at the windows of the keen gray eyes, however the mouth
+might be able to keep it within doors. She was neatly dressed in black
+silk, with a lace collar. Her hands were small and white.
+
+The moment the traveller stopped at the door, Miss Napier started.
+
+'Letty,' she said, 'wha's that? I could amaist sweir to Black Geordie's
+fit.'
+
+'A' four o' them, I think,' returned Miss Letty, as the horse,
+notwithstanding, or perhaps in consequence of his fatigue, began to paw
+and move about on the stones impatiently.
+
+The rider had not yet spoken.
+
+'He'll be efter some o' 's deevil-ma'-care sculduddery. But jist rin to
+the door, Letty, or Lizzy 'll be there afore ye, and maybe she wadna be
+ower ceevil. What can he be efter noo?'
+
+'What wad the grew (grayhound) be efter but maukin (hare)?' returned
+Miss Letty.
+
+'Hoot! nonsense! He kens naething aboot her. Gang to the door, lassie.'
+
+Miss Letty obeyed.
+
+'Wha's there?' she asked, somewhat sharply, as she opened it, 'that
+neither chaps (knocks) nor ca's?--Preserve 's a'! is't you, my lord?'
+
+'Hoo ken ye me, Miss Letty withoot seein' my face?'
+
+'A'body at The Boar's Heid kens Black Geordie as weel 's yer lordship's
+ain sel'. But whaur comes yer lordship frae in sic a nicht as this?'
+
+'From Russia. Never dismounted between Moscow and Aberdeen. The ice is
+bearing to-night.'
+
+And the baron laughed inside the upturned collar of his cloak, for he
+knew that strangely-exaggerated stories were current about his feats in
+the saddle.
+
+'That's a lang ride, my lord, and a sliddery. And what's yer lordship's
+wull?'
+
+'Muckle ye care aboot my lordship to stand jawin' there in a night like
+this! Is nobody going to take my horse?'
+
+'I beg yer lordship's pardon. Caumill!--Yer lordship never said ye
+wanted yer lordship's horse ta'en. I thocht ye micht be gaein' on to The
+Bothie.--Tak' Black Geordie here, Caumill.--Come in to the parlour, my
+lord.'
+
+'How d'ye do, Miss Naper?' said Lord Rothie, as he entered the room.
+'Here's this jade of a sister of yours asking me why I don't go home to
+The Bothie, when I choose to stop and water here.'
+
+'What'll ye tak', my lord?--Letty, fess the brandy.'
+
+'Oh! damn your brandy! Bring me a gill of good Glendronach.'
+
+'Rin, Letty. His lordship's cauld.--I canna rise to offer ye the
+airm-cheir, my lord.'
+
+'I can get one for myself, thank heaven!'
+
+'Lang may yer lordship return sic thanks.'
+
+'For I'm only new begun, ye think, Miss Naper. Well, I don't often
+trouble heaven with my affairs. By Jove! I ought to be heard when
+I do.'
+
+'Nae doobt ye will, my lord, whan ye seek onything that's fit to be gien
+ye.'
+
+'True. Heaven's gifts are seldom much worth the asking.'
+
+'Haud yer tongue, my lord, and dinna bring doon a judgment upo' my
+hoose, for it wad be missed oot o' Rothieden.'
+
+'You're right there, Miss Naper. And here comes the whisky to stop my
+mouth.'
+
+The Baron of Rothie sat for a few minutes with his feet on the fender
+before Miss Letty's blazing fire, without speaking, while he sipped the
+whisky neat from a wine-glass. He was a man about the middle height,
+rather full-figured, muscular and active, with a small head, and an eye
+whose brightness had not yet been dimmed by the sensuality which might
+be read in the condition rather than frame of his countenance. But while
+he spoke so pleasantly to the Miss Napiers, and his forehead spread
+broad and smooth over the twinkle of his hazel eye, there was a sharp
+curve on each side of his upper lip, half-way between the corner and
+the middle, which reminded one of the same curves in the lip of his
+ancestral boar's head, where it was lifted up by the protruding tusks.
+These curves disappeared, of course, when he smiled, and his smile,
+being a lord's, was generally pronounced irresistible. He was
+good-natured, and nowise inclined to stand upon his rank, so long as he
+had his own way.
+
+'Any customers by the mail to-night, Miss Naper?' he asked, in a
+careless tone.
+
+'Naebody partic'lar, my lord.'
+
+'I thought ye never let anybody in that wasn't particularly particular.
+No foot-passengers--eh?'
+
+'Hoot, my lord! that's twa year ago. Gin I had jaloosed him to be a
+fren' o' yer lordship's, forby bein' a lord himsel', ye ken as weel 's I
+du that I wadna hae sent him ower the gait to Luckie Happit's, whaur
+he wadna even be ower sure o' gettin' clean sheets. But gin lords an'
+lords' sons will walk afit like ither fowk, wha's to ken them frae ither
+fowk?'
+
+'Well, Miss Naper, he was no lord at all. He was nothing but a
+factor-body doon frae Glenbucket.'
+
+'There was sma' hairm dune than, my lord. I'm glaid to hear 't. But
+what'll yer lordship hae to yer supper?'
+
+'I would like a dish o' your chits and nears (sweetbreads and kidneys).'
+
+'Noo, think o' that!' returned the landlady, laughing. 'You great fowk
+wad hae the verra coorse o' natur' turned upside doon to shuit yersels.
+Wha ever heard o' caure (calves) at this time o' the year?'
+
+'Well, anything you like. Who was it came by the mail, did you say?'
+
+'I said naebody partic'lar, my lord.'
+
+'Well, I'll just go and have a look at Black Geordie.'
+
+'Verra weel, my lord.--Letty, rin an' luik efter him; and as sune 's
+he's roon' the neuk, tell Lizzie no to say a word aboot the leddy. As
+sure 's deith he's efter her. Whaur cud he hae heard tell o' her?'
+
+Lord Rothie came, a moment after, sauntering into the bar-parlour, where
+Lizzie, the third Miss Napier, a red-haired, round-eyed, white-toothed
+woman of forty, was making entries in a book.
+
+'She's a bonnie lassie that, that came in the coach to-night, they say,
+Miss Lizzie.'
+
+'As ugly 's sin, my lord,' answered Lizzie.
+
+'I hae seen some sin 'at was nane sae ugly, Miss Lizzie.'
+
+'She wad hae clean scunnert (disgusted) ye, my lord. It's a mercy ye
+didna see her.'
+
+'If she be as ugly as all that, I would just like to see her.'
+
+Miss Lizzie saw she had gone too far.
+
+'Ow, deed! gin yer lordship wants to see her, ye may see her at yer
+wull. I s' gang and tell her.'
+
+And she rose as if to go.
+
+'No, no. Nothing of the sort, Miss Lizzie. Only I heard that she was
+bonnie, and I wanted to see her. You know I like to look at a pretty
+girl.'
+
+'That's ower weel kent, my lord.'
+
+'Well, there's no harm in that, Miss Lizzie.'
+
+'There's no harm in that, my lord, though yer lordship says 't.'
+
+The facts were that his lordship had been to the county-town, some forty
+miles off, and Black Geordie had been sent to Hillknow to meet him; for
+in any weather that would let him sit, he preferred horseback to every
+other mode of travelling, though he seldom would be followed by a groom.
+He had posted to Hillknow, and had dined with a friend at the inn. The
+coach stopping to change horses, he had caught a glimpse of a pretty
+face, as he thought, from its window, and had hoped to overtake the
+coach before it reached Rothieden. But stopping to drink another bottle,
+he had failed; and it was on the merest chance of seeing that pretty
+face that he stopped at The Boar's Head. In all probability, had the
+Marquis seen the lady, he would not have thought her at all such a
+beauty as she appeared in the eyes of Dooble Sanny; nor, I venture to
+think, had he thought as the shoemaker did, would he yet have dared to
+address her in other than the words of such respect as he could still
+feel in the presence of that which was more noble than himself.
+
+Whether or not on his visit to the stable he found anything amiss with
+Black Geordie, I cannot tell, but he now begged Miss Lizzie to have a
+bedroom prepared for him.
+
+It happened to be the evening of Friday, one devoted by some of the
+townspeople to a symposium. To this, knowing that the talk will throw
+a glimmer on several matters, I will now introduce my reader, as a
+spectator through the reversed telescope of my history.
+
+A few of the more influential of the inhabitants had grown, rather than
+formed themselves, into a kind of club, which met weekly at The Boar's
+Head. Although they had no exclusive right to the room in which they
+sat, they generally managed to retain exclusive possession of it; for if
+any supposed objectionable person entered, they always got rid of him,
+sometimes without his being aware of how they had contrived to make him
+so uncomfortable. They began to gather about seven o'clock, when it
+was expected that boiling water would be in readiness for the compound
+generally called toddy, sometimes punch. As soon as six were assembled,
+one was always voted into the chair.
+
+On the present occasion, Mr. Innes, the school-master, was unanimously
+elected to that honour. He was a hard-featured, sententious, snuffy
+individual, of some learning, and great respectability.
+
+I omit the political talk with which their intercommunications began;
+for however interesting at the time is the scaffolding by which existing
+institutions arise, the poles and beams when gathered again in the
+builder's yard are scarcely a subject for the artist.
+
+The first to lead the way towards matters of nearer personality was
+William MacGregor, the linen manufacturer, a man who possessed a score
+of hand-looms or so--half of which, from the advance of cotton and the
+decline of linen-wear, now stood idle--but who had already a sufficient
+deposit in the hands of Mr. Thomson the banker--agent, that is, for the
+county-bank--to secure him against any necessity for taking to cotton
+shirts himself, which were an abomination and offence unpardonable in
+his eyes.
+
+'Can ye tell me, Mr. Cocker,' he said, 'what mak's Sandy, Lord Rothie,
+or Wrathy, or what suld he be ca'd?--tak' to The Bothie at a time
+like this, whan there's neither huntin', nor fishin', nor shutin', nor
+onything o' the kin' aboot han' to be playacks till him, the bonnie
+bairn--'cep' it be otters an' sic like?'
+
+William was a shrunken old man, with white whiskers and a black wig, a
+keen black eye, always in search of the ludicrous in other people, and a
+mouth ever on the move, as if masticating something comical.
+
+'You know just as well as I do,' answered Mr. Cocker, the Marquis of
+Boarshead's factor for the surrounding estate. 'He never was in the way
+of giving a reason for anything, least of all for his own movements.'
+
+'Somebody was sayin' to me,' resumed MacGregor, who, in all probability,
+invented the story at the moment, 'that the prince took him kissin'
+ane o' his servan' lasses, and kickit him oot o' Carlton Hoose into the
+street, and he canna win' ower the disgrace o' 't.'
+
+''Deed for the kissin',' said Mr. Thomson, a portly, comfortable-looking
+man, 'that's neither here nor there, though it micht hae been a duchess
+or twa; but for the kickin', my word! but Lord Sandy was mair likly to
+kick oot the prince. Do ye min' hoo he did whan the Markis taxed him
+wi'--?'
+
+'Haud a quaiet sough,' interposed Mr. Cruickshank, the solicitor;
+'there's a drap i' the hoose.'
+
+This was a phrase well understood by the company, indicating the
+presence of some one unknown, or unfit to be trusted.
+
+As he spoke he looked towards the farther end of the room, which lay in
+obscurity; for it was a large room, lighted only by the four candles on
+the table at which the company sat.
+
+'Whaur, Mr. Cruickshank?' asked the dominie in a whisper.
+
+'There,' answered Sampson Peddie, the bookseller, who seized the
+opportunity of saying something, and pointed furtively where the
+solicitor had only looked.
+
+A dim figure was descried at a table in the farthest corner of the room,
+and they proceeded to carry out the plan they generally adopted to get
+rid of a stranger.
+
+'Ye made use o' a curious auld Scots phrase this moment, Mr. Curshank:
+can ye explain hoo it comes to beir the meanin' that it's weel kent to
+beir?' said the manufacturer.
+
+'Not I, Mr. MacGregor,' answered the solicitor. 'I'm no philologist or
+antiquarian. Ask the chairman.'
+
+'Gentlemen,' responded Mr. Innes, taking a huge pinch of snuff after
+the word, and then, passing the box to Mr. Cocker, a sip from his glass
+before he went on: 'the phrase, gentlemen, "a drap i' the hoose," no
+doobt refers to an undesirable presence, for ye're weel awaur that it's
+a most unpleasin' discovery, in winter especially, to find a drop o'
+water hangin' from yer ceiling; a something, in short, whaur it has no
+business to be, and is not accordingly looked for, or prepared against.'
+
+'It seems to me, Mr. Innes,' said MacGregor, 'that ye hae hit the nail,
+but no upo' the heid. What mak' ye o' the phrase, no confined to the
+Scots tongue, I believe, o' an eaves-drapper? The whilk, no doobt,
+represents a body that hings aboot yer winnock, like a drap hangin' ower
+abune it frae the eaves--therefore called an eaves drapper. But the sort
+of whilk we noo speak, are a waur sort a'thegither; for they come to the
+inside o' yer hoose, o' yer verra chaumer, an' hing oot their lang lugs
+to hear what ye carena to be hard save by a dooce frien' or twa ower a
+het tum'ler.'
+
+At the same moment the door opened, and a man entered, who was received
+with unusual welcome.
+
+'Bless my sowl!' said the president, rising; 'it's Mr. Lammie!--Come
+awa', Mr. Lammie. Sit doon; sit doon. Whaur hae ye been this mony a day,
+like a pelican o' the wilderness?'
+
+Mr. Lammie was a large, mild man, with florid cheeks, no whiskers, and a
+prominent black eye. He was characterized by a certain simple alacrity,
+a gentle, but outspeaking readiness, which made him a favourite.
+
+'I dinna richtly mak' oot wha ye are,' he answered. 'Ye hae unco little
+licht here! Hoo are ye a', gentlemen? I s' discover ye by degrees, and
+pay my respecks accordin'.'
+
+And he drew a chair to the table.
+
+''Deed I wuss ye wad,' returned MacGregor, in a voice pretentiously
+hushed, but none the less audible. 'There's a drap in yon en' o' the
+hoose, Mr. Lammie.'
+
+'Hoot! never min' the man,' said Lammie, looking round in the direction
+indicated. 'I s' warran' he cares as little aboot hiz as we care aboot
+him. There's nae treason noo a-days. I carena wha hears what I say.'
+
+'For my pairt,' said Mr. Peddie, 'I canna help wonnerin' gin it cud be
+oor auld frien' Mr. Faukener.'
+
+'Speyk o' the de'il--' said Mr. Lammie.
+
+'Hoot! na,' returned Peddie, interrupting. 'He wasna a'thegither the
+de'il.'
+
+'Haud the tongue o' ye,' retorted Lammie. 'Dinna ye ken a proverb whan
+ye hear 't? De'il hae ye! ye're as sharpset as a missionar'. I was only
+gaun to say that I'm doobtin' Andrew's deid.'
+
+'Ay! ay!' commenced a chorus of questioning.
+
+'Mhm!'
+
+'Aaay!'
+
+'What gars ye think that?'
+
+'And sae he's deid!'
+
+'He was a great favourite, Anerew!'
+
+'Whaur dee'd he?'
+
+'Aye some upsettin' though!'
+
+'Ay. He was aye to be somebody wi' his tale.'
+
+'A gude-hertit crater, but ye cudna lippen till him.'
+
+'Speyk nae ill o' the deid. Maybe they'll hear ye, and turn roon' i'
+their coffins, and that'll whumle you i' your beds,' said MacGregor,
+with a twinkle in his eye.
+
+'Ring the bell for anither tum'ler, Sampson,' said the chairman.
+
+'What'll be dune wi' that factory place, noo? It'll be i' the market?'
+
+'It's been i' the market for mony a year. But it's no his ava. It
+belangs to the auld leddy, his mither,' said the weaver.
+
+'Why don't you buy it, Mr. MacGregor, and set up a cotton mill? There's
+not much doing with the linen now,' said Mr. Cocker.
+
+'Me!' returned MacGregor, with indignation. 'The Lord forgie ye for
+mintin' (hinting) at sic a thing, Mr. Cocker! Me tak' to coaton! I wad
+as sune spin the hair frae Sawtan's hurdies. Short fushionless dirt,
+that canna grow straucht oot o' the halesome yird, like the bonnie
+lint-bells, but maun stick itsel' upo' a buss!--set it up! Coorse vulgar
+stuff, 'at naebody wad weir but loup-coonter lads that wad fain luik
+like gentlemen by means o' the collars and ruffles--an' a' comin' frae
+the auld loom! They may weel affoord se'enteen hunner linen to set it
+aff wi' 'at has naething but coaton inside the breeks o' them.'
+
+'But Dr. Wagstaff says it's healthier,' interposed Peddie.
+
+'I'll wag a staff till him. De'il a bit o' 't 's healthier! an' that
+he kens. It's nae sae healthy, an' sae it mak's him mair wark wi' 's
+poothers an' his drauchts, an' ither stinkin' stuff. Healthier! What
+neist?'
+
+'Somebody tellt me,' said the bookseller, inwardly conscious of offence,
+''at hoo Lord Sandy himsel' weirs cotton.'
+
+'Ow 'deed, maybe. And he sets mony a worthy example furbye. Hoo mony,
+can ye tell me, Mr. Peddie, has he pulled doon frae honest, if no frae
+high estate, and sent oot to seek their livin' as he taucht them? Hoo
+mony--?'
+
+'Hoot, hoot! Mr. MacGregor, his lordship hasn't a cotton shirt in his
+possession, I'll be bound,' said Mr. Cocker. 'And, besides, you have not
+to wash his dirty linen--or cotton either.'
+
+'That's as muckle as to say, accordin' to Cocker, that I'm no to speik
+a word against him. But I'll say what I like. He's no my maister,' said
+MacGregor, who could drink very little without suffering in his temper
+and manners; and who, besides, had a certain shrewd suspicion as to the
+person who still sat in the dark end of the room, possibly because the
+entrance of Mr. Lammie had interrupted the exorcism.
+
+The chairman interposed with soothing words; and the whole company,
+Cocker included, did its best to pacify the manufacturer; for they all
+knew what would be the penalty if they failed.
+
+A good deal of talk followed, and a good deal of whisky was drunk. They
+were waited upon by Meg, who, without their being aware of it, cast a
+keen parting glance at them every time she left the room. At length the
+conversation had turned again to Andrew Falconer's death.
+
+'Whaur said ye he dee'd, Mr. Lammie?'
+
+'I never said he was deid. I said I was feared 'at he was deid.'
+
+'An' what gars ye say that? It micht be o' consequence to hae 't
+correck,' said the solicitor.
+
+'I had a letter frae my auld frien' and his, Dr. Anderson. Ye min' upo'
+him, Mr. Innes, dunna ye? He's heid o' the medical boord at Calcutta
+noo. He says naething but that he doobts he's gane. He gaed up the
+country, and he hasna hard o' him for sae lang. We hae keepit up a
+correspondence for mony a year noo, Dr. Anderson an' me. He was a
+relation o' Anerew's, ye ken--a second cousin, or something. He'll be
+hame or lang, I'm thinkin', wi' a fine pension.'
+
+'He winna weir a cotton sark, I'll be boon',' said MacGregor.
+
+'What's the auld leddy gaein' to du wi' that lang-leggit oye (grandson)
+o' hers, Anerew's son?' asked Sampson.
+
+'Ow! he'll be gaein' to the college, I'm thinkin'. He's a fine lad, and
+a clever, they tell me,' said Mr. Thomson.
+
+'Indeed, he's all that, and more too,' said the school-master.
+
+'There's naething 'ull du but the college noo!' said MacGregor, whom
+nobody heeded, for fear of again rousing his anger.
+
+'Hoo 'ill she manage that, honest woman? She maun hae but little to
+spare frae the cleedin' o' 'm.'
+
+'She's a gude manager, Mistress Faukner. And, ye see, she has the
+bleachgreen yet.'
+
+'She doesna weir cotton sarks,' growled MacGregor. 'Mony's the wob o'
+mine she's bleached and boucht tu!'
+
+Nobody heeding him yet, he began to feel insulted, and broke in upon the
+conversation with intent.
+
+'Ye haena telt 's yet, Cocker,' he said, 'what that maister o' yours is
+duin' here at this time o' the year. I wad ken that, gin ye please.'
+
+'How should I know, Mr. MacGregor?' returned the factor, taking no
+notice of the offensive manner in which the question was put.
+
+'He's no a hair better nor ane o' thae Algerine pirates 'at Lord
+Exmooth's het the hips o'--and that's my opingon.'
+
+'He's nae amo' your feet, MacGregor,' said the banker. 'Ye micht jist
+lat him lie.'
+
+'Gin I had him doon, faith gin I wadna lat him lie! I'll jist tell ye
+ae thing, gentlemen, that cam' to my knowledge no a hunner year ago. An'
+it's a' as true 's gospel, though I hae aye held my tongue aboot it till
+this verra nicht. Ay! ye'll a' hearken noo; but it's no lauchin', though
+there was sculduddery eneuch, nae doobt, afore it cam' that len'th. And
+mony a het drap did the puir lassie greet, I can tell ye. Faith! it was
+no lauchin' to her. She was a servan' o' oors, an' a ticht bonnie lass
+she was. They ca'd her the weyver's bonny Mary--that's the name she gaed
+by. Weel, ye see--'
+
+MacGregor was interrupted by a sound from the further end of the room.
+The stranger, whom most of them had by this time forgotten, had risen,
+and was approaching the table where they sat.
+
+'Guid guide us!' interrupted several under their breaths, as all rose,
+'it's Lord Sandy himsel'!'
+
+'I thank you, gentleman,' he said, with a mixture of irony and contempt,
+'for the interest you take in my private history. I should have thought
+it had been as little to the taste as it is to the honour of some of you
+to listen to such a farrago of lies.'
+
+'Lees! my lord,' said MacGregor, starting to his feet. Mr. Cocker looked
+dismayed, and Mr. Lammie sheepish--all of them dazed and dumbfoundered,
+except the old weaver, who, as his lordship turned to leave the room,
+added:
+
+'Lang lugs (ears) suld be made o' leather, my lord, for fear they grow
+het wi' what they hear.'
+
+Lord Rothie turned in a rage. He too had been drinking.
+
+'Kick that toad into the street, or, by heaven! it's the last drop any
+of you drink in this house!' he cried.
+
+'The taed may tell the poddock (frog) what the rottan (rat) did i' the
+taed's hole, my lord,' said MacGregor, whom independence, honesty, bile,
+and drink combined to render fearless.
+
+Lord Sandy left the room without another word. His factor took his hat
+and followed him. The rest dropped into their seats in silence. Mr.
+Lammie was the first to speak.
+
+'There's a pliskie!' he said.
+
+'I cud jist say the word efter auld Simeon,' said MacGregor.
+
+'I never thocht to be sae favoured! Eh! but I hae langed, and noo I hae
+spoken!' with which words he sat down, contented.
+
+When Mr. Cocker overtook his master, as MacGregor had not unfitly styled
+him, he only got a damning for his pains, and went home considerably
+crestfallen.
+
+Lord Rothie returned to the landlady in her parlour.
+
+'What's the maitter wi' ye, my lord? What's vexed ye?' asked Miss
+Napier, with a twinkle in her eyes, for she thought, from the baron's
+mortification, he must have received some rebuff, and now that the
+bonnie leddy was safe at Captain Forsyth's, enjoyed the idea of it.
+
+'Ye keep an ill-tongued hoose, Miss Naper,' answered his lordship.
+
+Miss Napier guessed at the truth at once--that he had overheard some
+free remarks on his well-known licence of behaviour.
+
+'Weel, my lord, I do my best. A body canna keep an inn and speir the
+carritchis (catechism) at the door o' 't. But I believe ye're i' the
+richt, my lord, for I heard an awfu' aff-gang o' sweirin' i' the yard,
+jist afore yer lordship cam' in. An' noo' 'at I think o' 't, it wasna
+that onlike yer lordship's ain word.'
+
+Lord Sandy broke into a loud laugh. He could enjoy a joke against
+himself when it came from a woman, and was founded on such a trifle as a
+personal vice.
+
+'I think I'll go to bed,' he said when his laugh was over. 'I believe
+it's the only safe place from your tongue, Miss Naper.'
+
+'Letty,' cried Miss Napier, 'fess a can'le, and show his lordship to the
+reid room.'
+
+Till Miss Letty appeared, the baron sat and stretched himself. He then
+rose and followed her into the archway, and up an outside stair to a
+door which opened immediately upon a handsome old-fashioned room, where
+a blazing fire lighted up the red hangings. Miss Letty set down the
+candle, and bidding his lordship good night, turned and left the room,
+shutting the door, and locking it behind her--a proceeding of which his
+lordship took no notice, for, however especially suitable it might be in
+his case, it was only, from whatever ancient source derived, the custom
+of the house in regard to this particular room and a corresponding
+chamber on the opposite side of the archway.
+
+Meantime the consternation amongst the members of the club was not so
+great as not to be talked over, or to prevent the call for more whisky
+and hot water. All but MacGregor, however, regretted what had occurred.
+He was so elevated with his victory and a sense of courage and prowess,
+that he became more and more facetious and overbearing.
+
+'It's all very well for you, Mr. MacGregor,' said the dominie, with
+dignity: 'you have nothing to lose.'
+
+'Troth! he canna brak the bank--eh, Mr. Tamson?'
+
+'He may give me a hint to make you withdraw your money, though, Mr.
+MacGregor.'
+
+'De'il care gin I do!' returned the weaver. 'I can mak' better o' 't ony
+day.'
+
+'But there's yer hoose an' kailyard,' suggested Peddie.
+
+'They're ma ain!--a' ma ain! He canna lay 's finger on onything o' mine
+but my servan' lass,' cried the weaver, slapping his thigh-bone--for
+there was little else to slap.
+
+Meg, at the moment, was taking her exit-glance. She went straight to
+Miss Napier.
+
+'Willie MacGregor's had eneuch, mem, an' a drappy ower.'
+
+'Sen' Caumill doon to Mrs. MacGregor to say wi' my compliments that she
+wad do weel to sen' for him,' was the response.
+
+Meantime he grew more than troublesome. Ever on the outlook, when sober,
+after the foibles of others, he laid himself open to endless ridicule
+when in drink, which, to tell the truth, was a rare occurrence. He was
+in the midst of a prophetic denunciation of the vices of the nobility,
+and especially of Lord Rothie, when Meg, entering the room, went quietly
+behind his chair and whispered:
+
+'Maister MacGregor, there's a lassie come for ye.'
+
+'I'm nae in,' he answered, magnificently.
+
+'But it's the mistress 'at's sent for ye. Somebody's wantin' ye.'
+
+'Somebody maun want me, than.--As I was sayin', Mr. Cheerman and
+gentlemen--'
+
+'Mistress MacGregor 'll be efter ye hersel', gin ye dinna gang,' said
+Meg.
+
+'Let her come. Duv ye think I'm fleyt at her? De'il a step 'll I gang
+till I please. Tell her that, Meg.'
+
+Meg left the room, with a broad grin on her good-humoured face.
+
+'What's the bitch lauchin' at?' exclaimed MacGregor, starting to his
+feet.
+
+The whole company rose likewise, using their endeavour to persuade him
+to go home.
+
+'Duv ye think I'm drunk, sirs? I'll lat ye ken I'm no drunk. I hae a
+wull o' mine ain yet. Am I to gang hame wi' a lassie to haud me oot o'
+the gutters? Gin ye daur to alloo that I'm drunk, ye ken hoo ye'll fare,
+for de'il a fit 'll I gang oot o' this till I hae anither tum'ler.'
+
+'I'm thinkin' there's mair o' 's jist want ane mair,' said Peddie.
+
+A confirmatory murmur arose as each looked into the bottom of his
+tumbler, and the bell was instantly rung. But it only brought Meg back
+with the message that it was time for them all to go home. Every eye
+turned upon MacGregor reproachfully.
+
+'Ye needna luik at me that gait, sirs. I'm no fou,' said he.
+
+''Deed no. Naebody taks ye to be,' answered the chairman. 'Meggie,
+there's naebody's had ower muckle yet, and twa or three o' 's hasna had
+freely eneuch. Jist gang an' fess a mutchkin mair. An' there'll be a
+shillin' to yersel', lass.'
+
+Meg retired, but straightway returned.
+
+'Miss Naper says there's no a drap mair drink to be had i' this hoose
+the nicht.'
+
+'Here, Meggie,' said the chairman, 'there's yer shillin'; and ye jist
+gang to Miss Lettie, and gie her my compliments, and say that Mr.
+Lammie's here, and we haena seen him for a lang time. And'--the rest was
+spoken in a whisper--'I'll sweir to ye, Meggie, the weyver body sanna
+hae ae drap o' 't.'
+
+Meg withdrew once more, and returned.
+
+'Miss Letty's compliments, sir, and Miss Naper has the keys, and she's
+gane till her bed, and we maunna disturb her. And it's time 'at a'
+honest fowk was in their beds tu. And gin Mr. Lammie wants a bed i' this
+hoose, he maun gang till 't. An' here's his can'le. Gude nicht to ye a',
+gentlemen.'
+
+So saying, Meg set the lighted candle on the sideboard, and finally
+vanished. The good-tempered, who formed the greater part of the company,
+smiled to each other, and emptied the last drops of their toddy first
+into their glasses, and thence into their mouths. The ill-tempered,
+numbering but one more than MacGregor, growled and swore a little, the
+weaver declaring that he would not go home. But the rest walked out and
+left him, and at last, appalled by the silence, he rose with his wig
+awry, and trotted--he always trotted when he was tipsy--home to his
+wife.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. MRS. FALCONER.
+
+Meantime Robert was seated in the parlour at the little dark mahogany
+table, in which the lamp, shaded towards his grandmother's side, shone
+brilliantly reflected. Her face being thus hidden both by the light and
+the shadow, he could not observe the keen look of stern benevolence with
+which, knowing that he could not see her, she regarded him as he ate
+his thick oat-cake of Betty's skilled manufacture, well loaded with the
+sweetest butter, and drank the tea which she had poured out and sugared
+for him with liberal hand. It was a comfortable little room, though its
+inlaid mahogany chairs and ancient sofa, covered with horsehair, had a
+certain look of hardness, no doubt. A shepherdess and lamb, worked in
+silks whose brilliance had now faded half-way to neutrality, hung in
+a black frame, with brass rosettes at the corners, over the
+chimney-piece--the sole approach to the luxury of art in the homely
+little place. Besides the muslin stretched across the lower part of the
+window, it was undefended by curtains. There was no cat in the room, nor
+was there one in the kitchen even; for Mrs. Falconer had such a respect
+for humanity that she grudged every morsel consumed by the lower
+creation. She sat in one of the arm-chairs belonging to the hairy set,
+leaning back in contemplation of her grandson, as she took her tea.
+
+She was a handsome old lady--little, but had once been taller, for she
+was more than seventy now. She wore a plain cap of muslin, lying close
+to her face, and bordered a little way from the edge with a broad black
+ribbon, which went round her face, and then, turning at right angles,
+went round the back of her neck. Her gray hair peeped a little way from
+under this cap. A clear but short-sighted eye of a light hazel shone
+under a smooth thoughtful forehead; a straight and well-elevated, but
+rather short nose, which left the firm upper lip long and capable of
+expressing a world of dignified offence, rose over a well-formed mouth,
+revealing more moral than temperamental sweetness; while the chin was
+rather deficient than otherwise, and took little share in indicating the
+remarkable character possessed by the old lady.
+
+After gazing at Robert for some time, she took a piece of oat-cake from
+a plate by her side, the only luxury in which she indulged, for it
+was made with cream instead of water--it was very little she ate of
+anything--and held it out to Robert in a hand white, soft, and smooth,
+but with square finger tips, and squat though pearly nails. 'Ha'e,
+Robert,' she said; and Robert received it with a 'Thank you, grannie';
+but when he thought she did not see him, slipped it under the table
+and into his pocket. She saw him well enough, however, and although she
+would not condescend to ask him why he put it away instead of eating it,
+the endeavour to discover what could have been his reason for so doing
+cost her two hours of sleep that night. She would always be at the
+bottom of a thing if reflection could reach it, but she generally
+declined taking the most ordinary measures to expedite the process.
+
+When Robert had finished his tea, instead of rising to get his books and
+betake himself to his lessons, in regard to which his grandmother had
+seldom any cause to complain, although she would have considered herself
+guilty of high treason against the boy's future if she had allowed
+herself once to acknowledge as much, he drew his chair towards the fire,
+and said:
+
+'Grandmamma!'
+
+'He's gaein' to tell me something,' said Mrs. Falconer to herself. 'Will
+'t be aboot the puir barfut crater they ca' Shargar, or will 't be aboot
+the piece he pat intil 's pooch?'
+
+'Weel, laddie?' she said aloud, willing to encourage him.
+
+'Is 't true that my gran'father was the blin' piper o' Portcloddie?'
+
+'Ay, laddie; true eneuch. Hoots, na! nae yer grandfather, but yer
+father's grandfather, laddie--my husband's father.'
+
+'Hoo cam that aboot?'
+
+'Weel, ye see, he was oot i' the Forty-five; and efter the battle o'
+Culloden, he had to rin for 't. He wasna wi' his ain clan at the battle,
+for his father had broucht him to the Lawlands whan he was a lad; but he
+played the pipes till a reg'ment raised by the Laird o' Portcloddie.
+And for ooks (weeks) he had to hide amo' the rocks. And they tuik a' his
+property frae him. It wasna muckle--a wheen hooses, and a kailyard or
+twa, wi' a bit fairmy on the tap o' a cauld hill near the sea-shore;
+but it was eneuch and to spare; and whan they tuik it frae him, he had
+naething left i' the warl' but his sons. Yer grandfather was born the
+verra day o' the battle, and the verra day 'at the news cam, the mother
+deed. But yer great grandfather wasna lang or he merried anither wife.
+He was sic a man as ony woman micht hae been prood to merry. She was the
+dother (daughter) o' an episcopalian minister, and she keepit a school
+in Portcloddie. I saw him first mysel' whan I was aboot twenty--that was
+jist the year afore I was merried. He was a gey (considerably) auld man
+than, but as straucht as an ellwand, and jist pooerfu' beyon' belief.
+His shackle-bane (wrist) was as thick as baith mine; and years and
+years efter that, whan he tuik his son, my husband, and his grandson, my
+Anerew--'
+
+'What ails ye, grannie? What for dinna ye gang on wi' the story?'
+
+After a somewhat lengthened pause, Mrs. Falconer resumed as if she had
+not stopped at all.
+
+'Ane in ilka han', jist for the fun o' 't, he kneipit their heids
+thegither, as gin they hed been twa carldoddies (stalks of ribgrass).
+But maybe it was the lauchin' o' the twa lads, for they thocht it unco
+fun. They were maist killed wi' lauchin'. But the last time he did it,
+the puir auld man hostit (coughed) sair efterhin, and had to gang and
+lie doon. He didna live lang efter that. But it wasna that 'at killed
+him, ye ken.'
+
+'But hoo cam he to play the pipes?'
+
+'He likit the pipes. And yer grandfather, he tuik to the fiddle.'
+
+'But what for did they ca' him the blin' piper o' Portcloddie?'
+
+'Because he turned blin' lang afore his en' cam, and there was naething
+ither he cud do. And he wad aye mak an honest baubee whan he cud; for
+siller was fell scarce at that time o' day amo' the Falconers. Sae he
+gaed throu the toon at five o'clock ilka mornin' playin' his pipes, to
+lat them 'at war up ken they war up in time, and them 'at warna, that it
+was time to rise. And syne he played them again aboot aucht o'clock at
+nicht, to lat them ken 'at it was time for dacent fowk to gang to their
+beds. Ye see, there wasna sae mony clocks and watches by half than as
+there is noo.'
+
+'Was he a guid piper, grannie?'
+
+'What for speir ye that?'
+
+'Because I tauld that sunk, Lumley--'
+
+'Ca' naebody names, Robert. But what richt had ye to be speikin' to a
+man like that?'
+
+'He spak to me first.'
+
+'Whaur saw ye him?'
+
+'At The Boar's Heid.'
+
+'And what richt had ye to gang stan'in' aboot? Ye oucht to ha' gane in
+at ance.'
+
+'There was a half-dizzen o' fowk stan'in' aboot, and I bude (behoved) to
+speik whan I was spoken till.'
+
+'But ye budena stop an' mak' ae fule mair.'
+
+'Isna that ca'in' names, grannie?'
+
+''Deed, laddie, I doobt ye hae me there. But what said the fallow Lumley
+to ye?'
+
+'He cast up to me that my grandfather was naething but a blin' piper.'
+
+'And what said ye?'
+
+'I daured him to say 'at he didna pipe weel.'
+
+'Weel dune, laddie! And ye micht say 't wi' a gude conscience, for he
+wadna hae been piper till 's regiment at the battle o' Culloden gin he
+hadna pipit weel. Yon's his kilt hingin' up i' the press i' the garret.
+Ye'll hae to grow, Robert, my man, afore ye fill that.'
+
+'And whase was that blue coat wi' the bonny gowd buttons upo' 't?' asked
+Robert, who thought he had discovered a new approach to an impregnable
+hold, which he would gladly storm if he could.
+
+'Lat the coat sit. What has that to do wi' the kilt? A blue coat and a
+tartan kilt gang na weel thegither.'
+
+'Excep' in an auld press whaur naebody sees them. Ye wadna care,
+grannie, wad ye, gin I was to cut aff the bonnie buttons?'
+
+'Dinna lay a finger upo' them. Ye wad be gaein' playin' at pitch and
+toss or ither sic ploys wi' them. Na, na, lat them sit.'
+
+'I wad only niffer them for bools (exchange them for marbles).'
+
+'I daur ye to touch the coat or onything 'ither that's i' that press.'
+
+'Weel, weel, grannie. I s' gang and get my lessons for the morn.'
+
+'It's time, laddie. Ye hae been jabberin' ower muckle. Tell Betty to
+come and tak' awa' the tay-things.'
+
+Robert went to the kitchen, got a couple of hot potatoes and a candle,
+and carried them up-stairs to Shargar, who was fast asleep. But the
+moment the light shone upon his face, he started up, with his eyes, if
+not his senses, wide awake.
+
+'It wasna me, mither! I tell ye it wasna me!'
+
+And he covered his head with both arms, as if to defend it from a shower
+of blows.
+
+'Haud yer tongue, Shargar. It's me.'
+
+But before Shargar could come to his senses, the light of the candle
+falling upon the blue coat made the buttons flash confused suspicions
+into his mind.
+
+'Mither, mither,' he said, 'ye hae gane ower far this time. There's ower
+mony o' them, and they're no the safe colour. We'll be baith hangt, as
+sure's there's a deevil in hell.'
+
+As he said thus, he went on trying to pick the buttons from the coat,
+taking them for sovereigns, though how he could have seen a sovereign
+at that time in Scotland I can only conjecture. But Robert caught him by
+the shoulders, and shook him awake with no gentle hands, upon which he
+began to rub his eyes, and mutter sleepily:
+
+'Is that you, Bob? I hae been dreamin', I doobt.'
+
+'Gin ye dinna learn to dream quaieter, ye'll get you and me tu into mair
+trouble nor I care to hae aboot ye, ye rascal. Haud the tongue o' ye,
+and eat this tawtie, gin ye want onything mair. And here's a bit o'
+reamy cakes tu ye. Ye winna get that in ilka hoose i' the toon. It's my
+grannie's especial.'
+
+Robert felt relieved after this, for he had eaten all the cakes Miss
+Napier had given him, and had had a pain in his conscience ever since.
+
+'Hoo got ye a haud o' 't?' asked Shargar, evidently supposing he had
+stolen it.
+
+'She gies me a bit noo and than.'
+
+'And ye didna eat it yersel'? Eh, Bob!'
+
+Shargar was somewhat overpowered at this fresh proof of Robert's
+friendship. But Robert was still more ashamed of what he had not done.
+
+He took the blue coat carefully from the bed, and hung it in its place
+again, satisfied now, from the way his grannie had spoken, or, rather,
+declined to speak, about it, that it had belonged to his father.
+
+'Am I to rise?' asked Shargar, not understanding the action.
+
+'Na, na, lie still. Ye'll be warm eneuch wantin' thae sovereigns. I'll
+lat ye oot i' the mornin' afore grannie's up. And ye maun mak' the best
+o't efter that till it's dark again. We'll sattle a' aboot it at the
+schuil the morn. Only we maun be circumspec', ye ken.'
+
+'Ye cudna lay yer han's upo' a drap o' whusky, cud ye, Bob?'
+
+Robert stared in horror. A boy like that asking for whisky! and in his
+grandmother's house, too!
+
+'Shargar,' he said solemnly, 'there's no a drap o' whusky i' this hoose.
+It's awfu' to hear ye mention sic a thing. My grannie wad smell the
+verra name o' 't a mile awa'. I doobt that's her fit upo' the stair
+a'ready.'
+
+Robert crept to the door, and Shargar sat staring with horror, his eyes
+looking from the gloom of the bed like those of a half-strangled dog.
+But it was a false alarm, as Robert presently returned to announce.
+
+'Gin ever ye sae muckle as mention whusky again, no to say drink ae drap
+o' 't, you and me pairt company, and that I tell you, Shargar,' said he,
+emphatically.
+
+'I'll never luik at it; I'll never mint at dreamin' o' 't,' answered
+Shargar, coweringly. 'Gin she pits 't intil my moo', I'll spit it oot.
+But gin ye strive wi' me, Bob, I'll cut my throat--I will; an' that'll
+be seen and heard tell o'.'
+
+All this time, save during the alarm of Mrs. Falconer's approach,
+when he sat with a mouthful of hot potato, unable to move his jaws for
+terror, and the remnant arrested half-way in its progress from his mouth
+after the bite--all this time Shargar had been devouring the provisions
+Robert had brought him, as if he had not seen food that day. As soon as
+they were finished, he begged for a drink of water, which Robert managed
+to procure for him. He then left him for the night, for his longer
+absence might have brought his grandmother after him, who had perhaps
+only too good reasons for being doubtful, if not suspicious, about boys
+in general, though certainly not about Robert in particular. He carried
+with him his books from the other garret-room where he kept them,
+and sat down at the table by his grandmother, preparing his Latin and
+geography by her lamp, while she sat knitting a white stocking with
+fingers as rapid as thought, never looking at her work, but staring
+into the fire, and seeing visions there which Robert would have given
+everything he could call his own to see, and then would have given his
+life to blot out of the world if he had seen them. Quietly the evening
+passed, by the peaceful lamp and the cheerful fire, with the Latin on
+the one side of the table, and the stocking on the other, as if ripe and
+purified old age and hopeful unstained youth had been the only extremes
+of humanity known to the world. But the bitter wind was howling by fits
+in the chimney, and the offspring of a nobleman and a gipsy lay asleep
+in the garret, covered with the cloak of an old Highland rebel.
+
+At nine o'clock, Mrs. Falconer rang the bell for Betty, and they had
+worship. Robert read a chapter, and his grandmother prayed an extempore
+prayer, in which they that looked at the wine when it was red in the
+cup, and they that worshipped the woman clothed in scarlet and seated
+upon the seven hills, came in for a strange mixture, in which the
+vengeance yielded only to the pity.
+
+'Lord, lead them to see the error of their ways,' she cried. 'Let the
+rod of thy wrath awake the worm of their conscience that they may know
+verily that there is a God that ruleth in the earth. Dinna lat them gang
+to hell, O Lord, we beseech thee.'
+
+As soon as prayers were over, Robert had a tumbler of milk and some more
+oat-cake, and was sent to bed; after which it was impossible for him to
+hold any further communication with Shargar. For his grandmother, little
+as one might suspect it who entered the parlour in the daytime, always
+slept in that same room, in a bed closed in with doors like those of a
+large press in the wall, while Robert slept in a little closet, looking
+into a garden at the back of the house, the door of which opened from
+the parlour close to the head of his grandmother's bed. It was just
+large enough to hold a good-sized bed with curtains, a chest of drawers,
+a bureau, a large eight-day clock, and one chair, leaving in the centre
+about five feet square for him to move about in. There was more room
+as well as more comfort in the bed. He was never allowed a candle, for
+light enough came through from the parlour, his grandmother thought; so
+he was soon extended between the whitest of cold sheets, with his knees
+up to his chin, and his thoughts following his lost father over
+all spaces of the earth with which his geography-book had made him
+acquainted.
+
+He was in the habit of leaving his closet and creeping through his
+grandmother's room before she was awake--or at least before she
+had given any signs to the small household that she was restored to
+consciousness, and that the life of the house must proceed. He therefore
+found no difficulty in liberating Shargar from his prison, except
+what arose from the boy's own unwillingness to forsake his comfortable
+quarters for the fierce encounter of the January blast which awaited
+him. But Robert did not turn him out before the last moment of safety
+had arrived; for, by the aid of signs known to himself, he watched
+the progress of his grandmother's dressing--an operation which did
+not consume much of the morning, scrupulous as she was with regard to
+neatness and cleanliness--until Betty was called in to give her careful
+assistance to the final disposition of the mutch, when Shargar's exit
+could be delayed no longer. Then he mounted to the foot of the second
+stair, and called in a keen whisper,
+
+'Noo, Shargar, cut for the life o' ye.'
+
+And down came the poor fellow, with long gliding steps, ragged and
+reluctant, and, without a word or a look, launched himself out into the
+cold, and sped away he knew not whither. As he left the door, the only
+suspicion of light was the dull and doubtful shimmer of the snow that
+covered the street, keen particles of which were blown in his face by
+the wind, which, having been up all night, had grown very cold, and
+seemed delighted to find one unprotected human being whom it might
+badger at its own bitter will. Outcast Shargar! Where he spent the
+interval between Mrs. Falconer's door and that of the school, I do not
+know. There was a report amongst his school-fellows that he had been
+found by Scroggie, the fish-cadger, lying at full length upon the back
+of his old horse, which, either from compassion or indifference, had not
+cared to rise up under the burden. They said likewise that, when accused
+by Scroggie of housebreaking, though nothing had to be broken to get in,
+only a string with a peculiar knot, on the invention of which the
+cadger prided himself, to be undone, all that Shargar had to say in his
+self-defence was, that he had a terrible sair wame, and that the horse
+was warmer nor the stanes i' the yard; and he had dune him nae ill, nae
+even drawn a hair frae his tail--which would have been a difficult feat,
+seeing the horse's tail was as bare as his hoof.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. ROBERT TO THE RESCUE!
+
+That Shargar was a parish scholar--which means that the parish paid his
+fees, although, indeed, they were hardly worth paying--made very little
+difference to his position amongst his school-fellows. Nor did the
+fact of his being ragged and dirty affect his social reception to his
+discomfort. But the accumulated facts of the oddity of his personal
+appearance, his supposed imbecility, and the bad character borne by his
+mother, placed him in a very unenviable relation to the tyrannical and
+vulgar-minded amongst them. Concerning his person, he was long, and,
+as his name implied, lean, with pale-red hair, reddish eyes, no visible
+eyebrows or eyelashes, and very pale face--in fact, he was half-way to
+an Albino. His arms and legs seemed of equal length, both exceedingly
+long. The handsomeness of his mother appeared only in his nose and
+mouth, which were regular and good, though expressionless; and the birth
+of his father only in his small delicate hands and feet, of which any
+girl who cared only for smallness, and heeded neither character nor
+strength, might have been proud. His feet, however, were supposed to be
+enormous, from the difficulty with which he dragged after him the huge
+shoes in which in winter they were generally encased.
+
+The imbecility, like the large feet, was only imputed. He certainly was
+not brilliant, but neither did he make a fool of himself in any of
+the few branches of learning of which the parish-scholar came in for a
+share. That which gained him the imputation was the fact that his nature
+was without a particle of the aggressive, and all its defensive of as
+purely negative a character as was possible. Had he been a dog, he
+would never have thought of doing anything for his own protection beyond
+turning up his four legs in silent appeal to the mercy of the heavens.
+He was an absolute sepulchre in the swallowing of oppression and
+ill-usage. It vanished in him. There was no echo of complaint, no murmur
+of resentment from the hollows of that soul. The blows that fell upon
+him resounded not, and no one but God remembered them.
+
+His mother made her living as she herself best knew, with occasional
+well-begrudged assistance from the parish. Her chief resource was no
+doubt begging from house to house for the handful of oatmeal which
+was the recognized, and, in the court of custom-taught conscience, the
+legalized dole upon which every beggar had a claim; and if she picked
+up at the same time a chicken, or a boy's rabbit, or any other stray
+luxury, she was only following the general rule of society, that your
+first duty is to take care of yourself. She was generally regarded as
+a gipsy, but I doubt if she had any gipsy blood in her veins. She was
+simply a tramper, with occasional fits of localization. Her worst fault
+was the way she treated her son, whom she starved apparently that she
+might continue able to beat him.
+
+The particular occasion which led to the recognition of the growing
+relation between Robert and Shargar was the following. Upon a certain
+Saturday--some sidereal power inimical to boys must have been in the
+ascendant--a Saturday of brilliant but intermittent sunshine, the white
+clouds seen from the school windows indicating by their rapid transit
+across those fields of vision that fresh breezes friendly to kites, or
+draigons, as they were called at Rothieden, were frolicking in the upper
+regions--nearly a dozen boys were kept in for not being able to pay down
+from memory the usual instalment of Shorter Catechism always due at
+the close of the week. Amongst these boys were Robert and Shargar.
+Sky-revealing windows and locked door were too painful; and in
+proportion as the feeling of having nothing to do increased, the more
+uneasy did the active element in the boys become, and the more ready
+to break out into some abnormal manifestation. Everything--sun, wind,
+clouds--was busy out of doors, and calling to them to come and join the
+fun; and activity at the same moment excited and restrained naturally
+turns to mischief. Most of them had already learned the obnoxious
+task--one quarter of an hour was enough for that--and now what should
+they do next? The eyes of three or four of the eldest of them fell
+simultaneously upon Shargar.
+
+Robert was sitting plunged in one of his day-dreams, for he, too, had
+learned his catechism, when he was roused from his reverie by a question
+from a pale-faced little boy, who looked up to him as a great authority.
+
+'What for 's 't ca'd the Shorter Carritchis, Bob?'
+
+''Cause it's no fully sae lang's the Bible,' answered Robert, without
+giving the question the consideration due to it, and was proceeding to
+turn the matter over in his mind, when the mental process was arrested
+by a shout of laughter. The other boys had tied Shargar's feet to the
+desk at which he sat--likewise his hands, at full stretch; then, having
+attached about a dozen strings to as many elf-locks of his pale-red
+hair, which was never cut or trimmed, had tied them to various pegs in
+the wall behind him, so that the poor fellow could not stir. They
+were now crushing up pieces of waste-paper, not a few leaves of stray
+school-books being regarded in that light, into bullets, dipping them in
+ink and aiming them at Shargar's face.
+
+For some time Shargar did not utter a word; and Robert, although
+somewhat indignant at the treatment he was receiving, felt as yet no
+impulse to interfere, for success was doubtful. But, indeed, he was not
+very easily roused to action of any kind; for he was as yet mostly in
+the larva-condition of character, when everything is transacted inside.
+But the fun grew more furious, and spot after spot of ink gloomed upon
+Shargar's white face. Still Robert took no notice, for they did not
+seem to be hurting him much. But when he saw the tears stealing down his
+patient cheeks, making channels through the ink which now nearly covered
+them, he could bear it no longer. He took out his knife, and under
+pretence of joining in the sport, drew near to Shargar, and with rapid
+hand cut the cords--all but those that bound his feet, which were less
+easy to reach without exposing himself defenceless.
+
+The boys of course turned upon Robert. But ere they came to more than
+abusive words a diversion took place.
+
+Mrs. Innes, the school-master's wife--a stout, kind-hearted woman,
+the fine condition of whose temperament was clearly the result of
+her physical prosperity--appeared at the door which led to the
+dwelling-house above, bearing in her hands a huge tureen of potato-soup,
+for her motherly heart could not longer endure the thought of dinnerless
+boys. Her husband being engaged at a parish meeting, she had a chance of
+interfering with success.
+
+But ere Nancy, the servant, could follow with the spoons and plates,
+Wattie Morrison had taken the tureen, and out of spite at Robert, had
+emptied its contents on the head of Shargar, who was still tied by the
+feet, with the words: 'Shargar, I anoint thee king over us, and here
+is thy crown,' giving the tureen, as he said so, a push on to his head,
+where it remained.
+
+Shargar did not move, and for one moment could not speak, but the next
+he gave a shriek that made Robert think he was far worse scalded than
+turned out to be the case. He darted to him in rage, took the tureen
+from his head, and, his blood being fairly up now, flung it with all his
+force at Morrison, and felled him to the earth. At the same moment the
+master entered by the street door and his wife by the house door,
+which was directly opposite. In the middle of the room the prisoners
+surrounded the fallen tyrant--Robert, with the red face of wrath, and
+Shargar, with a complexion the mingled result of tears, ink, and soup,
+which latter clothed him from head to foot besides, standing on the
+outskirts of the group. I need not follow the story farther. Both
+Robert and Morrison got a lickin'; and if Mr. Innes had been like some
+school-masters of those times, Shargar would not have escaped his share
+of the evil things going.
+
+From that day Robert assumed the acknowledged position of Shargar's
+defender. And if there was pride and a sense of propriety mingled with
+his advocacy of Shargar's rights, nay, even if the relation was not
+altogether free from some amount of show-off on Robert's part, I cannot
+yet help thinking that it had its share in that development of the
+character of Falconer which has chiefly attracted me to the office
+of his biographer. There may have been in it the exercise of some
+patronage; probably it was not pure from the pride of beneficence; but
+at least it was a loving patronage and a vigorous beneficence; and,
+under the reaction of these, the good which in Robert's nature was as
+yet only in a state of solution, began to crystallize into character.
+
+But the effect of the new relation was far more remarkable on Shargar.
+As incapable of self-defence as ever, he was yet in a moment roused to
+fury by any attack upon the person or the dignity of Robert: so that,
+indeed, it became a new and favourite mode of teasing Shargar to heap
+abuse, real or pretended, upon his friend. From the day when Robert thus
+espoused his part, Shargar was Robert's dog. That very evening, when she
+went to take a parting peep at the external before locking the door for
+the night, Betty found him sitting upon the door-step, only, however,
+to send him off, as she described it, 'wi' a flech [1] in 's lug (a flea
+in his ear).' For the character of the mother was always associated
+with the boy, and avenged upon him. I must, however, allow that those
+delicate, dirty fingers of his could not with safety be warranted from
+occasional picking and stealing.
+
+At this period of my story, Robert himself was rather a
+grotesque-looking animal, very tall and lanky, with especially long
+arms, which excess of length they retained after he was full-grown. In
+this respect Shargar and he were alike; but the long legs of Shargar
+were unmatched in Robert, for at this time his body was peculiarly long.
+He had large black eyes, deep sunk even then, and a Roman nose, the size
+of which in a boy of his years looked portentous. For the rest, he was
+dark-complexioned, with dark hair, destined to grow darker still, with
+hands and feet well modelled, but which would have made four feet and
+four hands such as Shargar's.
+
+When his mind was not oppressed with the consideration of any important
+metaphysical question, he learned his lessons well; when such was
+present, the Latin grammar, with all its attendant servilities, was
+driven from the presence of the lordly need. That once satisfied in
+spite of pandies and imprisonments, he returned with fresh zest, and,
+indeed, with some ephemeral ardour, to the rules of syntax or prosody,
+though the latter, in the mode in which it was then and there taught,
+was almost as useless as the task set himself by a worthy lay-preacher
+in the neighbourhood--of learning the first nine chapters of the first
+Book of the Chronicles, in atonement for having, in an evil hour of
+freedom of spirit, ventured to suggest that such lists of names, even
+although forming a portion of Holy Writ, could scarcely be reckoned of
+equally divine authority with St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. THE ANGEL UNAWARES.
+
+Although Betty seemed to hold little communication with the outer world,
+she yet contrived somehow or other to bring home what gossip was going
+to the ears of her mistress, who had very few visitors; for, while her
+neighbours held Mrs. Falconer in great and evident respect, she was not
+the sort of person to sit down and have a news with. There was a certain
+sedate self-contained dignity about her which the common mind felt to be
+chilling and repellant; and from any gossip of a personal nature--what
+Betty brought her always excepted--she would turn away, generally with
+the words, 'Hoots! I canna bide clashes.'
+
+On the evening following that of Shargar's introduction to Mrs.
+Falconer's house, Betty came home from the butcher's--for it was
+Saturday night, and she had gone to fetch the beef for their Sunday's
+broth--with the news that the people next door, that is, round the
+corner in the next street, had a visitor.
+
+The house in question had been built by Robert's father, and was,
+compared with Mrs. Falconer's one-storey house, large and handsome.
+Robert had been born, and had spent a few years of his life in it, but
+could recall nothing of the facts of those early days. Some time before
+the period at which my history commences it had passed into other hands,
+and it was now quite strange to him. It had been bought by a retired
+naval officer, who lived in it with his wife--the only Englishwoman in
+the place, until the arrival, at The Boar's Head, of the lady so much
+admired by Dooble Sanny.
+
+Robert was up-stairs when Betty emptied her news-bag, and so heard
+nothing of this bit of gossip. He had just assured Shargar that as soon
+as his grandmother was asleep he would look about for what he could
+find, and carry it up to him in the garret. As yet he had confined the
+expenditure out of Shargar's shilling to twopence.
+
+The household always retired early--earlier on Saturday night in
+preparation for the Sabbath--and by ten o'clock grannie and Betty were
+in bed. Robert, indeed, was in bed too; but he had lain down in his
+clothes, waiting for such time as might afford reasonable hope of his
+grandmother being asleep, when he might both ease Shargar's hunger and
+get to sleep himself. Several times he got up, resolved to make his
+attempt; but as often his courage failed and he lay down again, sure
+that grannie could not be asleep yet. When the clock beside him
+struck eleven, he could bear it no longer, and finally rose to do his
+endeavour.
+
+Opening the door of the closet slowly and softly, he crept upon his
+hands and knees into the middle of the parlour, feeling very much like a
+thief, as, indeed, in a measure he was, though from a blameless motive.
+But just as he had accomplished half the distance to the door, he was
+arrested and fixed with terror; for a deep sigh came from grannie's bed,
+followed by the voice of words. He thought at first that she had
+heard him, but he soon found that he was mistaken. Still, the fear of
+discovery held him there on all fours, like a chained animal. A dull red
+gleam, faint and dull, from the embers of the fire, was the sole light
+in the room. Everything so common to his eyes in the daylight seemed
+now strange and eerie in the dying coals, and at what was to the boy the
+unearthly hour of the night.
+
+He felt that he ought not to listen to grannie, but terror made him
+unable to move.
+
+'Och hone! och hone!' said grannie from the bed. 'I've a sair, sair
+hert. I've a sair hert i' my breist, O Lord! thoo knowest. My ain
+Anerew! To think o' my bairnie that I cairriet i' my ain body, that
+sookit my breists, and leuch i' my face--to think o' 'im bein' a
+reprobate! O Lord! cudna he be eleckit yet? Is there nae turnin' o' thy
+decrees? Na, na; that wadna do at a'. But while there's life there's
+houp. But wha kens whether he be alive or no? Naebody can tell. Glaidly
+wad I luik upon 's deid face gin I cud believe that his sowl wasna amang
+the lost. But eh! the torments o' that place! and the reik that gangs up
+for ever an' ever, smorin' (smothering) the stars! And my Anerew doon i'
+the hert o' 't cryin'! And me no able to win till him! O Lord! I canna
+say thy will be done. But dinna lay 't to my chairge; for gin ye was a
+mither yersel' ye wadna pit him there. O Lord! I'm verra ill-fashioned.
+I beg yer pardon. I'm near oot o' my min'. Forgie me, O Lord! for I
+hardly ken what I'm sayin'. He was my ain babe, my ain Anerew, and ye
+gae him to me yersel'. And noo he's for the finger o' scorn to pint at;
+an ootcast an' a wan'erer frae his ain country, an' daurna come
+within sicht o' 't for them 'at wad tak' the law o' 'm. An' it's a'
+drink--drink an' ill company! He wad hae dune weel eneuch gin they
+wad only hae latten him be. What for maun men be aye drink-drinkin' at
+something or ither? I never want it. Eh! gin I war as young as whan he
+was born, I wad be up an' awa' this verra nicht to luik for him. But
+it's no use me tryin' 't. O God! ance mair I pray thee to turn him frae
+the error o' 's ways afore he goes hence an' isna more. And O dinna lat
+Robert gang efter him, as he's like eneuch to do. Gie me grace to haud
+him ticht, that he may be to the praise o' thy glory for ever an' ever.
+Amen.'
+
+Whether it was that the weary woman here fell asleep, or that she
+was too exhausted for further speech, Robert heard no more, though he
+remained there frozen with horror for some minutes after his grandmother
+had ceased. This, then, was the reason why she would never speak about
+his father! She kept all her thoughts about him for the silence of the
+night, and loneliness with the God who never sleeps, but watches the
+wicked all through the dark. And his father was one of the wicked! And
+God was against him! And when he died he would go to hell! But he was
+not dead yet: Robert was sure of that. And when he grew a man, he would
+go and seek him, and beg him on his knees to repent and come back to
+God, who would forgive him then, and take him to heaven when he died.
+And there he would be good, and good people would love him.
+
+Something like this passed through the boy's mind ere he moved to creep
+from the room, for his was one of those natures which are active in the
+generation of hope. He had almost forgotten what he came there for; and
+had it not been that he had promised Shargar, he would have crept back
+to his bed and left him to bear his hunger as best he could. But now,
+first his right hand, then his left knee, like any other quadruped, he
+crawled to the door, rose only to his knees to open it, took almost a
+minute to the operation, then dropped and crawled again, till he had
+passed out, turned, and drawn the door to, leaving it slightly ajar.
+Then it struck him awfully that the same terrible passage must be gone
+through again. But he rose to his feet, for he had no shoes on, and
+there was little danger of making any noise, although it was pitch
+dark--he knew the house so well. With gathering courage, he felt his way
+to the kitchen, and there groped about; but he could find nothing beyond
+a few quarters of oat-cake, which, with a mug of water, he proceeded to
+carry up to Shargar in the garret.
+
+When he reached the kitchen door, he was struck with amazement and for
+a moment with fresh fear. A light was shining into the transe from the
+stair which went up at right angles from the end of it. He knew it could
+not be grannie, and he heard Betty snoring in her own den, which opened
+from the kitchen. He thought it must be Shargar who had grown impatient;
+but how he had got hold of a light he could not think. As soon as he
+turned the corner, however, the doubt was changed into mystery. At the
+top of the broad low stair stood a woman-form with a candle in her hand,
+gazing about her as if wondering which way to go. The light fell full
+upon her face, the beauty of which was such that, with her dress, which
+was white--being, in fact, a nightgown--and her hair, which was hanging
+loose about her shoulders and down to her waist, it led Robert at once
+to the conclusion (his reasoning faculties already shaken by the events
+of the night) that she was an angel come down to comfort his grannie;
+and he kneeled involuntarily at the foot of the stair, and gazed up at
+her, with the cakes in one hand, and the mug of water in the other, like
+a meat-and-drink offering. Whether he had closed his eyes or bowed his
+head, he could not say; but he became suddenly aware that the angel had
+vanished--he knew not when, how, or whither. This for a time confirmed
+his assurance that it was an angel. And although he was undeceived
+before long, the impression made upon him that night was never effaced.
+But, indeed, whatever Falconer heard or saw was something more to him
+than it would have been to anybody else.
+
+Elated, though awed, by the vision, he felt his way up the stair in
+the new darkness, as if walking in a holy dream, trod as if upon sacred
+ground as he crossed the landing where the angel had stood--went up and
+up, and found Shargar wide awake with expectant hunger. He, too, had
+caught a glimmer of the light. But Robert did not tell him what he had
+seen. That was too sacred a subject to enter upon with Shargar, and he
+was intent enough upon his supper not to be inquisitive.
+
+Robert left him to finish it at his leisure, and returned to cross his
+grandmother's room once more, half expecting to find the angel standing
+by her bedside. But all was dark and still. Creeping back as he had
+come, he heard her quiet, though deep, breathing, and his mind was at
+ease about her for the night. What if the angel he had surprised had
+only come to appear to grannie in her sleep? Why not? There were such
+stories in the Bible, and grannie was certainly as good as some of the
+people in the Bible that saw angels--Sarah, for instance. And if the
+angels came to see grannie, why should they not have some care over his
+father as well? It might be--who could tell?
+
+It is perhaps necessary to explain Robert's vision. The angel was the
+owner of the boxes he had seen at The Boar's Head. Looking around her
+room before going to bed, she had seen a trap in the floor near the
+wall, and raising it, had discovered a few steps of a stair leading down
+to a door. Curiosity naturally led her to examine it. The key was in the
+lock. It opened outwards, and there she found herself, to her surprise,
+in the heart of another dwelling, of lowlier aspect. She never saw
+Robert; for while he approached with shoeless feet, she had been
+glancing through the open door of the gable-room, and when he knelt, the
+light which she held in her hand had, I presume, hidden him from her.
+He, on his part, had not observed that the moveless door stood open at
+last.
+
+I have already said that the house adjoining had been built by Robert's
+father. The lady's room was that which he had occupied with his wife,
+and in it Robert had been born. The door, with its trap-stair, was
+a natural invention for uniting the levels of the two houses, and a
+desirable one in not a few of the forms which the weather assumed in
+that region. When the larger house passed into other hands, it had
+never entered the minds of the simple people who occupied the contiguous
+dwellings, to build up the doorway between.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. A DISCOVERY.
+
+The friendship of Robert had gained Shargar the favourable notice of
+others of the school-public. These were chiefly of those who came from
+the country, ready to follow an example set them by a town boy. When his
+desertion was known, moved both by their compassion for him, and their
+respect for Robert, they began to give him some portion of the dinner
+they brought with them; and never in his life had Shargar fared so well
+as for the first week after he had been cast upon the world. But in
+proportion as their interest faded with the novelty, so their appetites
+reasserted former claims of use and wont, and Shargar began once more
+to feel the pangs of hunger. For all that Robert could manage to procure
+for him without attracting the attention he was so anxious to avoid,
+was little more than sufficient to keep his hunger alive, Shargar
+being gifted with a great appetite, and Robert having no allowance of
+pocket-money from his grandmother. The threepence he had been able to
+spend on him were what remained of sixpence Mr. Innes had given him
+for an exercise which he wrote in blank verse instead of in prose--an
+achievement of which the school-master was proud, both from his
+reverence for Milton, and from his inability to compose a metrical line
+himself. And how and when he should ever possess another penny was even
+unimaginable. Shargar's shilling was likewise spent. So Robert could but
+go on pocketing instead of eating all that he dared, watching anxiously
+for opportunity of evading the eyes of his grandmother. On her dimness
+of sight, however, he depended too confidently after all; for either she
+was not so blind as he thought she was, or she made up for the defect of
+her vision by the keenness of her observation. She saw enough to cause
+her considerable annoyance, though it suggested nothing inconsistent
+with rectitude on the part of the boy, further than that there was
+something underhand going on. One supposition after another arose in
+the old lady's brain, and one after another was dismissed as improbable.
+First, she tried to persuade herself that he wanted to take the
+provisions to school with him, and eat them there--a proceeding of which
+she certainly did not approve, but for the reproof of which she was
+unwilling to betray the loopholes of her eyes. Next she concluded, for
+half a day, that he must have a pair of rabbits hidden away in some nook
+or other--possibly in the little strip of garden belonging to the house.
+And so conjecture followed conjecture for a whole week, during which,
+strange to say, not even Betty knew that Shargar slept in the house. For
+so careful and watchful were the two boys, that although she could not
+help suspecting something from the expression and behaviour of Robert,
+what that something might be she could not imagine; nor had she and her
+mistress as yet exchanged confidences on the subject. Her observation
+coincided with that of her mistress as to the disappearance of odds and
+ends of eatables--potatoes, cold porridge, bits of oat-cake; and even,
+on one occasion, when Shargar happened to be especially ravenous, a
+yellow, or cured and half-dried, haddock, which the lad devoured raw,
+vanished from her domain. He went to school in the morning smelling so
+strong in consequence, that they told him he must have been passing the
+night in Scroggie's cart, and not on his horse's back this time.
+
+The boys kept their secret well.
+
+One evening, towards the end of the week, Robert, after seeing Shargar
+disposed of for the night, proceeded to carry out a project which
+had grown in his brain within the last two days in consequence of an
+occurrence with which his relation to Shargar had had something to do.
+It was this:
+
+The housing of Shargar in the garret had led Robert to make a close
+acquaintance with the place. He was familiar with all the outs and
+ins of the little room which he considered his own, for that was a
+civilized, being a plastered, ceiled, and comparatively well-lighted
+little room, but not with the other, which was three times its size,
+very badly lighted, and showing the naked couples from roof-tree to
+floor. Besides, it contained no end of dark corners, with which his
+childish imagination had associated undefined horrors, assuming now one
+shape, now another. Also there were several closets in it, constructed
+in the angles of the place, and several chests--two of which he had
+ventured to peep into. But although he had found them filled, not with
+bones, as he had expected, but one with papers, and one with garments,
+he had yet dared to carry his researches no further. One evening,
+however, when Betty was out, and he had got hold of her candle, and gone
+up to keep Shargar company for a few minutes, a sudden impulse seized
+him to have a peep into all the closets. One of them he knew a little
+about, as containing, amongst other things, his father's coat with
+the gilt buttons, and his great-grandfather's kilt, as well as other
+garments useful to Shargar: now he would see what was in the rest. He
+did not find anything very interesting, however, till he arrived at
+the last. Out of it he drew a long queer-shaped box into the light of
+Betty's dip.
+
+'Luik here, Shargar!' he said under his breath, for they never dared to
+speak aloud in these precincts--'luik here! What can there be in this
+box? Is't a bairnie's coffin, duv ye think? Luik at it.'
+
+In this case Shargar, having roamed the country a good deal more than
+Robert, and having been present at some merry-makings with his mother,
+of which there were comparatively few in that country-side, was better
+informed than his friend.
+
+'Eh! Bob, duvna ye ken what that is? I thocht ye kent a' thing. That's a
+fiddle.'
+
+'That's buff an' styte (stuff and nonsense), Shargar. Do ye think I
+dinna ken a fiddle whan I see ane, wi' its guts ootside o' 'ts wame, an'
+the thoomacks to screw them up wi' an' gar't skirl?'
+
+'Buff an' styte yersel'!' cried Shargar, in indignation, from the bed.
+'Gie's a haud o' 't.'
+
+Robert handed him the case. Shargar undid the hooks in a moment, and
+revealed the creature lying in its shell like a boiled bivalve.
+
+'I tellt ye sae!' he exclaimed triumphantly. 'Maybe ye'll lippen to me
+(trust me) neist time.'
+
+'An' I tellt you,' retorted Robert, with an equivocation altogether
+unworthy of his growing honesty. 'I was cocksure that cudna be a fiddle.
+There's the fiddle i' the hert o' 't! Losh! I min' noo. It maun be my
+grandfather's fiddle 'at I hae heard tell o'.'
+
+'No to ken a fiddle-case!' reflected Shargar, with as much of contempt
+as it was possible for him to show.
+
+'I tell ye what, Shargar,' returned Robert, indignantly; 'ye may ken the
+box o' a fiddle better nor I do, but de'il hae me gin I dinna ken the
+fiddle itsel' raither better nor ye do in a fortnicht frae this time. I
+s' tak' it to Dooble Sanny; he can play the fiddle fine. An' I'll play
+'t too, or the de'il s' be in't.'
+
+'Eh, man, that 'll be gran'!' cried Shargar, incapable of jealousy. 'We
+can gang to a' the markets thegither and gaither baubees (halfpence).'
+
+To this anticipation Robert returned no reply, for, hearing Betty come
+in, he judged it time to restore the violin to its case, and Betty's
+candle to the kitchen, lest she should invade the upper regions in
+search of it. But that very night he managed to have an interview with
+Dooble Sanny, the shoemaker, and it was arranged between them that
+Robert should bring his violin on the evening at which my story has now
+arrived.
+
+Whatever motive he had for seeking to commence the study of music, it
+holds even in more important matters that, if the thing pursued be
+good, there is a hope of the pursuit purifying the motive. And Robert no
+sooner heard the fiddle utter a few mournful sounds in the hands of the
+soutar, who was no contemptible performer, than he longed to establish
+such a relation between himself and the strange instrument, that, dumb
+and deaf as it had been to him hitherto, it would respond to his touch
+also, and tell him the secrets of its queerly-twisted skull, full of
+sweet sounds instead of brains. From that moment he would be a musician
+for music's own sake, and forgot utterly what had appeared to
+him, though I doubt if it was, the sole motive of his desire to
+learn--namely, the necessity of retaining his superiority over Shargar.
+
+What added considerably to the excitement of his feelings on the
+occasion, was the expression of reverence, almost of awe, with which
+the shoemaker took the instrument from its case, and the tenderness with
+which he handled it. The fact was that he had not had a violin in his
+hands for nearly a year, having been compelled to pawn his own in order
+to alleviate the sickness brought on his wife by his own ill-treatment
+of her, once that he came home drunk from a wedding. It was strange to
+think that such dirty hands should be able to bring such sounds out of
+the instrument the moment he got it safely cuddled under his cheek. So
+dirty were they, that it was said Dooble Sanny never required to carry
+any rosin with him for fiddler's need, his own fingers having always
+enough upon them for one bow at least. Yet the points of those fingers
+never lost the delicacy of their touch. Some people thought this was
+in virtue of their being washed only once a week--a custom Alexander
+justified on the ground that, in a trade like his, it was of no use to
+wash oftener, for he would be just as dirty again before night.
+
+The moment he began to play, the face of the soutar grew ecstatic. He
+stopped at the very first note, notwithstanding, let fall his arms, the
+one with the bow, the other with the violin, at his sides, and said,
+with a deep-drawn respiration and lengthened utterance:
+
+'Eh!'
+
+Then after a pause, during which he stood motionless:
+
+'The crater maun be a Cry Moany! Hear till her!' he added, drawing
+another long note.
+
+Then, after another pause:
+
+'She's a Straddle Vawrious at least! Hear till her. I never had sic a
+combination o' timmer and catgut atween my cleuks (claws) afore.'
+
+As to its being a Stradivarius, or even a Cremona at all, the testimony
+of Dooble Sanny was not worth much on the point. But the shoemaker's
+admiration roused in the boy's mind a reverence for the individual
+instrument which he never lost.
+
+From that day the two were friends.
+
+Suddenly the soutar started off at full speed in a strathspey, which was
+soon lost in the wail of a Highland psalm-tune, giving place in its turn
+to 'Sic a wife as Willie had!' And on he went without pause, till Robert
+dared not stop any longer. The fiddle had bewitched the fiddler.
+
+'Come as aften 's ye like, Robert, gin ye fess this leddy wi' ye,' said
+the soutar.
+
+And he stroked the back of the violin tenderly with his open palm.
+
+'But wad ye hae ony objection to lat it lie aside ye, and lat me come
+whan I can?'
+
+'Objection, laddie? I wad as sune objeck to lattin' my ain wife lie
+aside me.'
+
+'Ay,' said Robert, seized with some anxiety about the violin as he
+remembered the fate of the wife, 'but ye ken Elspet comes aff a' the
+waur sometimes.'
+
+Softened by the proximity of the wonderful violin, and stung afresh by
+the boy's words as his conscience had often stung him before, for he
+loved his wife dearly save when the demon of drink possessed him,
+the tears rose in Elshender's eyes. He held out the violin to Robert,
+saying, with unsteady voice:
+
+'Hae, tak her awa'. I dinna deserve to hae sic a thing i' my hoose. But
+hear me, Robert, and lat hearin' be believin'. I never was sae drunk but
+I cud tune my fiddle. Mair by token, ance they fand me lyin' o' my back
+i' the Corrie, an' the watter, they say, was ower a' but the mou' o'
+me; but I was haudin' my fiddle up abune my heid, and de'il a spark o'
+watter was upo' her.'
+
+'It's a pity yer wife wasna yer fiddle, than, Sanny,' said Robert, with
+more presumption than wit.
+
+''Deed ye're i' the richt, there, Robert. Hae, tak' yer fiddle.'
+
+''Deed no,' returned Robert. 'I maun jist lippen (trust) to ye, Sanders.
+I canna bide langer the nicht; but maybe ye'll tell me hoo to haud her
+the neist time 'at I come--will ye?'
+
+'That I wull, Robert, come whan ye like. An' gin ye come o' ane 'at
+cud play this fiddle as this fiddle deserves to be playt, ye'll do me
+credit.'
+
+'Ye min' what that sumph Lumley said to me the ither nicht, Sanders,
+aboot my grandfather?'
+
+'Ay, weel eneuch. A dish o' drucken havers!'
+
+'It was true eneuch aboot my great-grandfather, though.'
+
+'No! Was't railly?'
+
+'Ay. He was the best piper in 's regiment at Culloden. Gin they had a'
+fouchten as he pipit, there wad hae been anither tale to tell. And he
+was toon-piper forby, jist like you, Sanders, efter they took frae him
+a' 'at he had.'
+
+'Na! heard ye ever the like o' that! Weel, wha wad hae thocht it? Faith!
+we maun hae you fiddle as weel as yer lucky-daiddy pipit.--But here's
+the King o' Bashan comin' efter his butes, an' them no half dune yet!'
+exclaimed Dooble Sanny, settling in haste to his awl and his lingel (Fr.
+ligneul). 'He'll be roarin' mair like a bull o' the country than the
+king o' 't.'
+
+As Robert departed, Peter Ogg came in, and as he passed the window, he
+heard the shoemaker averring:
+
+'I haena risen frae my stule sin' ane o'clock; but there's a sicht to be
+dune to them, Mr. Ogg.'
+
+Indeed, Alexander ab Alexandro, as Mr. Innes facetiously styled him, was
+in more ways than one worthy of the name of Dooble. There seemed to be
+two natures in the man, which all his music had not yet been able to
+blend.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. ANOTHER DISCOVERY IN THE GARRET.
+
+Little did Robert dream of the reception that awaited him at home.
+Almost as soon as he had left the house, the following events began to
+take place.
+
+The mistress's bell rang, and Betty 'gaed benn the hoose to see what she
+cud be wantin',' whereupon a conversation ensued.
+
+'Wha was that at the door, Betty?' asked Mrs. Falconer; for Robert had
+not shut the door so carefully as he ought, seeing that the deafness of
+his grandmother was of much the same faculty as her blindness.
+
+Had Robert not had a hold of Betty by the forelock of her years, he
+would have been unable to steal any liberty at all. Still Betty had a
+conscience, and although she would not offend Robert if she could help
+it, yet she would not lie.
+
+''Deed, mem, I canna jist distinckly say 'at I heard the door,' she
+answered.
+
+'Whaur's Robert?' was her next question.
+
+'He's generally up the stair aboot this hoor, mem--that is, whan he's no
+i' the parlour at 's lessons.'
+
+'What gangs he sae muckle up the stair for, Betty, do ye ken? It's
+something by ordinar' wi' 'm.'
+
+''Deed I dinna ken, mem. I never tuik it into my heid to gang
+considerin' aboot it. He'll hae some ploy o' 's ain, nae doobt. Laddies
+will be laddies, ye ken, mem.'
+
+'I doobt, Betty, ye'll be aidin' an' abettin'. An' it disna become yer
+years, Betty.'
+
+'My years are no to fin' faut wi', mem. They're weel eneuch.'
+
+'That's naething to the pint, Betty. What's the laddie aboot?'
+
+'Do ye mean whan he gangs up the stair, mem?'
+
+'Ay. Ye ken weel eneuch what I mean.'
+
+'Weel, mem, I tell ye I dinna ken. An' ye never heard me tell ye a lee
+sin' ever I was i' yer service, mem.'
+
+'Na, nae doonricht. Ye gang aboot it an' aboot it, an' at last ye come
+sae near leein' that gin ye spak anither word, ye wad be at it; and
+it jist fleys (frights) me frae speirin' ae ither question at ye.
+An' that's hoo ye win oot o' 't. But noo 'at it's aboot my ain oye
+(grandson), I'm no gaein' to tyne (lose) him to save a woman o' your
+years, wha oucht to ken better; an sae I'll speir at ye, though ye suld
+be driven to lee like Sawtan himsel'.--What's he aboot whan he gangs up
+the stair? Noo!'
+
+'Weel, as sure's deith, I dinna ken. Ye drive me to sweirin', mem, an'
+no to leein'.'
+
+'I carena. Hae ye no idea aboot it, than, Betty?'
+
+'Weel, mem, I think sometimes he canna be weel, and maun hae a tod (fox)
+in 's stamack, or something o' that nater. For what he eats is awfu'.
+An' I think whiles he jist gangs up the stair to eat at 's ain wull.'
+
+'That jumps wi' my ain observations, Betty. Do ye think he micht hae a
+rabbit, or maybe a pair o' them, in some boxie i' the garret, noo?'
+
+'And what for no, gin he had, mem?'
+
+'What for no? Nesty stinkin' things! But that's no the pint. I aye hae
+to haud ye to the pint, Betty. The pint is, whether he has rabbits or
+no?'
+
+'Or guinea-pigs,' suggested Betty.
+
+'Weel.'
+
+'Or maybe a pup or twa. Or I kent a laddie ance 'at keepit a haill
+faimily o' kittlins. Or maybe he micht hae a bit lammie. There was an
+uncle o' min' ain--'
+
+'Haud yer tongue, Betty! Ye hae ower muckle to say for a' the sense
+there's intil 't.'
+
+'Weel, mem, ye speirt questions at me.'
+
+'Weel, I hae had eneuch o' yer answers, Betty. Gang and tell Robert to
+come here direckly.'
+
+Betty went, knowing perfectly that Robert had gone out, and returned
+with the information. Her mistress searched her face with a keen eye.
+
+'That maun hae been himsel' efter a' whan ye thocht ye hard the door
+gang,' said Betty.
+
+'It's a strange thing that I suld hear him benn here wi' the door
+steekit, an' your door open at the verra door-cheek o' the ither, an'
+you no hear him, Betty. And me sae deif as weel!'
+
+''Deed, mem,' retorted Betty, losing her temper a little, 'I can be as
+deif 's ither fowk mysel' whiles.'
+
+When Betty grew angry, Mrs. Falconer invariably grew calm, or, at least,
+put her temper out of sight. She was silent now, and continued silent
+till Betty moved to return to her kitchen, when she said, in a tone of
+one who had just arrived at an important resolution:
+
+'Betty, we'll jist awa' up the stair an' luik.'
+
+'Weel, mem, I hae nae objections.'
+
+'Nae objections! What for suld you or ony ither body hae ony objections
+to me gaein' whaur I like i' my ain hoose? Umph!' exclaimed Mrs.
+Falconer, turning and facing her maid.
+
+'In coorse, mem. I only meant I had nae objections to gang wi' ye.'
+
+'And what for suld you or ony ither woman that I paid twa pun' five i'
+the half-year till, daur to hae objections to gaein' whaur I wantit ye
+to gang i' my ain hoose?'
+
+'Hoot, mem! it was but a slip o' the tongue--naething mair.'
+
+'Slip me nae sic slips, or ye'll come by a fa' at last, I doobt, Betty,'
+concluded Mrs. Falconer, in a mollified tone, as she turned and led the
+way from the room.
+
+They got a candle in the kitchen and proceeded up-stairs, Mrs. Falconer
+still leading, and Betty following. They did not even look into the
+ga'le-room, not doubting that the dignity of the best bed-room was in no
+danger of being violated even by Robert, but took their way upwards to
+the room in which he kept his school-books--almost the only articles of
+property which the boy possessed. Here they found nothing suspicious.
+All was even in the best possible order--not a very wonderful fact,
+seeing a few books and a slate were the only things there besides the
+papers on the shelves.
+
+What the feelings of Shargar must have been when he heard the steps and
+voices, and saw the light approaching his place of refuge, we will not
+change our point of view to inquire. He certainly was as little to
+be envied at that moment as at any moment during the whole of his
+existence.
+
+The first sense Mrs. Falconer made use of in the search after possible
+animals lay in her nose. She kept snuffing constantly, but, beyond
+the usual musty smell of neglected apartments, had as yet discovered
+nothing. The moment she entered the upper garret, however--
+
+'There's an ill-faured smell here, Betty,' she said, believing that they
+had at last found the trail of the mystery; 'but it's no like the smell
+o' rabbits. Jist luik i' the nuik there ahin' the door.'
+
+'There's naething here,' responded Betty.
+
+'Roon the en' o' that kist there. I s' luik into the press.'
+
+As Betty rose from her search behind the chest and turned towards her
+mistress, her eyes crossed the cavernous opening of the bed. There, to
+her horror, she beheld a face like that of a galvanised corpse staring
+at her from the darkness. Shargar was in a sitting posture, paralysed
+with terror, waiting, like a fascinated bird, till Mrs. Falconer
+and Betty should make the final spring upon him, and do whatever was
+equivalent to devouring him upon the spot. He had sat up to listen to
+the noise of their ascending footsteps, and fear had so overmastered
+him, that he either could not, or forgot that he could lie down and
+cover his head with some of the many garments scattered around him.
+
+'I didna say whusky, did I?' he kept repeating to himself, in utter
+imbecility of fear.
+
+'The Lord preserve 's!' exclaimed Betty, the moment she could speak; for
+during the first few seconds, having caught the infection of Shargar's
+expression, she stood equally paralysed. 'The Lord preserve 's!' she
+repeated.
+
+'Ance is eneuch,' said Mrs. Falconer, sharply, turning round to see what
+the cause of Betty's ejaculation might be.
+
+I have said that she was dim-sighted. The candle they had was little
+better than a penny dip. The bed was darker than the rest of the room.
+Shargar's face had none of the more distinctive characteristics of
+manhood upon it.
+
+'Gude preserve 's!' exclaimed Mrs. Falconer in her turn: 'it's a
+wumman.'
+
+Poor deluded Shargar, thinking himself safer under any form than that
+which he actually bore, attempted no protest against the mistake. But,
+indeed, he was incapable of speech. The two women flew upon him to drag
+him out of bed. Then first recovering his powers of motion, he sprung up
+in an agony of terror, and darted out between them, overturning Betty in
+his course.
+
+'Ye rouch limmer!' cried Betty, from the floor. 'Ye lang-leggit jaud!'
+she added, as she rose--and at the same moment Shargar banged the
+street-door behind him in his terror--'I wat ye dinna carry yer coats
+ower syde (too long)!'
+
+For Shargar, having discovered that the way to get the most warmth from
+Robert's great-grandfather's kilt was to wear it in the manner for which
+it had been fabricated, was in the habit of fastening it round his waist
+before he got into bed; and the eye of Betty, as she fell, had caught
+the swing of this portion of his attire.
+
+But poor Mrs. Falconer, with sunken head, walked out of the garret in
+the silence of despair. She went slowly down the steep stair, supporting
+herself against the wall, her round-toed shoes creaking solemnly as she
+went, took refuge in the ga'le-room, and burst into a violent fit of
+weeping. For such depravity she was not prepared. What a terrible curse
+hung over her family! Surely they were all reprobate from the womb, not
+one elected for salvation from the guilt of Adam's fall, and therefore
+abandoned to Satan as his natural prey, to be led captive of him at his
+will. She threw herself on her knees at the side of the bed, and prayed
+heart-brokenly. Betty heard her as she limped past the door on her way
+back to her kitchen.
+
+Meantime Shargar had rushed across the next street on his bare feet
+into the Crookit Wynd, terrifying poor old Kirstan Peerie, the divisions
+betwixt the compartments of whose memory had broken down, into the
+exclamation to her next neighbour, Tam Rhin, with whom she was trying to
+gossip:
+
+'Eh, Tammas! that'll be ane o' the slauchtert at Culloden.'
+
+He never stopped till he reached his mother's deserted abode--strange
+instinct! There he ran to earth like a hunted fox. Rushing at the door,
+forgetful of everything but refuge, he found it unlocked, and closing it
+behind him, stood panting like the hart that has found the water-brooks.
+The owner had looked in one day to see whether the place was worth
+repairing, for it was a mere outhouse, and had forgotten to turn the key
+when he left it. Poor Shargar! Was it more or less of a refuge that
+the mother that bore him was not there either to curse or welcome his
+return? Less--if we may judge from a remark he once made in my hearing
+many long years after:
+
+'For, ye see,' he said, 'a mither's a mither, be she the verra de'il.'
+
+Searching about in the dark, he found the one article unsold by the
+landlord, a stool, with but two of its natural three legs. On this he
+balanced himself and waited--simply for what Robert would do; for his
+faith in Robert was unbounded, and he had no other hope on earth.
+But Shargar was not miserable. In that wretched hovel, his bare feet
+clasping the clay floor in constant search of a wavering equilibrium,
+with pitch darkness around him, and incapable of the simplest
+philosophical or religious reflection, he yet found life good. For it
+had interest. Nay, more, it had hope. I doubt, however, whether there is
+any interest at all without hope.
+
+While he sat there, Robert, thinking him snug in the garret, was walking
+quietly home from the shoemaker's; and his first impulse on entering was
+to run up and recount the particulars of his interview with Alexander.
+Arrived in the dark garret, he called Shargar, as usual, in a
+whisper--received no reply--thought he was asleep--called louder (for
+he had had a penny from his grandmother that day for bringing home
+two pails of water for Betty, and had just spent it upon a loaf for
+him)--but no Shargar replied. Thereupon he went to the bed to lay hold
+of him and shake him. But his searching hands found no Shargar. Becoming
+alarmed, he ran down-stairs to beg a light from Betty.
+
+When he reached the kitchen, he found Betty's nose as much in the air
+as its construction would permit. For a hook-nosed animal, she certainly
+was the most harmless and ovine creature in the world, but this was a
+case in which feminine modesty was both concerned and aggrieved. She
+showed her resentment no further, however, than by simply returning no
+answer in syllable, or sound, or motion, to Robert's request. She was
+washing up the tea-things, and went on with her work as if she had been
+in absolute solitude, saving that her countenance could hardly have kept
+up that expression of injured dignity had such been the case. Robert
+plainly saw, to his great concern, that his secret had been discovered
+in his absence, and that Shargar had been expelled with contumely.
+But, with an instinct of facing the worst at once which accompanied him
+through life, he went straight to his grandmother's parlour.
+
+'Well, grandmamma,' he said, trying to speak as cheerfully as he could.
+
+Grannie's prayers had softened her a little, else she would have been
+as silent as Betty; for it was from her mistress that Betty had learned
+this mode of torturing a criminal. So she was just able to return his
+greeting in the words, 'Weel, Robert,' pronounced in a finality of tone
+that indicated she had done her utmost, and had nothing to add.
+
+'Here's a browst (brewage)!' thought Robert to himself; and, still on
+the principle of flying at the first of mischief he saw--the best mode
+of meeting it, no doubt--addressed his grandmother at once. The effort
+necessary gave a tone of defiance to his words.
+
+'What for willna ye speik to me, grannie?' he said. 'I'm no a haithen,
+nor yet a papist.'
+
+'Ye're waur nor baith in ane, Robert.'
+
+'Hoots! ye winna say baith, grannie,' returned Robert, who, even at the
+age of fourteen, when once compelled to assert himself, assumed a modest
+superiority.
+
+'Nane o' sic impidence!' retorted Mrs. Falconer. 'I wonner whaur ye
+learn that. But it's nae wonner. Evil communications corrupt gude
+mainners. Ye're a lost prodigal, Robert, like yer father afore ye. I hae
+jist been sittin' here thinkin' wi' mysel' whether it wadna be better
+for baith o' 's to lat ye gang an' reap the fruit o' yer doin's at ance;
+for the hard ways is the best road for transgressors. I'm no bund to
+keep ye.'
+
+'Weel, weel, I s' awa' to Shargar. Him and me 'ill haud on thegither
+better nor you an' me, grannie. He's a puir cratur, but he can stick
+till a body.'
+
+'What are ye haverin' aboot Shargar for, ye heepocreet loon? Ye'll no
+gang to Shargar, I s' warran'! Ye'll be efter that vile limmer that's
+turnt my honest hoose intil a sty this last fortnicht.'
+
+'Grannie, I dinna ken what ye mean.'
+
+'She kens, than. I sent her aff like ane o' Samson's foxes, wi' a
+firebrand at her tail. It's a pity it wasna tied atween the twa o' ye.'
+
+'Preserve 's, grannie! Is't possible ye hae ta'en Shargar for ane o'
+wumman-kin'?'
+
+'I ken naething aboot Shargar, I tell ye. I ken that Betty an' me tuik
+an ill-faured dame i' the bed i' the garret.'
+
+'Cud it be his mither?' thought Robert in bewilderment; but he recovered
+himself in a moment, and answered,
+
+'Shargar may be a quean efter a', for onything 'at I ken to the
+contrairy; but I aye tuik him for a loon. Faith, sic a quean as he'd
+mak!'
+
+And careless to resist the ludicrousness of the idea, he burst into a
+loud fit of laughter, which did more to reassure his grannie than any
+amount of protestation could have done, however she pretended to take
+offence at his ill-timed merriment.
+
+Seeing his grandmother staggered, Robert gathered courage to assume the
+offensive.
+
+'But, granny! hoo ever Betty, no to say you, cud hae driven oot a puir
+half-stervit cratur like Shargar, even supposin' he oucht to hae been
+in coaties, and no in troosers--and the mither o' him run awa' an' left
+him--it's mair nor I can unnerstan.' I misdoobt me sair but he's gane
+and droont himsel'.'
+
+Robert knew well enough that Shargar would not drown himself without at
+least bidding him good-bye; but he knew too that his grandmother could
+be wrought upon. Her conscience was more tender than her feelings; and
+this peculiarity occasioned part of the mutual non-understanding rather
+than misunderstanding between her grandson and herself. The first
+relation she bore to most that came near her was one of severity and
+rebuke; but underneath her cold outside lay a warm heart, to which
+conscience acted the part of a somewhat capricious stoker, now quenching
+its heat with the cold water of duty, now stirring it up with the poker
+of reproach, and ever treating it as an inferior and a slave. But her
+conscience was, on the whole, a better friend to her race than her
+heart; and, indeed, the conscience is always a better friend than a
+heart whose motions are undirected by it. From Falconer's account of
+her, however, I cannot help thinking that she not unfrequently took
+refuge in severity of tone and manner from the threatened ebullition
+of a feeling which she could not otherwise control, and which she was
+ashamed to manifest. Possibly conscience had spoken more and more gently
+as its behests were more and more readily obeyed, until the heart began
+to gather courage, and at last, as in many old people, took the upper
+hand, which was outwardly inconvenient to one of Mrs. Falconer's
+temperament. Hence, in doing the kindest thing in the world, she would
+speak in a tone of command, even of rebuke, as if she were compelling
+the performance of the most unpleasant duty in the person who received
+the kindness. But the human heart is hard to analyze, and, indeed, will
+not submit quietly to the operation, however gently performed. Nor is
+the result at all easy to put into words. It is best shown in actions.
+
+Again, it may appear rather strange that Robert should be able to talk
+in such an easy manner to his grandmother, seeing he had been guilty
+of concealment, if not of deception. But she had never been so actively
+severe towards Robert as she had been towards her own children. To him
+she was wonderfully gentle for her nature, and sought to exercise the
+saving harshness which she still believed necessary, solely in keeping
+from him every enjoyment of life which the narrowest theories as to
+the rule and will of God could set down as worldly. Frivolity, of
+which there was little in this sober boy, was in her eyes a vice; loud
+laughter almost a crime; cards, and novelles, as she called them, were
+such in her estimation, as to be beyond my powers of characterization.
+Her commonest injunction was, 'Noo be douce,'--that is sober--uttered
+to the soberest boy she could ever have known. But Robert was a
+large-hearted boy, else this life would never have had to be written;
+and so, through all this, his deepest nature came into unconscious
+contact with that of his noble old grandmother. There was nothing small
+about either of them. Hence Robert was not afraid of her. He had got
+more of her nature in him than of her son's. She and his own mother had
+more share in him than his father, though from him he inherited good
+qualities likewise.
+
+He had concealed his doings with Shargar simply because he believed they
+could not be done if his grandmother knew of his plans. Herein he did
+her less than justice. But so unpleasant was concealment to his nature,
+and so much did the dread of discovery press upon him, that the moment
+he saw the thing had come out into the daylight of her knowledge, such a
+reaction of relief took place as, operating along with his deep natural
+humour and the comical circumstance of the case, gave him an ease and
+freedom of communication which he had never before enjoyed with her.
+Likewise there was a certain courage in the boy which, if his own
+natural disposition had not been so quiet that he felt the negations
+of her rule the less, might have resulted in underhand doings of a very
+different kind, possibly, from those of benevolence.
+
+He must have been a strange being to look at, I always think, at this
+point of his development, with his huge nose, his black eyes, his lanky
+figure, and his sober countenance, on which a smile was rarely visible,
+but from which burst occasional guffaws of laughter.
+
+At the words 'droont himsel',' Mrs. Falconer started.
+
+'Rin, laddie, rin,' she said, 'an' fess him back direckly! Betty! Betty!
+gang wi' Robert and help him to luik for Shargar. Ye auld, blin', doited
+body, 'at says ye can see, and canna tell a lad frae a lass!'
+
+'Na, na, grannie. I'm no gaein' oot wi' a dame like her trailin' at
+my fut. She wad be a sair hinnerance to me. Gin Shargar be to be
+gotten--that is, gin he be in life--I s' get him wantin' Betty. And gin
+ye dinna ken him for the crater ye fand i' the garret, he maun be sair
+changed sin' I left him there.'
+
+'Weel, weel, Robert, gang yer wa's. But gin ye be deceivin' me, may the
+Lord--forgie ye, Robert, for sair ye'll need it.'
+
+'Nae fear o' that, grannie,' returned Robert, from the street door, and
+vanished.
+
+Mrs. Falconer stalked--No, I will not use that word of the gait of a
+woman like my friend's grandmother. 'Stately stept she butt the hoose'
+to Betty. She felt strangely soft at the heart, Robert not being yet
+proved a reprobate; but she was not therefore prepared to drop one atom
+of the dignity of her relation to her servant.
+
+'Betty,' she said, 'ye hae made a mistak.'
+
+'What's that, mem?' returned Betty.
+
+'It wasna a lass ava; it was that crater Shargar.'
+
+'Ye said it was a lass yersel' first, mem.'
+
+'Ye ken weel eneuch that I'm short sichtit, an' hae been frae the day o'
+my birth.'
+
+'I'm no auld eneuch to min' upo' that, mem,' returned Betty
+revengefully, but in an undertone, as if she did not intend her mistress
+to hear. And although she heard well enough, her mistress adopted
+the subterfuge. 'But I'll sweir the crater I saw was in cwytes
+(petticoats).'
+
+'Sweir not at all, Betty. Ye hae made a mistak ony gait.'
+
+'Wha says that, mem?'
+
+'Robert.'
+
+'Aweel, gin he be tellin' the trowth--'
+
+'Daur ye mint (insinuate) to me that a son o' mine wad tell onything but
+the trowth?'
+
+'Na, na, mem. But gin that wasna a quean, ye canna deny but she luikit
+unco like ane, and no a blate (bashful) ane eyther.'
+
+'Gin he was a loon, he wadna luik like a blate lass, ony gait, Betty.
+And there ye're wrang.'
+
+'Weel, weel, mem, hae 't yer ain gait,' muttered Betty.
+
+'I wull hae 't my ain gait,' retorted her mistress, 'because it's the
+richt gait, Betty. An' noo ye maun jist gang up the stair, an' get the
+place cleant oot an' put in order.'
+
+'I wull do that, mem.'
+
+'Ay wull ye. An' luik weel aboot, Betty, you that can see sae weel, in
+case there suld be ony cattle aboot; for he's nane o' the cleanest, yon
+dame!'
+
+'I wull do that, mem.'
+
+'An' gang direckly, afore he comes back.'
+
+'Wha comes back?'
+
+'Robert, of course.'
+
+'What for that?'
+
+''Cause he's comin' wi' 'im.'
+
+'What he 's comin' wi' 'im?'
+
+'Ca' 't she, gin ye like. It's Shargar.'
+
+'Wha says that?' exclaimed Betty, sniffing and starting at once.
+
+'I say that. An' ye gang an' du what I tell ye, this minute.'
+
+Betty obeyed instantly; for the tone in which the last words were spoken
+was one she was not accustomed to dispute. She only muttered as she
+went, 'It 'll a' come upo' me as usual.'
+
+Betty's job was long ended before Robert returned. Never dreaming that
+Shargar could have gone back to the old haunt, he had looked for him
+everywhere before that occurred to him as a last chance. Nor would he
+have found him even then, for he would not have thought of his being
+inside the deserted house, had not Shargar heard his footsteps in the
+street.
+
+He started up from his stool saying, 'That's Bob!' but was not sure
+enough to go to the door: he might be mistaken; it might be the
+landlord! He heard the feet stop and did not move; but when he heard
+them begin to go away again, he rushed to the door, and bawled on the
+chance at the top of his voice, 'Bob! Bob!'
+
+'Eh! ye crater!' said Robert, 'ir ye there efter a'?
+
+'Eh! Bob,' exclaimed Shargar, and burst into tears. 'I thocht ye wad
+come efter me.'
+
+'Of coorse,' answered Robert, coolly. 'Come awa' hame.'
+
+'Whaur til?' asked Shargar in dismay.
+
+'Hame to yer ain bed at my grannie's.'
+
+'Na, na,' said Shargar, hurriedly, retreating within the door of the
+hovel. 'Na, na, Bob, lad, I s' no du that. She's an awfu' wuman, that
+grannie o' yours. I canna think hoo ye can bide wi' her. I'm weel oot o'
+her grups, I can tell ye.'
+
+It required a good deal of persuasion, but at last Robert prevailed
+upon Shargar to return. For was not Robert his tower of strength? And if
+Robert was not frightened at his grannie, or at Betty, why should he
+be? At length they entered Mrs. Falconer's parlour, Robert dragging in
+Shargar after him, having failed altogether in encouraging him to enter
+after a more dignified fashion.
+
+It must be remembered that although Shargar was still kilted, he was not
+the less trowsered, such as the trowsers were. It makes my heart ache to
+think of those trowsers--not believing trowsers essential to blessedness
+either, but knowing the superiority of the old Roman costume of the
+kilt.
+
+No sooner had Mrs. Falconer cast her eyes upon him than she could not
+but be convinced of the truth of Robert's averment.
+
+'Here he is, grannie; and gin ye bena saitisfeed yet--'
+
+'Haud yer tongue, laddie. Ye hae gi'en me nae cause to doobt yer word.'
+
+Indeed, during Robert's absence, his grandmother had had leisure to
+perceive of what an absurd folly she had been guilty. She had also had
+time to make up her mind as to her duty with regard to Shargar; and
+the more she thought about it, the more she admired the conduct of her
+grandson, and the better she saw that it would be right to follow his
+example. No doubt she was the more inclined to this benevolence that she
+had as it were received her grandson back from the jaws of death.
+
+When the two lads entered, from her arm-chair Mrs. Falconer examined
+Shargar from head to foot with the eye of a queen on her throne, and
+a countenance immovable in stern gentleness, till Shargar would gladly
+have sunk into the shelter of the voluminous kilt from the gaze of those
+quiet hazel eyes.
+
+At length she spoke:
+
+'Robert, tak him awa'.'
+
+'Whaur'll I tak him till, grannie?'
+
+'Tak him up to the garret. Betty 'ill ha' ta'en a tub o' het water up
+there 'gen this time, and ye maun see that he washes himsel' frae heid
+to fut, or he s' no bide an 'oor i' my hoose. Gang awa' an' see till 't
+this minute.'
+
+But she detained them yet awhile with various directions in regard of
+cleansing, for the carrying out of which Robert was only too glad to
+give his word. She dismissed them at last, and Shargar by and by found
+himself in bed, clean, and, for the first time in his life, between a
+pair of linen sheets--not altogether to his satisfaction, for mere order
+and comfort were substituted for adventure and success.
+
+But greater trials awaited him. In the morning he was visited by Brodie,
+the tailor, and Elshender, the shoemaker, both of whom he held in awe as
+his superiors in the social scale, and by them handled and measured from
+head to feet, the latter included; after which he had to lie in bed
+for three days, till his clothes came home; for Betty had carefully
+committed every article of his former dress to the kitchen fire, not
+without a sense of pollution to the bottom of her kettle. Nor would he
+have got them for double the time, had not Robert haunted the tailor,
+as well as the soutar, like an evil conscience, till they had finished
+them. Thus grievous was Shargar's introduction to the comforts of
+respectability. Nor did he like it much better when he was dressed, and
+able to go about; for not only was he uncomfortable in his new clothes,
+which, after the very easy fit of the old ones, felt like a suit of
+plate-armour, but he was liable to be sent for at any moment by the
+awful sovereignty in whose dominions he found himself, and which,
+of course, proceeded to instruct him not merely in his own religious
+duties, but in the religious theories of his ancestors, if, indeed,
+Shargar's ancestors ever had any. And now the Shorter Catechism seemed
+likely to be changed into the Longer Catechism; for he had it Sundays as
+well as Saturdays, besides Alleine's Alarm to the Unconverted, Baxter's
+Saint's Rest, Erskine's Gospel Sonnets, and other books of a like
+kind. Nor was it any relief to Shargar that the gloom was broken by the
+incomparable Pilgrim's Progress and the Holy War, for he cared for none
+of these things. Indeed, so dreary did he find it all, that his love to
+Robert was never put to such a severe test. But for that, he would have
+run for it. Twenty times a day was he so tempted.
+
+At school, though it was better, yet it was bad. For he was ten times as
+much laughed at for his new clothes, though they were of the plainest,
+as he had been for his old rags. Still he bore all the pangs of
+unwelcome advancement without a grumble, for the sake of his friend
+alone, whose dog he remained as much as ever. But his past life of cold
+and neglect, and hunger and blows, and homelessness and rags, began
+to glimmer as in the distance of a vaporous sunset, and the loveless
+freedom he had then enjoyed gave it a bloom as of summer-roses.
+
+I wonder whether there may not have been in some unknown corner of the
+old lady's mind this lingering remnant of paganism, that, in reclaiming
+the outcast from the error of his ways, she was making an offering
+acceptable to that God whom her mere prayers could not move to look
+with favour upon her prodigal son Andrew. Nor from her own acknowledged
+religious belief as a background would it have stuck so fiery off
+either. Indeed, it might have been a partial corrective of some yet
+more dreadful articles of her creed,--which she held, be it remembered,
+because she could not help it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. PRIVATE INTERVIEWS.
+
+The winter passed slowly away. Robert and Shargar went to school
+together, and learned their lessons together at Mrs. Falconer's table.
+Shargar soon learned to behave with tolerable propriety; was obedient,
+as far as eye-service went; looked as queer as ever; did what he
+pleased, which was nowise very wicked, the moment he was out of the old
+lady's sight; was well fed and well cared for; and when he was asked how
+he was, gave the invariable answer: 'Middlin'.' He was not very happy.
+
+There was little communication in words between the two boys, for the
+one had not much to say, and the pondering fits of the other grew
+rather than relaxed in frequency and intensity. Yet amongst chance
+acquaintances in the town Robert had the character of a wag, of which
+he was totally unaware himself. Indeed, although he had more than the
+ordinary share of humour, I suspect it was not so much his fun as his
+earnest that got him the character; for he would say such altogether
+unheard-of and strange things, that the only way they were capable of
+accounting for him was as a humorist.
+
+'Eh!' he said once to Elshender, during a pause common to a
+thunder-storm and a lesson on the violin 'eh! wadna ye like to be up in
+that clood wi' a spaud, turnin' ower the divots and catchin' the flashes
+lyin' aneath them like lang reid fiery worms?'
+
+'Ay, man, but gin ye luik up to the cloods that gait, ye'll never be
+muckle o' a fiddler.'
+
+This was merely an outbreak of that insolence of advice so often shown
+to the young from no vantage-ground but that of age and faithlessness,
+reminding one of the 'jigging fool' who interfered between Brutus and
+Cassius on the sole ground that he had seen more years than they. As if
+ever a fiddler that did not look up to the clouds would be anything but
+a catgut-scraper! Even Elshender's fiddle was the one angel that held
+back the heavy curtain of his gross nature, and let the sky shine
+through. He ought to have been set fiddling every Sunday morning, and
+from his fiddling dragged straight to church. It was the only thing man
+could have done for his conversion, for then his heart was open. But I
+fear the prayers would have closed it before the sermon came. He should
+rather have been compelled to take his fiddle to church with him, and
+have a gentle scrape at it in the pauses of the service; only there are
+no such pauses in the service, alas! And Dooble Sanny, though not too
+religious to get drunk occasionally, was a great deal too religious to
+play his fiddle on the Sabbath: he would not willingly anger the powers
+above; but it was sometimes a sore temptation, especially after he got
+possession of old Mr. Falconer's wonderful instrument.
+
+'Hoots, man!' he would say to Robert; 'dinna han'le her as gin she war
+an egg-box. Tak haud o' her as gin she war a leevin' crater. Ye maun
+jist straik her canny, an' wile the music oot o' her; for she's like
+ither women: gin ye be rouch wi' her, ye winna get a word oot o' her.
+An' dinna han'le her that gait. She canna bide to be contred an' pu'd
+this gait and that gait.--Come to me, my bonny leddy. Ye'll tell me yer
+story, winna ye, my dauty (pet)?'
+
+And with every gesture as if he were humouring a shy and invalid girl,
+he would, as he said, wile the music out of her in sobs and wailing,
+till the instrument, gathering courage in his embrace, grew gently
+merry in its confidence, and broke at last into airy laughter. He always
+spoke, and apparently thought, of his violin as a woman, just as a
+sailor does of his craft. But there was nothing about him, except
+his love for music and its instruments, to suggest other than a most
+uncivilized nature. That which was fine in him was constantly checked
+and held down by the gross; the merely animal overpowered the spiritual;
+and it was only upon occasion that his heavenly companion, the violin,
+could raise him a few feet above the mire and the clay. She never
+succeeded in setting his feet on a rock; while, on the contrary, he
+often dragged her with him into the mire of questionable company and
+circumstances. Worthy Mr. Falconer would have been horrified to see his
+umquhile modest companion in such society as that into which she was now
+introduced at times. But nevertheless the soutar was a good and patient
+teacher; and although it took Robert rather more than a fortnight
+to redeem his pledge to Shargar, he did make progress. It could not,
+however, be rapid, seeing that an hour at a time, two evenings in
+the week, was all that he could give to the violin. Even with this
+moderation, the risk of his absence exciting his grandmother's suspicion
+and inquiry was far from small.
+
+And now, were those really faded old memories of his grandfather and
+his merry kindness, all so different from the solemn benevolence of his
+grandmother, which seemed to revive in his bosom with the revivification
+of the violin? The instrument had surely laid up a story in its hollow
+breast, had been dreaming over it all the time it lay hidden away in the
+closet, and was now telling out its dreams about the old times in the
+ear of the listening boy. To him also it began to assume something of
+that mystery and life which had such a softening, and, for the moment at
+least, elevating influence on his master.
+
+At length the love of the violin had grown upon him so, that he could
+not but cast about how he might enjoy more of its company. It would not
+do, for many reasons, to go oftener to the shoemaker's, especially
+now that the days were getting longer. Nor was that what he wanted.
+He wanted opportunity for practice. He wanted to be alone with the
+creature, to see if she would not say something more to him than she had
+ever said yet. Wafts and odours of melodies began to steal upon him ere
+he was aware in the half lights between sleeping and waking: if he could
+only entice them to creep out of the violin, and once 'bless his humble
+ears' with the bodily hearing of them! Perhaps he might--who could tell?
+But how? But where?
+
+There was a building in Rothieden not old, yet so deserted that its very
+history seemed to have come to a standstill, and the dust that filled it
+to have fallen from the plumes of passing centuries. It was the property
+of Mrs. Falconer, left her by her husband. Trade had gradually ebbed
+away from the town till the thread-factory stood unoccupied, with all
+its machinery rusting and mouldering, just as the work-people had risen
+and left it one hot, midsummer day, when they were told that their
+services were no longer required. Some of the thread even remained upon
+the spools, and in the hollows of some of the sockets the oil had as yet
+dried only into a paste; although to Robert the desertion of the place
+appeared immemorial. It stood at a furlong's distance from the house, on
+the outskirt of the town. There was a large, neglected garden behind it,
+with some good fruit-trees, and plenty of the bushes which boys love
+for the sake of their berries. After grannie's jam-pots were properly
+filled, the remnant of these, a gleaning far greater than the gathering,
+was at the disposal of Robert, and, philosopher although in some measure
+he was already, he appreciated the privilege. Haunting this garden in
+the previous summer, he had for the first time made acquaintance with
+the interior of the deserted factory. The door to the road was always
+kept locked, and the key of it lay in one of grannie's drawers; but he
+had then discovered a back entrance less securely fastened, and with a
+strange mingling of fear and curiosity had from time to time extended
+his rambles over what seemed to him the huge desolation of the place.
+Half of it was well built of stone and lime, but of the other half the
+upper part was built of wood, which now showed signs of considerable
+decay. One room opened into another through the length of the place,
+revealing a vista of machines, standing with an air of the last folding
+of the wings of silence over them, and the sense of a deeper and deeper
+sinking into the soundless abyss. But their activity was not so far
+vanished but that by degrees Robert came to fancy that he had some
+time or other seen a woman seated at each of those silent powers, whose
+single hand set the whole frame in motion, with its numberless spindles
+and spools rapidly revolving--a vague mystery of endless threads in
+orderly complication, out of which came some desired, to him unknown,
+result, so that the whole place was full of a bewildering tumult of
+work, every little reel contributing its share, as the water-drops
+clashing together make the roar of a tempest. Now all was still as the
+church on a week-day, still as the school on a Saturday afternoon. Nay,
+the silence seemed to have settled down like the dust, and grown old and
+thick, so dead and old that the ghost of the ancient noise had arisen to
+haunt the place.
+
+Thither would Robert carry his violin, and there would he woo her.
+
+'I'm thinkin' I maun tak her wi' me the nicht, Sanders,' he said,
+holding the fiddle lovingly to his bosom, after he had finished his next
+lesson.
+
+The shoemaker looked blank.
+
+'Ye're no gaein' to desert me, are ye?'
+
+'Na, weel I wat!' returned Robert. 'But I want to try her at hame. I
+maun get used till her a bittie, ye ken, afore I can du onything wi'
+her.'
+
+'I wiss ye had na brought her here ava. What I am to du wantin' her!'
+
+'What for dinna ye get yer ain back?'
+
+'I haena the siller, man. And, forbye, I doobt I wadna be that sair
+content wi' her noo gin I had her. I used to think her gran'. But I'm
+clean oot o' conceit o' her. That bonnie leddy's ta'en 't clean oot o'
+me.'
+
+'But ye canna hae her aye, ye ken, Sanders. She's no mine. She's my
+grannie's, ye ken.'
+
+'What's the use o' her to her? She pits nae vailue upon her. Eh, man,
+gin she wad gie her to me, I wad haud her i' the best o' shune a' the
+lave o' her days.'
+
+'That wadna be muckle, Sanders, for she hasna had a new pair sin' ever I
+mind.'
+
+'But I wad haud Betty in shune as weel.'
+
+'Betty pays for her ain shune, I reckon.'
+
+'Weel, I wad haud you in shune, and yer bairns, and yer bairns' bairns,'
+cried the soutar, with enthusiasm.
+
+'Hoot, toot, man! Lang or that ye'll be fiddlin' i' the new Jeroozlem.'
+
+'Eh, man!' said Alexander, looking up--he had just cracked the
+roset-ends off his hands, for he had the upper leather of a boot in the
+grasp of the clams, and his right hand hung arrested on its blind way to
+the awl--'duv ye think there'll be fiddles there? I thocht they war a'
+hairps, a thing 'at I never saw, but it canna be up till a fiddle.'
+
+'I dinna ken,' answered Robert; 'but ye suld mak a pint o' seein' for
+yersel'.'
+
+'Gin I thoucht there wad be fiddles there, faith I wad hae a try. It
+wadna be muckle o' a Jeroozlem to me wantin' my fiddle. But gin there
+be fiddles, I daursay they'll be gran' anes. I daursay they wad gi' me a
+new ane--I mean ane as auld as Noah's 'at he played i' the ark whan the
+de'il cam' in by to hearken. I wad fain hae a try. Ye ken a' aboot it
+wi' that grannie o' yours: hoo's a body to begin?'
+
+'By giein' up the drink, man.'
+
+'Ay--ay--ay--I reckon ye're richt. Weel, I'll think aboot it whan ance
+I'm throu wi' this job. That'll be neist ook, or thereabouts, or aiblins
+twa days efter. I'll hae some leiser than.'
+
+Before he had finished speaking he had caught up his awl and begun
+to work vigorously, boring his holes as if the nerves of feeling were
+continued to the point of the tool, inserting the bristles that served
+him for needles with a delicacy worthy of soft-skinned fingers, drawing
+through the rosined threads with a whisk, and untwining them with a
+crack from the leather that guarded his hands.
+
+'Gude nicht to ye,' said Robert, with the fiddle-case under his arm.
+
+The shoemaker looked up, with his hands bound in his threads.
+
+'Ye're no gaein' to tak her frae me the nicht?'
+
+'Ay am I, but I'll fess her back again. I'm no gaein' to Jericho wi'
+her.'
+
+'Gang to Hecklebirnie wi' her, and that's three mile ayont hell.'
+
+'Na; we maun win farther nor that. There canna be muckle fiddlin'
+there.'
+
+'Weel, tak her to the new Jeroozlem. I s' gang doon to Lucky Leary's,
+and fill mysel' roarin' fou, an' it'll be a' your wyte (blame).'
+
+'I doobt ye'll get the straiks (blows) though. Or maybe ye think Bell
+'ill tak them for ye.'
+
+Dooble Sanny caught up a huge boot, the sole of which was filled with
+broad-headed nails as thick as they could be driven, and, in a rage,
+threw it at Robert as he darted out. Through its clang against the
+door-cheek, the shoemaker heard a cry from the instrument. He cast
+everything from him and sprang after Robert. But Robert was down the
+wynd like a long-legged grayhound, and Elshender could only follow like
+a fierce mastiff. It was love and grief, though, and apprehension and
+remorse, not vengeance, that winged his heels. He soon saw that pursuit
+was vain.
+
+'Robert! Robert!' he cried; 'I canna win up wi' ye. Stop, for God's
+sake! Is she hurtit?'
+
+Robert stopped at once.
+
+'Ye hae made a bonny leddy o' her--a lameter (cripple) I doobt, like yer
+wife,' he answered, with indignation.
+
+'Dinna be aye flingin' a man's fau'ts in 's face. It jist maks him 'at
+he canna bide himsel' or you eyther. Lat's see the bonny crater.'
+
+Robert complied, for he too was anxious. They were now standing in the
+space in front of Shargar's old abode, and there was no one to be seen.
+Elshender took the box, opened it carefully, and peeped in with a face
+of great apprehension.
+
+'I thocht that was a'!' he said with some satisfaction. 'I kent the
+string whan I heard it. But we'll sune get a new thairm till her,' he
+added, in a tone of sorrowful commiseration and condolence, as he took
+the violin from the case, tenderly as if it had been a hurt child.
+
+One touch of the bow, drawing out a goul of grief, satisfied him that
+she was uninjured. Next a hurried inspection showed him that there was
+enough of the catgut twisted round the peg to make up for the part
+that was broken off. In a moment he had fastened it to the tail-piece,
+tightened and tuned it. Forthwith he took the bow from the case-lid,
+and in jubilant guise he expatiated upon the wrong he had done his bonny
+leddy, till the doors and windows around were crowded with heads peering
+through the dark to see whence the sounds came, and a little child
+toddled across from one of the lowliest houses with a ha'penny for the
+fiddler. Gladly would Robert have restored it with interest, but, alas!
+there was no interest in his bank, for not a ha'penny had he in the
+world. The incident recalled Sandy to Rothieden and its cares. He
+restored the violin to its case, and while Robert was fearing he would
+take it under his arm and walk away with it, handed it back with a
+humble sigh and a 'Praise be thankit;' then, without another word,
+turned and went to his lonely stool and home 'untreasured of its
+mistress.' Robert went home too, and stole like a thief to his room.
+
+The next day was a Saturday, which, indeed, was the real old Sabbath, or
+at least the half of it, to the schoolboys of Rothieden. Even Robert's
+grannie was Jew enough, or rather Christian enough, to respect this
+remnant of the fourth commandment--divine antidote to the rest of the
+godless money-making and soul-saving week--and he had the half-day to
+himself. So as soon as he had had his dinner, he managed to give Shargar
+the slip, left him to the inroads of a desolate despondency, and stole
+away to the old factory-garden. The key of that he had managed to
+purloin from the kitchen where it hung; nor was there much danger of its
+absence being discovered, seeing that in winter no one thought of the
+garden. The smuggling of the violin out of the house was the 'dearest
+danger'--the more so that he would not run the risk of carrying her out
+unprotected, and it was altogether a bulky venture with the case. But
+by spying and speeding he managed it, and soon found himself safe within
+the high walls of the garden.
+
+It was early spring. There had been a heavy fall of sleet in the
+morning, and now the wind blew gustfully about the place. The neglected
+trees shook showers upon him as he passed under them, trampling down the
+rank growth of the grass-walks. The long twigs of the wall-trees, which
+had never been nailed up, or had been torn down by the snow and the
+blasts of winter, went trailing away in the moan of the fitful wind, and
+swung back as it sunk to a sigh. The currant and gooseberry bushes, bare
+and leafless, and 'shivering all for cold,' neither reminded him of the
+feasts of the past summer, nor gave him any hope for the next. He strode
+careless through it all to gain the door at the bottom. It yielded to a
+push, and the long grass streamed in over the threshold as he entered.
+He mounted by a broad stair in the main part of the house, passing the
+silent clock in one of its corners, now expiating in motionlessness the
+false accusations it had brought against the work-people, and turned
+into the chaos of machinery.
+
+I fear that my readers will expect, from the minuteness with which I
+recount these particulars, that, after all, I am going to describe a
+rendezvous with a lady, or a ghost at least. I will not plead in excuse
+that I, too, have been infected with Sandy's mode of regarding her,
+but I plead that in the mind of Robert the proceeding was involved in
+something of that awe and mystery with which a youth approaches the
+woman he loves. He had not yet arrived at the period when the feminine
+assumes its paramount influence, combining in itself all that music,
+colour, form, odour, can suggest, with something infinitely higher and
+more divine; but he had begun to be haunted with some vague aspirations
+towards the infinite, of which his attempts on the violin were the
+outcome. And now that he was to be alone, for the first time, with this
+wonderful realizer of dreams and awakener of visions, to do with her as
+he would, to hint by gentle touches at the thoughts that were fluttering
+in his soul, and listen for her voice that by the echoes in which she
+strove to respond he might know that she understood him, it was no
+wonder if he felt an ethereal foretaste of the expectation that haunts
+the approach of souls.
+
+But I am not even going to describe his first tete-a-tete with his
+violin. Perhaps he returned from it somewhat disappointed. Probably he
+found her coy, unready to acknowledge his demands on her attention. But
+not the less willingly did he return with her to the solitude of the
+ruinous factory. On every safe occasion, becoming more and more frequent
+as the days grew longer, he repaired thither, and every time returned
+more capable of drawing the coherence of melody from that matrix of
+sweet sounds.
+
+At length the people about began to say that the factory was haunted;
+that the ghost of old Mr. Falconer, unable to repose while neglect was
+ruining the precious results of his industry, visited the place night
+after night, and solaced his disappointment by renewing on his favourite
+violin strains not yet forgotten by him in his grave, and remembered
+well by those who had been in his service, not a few of whom lived in
+the neighbourhood of the forsaken building.
+
+One gusty afternoon, like the first, but late in the spring, Robert
+repaired as usual to this his secret haunt. He had played for some time,
+and now, from a sudden pause of impulse, had ceased, and begun to
+look around him. The only light came from two long pale cracks in
+the rain-clouds of the west. The wind was blowing through the broken
+windows, which stretched away on either hand. A dreary, windy gloom,
+therefore, pervaded the desolate place; and in the dusk, and their
+settled order, the machines looked multitudinous. An eerie sense of
+discomfort came over him as he gazed, and he lifted his violin to dispel
+the strange unpleasant feeling that grew upon him. But at the first long
+stroke across the strings, an awful sound arose in the further room; a
+sound that made him all but drop the bow, and cling to his violin. It
+went on. It was the old, all but forgotten whirr of bobbins, mingled
+with the gentle groans of the revolving horizontal wheel, but magnified
+in the silence of the place, and the echoing imagination of the boy,
+into something preternaturally awful. Yielding for a moment to the
+growth of goose-skin, and the insurrection of hair, he recovered himself
+by a violent effort, and walked to the door that connected the two
+compartments. Was it more or less fearful that the jenny was not going
+of itself? that the figure of an old woman sat solemnly turning and
+turning the hand-wheel? Not without calling in the jury of his senses,
+however, would he yield to the special plea of his imagination, but went
+nearer, half expecting to find that the mutch, with its big flapping
+borders, glimmering white in the gloom across many a machine, surrounded
+the face of a skull. But he was soon satisfied that it was only a blind
+woman everybody knew--so old that she had become childish. She had heard
+the reports of the factory being haunted, and groping about with her
+half-withered brain full of them, had found the garden and the back door
+open, and had climbed to the first-floor by a farther stair, well known
+to her when she used to work that very machine. She had seated herself
+instinctively, according to ancient wont, and had set it in motion once
+more.
+
+Yielding to an impulse of experiment, Robert began to play again.
+Thereupon her disordered ideas broke out in words. And Robert soon began
+to feel that it could hardly be more ghastly to look upon a ghost than
+to be taken for one.
+
+'Ay, ay, sir,' said the old woman, in a tone of commiseration, 'it maun
+be sair to bide. I dinna wonner 'at ye canna lie still. But what gars ye
+gang daunerin' aboot this place? It's no yours ony langer. Ye ken whan
+fowk's deid, they tyne the grip (loose hold). Ye suld gang hame to yer
+wife. She micht say a word to quaiet yer auld banes, for she's a douce
+an' a wice woman--the mistress.'
+
+Then followed a pause. There was a horror about the old woman's voice,
+already half dissolved by death, in the desolate place, that almost took
+from Robert the power of motion. But his violin sent forth an accidental
+twang, and that set her going again.
+
+'Ye was aye a douce honest gentleman yersel', an' I dinna wonner ye
+canna bide it. But I wad hae thoucht glory micht hae hauden ye in. But
+yer ain son! Eh ay! And a braw lad and a bonnie! It's a sod thing he
+bude to gang the wrang gait; and it's no wonner, as I say, that ye lea'
+the worms to come an' luik efter him. I doobt--I doobt it winna be to
+you he'll gang at the lang last. There winna be room for him aside ye in
+Awbrahawm's boasom. And syne to behave sae ill to that winsome wife o'
+his! I dinna wonner 'at ye maun be up! Eh na! But, sir, sin ye are up,
+I wish ye wad speyk to John Thamson no to tak aff the day 'at I was awa'
+last ook, for 'deed I was verra unweel, and bude to keep my bed.'
+
+Robert was beginning to feel uneasy as to how he should get rid of her,
+when she rose, and saying, 'Ay, ay, I ken it's sax o'clock,' went out
+as she had come in. Robert followed, and saw her safe out of the garden,
+but did not return to the factory.
+
+So his father had behaved ill to his mother too!
+
+'But what for hearken to the havers o' a dottled auld wife?' he said to
+himself, pondering as he walked home.
+
+Old Janet told a strange story of how she had seen the ghost, and had
+had a long talk with him, and of what he said, and of how he groaned and
+played the fiddle between. And finding that the report had reached his
+grandmother's ears, Robert thought it prudent, much to his discontent,
+to intermit his visits to the factory. Mrs. Falconer, of course,
+received the rumour with indignant scorn, and peremptorily refused to
+allow any examination of the premises.
+
+But how have the violin by him and not hear her speak? One evening the
+longing after her voice grow upon him till he could resist it no longer.
+He shut the door of his garret-room, and, with Shargar by him, took her
+out and began to play softly, gently--oh so softly, so gently! Shargar
+was enraptured. Robert went on playing.
+
+Suddenly the door opened, and his grannie stood awfully revealed before
+them. Betty had heard the violin, and had flown to the parlour in the
+belief that, unable to get any one to heed him at the factory, the ghost
+had taken Janet's advice, and come home. But his wife smiled a smile
+of contempt, went with Betty to the kitchen--over which Robert's room
+lay--heard the sounds, put off her creaking shoes, stole up-stairs on
+her soft white lambswool stockings, and caught the pair. The violin was
+seized, put in its case, and carried off; and Mrs. Falconer rejoiced to
+think she had broken a gin set by Satan for the unwary feet of her poor
+Robert. Little she knew the wonder of that violin--how it had kept the
+soul of her husband alive! Little she knew how dangerous it is to shut
+an open door, with ever so narrow a peep into the eternal, in the face
+of a son of Adam! And little she knew how determinedly and restlessly
+a nature like Robert's would search for another, to open one possibly
+which she might consider ten times more dangerous than that which she
+had closed.
+
+When Alexander heard of the affair, he was at first overwhelmed with the
+misfortune; but gathering a little heart at last, he set to 'working,'
+as he said himself, 'like a verra deevil'; and as he was the best
+shoemaker in the town, and for the time abstained utterly from whisky,
+and all sorts of drink but well-water, he soon managed to save the money
+necessary, and redeem the old fiddle. But whether it was from fancy, or
+habit, or what, even Robert's inexperienced ear could not accommodate
+itself, save under protest, to the instrument which once his teacher had
+considered all but perfect; and it needed the master's finest touch to
+make its tone other than painful to the sense of the neophyte.
+
+No one can estimate too highly the value of such a resource to a man
+like the shoemaker, or a boy like Robert. Whatever it be that keeps the
+finer faculties of the mind awake, wonder alive, and the interest above
+mere eating and drinking, money-making and money-saving; whatever it
+be that gives gladness, or sorrow, or hope--this, be it violin, pencil,
+pen, or, highest of all, the love of woman, is simply a divine gift of
+holy influence for the salvation of that being to whom it comes, for the
+lifting of him out of the mire and up on the rock. For it keeps a way
+open for the entrance of deeper, holier, grander influences, emanating
+from the same riches of the Godhead. And though many have genius that
+have no grace, they will only be so much the worse, so much the nearer
+to the brute, if you take from them that which corresponds to Dooble
+Sanny's fiddle.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. ROBERT'S PLAN OF SALVATION.
+
+For some time after the loss of his friend, Robert went loitering and
+mooning about, quite neglecting the lessons to which he had not, it must
+be confessed, paid much attention for many weeks. Even when seated at
+his grannie's table, he could do no more than fix his eyes on his book:
+to learn was impossible; it was even disgusting to him. But his was a
+nature which, foiled in one direction, must, absolutely helpless against
+its own vitality, straightway send out its searching roots in another.
+Of all forces, that of growth is the one irresistible, for it is the
+creating power of God, the law of life and of being. Therefore no
+accumulation of refusals, and checks, and turnings, and forbiddings,
+from all the good old grannies in the world, could have prevented Robert
+from striking root downward, and bearing fruit upward, though, as in all
+higher natures, the fruit was a long way off yet. But his soul was only
+sad and hungry. He was not unhappy, for he had been guilty of nothing
+that weighed on his conscience. He had been doing many things of late,
+it is true, without asking leave of his grandmother, but wherever prayer
+is felt to be of no avail, there cannot be the sense of obligation save
+on compulsion. Even direct disobedience in such case will generally
+leave little soreness, except the thing forbidden should be in its own
+nature wrong, and then, indeed, 'Don Worm, the conscience,' may begin to
+bite. But Robert felt nothing immoral in playing upon his grandfather's
+violin, nor even in taking liberties with a piece of lumber for which
+nobody cared but possibly the dead; therefore he was not unhappy, only
+much disappointed, very empty, and somewhat gloomy. There was nothing
+to look forward to now, no secret full of riches and endless in hope--in
+short, no violin.
+
+To feel the full force of his loss, my reader must remember that around
+the childhood of Robert, which he was fast leaving behind him, there had
+gathered no tenderness--none at least by him recognizable as such. All
+the women he came in contact with were his grandmother and Betty. He
+had no recollection of having ever been kissed. From the darkness and
+negation of such an embryo-existence, his nature had been unconsciously
+striving to escape--struggling to get from below ground into the sunlit
+air--sighing after a freedom he could not have defined, the freedom that
+comes, not of independence, but of love--not of lawlessness, but of
+the perfection of law. Of this beauty of life, with its wonder and its
+deepness, this unknown glory, his fiddle had been the type. It had been
+the ark that held, if not the tables of the covenant, yet the golden pot
+of angel's food, and the rod that budded in death. And now that it was
+gone, the gloomier aspect of things began to lay hold upon him; his
+soul turned itself away from the sun, and entered into the shadow of the
+under-world. Like the white-horsed twins of lake Regillus, like Phoebe,
+the queen of skyey plain and earthly forest, every boy and girl, every
+man and woman, that lives at all, has to divide many a year between
+Tartarus and Olympus.
+
+For now arose within him, not without ultimate good, the evil phantasms
+of a theology which would explain all God's doings by low conceptions,
+low I mean for humanity even, of right, and law, and justice, then only
+taking refuge in the fact of the incapacity of the human understanding
+when its own inventions are impugned as undivine. In such a system, hell
+is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as
+hell. Hence, as foundations must be laid in the deepest, the system is
+founded in hell, and the first article in the creed that Robert Falconer
+learned was, 'I believe in hell.' Practically, I mean, it was so; else
+how should it be that as often as a thought of religious duty arose in
+his mind, it appeared in the form of escaping hell, of fleeing from the
+wrath to come? For his very nature was hell, being not born in sin and
+brought forth in iniquity, but born sin and brought forth iniquity. And
+yet God made him. He must believe that. And he must believe, too, that
+God was just, awfully just, punishing with fearful pains those who did
+not go through a certain process of mind which it was utterly impossible
+they should go through without a help which he would give to some, and
+withhold from others, the reason of the difference not being such,
+to say the least of it, as to come within the reach of the persons
+concerned. And this God they said was love. It was logically absurd, of
+course, yet, thank God, they did say that God was love; and many of them
+succeeded in believing it, too, and in ordering their ways as if the
+first article of their creed had been 'I believe in God'; whence, in
+truth, we are bound to say it was the first in power and reality, if
+not in order; for what are we to say a man believes, if not what he acts
+upon? Still the former article was the one they brought chiefly to bear
+upon their children. This mortar, probably they thought, threw the shell
+straighter than any of the other field-pieces of the church-militant.
+Hence it was even in justification of God himself that a party arose to
+say that a man could believe without the help of God at all, and after
+believing only began to receive God's help--a heresy all but as dreary
+and barren as the former. No one dreamed of saying--at least such a
+glad word of prophecy never reached Rothieden--that, while nobody can
+do without the help of the Father any more than a new-born babe could of
+itself live and grow to a man, yet that in the giving of that help the
+very fatherhood of the Father finds its one gladsome labour; that for
+that the Lord came; for that the world was made; for that we were born
+into it; for that God lives and loves like the most loving man or woman
+on earth, only infinitely more, and in other ways and kinds besides,
+which we cannot understand; and that therefore to be a man is the soul
+of eternal jubilation.
+
+Robert consequently began to take fits of soul-saving, a most rational
+exercise, worldly wise and prudent--right too on the principles he
+had received, but not in the least Christian in its nature, or even
+God-fearing. His imagination began to busy itself in representing the
+dire consequences of not entering into the one refuge of faith. He made
+many frantic efforts to believe that he believed; took to keeping the
+Sabbath very carefully--that is, by going to church three times, and to
+Sunday-school as well; by never walking a step save to or from church;
+by never saying a word upon any subject unconnected with religion,
+chiefly theoretical; by never reading any but religious books; by never
+whistling; by never thinking of his lost fiddle, and so on--all the time
+feeling that God was ready to pounce upon him if he failed once; till
+again and again the intensity of his efforts utterly defeated their
+object by destroying for the time the desire to prosecute them with
+the power to will them. But through the horrible vapours of these vain
+endeavours, which denied God altogether as the maker of the world, and
+the former of his soul and heart and brain, and sought to worship him as
+a capricious demon, there broke a little light, a little soothing, soft
+twilight, from the dim windows of such literature as came in his way.
+Besides The Pilgrim's Progress there were several books which shone
+moon-like on his darkness, and lifted something of the weight of that
+Egyptian gloom off his spirit. One of these, strange to say, was Defoe's
+Religious Courtship, and one, Young's Night Thoughts. But there was
+another which deserves particular notice, inasmuch as it did far more
+than merely interest or amuse him, raising a deep question in his mind,
+and one worthy to be asked. This book was the translation of Klopstock's
+Messiah, to which I have already referred. It was not one of his
+grandmother's books, but had probably belonged to his father: he had
+found it in his little garret-room. But as often as she saw him reading
+it, she seemed rather pleased, he thought. As to the book itself, its
+florid expatiation could neither offend nor injure a boy like Robert,
+while its representation of our Lord was to him a wonderful relief from
+that given in the pulpit, and in all the religious books he knew. But
+the point for the sake of which I refer to it in particular is this:
+Amongst the rebel angels who are of the actors in the story, one of
+the principal is a cherub who repents of making his choice with Satan,
+mourns over his apostasy, haunts unseen the steps of our Saviour, wheels
+lamenting about the cross, and would gladly return to his lost duties
+in heaven, if only he might--a doubt which I believe is left unsolved
+in the volume, and naturally enough remained unsolved in Robert's
+mind:--Would poor Abaddon be forgiven and taken home again? For although
+naturally, that is, to judge by his own instincts, there could be no
+question of his forgiveness, according to what he had been taught there
+could be no question of his perdition. Having no one to talk to, he
+divided himself and went to buffets on the subject, siding, of course,
+with the better half of himself which supported the merciful view of
+the matter; for all his efforts at keeping the Sabbath, had in his own
+honest judgment failed so entirely, that he had no ground for believing
+himself one of the elect. Had he succeeded in persuading himself that he
+was, there is no saying to what lengths of indifference about others the
+chosen prig might have advanced by this time.
+
+He made one attempt to open the subject with Shargar.
+
+'Shargar, what think ye?' he said suddenly, one day. 'Gin a de'il war to
+repent, wad God forgie him?'
+
+'There's no sayin' what fowk wad du till ance they're tried,' returned
+Shargar, cautiously.
+
+Robert did not care to resume the question with one who so circumspectly
+refused to take a metaphysical or a priori view of the matter.
+
+He made an attempt with his grandmother.
+
+One Sunday, his thoughts, after trying for a time to revolve in due
+orbit around the mind of the Rev. Hugh Maccleary, as projected in a
+sermon which he had botched up out of a commentary, failed at last
+and flew off into what the said gentleman would have pronounced 'very
+dangerous speculation, seeing no man is to go beyond what is written in
+the Bible, which contains not only the truth, but the whole truth, and
+nothing but the truth, for this time and for all future time--both here
+and in the world to come.' Some such sentence, at least, was in his
+sermon that day, and the preacher no doubt supposed St. Matthew, not St.
+Matthew Henry, accountable for its origination. In the Limbo into
+which Robert's then spirit flew, it had been sorely exercised about the
+substitution of the sufferings of Christ for those which humanity must
+else have endured while ages rolled on--mere ripples on the ocean of
+eternity.
+
+'Noo, be douce,' said Mrs. Falconer, solemnly, as Robert, a trifle
+lighter at heart from the result of his cogitations than usual, sat down
+to dinner: he had happened to smile across the table to Shargar. And he
+was douce, and smiled no more.
+
+They ate their broth, or, more properly, supped it, with horn spoons, in
+absolute silence; after which Mrs. Falconer put a large piece of meat on
+the plate of each, with the same formula:
+
+'Hae. Ye s' get nae mair.'
+
+The allowance was ample in the extreme, bearing a relation to her words
+similar to that which her practice bore to her theology. A piece of
+cheese, because it was the Sabbath, followed, and dinner was over.
+
+When the table had been cleared by Betty, they drew their chairs to
+the fire, and Robert had to read to his grandmother, while Shargar sat
+listening. He had not read long, however, before he looked up from his
+Bible and began the following conversation:--
+
+'Wasna it an ill trick o' Joseph, gran'mither, to put that cup, an' a
+siller ane tu, into the mou' o' Benjamin's seck?'
+
+'What for that, laddie? He wanted to gar them come back again, ye ken.'
+
+'But he needna hae gane aboot it in sic a playactor-like gait. He needna
+hae latten them awa' ohn tellt (without telling) them that he was their
+brither.'
+
+'They had behaved verra ill till him.'
+
+'He used to clype (tell tales) upo' them, though.'
+
+'Laddie, tak ye care what ye say aboot Joseph, for he was a teep o'
+Christ.'
+
+'Hoo was that, gran'mither?'
+
+'They sellt him to the Ishmeleets for siller, as Judas did him.'
+
+'Did he beir the sins o' them 'at sellt him?'
+
+'Ye may say, in a mainner, 'at he did; for he was sair afflickit afore
+he wan up to be the King's richt han'; an' syne he keepit a hantle o'
+ill aff o' 's brithren.'
+
+'Sae, gran'mither, ither fowk nor Christ micht suffer for the sins o'
+their neebors?'
+
+'Ay, laddie, mony a ane has to do that. But no to mak atonement, ye ken.
+Naething but the sufferin' o' the spotless cud du that. The Lord wadna
+be saitisfeet wi' less nor that. It maun be the innocent to suffer for
+the guilty.'
+
+'I unnerstan' that,' said Robert, who had heard it so often that he had
+not yet thought of trying to understand it. 'But gin we gang to the gude
+place, we'll be a' innocent, willna we, grannie?'
+
+'Ay, that we will--washed spotless, and pure, and clean, and dressed
+i' the weddin' garment, and set doon at the table wi' him and wi' his
+Father. That's them 'at believes in him, ye ken.'
+
+'Of coorse, grannie.--Weel, ye see, I hae been thinkin' o' a plan for
+maist han' toomin' (almost emptying) hell.'
+
+'What's i' the bairn's heid noo? Troth, ye're no blate, meddlin' wi' sic
+subjecks, laddie!'
+
+'I didna want to say onything to vex ye, grannie. I s' gang on wi' the
+chapter.'
+
+'Ow, say awa'. Ye sanna say muckle 'at's wrang afore I cry haud,' said
+Mrs. Falconer, curious to know what had been moving in the boy's mind,
+but watching him like a cat, ready to spring upon the first visible hair
+of the old Adam.
+
+And Robert, recalling the outbreak of terrible grief which he had heard
+on that memorable night, really thought that his project would bring
+comfort to a mind burdened with such care, and went on with the
+exposition of his plan.
+
+'A' them 'at sits doon to the supper o' the Lamb 'll sit there because
+Christ suffert the punishment due to their sins--winna they, grannie?'
+
+'Doobtless, laddie.'
+
+'But it'll be some sair upo' them to sit there aitin' an' drinkin' an'
+talkin' awa', an' enjoyin' themsel's, whan ilka noo an' than there'll
+come a sough o' wailin' up frae the ill place, an' a smell o' burnin'
+ill to bide.'
+
+'What put that i' yer heid, laddie? There's no rizzon to think 'at
+hell's sae near haven as a' that. The Lord forbid it!'
+
+'Weel, but, grannie, they'll ken 't a' the same, whether they smell 't
+or no. An' I canna help thinkin' that the farrer awa' I thoucht they
+war, the waur I wad like to think upo' them. 'Deed it wad be waur.'
+
+'What are ye drivin' at, laddie? I canna unnerstan' ye,' said Mrs.
+Falconer, feeling very uncomfortable, and yet curious, almost anxious,
+to hear what would come next. 'I trust we winna hae to think muckle--'
+
+But here, I presume, the thought of the added desolation of her Andrew
+if she, too, were to forget him, as well as his Father in heaven,
+checked the flow of her words. She paused, and Robert took up his
+parable and went on, first with yet another question.
+
+'Duv ye think, grannie, that a body wad be allooed to speik a word i'
+public, like, there--at the lang table, like, I mean?'
+
+'What for no, gin it was dune wi' moedesty, and for a guid rizzon? But
+railly, laddie, I doobt ye're haverin' a'thegither. Ye hard naething
+like that, I'm sure, the day, frae Mr. Maccleary.'
+
+'Na, na; he said naething aboot it. But maybe I'll gang and speir at
+him, though.'
+
+'What aboot?'
+
+'What I'm gaein' to tell ye, grannie.'
+
+'Weel, tell awa', and hae dune wi' 't. I'm growin' tired o' 't.'
+
+It was something else than tired she was growing.
+
+'Weel, I'm gaein' to try a' that I can to win in there.'
+
+'I houp ye will. Strive and pray. Resist the deevil. Walk in the licht.
+Lippen not to yersel', but trust in Christ and his salvation.'
+
+'Ay, ay, grannie.--Weel--'
+
+'Are ye no dune yet?'
+
+'Na. I'm but jist beginnin'.'
+
+'Beginnin', are ye? Humph!'
+
+'Weel, gin I win in there, the verra first nicht I sit doon wi' the lave
+o' them, I'm gaein' to rise up an' say--that is, gin the Maister, at
+the heid o' the table, disna bid me sit doon--an' say: "Brithers an'
+sisters, the haill o' ye, hearken to me for ae minute; an', O Lord! gin
+I say wrang, jist tak the speech frae me, and I'll sit doon dumb an'
+rebukit. We're a' here by grace and no by merit, save his, as ye a' ken
+better nor I can tell ye, for ye hae been langer here nor me. But it's
+jist ruggin' an' rivin' at my hert to think o' them 'at's doon there.
+Maybe ye can hear them. I canna. Noo, we hae nae merit, an' they hae nae
+merit, an' what for are we here and them there? But we're washed clean
+and innocent noo; and noo, whan there's no wyte lying upo' oursel's,
+it seems to me that we micht beir some o' the sins o' them 'at hae
+ower mony. I call upo' ilk ane o' ye 'at has a frien' or a neebor down
+yonner, to rise up an' taste nor bite nor sup mair till we gang up
+a'thegither to the fut o' the throne, and pray the Lord to lat's gang
+and du as the Maister did afore 's, and beir their griefs, and cairry
+their sorrows doon in hell there; gin it maybe that they may repent and
+get remission o' their sins, an' come up here wi' us at the lang last,
+and sit doon wi' 's at this table, a' throuw the merits o' oor Saviour
+Jesus Christ, at the heid o' the table there. Amen."'
+
+Half ashamed of his long speech, half overcome by the feelings fighting
+within him, and altogether bewildered, Robert burst out crying like a
+baby, and ran out of the room--up to his own place of meditation, where
+he threw himself on the floor. Shargar, who had made neither head nor
+tail of it all, as he said afterwards, sat staring at Mrs. Falconer. She
+rose, and going into Robert's little bedroom, closed the door, and what
+she did there is not far to seek.
+
+When she came out, she rang the bell for tea, and sent Shargar to look
+for Robert. When he appeared, she was so gentle to him that it woke
+quite a new sensation in him. But after tea was over, she said:
+
+'Noo, Robert, lat's hae nae mair o' this. Ye ken as weel 's I du that
+them 'at gangs there their doom is fixed, and noething can alter 't. An'
+we're not to alloo oor ain fancies to cairry 's ayont the Scripter. We
+hae oor ain salvation to work oot wi' fear an' trimlin'. We hae naething
+to do wi' what's hidden. Luik ye till 't 'at ye win in yersel'. That's
+eneuch for you to min'.--Shargar, ye can gang to the kirk. Robert's to
+bide wi' me the nicht.'
+
+Mrs. Falconer very rarely went to church, for she could not hear a word,
+and found it irksome.
+
+When Robert and she were alone together,
+
+'Laddie,' she said, 'be ye waure o' judgin' the Almichty. What luiks
+to you a' wrang may be a' richt. But it's true eneuch 'at we dinna ken
+a'thing; an' he's no deid yet--I dinna believe 'at he is--and he'll
+maybe win in yet.'
+
+Here her voice failed her. And Robert had nothing to say now. He had
+said all his say before.
+
+'Pray, Robert, pray for yer father, laddie,' she resumed; 'for we hae
+muckle rizzon to be anxious aboot 'im. Pray while there's life an' houp.
+Gie the Lord no rist. Pray till 'im day an' nicht, as I du, that he wad
+lead 'im to see the error o' his ways, an' turn to the Lord, wha's ready
+to pardon. Gin yer mother had lived, I wad hae had mair houp, I confess,
+for she was a braw leddy and a bonny, and that sweet-tongued! She cud
+hae wiled a maukin frae its lair wi' her bonnie Hielan' speech. I never
+likit to hear nane o' them speyk the Erse (Irish, that is, Gaelic), it
+was aye sae gloggie and baneless; and I cudna unnerstan' ae word o'
+'t. Nae mair cud yer father--hoot! yer gran'father, I mean--though his
+father cud speyk it weel. But to hear yer mother--mamma, as ye used to
+ca' her aye, efter the new fashion--to hear her speyk English, that was
+sweet to the ear; for the braid Scotch she kent as little o' as I do o'
+the Erse. It was hert's care aboot him that shortent her days. And a'
+that'll be laid upo' him. He'll hae 't a' to beir an' accoont for. Och
+hone! Och hone! Eh! Robert, my man, be a guid lad, an' serve the Lord
+wi' a' yer hert, an' sowl, an' stren'th, an' min'; for gin ye gang
+wrang, yer ain father 'll hae to beir naebody kens hoo muckle o' the
+wyte o' 't, for he's dune naething to bring ye up i' the way ye suld
+gang, an' haud ye oot o' the ill gait. For the sake o' yer puir father,
+haud ye to the richt road. It may spare him a pang or twa i' the ill
+place. Eh, gin the Lord wad only tak me, and lat him gang!'
+
+Involuntarily and unconsciously the mother's love was adopting the hope
+which she had denounced in her grandson. And Robert saw it, but he was
+never the man when I knew him to push a victory. He said nothing. Only a
+tear or two at the memory of the wayworn man, his recollection of whose
+visit I have already recorded, rolled down his cheeks. He was at such a
+distance from him!--such an impassable gulf yawned between them!--that
+was the grief! Not the gulf of death, nor the gulf that divides hell
+from heaven, but the gulf of abjuration by the good because of his evil
+ways. His grandmother, herself weeping fast and silently, with scarce
+altered countenance, took her neatly-folded handkerchief from her
+pocket, and wiped her grandson's fresh cheeks, then wiped her own
+withered face; and from that moment Robert knew that he loved her.
+
+Then followed the Sabbath-evening prayer that she always offered
+with the boy, whichever he was, who kept her company. They knelt down
+together, side by side, in a certain corner of the room, the same, I
+doubt not, in which she knelt at her private devotions, before going to
+bed. There she uttered a long extempore prayer, rapid in speech, full of
+divinity and Scripture-phrases, but not the less earnest and simple, for
+it flowed from a heart of faith. Then Robert had to pray after her, loud
+in her ear, that she might hear him thoroughly, so that he often felt as
+if he were praying to her, and not to God at all.
+
+She had begun to teach him to pray so early that the custom reached
+beyond the confines of his memory. At first he had had to repeat the
+words after her; but soon she made him construct his own utterances,
+now and then giving him a suggestion in the form of a petition when
+he seemed likely to break down, or putting a phrase into what she
+considered more suitable language. But all such assistance she had given
+up long ago.
+
+On the present occasion, after she had ended her petitions with those
+for Jews and pagans, and especially for the 'Pop' o' Rom',' in whom with
+a rare liberality she took the kindest interest, always praying God to
+give him a good wife, though she knew perfectly well the marriage-creed
+of the priesthood, for her faith in the hearer of prayer scorned every
+theory but that in which she had herself been born and bred, she turned
+to Robert with the usual 'Noo, Robert!' and Robert began. But after he
+had gone on for some time with the ordinary phrases, he turned all
+at once into a new track, and instead of praying in general terms for
+'those that would not walk in the right way,' said,
+
+'O Lord! save my father,' and there paused.
+
+'If it be thy will,' suggested his grandmother.
+
+But Robert continued silent. His grandmother repeated the subjunctive
+clause.
+
+'I'm tryin', grandmother,' said Robert, 'but I canna say 't. I daurna
+say an if aboot it. It wad be like giein' in till 's damnation. We maun
+hae him saved, grannie!'
+
+'Laddie! laddie! haud yer tongue!' said Mrs. Falconer, in a tone of
+distressed awe. 'O Lord, forgie 'im. He's young and disna ken better
+yet. He canna unnerstan' thy ways, nor, for that maitter, can I preten'
+to unnerstan' them mysel'. But thoo art a' licht, and in thee is no
+darkness at all. And thy licht comes into oor blin' een, and mak's
+them blinner yet. But, O Lord, gin it wad please thee to hear oor
+prayer...eh! hoo we wad praise thee! And my Andrew wad praise thee mair
+nor ninety and nine o' them 'at need nae repentance.'
+
+A long pause followed. And then the only words that would come were:
+'For Christ's sake. Amen.'
+
+When she said that God was light, instead of concluding therefrom that
+he could not do the deeds of darkness, she was driven, from a faith in
+the teaching of Jonathan Edwards as implicit as that of 'any lay papist
+of Loretto,' to doubt whether the deeds of darkness were not after all
+deeds of light, or at least to conclude that their character depended
+not on their own nature, but on who did them.
+
+They rose from their knees, and Mrs. Falconer sat down by her fire, with
+her feet on her little wooden stool, and began, as was her wont in that
+household twilight, ere the lamp was lighted, to review her past life,
+and follow her lost son through all conditions and circumstances to her
+imaginable. And when the world to come arose before her, clad in all the
+glories which her fancy, chilled by education and years, could supply,
+it was but to vanish in the gloom of the remembrance of him with whom
+she dared not hope to share its blessedness. This at least was how
+Falconer afterwards interpreted the sudden changes from gladness to
+gloom which he saw at such times on her countenance.
+
+But while such a small portion of the universe of thought was
+enlightened by the glowworm lamp of the theories she had been taught,
+she was not limited for light to that feeble source. While she walked
+on her way, the moon, unseen herself behind the clouds, was illuminating
+the whole landscape so gently and evenly, that the glowworm being the
+only visible point of radiance, to it she attributed all the light. But
+she felt bound to go on believing as she had been taught; for sometimes
+the most original mind has the strongest sense of law upon it, and will,
+in default of a better, obey a beggarly one--only till the higher law
+that swallows it up manifests itself. Obedience was as essential an
+element of her creed as of that of any purest-minded monk; neither being
+sufficiently impressed with this: that, while obedience is the law of
+the kingdom, it is of considerable importance that that which is obeyed
+should be in very truth the will of God. It is one thing, and a good
+thing, to do for God's sake that which is not his will: it is another
+thing, and altogether a better thing--how much better, no words can
+tell--to do for God's sake that which is his will. Mrs. Falconer's
+submission and obedience led her to accept as the will of God, lest she
+should be guilty of opposition to him, that which it was anything but
+giving him honour to accept as such. Therefore her love to God was too
+like the love of the slave or the dog; too little like the love of the
+child, with whose obedience the Father cannot be satisfied until he
+cares for his reason as the highest form of his will. True, the child
+who most faithfully desires to know the inward will or reason of
+the Father, will be the most ready to obey without it; only for this
+obedience it is essential that the apparent command at least be such as
+he can suppose attributable to the Father. Of his own self he is bound
+to judge what is right, as the Lord said. Had Abraham doubted whether it
+was in any case right to slay his son, he would have been justified
+in doubting whether God really required it of him, and would have been
+bound to delay action until the arrival of more light. True, the will
+of God can never be other than good; but I doubt if any man can ever be
+sure that a thing is the will of God, save by seeing into its nature and
+character, and beholding its goodness. Whatever God does must be right,
+but are we sure that we know what he does? That which men say he does
+may be very wrong indeed.
+
+This burden she in her turn laid upon Robert--not unkindly, but as
+needful for his training towards well-being. Her way with him was
+shaped after that which she recognized as God's way with her. 'Speir nae
+questons, but gang an' du as ye're tellt.' And it was anything but a bad
+lesson for the boy. It was one of the best he could have had--that of
+authority. It is a grand thing to obey without asking questions, so long
+as there is nothing evil in what is commanded. Only grannie concealed
+her reasons without reason; and God makes no secrets. Hence she seemed
+more stern and less sympathetic than she really was.
+
+She sat with her feet on the little wooden stool, and Robert sat beside
+her staring into the fire, till they heard the outer door open, and
+Shargar and Betty come in from church.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. ROBERT'S MOTHER.
+
+Early on the following morning, while Mrs. Falconer, Robert, and Shargar
+were at breakfast, Mr. Lammie came. He had delayed communicating the
+intelligence he had received till he should be more certain of its
+truth. Older than Andrew, he had been a great friend of his father,
+and likewise of some of Mrs. Falconer's own family. Therefore he was
+received with a kindly welcome. But there was a cloud on his brow which
+in a moment revealed that his errand was not a pleasant one.
+
+'I haena seen ye for a lang time, Mr. Lammie. Gae butt the hoose, lads.
+Or I'm thinkin' it maun be schule-time. Sit ye doon, Mr. Lammie, and
+lat's hear yer news.'
+
+'I cam frae Aberdeen last nicht, Mistress Faukner,' he began.
+
+'Ye haena been hame sin' syne?' she rejoined.
+
+'Na. I sleepit at The Boar's Heid.'
+
+'What for did ye that? What gart ye be at that expense, whan ye kent I
+had a bed i' the ga'le-room?'
+
+'Weel, ye see, they're auld frien's o' mine, and I like to gang to them
+whan I'm i' the gait o' 't.'
+
+'Weel, they're a fine faimily, the Miss Napers. And, I wat, sin' they
+maun sell drink, they du 't wi' discretion. That's weel kent.'
+
+Possibly Mr. Lammie, remembering what then occurred, may have thought
+the discretion a little in excess of the drink, but he had other matters
+to occupy him now. For a few moments both were silent.
+
+'There's been some ill news, they tell me, Mrs. Faukner,' he said at
+length, when the silence had grown painful.
+
+'Humph!' returned the old lady, her face becoming stony with the effort
+to suppress all emotion. 'Nae aboot Anerew?'
+
+''Deed is 't, mem. An' ill news, I'm sorry to say.'
+
+'Is he ta'en?'
+
+'Ay is he--by a jyler that winna tyne the grup.'
+
+'He's no deid, John Lammie? Dinna say 't.'
+
+'I maun say 't, Mrs. Faukner. I had it frae Dr. Anderson, yer ain
+cousin. He hintit at it afore, but his last letter leaves nae room to
+doobt upo' the subjeck. I'm unco sorry to be the beirer o' sic ill news,
+Mrs. Faukner, but I had nae chice.'
+
+'Ohone! Ohone! the day o' grace is by at last! My puir Anerew!'
+exclaimed Mrs. Falconer, and sat dumb thereafter.
+
+Mr. Lammie tried to comfort her with some of the usual comfortless
+commonplaces. She neither wept nor replied, but sat with stony face
+staring into her lap, till, seeing that she was as one that heareth not,
+he rose and left her alone with her grief. A few minutes after he was
+gone, she rang the bell, and told Betty in her usual voice to send
+Robert to her.
+
+'He's gane to the schule, mem.'
+
+'Rin efter him, an' tell him to come hame.'
+
+When Robert appeared, wondering what his grandmother could want with
+him, she said:
+
+'Close the door, Robert. I canna lat ye gang to the schule the day. We
+maun lea' him oot noo.'
+
+'Lea' wha oot, grannie?'
+
+'Him, him--Anerew. Yer father, laddie. I think my hert 'll brak.'
+
+'Lea' him oot o' what, grannie? I dinna unnerstan' ye.'
+
+'Lea' him oot o' oor prayers, laddie, and I canna bide it.'
+
+'What for that?'
+
+'He's deid.'
+
+'Are ye sure?'
+
+'Ay, ower sure--ower sure, laddie.'
+
+'Weel, I dinna believe 't.'
+
+'What for that?'
+
+''Cause I winna believe 't. I'm no bund to believe 't, am I?'
+
+'What's the gude o' that? What for no believe 't? Dr. Anderson's sent
+hame word o' 't to John Lammie. Och hone! och hone!'
+
+'I tell ye I winna believe 't, grannie, 'cep' God himsel' tells me. As
+lang 's I dinna believe 'at he's deid, I can keep him i' my prayers. I'm
+no gaein' to lea' him oot, I tell ye, grannie.'
+
+'Weel, laddie, I canna argue wi' ye. I hae nae hert til 't. I doobt I
+maun greit! Come awa'.'
+
+She took him by the hand and rose, then let him go again, saying,
+
+'Sneck the door, laddie.'
+
+Robert bolted the door, and his grandmother again taking his hand, led
+him to the usual corner. There they knelt down together, and the old
+woman's prayer was one great and bitter cry for submission to the divine
+will. She rose a little strengthened, if not comforted, saying,
+
+'Ye maun pray yer lane, laddie. But oh be a guid lad, for ye're a' that
+I hae left; and gin ye gang wrang tu, ye'll bring doon my gray hairs wi'
+sorrow to the grave. They're gray eneuch, and they're near eneuch to the
+grave, but gin ye turn oot weel, I'll maybe haud up my heid a bit yet.
+But O Anerew! my son! my son! Would God I had died for thee!'
+
+And the words of her brother in grief, the king of Israel, opened the
+floodgates of her heart, and she wept. Robert left her weeping, and
+closed the door quietly as if his dead father had been lying in the
+room.
+
+He took his way up to his own garret, closed that door too, and sat down
+upon the floor, with his back against the empty bedstead.
+
+There were no more castles to build now. It was all very well to say
+that he would not believe the news and would pray for his father, but
+he did believe them--enough at least to spoil the praying. His favourite
+employment, seated there, had hitherto been to imagine how he would grow
+a great man, and set out to seek his father, and find him, and stand by
+him, and be his son and servant. Oh! to have the man stroke his head
+and pat his cheek, and love him! One moment he imagined himself his
+indignant defender, the next he would be climbing on his knee, as if he
+were still a little child, and laying his head on his shoulder. For he
+had had no fondling his life long, and his heart yearned for it. But all
+this was gone now. A dreary time lay before him, with nobody to please,
+nobody to serve; with nobody to praise him. Grannie never praised him.
+She must have thought praise something wicked. And his father was in
+misery, for ever and ever! Only somehow that thought was not quite
+thinkable. It was more the vanishing of hope from his own life than a
+sense of his father's fate that oppressed him.
+
+He cast his eyes, as in a hungry despair, around the empty room--or,
+rather, I should have said, in that faintness which makes food at once
+essential and loathsome; for despair has no proper hunger in it. The
+room seemed as empty as his life. There was nothing for his eyes to rest
+upon but those bundles and bundles of dust-browned papers on the shelves
+before him. What were they all about? He understood that they were his
+father's: now that he was dead, it would be no sacrilege to look at
+them. Nobody cared about them. He would see at least what they were. It
+would be something to do in this dreariness.
+
+Bills and receipts, and everything ephemeral--to feel the interest of
+which, a man must be a poet indeed--was all that met his view. Bundle
+after bundle he tried, with no better success. But as he drew near the
+middle of the second shelf, upon which they lay several rows deep, he
+saw something dark behind, hurriedly displaced the packets between, and
+drew forth a small workbox. His heart beat like that of the prince in
+the fairy-tale, when he comes to the door of the Sleeping Beauty. This
+at least must have been hers. It was a common little thing, probably
+a childish possession, and kept to hold trifles worth more than they
+looked to be. He opened it with bated breath. The first thing he saw was
+a half-finished reel of cotton--a pirn, he called it. Beside it was a
+gold thimble. He lifted the tray. A lovely face in miniature, with dark
+hair and blue eyes, lay looking earnestly upward. At the lid of this
+coffin those eyes had looked for so many years! The picture was set all
+round with pearls in an oval ring. How Robert knew them to be pearls
+he could not tell, for he did not know that he had ever seen any pearls
+before, but he knew they were pearls, and that pearls had something
+to do with the New Jerusalem. But the sadness of it all at length
+overpowered him, and he burst out crying. For it was awfully sad that
+his mother's portrait should be in his own mother's box.
+
+He took a bit of red tape off a bundle of the papers, put it through
+the eye of the setting, and hung the picture round his neck, inside his
+clothes, for grannie must not see it. She would take that away as she
+had taken his fiddle. He had a nameless something now for which he had
+been longing for years.
+
+Looking again in the box, he found a little bit of paper, discoloured
+with antiquity, as it seemed to him, though it was not so old as
+himself. Unfolding it he found written upon it a well-known hymn, and at
+the bottom of the hymn, the words: 'O Lord! my heart is very sore.'--The
+treasure upon Robert's bosom was no longer the symbol of a mother's
+love, but of a woman's sadness, which he could not reach to comfort. In
+that hour, the boy made a great stride towards manhood. Doubtless his
+mother's grief had been the same as grannie's--the fear that she would
+lose her husband for ever. The hourly fresh griefs from neglect and
+wrong did not occur to him; only the never never more. He looked no
+farther, took the portrait from his neck and replaced it with the paper,
+put the box back, and walled it up in solitude once more with the dusty
+bundles. Then he went down to his grandmother, sadder and more desolate
+than ever.
+
+He found her seated in her usual place. Her New Testament, a large-print
+octavo, lay on the table beside her unopened; for where within those
+boards could she find comfort for a grief like hers? That it was the
+will of God might well comfort any suffering of her own, but would it
+comfort Andrew? and if there was no comfort for Andrew, how was Andrew's
+mother to be comforted?
+
+Yet God had given his first-born to save his brethren: how could he be
+pleased that she should dry her tears and be comforted? True, some awful
+unknown force of a necessity with which God could not cope came in to
+explain it; but this did not make God more kind, for he knew it all
+every time he made a man; nor man less sorrowful, for God would have his
+very mother forget him, or, worse still, remember him and be happy.
+
+'Read a chapter till me, laddie,' she said.
+
+Robert opened and read till he came to the words: 'I pray not for the
+world.'
+
+'He was o' the world,' said the old woman; 'and gin Christ wadna pray
+for him, what for suld I?'
+
+Already, so soon after her son's death, would her theology begin to
+harden her heart. The strife which results from believing that the
+higher love demands the suppression of the lower, is the most fearful of
+all discords, the absolute love slaying love--the house divided against
+itself; one moment all given up for the will of Him, the next the human
+tenderness rushing back in a flood. Mrs. Falconer burst into a very
+agony of weeping. From that day, for many years, the name of her
+lost Andrew never passed her lips in the hearing of her grandson, and
+certainly in that of no one else.
+
+But in a few weeks she was more cheerful. It is one of the mysteries of
+humanity that mothers in her circumstances, and holding her creed, do
+regain not merely the faculty of going on with the business of life,
+but, in most cases, even cheerfulness. The infinite Truth, the Love of
+the universe, supports them beyond their consciousness, coming to them
+like sleep from the roots of their being, and having nothing to do with
+their opinions or beliefs. And hence spring those comforting subterfuges
+of hope to which they all fly. Not being able to trust the Father
+entirely, they yet say: 'Who can tell what took place at the last
+moment? Who can tell whether God did not please to grant them saving
+faith at the eleventh hour?'--that so they might pass from the very
+gates of hell, the only place for which their life had fitted them, into
+the bosom of love and purity! This God could do for all: this for the
+son beloved of his mother perhaps he might do!
+
+O rebellious mother heart! dearer to God than that which beats
+laboriously solemn under Genevan gown or Lutheran surplice! if thou
+wouldst read by thine own large light, instead of the glimmer from
+the phosphorescent brains of theologians, thou mightst even be able to
+understand such a simple word as that of the Saviour, when, wishing his
+disciples to know that he had a nearer regard for them as his brethren
+in holier danger, than those who had not yet partaken of his light, and
+therefore praying for them not merely as human beings, but as the human
+beings they were, he said to his Father in their hearing: 'I pray not
+for the world, but for them,'--not for the world now, but for them--a
+meaningless utterance, if he never prayed for the world; a word of
+small meaning, if it was not his very wont and custom to pray for the
+world--for men as men. Lord Christ! not alone from the pains of hell, or
+of conscience--not alone from the outer darkness of self and all that is
+mean and poor and low, do we fly to thee; but from the anger that arises
+within us at the wretched words spoken in thy name, at the degradation
+of thee and of thy Father in the mouths of those that claim especially
+to have found thee, do we seek thy feet. Pray thou for them also, for
+they know not what they do.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. MARY ST. JOHN.
+
+After this, day followed day in calm, dull progress. Robert did not care
+for the games through which his school-fellows forgot the little they
+had to forget, and had therefore few in any sense his companions. So
+he passed his time out of school in the society of his grandmother
+and Shargar, except that spent in the garret, and the few hours a
+week occupied by the lessons of the shoemaker. For he went on, though
+half-heartedly, with those lessons, given now upon Sandy's redeemed
+violin which he called his old wife, and made a little progress even, as
+we sometimes do when we least think it.
+
+He took more and more to brooding in the garret; and as more questions
+presented themselves for solution, he became more anxious to arrive at
+the solution, and more uneasy as he failed in satisfying himself that
+he had arrived at it; so that his brain, which needed quiet for the true
+formation of its substance, as a cooling liquefaction or an evaporating
+solution for the just formation of its crystals, became in danger of
+settling into an abnormal arrangement of the cellular deposits.
+
+I believe that even the new-born infant is, in some of his moods,
+already grappling with the deepest metaphysical problems, in
+forms infinitely too rudimental for the understanding of the grown
+philosopher--as far, in fact, removed from his ken on the one side, that
+of intelligential beginning, the germinal subjective, as his abstrusest
+speculations are from the final solutions of absolute entity on the
+other. If this be the case, it is no wonder that at Robert's age the
+deepest questions of his coming manhood should be in active operation,
+although so surrounded with the yoke of common belief and the shell of
+accredited authority, that the embryo faith, which in minds like his
+always takes the form of doubt, could not be defined any more than its
+existence could be disproved. I have given a hint at the tendency of
+his mind already, in the fact that one of the most definite inquiries to
+which he had yet turned his thoughts was, whether God would have mercy
+upon a repentant devil. An ordinary puzzle had been--if his father were
+to marry again, and it should turn out after all that his mother was
+not dead, what was his father to do? But this was over now. A third was,
+why, when he came out of church, sunshine always made him miserable, and
+he felt better able to be good when it rained or snowed hard. I might
+mention the inquiry whether it was not possible somehow to elude the
+omniscience of God; but that is a common question with thoughtful
+children, and indicates little that is characteristic of the individual.
+That he puzzled himself about the perpetual motion may pass for little
+likewise; but one thing which is worth mentioning, for indeed it caused
+him considerable distress, was, that in reading the Paradise Lost
+he could not help sympathizing with Satan, and feeling--I do not say
+thinking--that the Almighty was pompous, scarcely reasonable, and
+somewhat revengeful.
+
+He was recognized amongst his school-fellows as remarkable for his love
+of fair-play; so much so, that he was their constant referee. Add to
+this that, notwithstanding his sympathy with Satan, he almost invariably
+sided with his master, in regard of any angry reflection or seditious
+movement, and even when unjustly punished himself, the occasional
+result of a certain backwardness in self-defence, never showed any
+resentment--a most improbable statement, I admit, but nevertheless
+true--and I think the rest of his character may be left to the gradual
+dawn of its historical manifestation.
+
+He had long ere this discovered who the angel was that had appeared
+to him at the top of the stair upon that memorable night; but he could
+hardly yet say that he had seen her; for, except one dim glimpse he
+had had of her at the window as he passed in the street, she had not
+appeared to him save in the vision of that night. During the whole
+winter she scarcely left the house, partly from the state of her health,
+affected by the sudden change to a northern climate, partly from the
+attention required by her aunt, to aid in nursing whom she had left the
+warmer south. Indeed, it was only to return the visits of a few of Mrs.
+Forsyth's chosen, that she had crossed the threshold at all; and those
+visits were paid at a time when all such half-grown inhabitants as
+Robert were gathered under the leathery wing of Mr. Innes.
+
+But long before the winter was over, Rothieden had discovered that the
+stranger, the English lady, Mary St. John, outlandish, almost heathenish
+as her lovely name sounded in its ears, had a power as altogether
+strange and new as her name. For she was not only an admirable performer
+on the pianoforte, but such a simple enthusiast in music, that the man
+must have had no music or little heart in him in whom her playing did
+not move all that there was of the deepest.
+
+Occasionally there would be quite a small crowd gathered at night by the
+window of Mrs. Forsyth's drawing-room, which was on the ground-floor,
+listening to music such as had never before been heard in Rothieden.
+More than once, when Robert had not found Sandy Elshender at home on the
+lesson-night, and had gone to seek him, he had discovered him lying in
+wait, like a fowler, to catch the sweet sounds that flew from the opened
+cage of her instrument. He leaned against the wall with his ear laid
+over the edge, and as near the window as he dared to put it, his rough
+face, gnarled and blotched, and hirsute with the stubble of neglected
+beard--his whole ursine face transfigured by the passage of the sweet
+sounds through his chaotic brain, which they swept like the wind of God,
+when of old it moved on the face of the waters that clothed the void and
+formless world.
+
+'Haud yer tongue!' he would say in a hoarse whisper, when Robert sought
+to attract his attention; 'haud yer tongue, man, and hearken. Gin yon
+bonny leddy 'at yer grannie keeps lockit up i' the aumry war to tak to
+the piano, that's jist hoo she wad play. Lord, man! pit yer sowl i' yer
+lugs, an' hearken.'
+
+The soutar was all wrong in this; for if old Mr. Falconer's violin had
+taken woman-shape, it would have been that of a slight, worn, swarthy
+creature, with wild black eyes, great and restless, a voice like a
+bird's, and thin fingers that clawed the music out of the wires like the
+quills of the old harpsichord; not that of Mary St. John, who was tall,
+and could not help being stately, was large and well-fashioned, as full
+of repose as Handel's music, with a contralto voice to make you weep,
+and eyes that would have seemed but for their maidenliness to be always
+ready to fold you in their lucid gray depths.
+
+Robert stared at the soutar, doubting at first whether he had not
+been drinking. But the intoxication of music produces such a different
+expression from that of drink, that Robert saw at once that if he had
+indeed been drinking, at least the music had got above the drink. As
+long as the playing went on, Elshender was not to be moved from the
+window.
+
+But to many of the people of Rothieden the music did not recommend
+the musician; for every sort of music, except the most unmusical
+of psalm-singing, was in their minds of a piece with 'dancin' an'
+play-actin', an' ither warldly vainities an' abominations.' And Robert,
+being as yet more capable of melody than harmony, grudged to lose a
+lesson on Sandy's 'auld wife o' a fiddle' for any amount of Miss St.
+John's playing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV. ERIC ERICSON.
+
+One gusty evening--it was of the last day in March--Robert well
+remembered both the date and the day--a bleak wind was driving up the
+long street of the town, and Robert was standing looking out of one of
+the windows in the gable-room. The evening was closing into night. He
+hardly knew how he came to be there, but when he thought about it he
+found it was play-Wednesday, and that he had been all the half-holiday
+trying one thing after another to interest himself withal, but in vain.
+He knew nothing about east winds; but not the less did this dreary wind
+of the dreary March world prove itself upon his soul. For such a wind
+has a shadow wind along with it, that blows in the minds of men.
+There was nothing genial, no growth in it. It killed, and killed most
+dogmatically. But it is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Even an east
+wind must bear some blessing on its ugly wings. And as Robert looked
+down from the gable, the wind was blowing up the street before it
+half-a-dozen footfaring students from Aberdeen, on their way home at the
+close of the session, probably to the farm-labours of the spring.
+
+This was a glad sight, as that of the returning storks in Denmark.
+Robert knew where they would put up, sought his cap, and went out. His
+grandmother never objected to his going to see Miss Napier; it was in
+her house that the weary men would this night rest.
+
+It was not without reason that Lord Rothie had teased his hostess about
+receiving foot-passengers, for to such it was her invariable custom to
+make some civil excuse, sending Meg or Peggy to show them over the way
+to the hostelry next in rank, a proceeding recognized by the inferior
+hostess as both just and friendly, for the good woman never thought of
+measuring The Star against The Boar's Head. More than one comical story
+had been the result of this law of The Boar's Head, unalterable almost
+as that of the Medes and Persians. I say almost, for to one class of
+the footfaring community the official ice about the hearts of the three
+women did thaw, yielding passage to a full river of hospitality and
+generosity; and that was the class to which these wayfarers belonged.
+
+Well may Scotland rejoice in her universities, for whatever may be said
+against their system--I have no complaint to make--they are divine in
+their freedom: men who follow the plough in the spring and reap
+the harvest in the autumn, may, and often do, frequent their sacred
+precincts when the winter comes--so fierce, yet so welcome--so severe,
+yet so blessed--opening for them the doors to yet harder toil and yet
+poorer fare. I fear, however, that of such there will be fewer and
+fewer, seeing one class which supplied a portion of them has almost
+vanished from the country--that class which was its truest, simplest,
+and noblest strength--that class which at one time rendered it something
+far other than ridicule to say that Scotland was pre-eminently a
+God-fearing nation--I mean the class of cottars.
+
+Of this class were some of the footfaring company. But there were others
+of more means than the men of this lowly origin, who either could
+not afford to travel by the expensive coaches, or could find none to
+accommodate them. Possibly some preferred to walk. However this may have
+been, the various groups which at the beginning and close of the session
+passed through Rothieden weary and footsore, were sure of a hearty
+welcome at The Boar's Head. And much the men needed it. Some of them
+would have walked between one and two hundred miles before completing
+their journey.
+
+Robert made a circuit, and, fleet of foot, was in Miss Napier's parlour
+before the travellers made their appearance on the square. When they
+knocked at the door, Miss Letty herself went and opened it.
+
+'Can ye tak 's in, mem?' was on the lips of their spokesman, but Miss
+Letty had the first word.
+
+'Come in, come in, gentlemen. This is the first o' ye, and ye're the
+mair welcome. It's like seein' the first o' the swallows. An' sic a day
+as ye hae had for yer lang traivel!' she went on, leading the way to her
+sister's parlour, and followed by all the students, of whom the one that
+came hindmost was the most remarkable of the group--at the same time the
+most weary and downcast.
+
+Miss Napier gave them a similar welcome, shaking hands with every one of
+them. She knew them all but the last. To him she involuntarily showed a
+more formal respect, partly from his appearance, and partly that she
+had never seen him before. The whisky-bottle was brought out, and all
+partook, save still the last. Miss Lizzie went to order their supper.
+
+'Noo, gentlemen,' said Miss Letty, 'wad ony o' ye like to gang an'
+change yer hose, and pit on a pair o' slippers?'
+
+Several declined, saying they would wait until they had had their
+supper; the roads had been quite dry, &c., &c. One said he would, and
+another said his feet were blistered.
+
+'Hoot awa'!' [2] exclaimed Miss Letty.--'Here, Peggy!' she cried, going to
+the door; 'tak a pail o' het watter up to the chackit room. Jist ye gang
+up, Mr. Cameron, and Peggy 'll see to yer feet.--Noo, sir, will ye gang
+to yer room an' mak yersel' comfortable?--jist as gin ye war at hame,
+for sae ye are.'
+
+She addressed the stranger thus. He replied in a low indifferent tone,
+
+'No, thank you; I must be off again directly.'
+
+He was from Caithness, and talked no Scotch.
+
+''Deed, sir, ye'll do naething o' the kin'. Here ye s' bide, tho' I suld
+lock the door.'
+
+'Come, come, Ericson, none o' your nonsense!' said one of his fellows.
+'Ye ken yer feet are sae blistered ye can hardly put ane by the
+ither.--It was a' we cud du, mem, to get him alang the last mile.'
+
+'That s' be my business, than,' concluded Miss Letty.
+
+She left the room, and returning in a few minutes, said, as a matter of
+course, but with authority,
+
+'Mr. Ericson, ye maun come wi' me.'
+
+Then she hesitated a little. Was it maidenliness in the waning woman of
+five-and-forty? It was, I believe; for how can a woman always remember
+how old she is? If ever there was a young soul in God's world, it was
+Letty Napier. And the young man was tall and stately as a Scandinavian
+chief, with a look of command, tempered with patient endurance, in his
+eagle face, for he was more like an eagle than any other creature,
+and in his countenance signs of suffering. Miss Letty seeing this,
+was moved, and her heart swelled, and she grew conscious and shy, and
+turning to Robert, said,
+
+'Come up the stair wi' 's, Robert; I may want ye.'
+
+Robert jumped to his feet. His heart too had been yearning towards the
+stranger.
+
+As if yielding to the inevitable, Ericson rose and followed Miss Letty.
+But when they had reached the room, and the door was shut behind them,
+and Miss Letty pointed to a chair beside which stood a little wooden
+tub full of hot water, saying, 'Sit ye doon there, Mr. Ericson,' he drew
+himself up, all but his graciously-bowed head, and said,
+
+'Ma'am, I must tell you that I followed the rest in here from the very
+stupidity of weariness. I have not a shilling in my pocket.'
+
+'God bless me!' said Miss Letty--and God did bless her, I am sure--'we
+maun see to the feet first. What wad ye du wi' a shillin' gin ye had it?
+Wad ye clap ane upo' ilka blister?'
+
+Ericson burst out laughing, and sat down. But still he hesitated.
+
+'Aff wi' yer shune, sir. Duv ye think I can wash yer feet throu ben'
+leather?' said Miss Letty, not disdaining to advance her fingers to a
+shoe-tie.
+
+'But I'm ashamed. My stockings are all in holes.'
+
+'Weel, ye s' get a clean pair to put on the morn, an' I'll darn them 'at
+ye hae on, gin they be worth darnin', afore ye gang--an' what are ye sae
+camstairie (unmanageable) for? A body wad think ye had a clo'en fit in
+ilk ane o' thae bits o' shune o' yours. I winna promise to please yer
+mither wi' my darnin' though.'
+
+'I have no mother to find fault with it,' said Ericson.
+
+'Weel, a sister's waur.'
+
+'I have no sister, either.'
+
+This was too much for Miss Letty. She could keep up the bravado of
+humour no longer. She fairly burst out crying. In a moment more the
+shoes and stockings were off, and the blisters in the hot water. Miss
+Letty's tears dropped into the tub, and the salt in them did not hurt
+the feet with which she busied herself, more than was necessary, to hide
+them.
+
+But no sooner had she recovered herself than she resumed her former
+tone.
+
+'A shillin'! said ye? An' a' thae greedy gleds (kites) o' professors to
+pay, that live upo' the verra blude and banes o' sair-vroucht students!
+Hoo cud ye hae a shillin' ower? Troth, it's nae wonner ye haena ane
+left. An' a' the merchan's there jist leevin' upo' ye! Lord hae a care
+o' 's! sic bonnie feet!--Wi' blisters I mean. I never saw sic a sicht o'
+raw puddin's in my life. Ye're no fit to come doon the stair again.'
+
+All the time she was tenderly washing and bathing the weary feet. When
+she had dressed them and tied them up, she took the tub of water and
+carried it away, but turned at the door.
+
+'Ye'll jist mak up yer min' to bide a twa three days,' she said; 'for
+thae feet cudna bide to be carried, no to say to carry a weicht like
+you. There's naebody to luik for ye, ye ken. An' ye're no to come doon
+the nicht. I'll sen' up yer supper. And Robert there 'll bide and keep
+ye company.'
+
+She vanished; and a moment after, Peggy appeared with a salamander--that
+is a huge poker, ending not in a point, but a red-hot ace of
+spades--which she thrust between the bars of the grate, into the heart
+of a nest of brushwood. Presently a cheerful fire illuminated the room.
+
+Ericson was seated on one chair, with his feet on another, his head
+sunk on his bosom, and his eyes thinking. There was something about him
+almost as powerfully attractive to Robert as it had been to Miss Letty.
+So he sat gazing at him, and longing for a chance of doing something for
+him. He had reverence already, and some love, but he had never felt
+at all as he felt towards this man. Nor was it as the Chinese puzzlers
+called Scotch metaphysicians, might have represented it--a combination
+of love and reverence. It was the recognition of the eternal brotherhood
+between him and one nobler than himself--hence a lovely eager worship.
+
+Seeing Ericson look about him as if he wanted something, Robert started
+to his feet.
+
+'Is there onything ye want, Mr. Ericson?' he said, with service standing
+in his eyes.
+
+'A small bundle I think I brought up with me,' replied the youth.
+
+It was not there. Robert rushed down-stairs, and returned with it--a
+nightshirt and a hairbrush or so, tied up in a blue cotton handkerchief.
+This was all that Robert was able to do for Ericson that evening.
+
+He went home and dreamed about him. He called at The Boar's Head the
+next morning before going to school, but Ericson was not yet up. When he
+called again as soon as morning school was over, he found that they had
+persuaded him to keep his bed, but Miss Letty took him up to his room.
+He looked better, was pleased to see Robert, and spoke to him kindly.
+Twice yet Robert called to inquire after him that day, and once more he
+saw him, for he took his tea up to him.
+
+The next day Ericson was much better, received Robert with a smile, and
+went out with him for a stroll, for all his companions were gone, and of
+some students who had arrived since he did not know any. Robert took him
+to his grandmother, who received him with stately kindness. Then they
+went out again, and passed the windows of Captain Forsyth's house. Mary
+St. John was playing. They stood for a moment, almost involuntarily, to
+listen. She ceased.
+
+'That's the music of the spheres,' said Ericson, in a low voice, as they
+moved on.
+
+'Will you tell me what that means?' asked Robert. 'I've come upon 't
+ower an' ower in Milton.'
+
+Thereupon Ericson explained to him what Pythagoras had taught about the
+stars moving in their great orbits with sounds of awful harmony,
+too grandly loud for the human organ to vibrate in response to their
+music--hence unheard of men. And Ericson spoke as if he believed it.
+But after he had spoken, his face grew sadder than ever; and, as if to
+change the subject, he said, abruptly,
+
+'What a fine old lady your grandmother is, Robert!'
+
+'Is she?' returned Robert.
+
+'I don't mean to say she's like Miss Letty,' said Ericson. 'She's an
+angel!'
+
+A long pause followed. Robert's thoughts went roaming in their usual
+haunts.
+
+'Do you think, Mr. Ericson,' he said, at length, taking up the old
+question still floating unanswered in his mind, 'do you think if a devil
+was to repent God would forgive him?'
+
+Ericson turned and looked at him. Their eyes met. The youth wondered at
+the boy. He had recognized in him a younger brother, one who had begun
+to ask questions, calling them out into the deaf and dumb abyss of the
+universe.
+
+'If God was as good as I would like him to be, the devils themselves
+would repent,' he said, turning away.
+
+Then he turned again, and looking down upon Robert like a sorrowful
+eagle from a crag over its harried nest, said,
+
+'If I only knew that God was as good as--that woman, I should die
+content.'
+
+Robert heard words of blasphemy from the mouth of an angel, but his
+respect for Ericson compelled a reply.
+
+'What woman, Mr. Ericson?' he asked.
+
+'I mean Miss Letty, of course.'
+
+'But surely ye dinna think God's nae as guid as she is? Surely he's as
+good as he can be. He is good, ye ken.'
+
+'Oh, yes. They say so. And then they tell you something about him that
+isn't good, and go on calling him good all the same. But calling anybody
+good doesn't make him good, you know.'
+
+'Then ye dinna believe 'at God is good, Mr. Ericson?' said Robert,
+choking with a strange mingling of horror and hope.
+
+'I didn't say that, my boy. But to know that God was good, and fair, and
+kind--heartily, I mean, not half-ways, and with ifs and buts--my boy,
+there would be nothing left to be miserable about.'
+
+In a momentary flash of thought, Robert wondered whether this might not
+be his old friend, the repentant angel, sent to earth as a man, that he
+might have a share in the redemption, and work out his own salvation.
+And from this very moment the thoughts about God that had hitherto been
+moving in formless solution in his mind began slowly to crystallize.
+
+The next day, Eric Ericson, not without a piece in ae pouch and money
+in another, took his way home, if home it could be called where neither
+father, mother, brother, nor sister awaited his return. For a season
+Robert saw him no more.
+
+As often as his name was mentioned, Miss Letty's eyes would grow hazy,
+and as often she would make some comical remark.
+
+'Puir fallow!' she would say, 'he was ower lang-leggit for this warld.'
+
+Or again:
+
+'Ay, he was a braw chield. But he canna live. His feet's ower sma'.'
+
+Or yet again:
+
+'Saw ye ever sic a gowk, to mak sic a wark aboot sittin' doon an' haein'
+his feet washed, as gin that cost a body onything!'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI. MR. LAMMIE'S FARM.
+
+One of the first warm mornings in the beginning of summer, the boy woke
+early, and lay awake, as was his custom, thinking. The sun, in all
+the indescribable purity of its morning light, had kindled a spot of
+brilliance just about where his grannie's head must be lying asleep in
+its sad thoughts, on the opposite side of the partition.
+
+He lay looking at the light. There came a gentle tapping at his window.
+A long streamer of honeysuckle, not yet in blossom, but alive with the
+life of the summer, was blown by the air of the morning against his
+window-pane, as if calling him to get up and look out. He did get up and
+look out.
+
+But he started back in such haste that he fell against the side of his
+bed. Within a few yards of his window, bending over a bush, was the
+loveliest face he had ever seen--the only face, in fact, he had ever yet
+felt to be beautiful. For the window looked directly into the garden
+of the next house: its honeysuckle tapped at his window, its sweet-peas
+grew against his window-sill. It was the face of the angel of that
+night; but how different when illuminated by the morning sun from then,
+when lighted up by a chamber-candle! The first thought that came to him
+was the half-ludicrous, all-fantastic idea of the shoemaker about his
+grandfather's violin being a woman. A vaguest dream-vision of her having
+escaped from his grandmother's aumrie (store-closet), and wandering free
+amidst the wind and among the flowers, crossed his mind before he had
+recovered sufficiently from his surprise to prevent Fancy from cutting
+any more of those too ridiculous capers in which she indulged at will in
+sleep, and as often besides as she can get away from the spectacles of
+old Grannie Judgment.
+
+But the music of her revelation was not that of the violin; and
+Robert vaguely felt this, though he searched no further for a fitting
+instrument to represent her. If he had heard the organ indeed!--but he
+knew no instrument save the violin: the piano he had only heard through
+the window. For a few moments her face brooded over the bush, and
+her long, finely-modelled fingers travelled about it as if they were
+creating a flower upon it--probably they were assisting the birth or
+blowing of some beauty--and then she raised herself with a lingering
+look, and vanished from the field of the window.
+
+But ever after this, when the evening grew dark, Robert would steal
+out of the house, leaving his book open by his grannie's lamp, that its
+patient expansion might seem to say, 'He will come back presently,' and
+dart round the corner with quick quiet step, to hear if Miss St. John
+was playing. If she was not, he would return to the Sabbath stillness
+of the parlour, where his grandmother sat meditating or reading, and
+Shargar sat brooding over the freedom of the old days ere Mrs. Falconer
+had begun to reclaim him. There he would seat himself once more at his
+book--to rise again ere another hour had gone by, and hearken yet again
+at her window whether the stream might not be flowing now. If he found
+her at her instrument he would stand listening in earnest delight,
+until the fear of being missed drove him in: this secret too might
+be discovered, and this enchantress too sent, by the decree of his
+grandmother, into the limbo of vanities. Thus strangely did his evening
+life oscillate between the two peaceful negations of grannie's parlour
+and the vital gladness of the unknown lady's window. And skilfully did
+he manage his retreats and returns, curtailing his absences with such
+moderation that, for a long time, they awoke no suspicion in the mind of
+his grandmother.
+
+I suspect myself that the old lady thought he had gone to his prayers in
+the garret. And I believe she thought that he was praying for his dead
+father; with which most papistical, and, therefore, most unchristian
+observance, she yet dared not interfere, because she expected Robert to
+defend himself triumphantly with the simple assertion that he did not
+believe his father was dead. Possibly the mother was not sorry that
+her poor son should be prayed for, in case he might be alive after all,
+though she could no longer do so herself--not merely dared not, but
+persuaded herself that she would not. Robert, however, was convinced
+enough, and hopeless enough, by this time, and had even less temptation
+to break the twentieth commandment by praying for the dead, than his
+grandmother had; for with all his imaginative outgoings after his
+father, his love to him was as yet, compared to that father's mother's,
+'as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.'
+
+Shargar would glance up at him with a queer look as he came in from
+these excursions, drop his head over his task again, look busy and
+miserable, and all would glide on as before.
+
+When the first really summer weather came, Mr. Lammie one day paid
+Mrs. Falconer a second visit. He had not been able to get over the
+remembrance of the desolation in which he had left her. But he could
+do nothing for her, he thought, till it was warm weather. He was
+accompanied by his daughter, a woman approaching the further verge of
+youth, bulky and florid, and as full of tenderness as her large frame
+could hold. After much, and, for a long time, apparently useless
+persuasion, they at last believed they had prevailed upon her to pay
+them a visit for a fortnight. But she had only retreated within another
+of her defences.
+
+'I canna leave thae twa laddies alane. They wad be up to a' mischeef.'
+
+'There's Betty to luik efter them,' suggested Miss Lammie.
+
+'Betty!' returned Mrs. Falconer, with scorn. 'Betty's naething but a
+bairn hersel'--muckler and waur faured (worse favoured).'
+
+'But what for shouldna ye fess the lads wi' ye?' suggested Mr. Lammie.
+
+'I hae no richt to burden you wi' them.'
+
+'Weel, I hae aften wonnert what gart ye burden yersel' wi' that Shargar,
+as I understan' they ca' him,' said Mr. Lammie.
+
+'Jist naething but a bit o' greed,' returned the old lady, with the
+nearest approach to a smile that had shown itself upon her face since
+Mr. Lammie's last visit.
+
+'I dinna understan' that, Mistress Faukner,' said Miss Lammie.
+
+'I'm sae sure o' haein' 't back again, ye ken,--wi' interest,' returned
+Mrs. Falconer.
+
+'Hoo's that? His father winna con ye ony thanks for haudin' him in
+life.'
+
+'He that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord, ye ken, Miss Lammie.'
+
+'Atweel, gin ye like to lippen to that bank, nae doobt ae way or anither
+it'll gang to yer accoont,' said Miss Lammie.
+
+'It wad ill become us, ony gait,' said her father, 'nae to gie him
+shelter for your sake, Mrs. Faukner, no to mention ither names, sin'
+it's yer wull to mak the puir lad ane o' the family.--They say his ain
+mither's run awa' an' left him.'
+
+''Deed she's dune that.'
+
+'Can ye mak onything o' 'im?'
+
+'He's douce eneuch. An' Robert says he does nae that ill at the schuil.'
+
+'Weel, jist fess him wi' ye. We'll hae some place or ither to put him
+intil, gin it suld be only a shak'-doon upo' the flure.'
+
+'Na, na. There's the schuilin'--what's to be dune wi' that?'
+
+'They can gang i' the mornin', and get their denner wi' Betty here; and
+syne come hame to their fower-hoors (four o'clock tea) whan the schule's
+ower i' the efternune. 'Deed, mem, ye maun jist come for the sake o' the
+auld frien'ship atween the faimilies.'
+
+'Weel, gin it maun be sae, it maun be sae,' yielded Mrs. Falconer, with
+a sigh.
+
+She had not left her own house for a single night for ten years. Nor is
+it likely she would have now given in, for immovableness was one of the
+most marked of her characteristics, had she not been so broken by mental
+suffering, that she did not care much about anything, least of all about
+herself.
+
+Innumerable were the instructions in propriety of behaviour which she
+gave the boys in prospect of this visit. The probability being that
+they would behave just as well as at home, these instructions were
+considerably unnecessary, for Mrs. Falconer was a strict enforcer of all
+social rules. Scarcely less unnecessary were the directions she gave as
+to the conduct of Betty, who received them all in erect submission, with
+her hands under her apron. She ought to have been a young girl instead
+of an elderly woman, if there was any propriety in the way her mistress
+spoke to her. It proved at least her own belief in the description she
+had given of her to Miss Lammie.
+
+'Noo, Betty, ye maun be dooce. An' dinna stan' at the door i' the
+gloamin'. An' dinna stan' claikin' an' jawin' wi' the ither lasses whan
+ye gang to the wall for watter. An' whan ye gang intil a chop, dinna
+hae them sayin' ahint yer back, as sune's yer oot again, "She's her ain
+mistress by way o'," or sic like. An' min' ye hae worship wi' yersel',
+whan I'm nae here to hae 't wi' ye. Ye can come benn to the parlour
+gin ye like. An' there's my muckle Testament. And dinna gie the lads a'
+thing they want. Gie them plenty to ait, but no ower muckle. Fowk suld
+aye lea' aff wi' an eppiteet.'
+
+Mr. Lammie brought his gig at last, and took grannie away to Bodyfauld.
+When the boys returned from school at the dinner-hour, it was to exult
+in a freedom which Robert had never imagined before. But even he could
+not know what a relief it was to Shargar to eat without the awfully calm
+eyes of Mrs. Falconer watching, as it seemed to him, the progress of
+every mouthful down that capacious throat of his. The old lady would
+have been shocked to learn how the imagination of the ill-mothered lad
+interpreted her care over him, but she would not have been surprised to
+know that the two were merry in her absence. She knew that, in some of
+her own moods, it would be a relief to think that that awful eye of
+God was not upon her. But she little thought that even in the lawless
+proceedings about to follow, her Robert, who now felt such a relief in
+her absence, would be walking straight on, though blindly, towards a
+sunrise of faith, in which he would know that for the eye of his God
+to turn away from him for one moment would be the horror of the outer
+darkness.
+
+Merriment, however, was not in Robert's thoughts, and still less was
+mischief. For the latter, whatever his grandmother might think, he had
+no capacity. The world was already too serious, and was soon to be
+too beautiful for mischief. After that, it would be too sad, and then,
+finally, until death, too solemn glad. The moment he heard of his
+grandmother's intended visit, one wild hope and desire and intent had
+arisen within him.
+
+When Betty came to the parlour door to lay the cloth for their dinner,
+she found it locked.
+
+'Open the door!' she cried, but cried in vain. From impatience she
+passed to passion; but it was of no avail: there came no more response
+than from the shrine of the deaf Baal. For to the boys it was an
+opportunity not at any risk to be lost. Dull Betty never suspected what
+they were about. They were ranging the place like two tiger-cats whose
+whelps had been carried off in their absence--questing, with nose to
+earth and tail in air, for the scent of their enemy. My simile has
+carried me too far: it was only a dead old gentleman's violin that a
+couple of boys was after--but with what eagerness, and, on the part of
+Robert, what alternations of hope and fear! And Shargar was always the
+reflex of Robert, so far as Shargar could reflect Robert. Sometimes
+Robert would stop, stand still in the middle of the room, cast a
+mathematical glance of survey over its cubic contents, and then dart off
+in another inwardly suggested direction of search. Shargar, on the
+other hand, appeared to rummage blindly without a notion of casting the
+illumination of thought upon the field of search. Yet to him fell the
+success. When hope was growing dim, after an hour and a half of vain
+endeavour, a scream of utter discordance heralded the resurrection
+of the lady of harmony. Taught by his experience of his wild mother's
+habits to guess at those of douce Mrs. Falconer, Shargar had found
+the instrument in her bed at the foot, between the feathers and the
+mattress. For one happy moment Shargar was the benefactor, and Robert
+the grateful recipient of favour. Nor, I do believe, was this thread
+of the still thickening cable that bound them ever forgotten: broken it
+could not be.
+
+Robert drew the recovered treasure from its concealment, opened the case
+with trembling eagerness, and was stooping, with one hand on the neck of
+the violin, and the other on the bow, to lift them from it, when Shargar
+stopped him.
+
+His success had given him such dignity, that for once he dared to act
+from himself.
+
+'Betty 'll hear ye,' he said.
+
+'What care I for Betty? She daurna tell. I ken hoo to manage her.'
+
+'But wadna 't be better 'at she didna ken?'
+
+'She's sure to fin' oot whan she mak's the bed. She turns 't ower and
+ower jist like a muckle tyke (dog) worryin' a rottan (rat).'
+
+'De'il a bit o' her s' be a hair wiser! Ye dinna play tunes upo' the
+boxie, man.'
+
+Robert caught at the idea. He lifted the 'bonny leddy' from her coffin;
+and while he was absorbed in the contemplation of her risen beauty,
+Shargar laid his hands on Boston's Four-fold State, the torment of his
+life on the Sunday evenings which it was his turn to spend with Mrs.
+Falconer, and threw it as an offering to the powers of Hades into the
+case, which he then buried carefully, with the feather-bed for mould,
+the blankets for sod, and the counterpane studiously arranged for
+stone, over it. He took heed, however, not to let Robert know of the
+substitution of Boston for the fiddle, because he knew Robert could not
+tell a lie. Therefore, when he murmured over the volume some of its
+own words which he had read the preceding Sunday, it was in a quite
+inaudible whisper: 'Now is it good for nothing but to cumber the ground,
+and furnish fuel for Tophet.'
+
+Robert must now hide the violin better than his grannie had done, while
+at the same time it was a more delicate necessity, seeing it had lost
+its shell, and he shrunk from putting her in the power of the shoemaker
+again. It cost him much trouble to fix on the place that was least
+unsuitable. First he put it into the well of the clock-case, but
+instantly bethought him what the awful consequence would be if one of
+the weights should fall from the gradual decay of its cord. He had heard
+of such a thing happening. Then he would put it into his own place of
+dreams and meditations. But what if Betty should take a fancy to change
+her bed? or some friend of his grannie's should come to spend the night?
+How would the bonny leddy like it? What a risk she would run! If he put
+her under the bed, the mice would get at her strings--nay, perhaps, knaw
+a hole right through her beautiful body. On the top of the clock, the
+brass eagle with outspread wings might scratch her, and there was not
+space to conceal her. At length he concluded--wrapped her in a piece of
+paper, and placed her on the top of the chintz tester of his bed, where
+there was just room between it and the ceiling: that would serve till he
+bore her to some better sanctuary. In the meantime she was safe, and the
+boy was the blessedest boy in creation.
+
+These things done, they were just in the humour to have a lark with
+Betty. So they unbolted the door, rang the bell, and when Betty
+appeared, red-faced and wrathful, asked her very gravely and politely
+whether they were not going to have some dinner before they went back to
+school: they had now but twenty minutes left. Betty was so dumfoundered
+with their impudence that she could not say a word. She did make haste
+with the dinner, though, and revealed her indignation only in her
+manner of putting the things on the table. As the boys left her, Robert
+contented himself with the single hint:
+
+'Betty, Bodyfauld 's i' the perris o' Kettledrum. Min' ye that.'
+
+Betty glowered and said nothing.
+
+But the delight of the walk of three miles over hill and dale and moor
+and farm to Mr. Lammie's! The boys, if not as wild as colts--that is,
+as wild as most boys would have been--were only the more deeply excited.
+That first summer walk, with a goal before them, in all the freshness of
+the perfecting year, was something which to remember in after days
+was to Falconer nothing short of ecstasy. The westering sun threw long
+shadows before them as they trudged away eastward, lightly laden with
+the books needful for the morrow's lessons. Once beyond the immediate
+purlieus of the town and the various plots of land occupied by its
+inhabitants, they crossed a small river, and entered upon a region of
+little hills, some covered to the top with trees, chiefly larch, others
+cultivated, and some bearing only heather, now nursing in secret its
+purple flame for the outburst of the autumn. The road wound between, now
+swampy and worn into deep ruts, now sandy and broken with large stones.
+Down to its edge would come the dwarfed oak, or the mountain ash, or
+the silver birch, single and small, but lovely and fresh; and now green
+fields, fenced with walls of earth as green as themselves, or of stones
+overgrown with moss, would stretch away on both sides, sprinkled with
+busily-feeding cattle. Now they would pass through a farm-steading,
+perfumed with the breath of cows, and the odour of burning peat--so
+fragrant! though not yet so grateful to the inner sense as it would be
+when encountered in after years and in foreign lands. For the smell of
+burning and the smell of earth are the deepest underlying sensuous bonds
+of the earth's unity, and the common brotherhood of them that dwell
+thereon. Now the scent of the larches would steal from the hill, or
+the wind would waft the odour of the white clover, beloved of his
+grandmother, to Robert's nostrils, and he would turn aside to pull her
+a handful. Then they clomb a high ridge, on the top of which spread a
+moorland, dreary and desolate, brightened by nothing save 'the canna's
+hoary beard' waving in the wind, and making it look even more desolate
+from the sympathy they felt with the forsaken grass. This crossed, they
+descended between young plantations of firs and rowan-trees and
+birches, till they reached a warm house on the side of the slope, with
+farm-offices and ricks of corn and hay all about it, the front overgrown
+with roses and honeysuckle, and a white-flowering plant unseen of their
+eyes hitherto, and therefore full of mystery. From the open kitchen
+door came the smell of something good. But beyond all to Robert was the
+welcome of Miss Lammie, whose small fat hand closed upon his like a very
+love-pudding, after partaking of which even his grandmother's stately
+reception, followed immediately by the words 'Noo be dooce,' could not
+chill the warmth in his bosom.
+
+I know but one writer whose pen would have been able worthily to set
+forth the delights of the first few days at Bodyfauld--Jean Paul. Nor
+would he have disdained to make the gladness of a country school-boy the
+theme of that pen. Indeed, often has he done so. If the writer has any
+higher purpose than the amusement of other boys, he will find the
+life of a country boy richer for his ends than that of a town boy.
+For example, he has a deeper sense of the marvel of Nature, a tenderer
+feeling of her feminality. I do not mean that the other cannot develop
+this sense, but it is generally feeble, and there is consequently less
+chance of its surviving. As far as my experience goes, town girls and
+country boys love Nature most. I have known town girls love her
+as passionately as country boys. Town boys have too many books and
+pictures. They see Nature in mirrors--invaluable privilege after they
+know herself, not before. They have greater opportunity of observing
+human nature; but here also the books are too many and various. They
+are cleverer than country boys, but they are less profound; their
+observation may be quicker; their perception is shallower. They know
+better what to do on an emergency; they know worse how to order their
+ways. Of course, in this, as in a thousand other matters, Nature will
+burst out laughing in the face of the would-be philosopher, and bringing
+forward her town boy, will say, 'Look here!' For the town boys
+are Nature's boys after all, at least so long as doctrines of
+self-preservation and ambition have not turned them from children of
+the kingdom into dirt-worms. But I must stop, for I am getting up to the
+neck in a bog of discrimination. As if I did not know the nobility of
+some townspeople, compared with the worldliness of some country folk. I
+give it up. We are all good and all bad. God mend all. Nothing will do
+for Jew or Gentile, Frenchman or Englishman, Negro or Circassian, town
+boy or country boy, but the kingdom of heaven which is within him, and
+must come thence to the outside of him.
+
+To a boy like Robert the changes of every day, from country to town
+with the gay morning, from town to country with the sober evening--for
+country as Rothieden might be to Edinburgh, much more was Bodyfauld
+country to Rothieden--were a source of boundless delight. Instead of
+houses, he saw the horizon; instead of streets or walled gardens, he
+roamed over fields bathed in sunlight and wind. Here it was good to
+get up before the sun, for then he could see the sun get up. And of
+all things those evening shadows lengthening out over the grassy
+wildernesses--for fields of a very moderate size appeared such to
+an imagination ever ready at the smallest hint to ascend its solemn
+throne--were a deepening marvel. Town to country is what a ceiling is to
+a caelum.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII. ADVENTURES.
+
+Grannie's first action every evening, the moment the boys entered the
+room, was to glance up at the clock, that she might see whether they had
+arrived in reasonable time. This was not pleasant, because it admonished
+Robert how impossible it was for him to have a lesson on his own violin
+so long as the visit to Bodyfauld lasted. If they had only been allowed
+to sleep at Rothieden, what a universe of freedom would have been
+theirs! As it was, he had but two hours to himself, pared at both ends,
+in the middle of the day. Dooble Sanny might have given him a lesson
+at that time, but he did not dare to carry his instrument through the
+streets of Rothieden, for the proceeding would be certain to come to
+his grandmother's ears. Several days passed indeed before he made up his
+mind as to how he was to reap any immediate benefit from the recovery
+of the violin. For after he had made up his mind to run the risk of
+successive mid-day solos in the old factory--he was not prepared to
+carry the instrument through the streets, or be seen entering the place
+with it.
+
+But the factory lay at the opposite corner of a quadrangle of gardens,
+the largest of which belonged to itself; and the corner of this garden
+touched the corner of Captain Forsyth's, which had formerly belonged
+to Andrew Falconer: he had had a door made in the walls at the point of
+junction, so that he could go from his house to his business across
+his own property: if this door were not locked, and Robert could pass
+without offence, what a north-west passage it would be for him! The
+little garden belonging to his grandmother's house had only a slight
+wooden fence to divide it from the other, and even in this fence there
+was a little gate: he would only have to run along Captain Forsyth's top
+walk to reach the door. The blessed thought came to him as he lay in bed
+at Bodyfauld: he would attempt the passage the very next day.
+
+With his violin in its paper under his arm, he sped like a hare from
+gate to door, found it not even latched, only pushed to and rusted into
+such rest as it was dangerous to the hinges to disturb. He opened it,
+however, without any accident, and passed through; then closing it
+behind him, took his way more leisurely through the tangled grass of
+his grandmother's property. When he reached the factory, he judged it
+prudent to search out a more secret nook, one more full of silence, that
+is, whence the sounds would be less certain to reach the ears of the
+passers by, and came upon a small room, near the top, which had been the
+manager's bedroom, and which, as he judged from what seemed the signs of
+ancient occupation, a cloak hanging on the wall, and the ashes of a
+fire lying in the grate, nobody had entered for years: it was the safest
+place in the world. He undid his instrument carefully, tuned its strings
+tenderly, and soon found that his former facility, such as it was, had
+not ebbed away beyond recovery. Hastening back as he came, he was just
+in time for his dinner, and narrowly escaped encountering Betty in the
+transe. He had been tempted to leave the instrument, but no one could
+tell what might happen, and to doubt would be to be miserable with
+anxiety.
+
+He did the same for several days without interruption--not, however,
+without observation. When, returning from his fourth visit, he opened
+the door between the gardens, he started back in dismay, for there stood
+the beautiful lady.
+
+Robert hesitated for a moment whether to fly or speak. He was a Lowland
+country boy, and therefore rude of speech, but he was three parts a
+Celt, and those who know the address of the Irish or of the Highlanders,
+know how much that involves as to manners and bearing. He advanced the
+next instant and spoke.
+
+'I beg yer pardon, mem. I thoucht naebody wad see me. I haena dune nae
+ill.'
+
+'I had not the least suspicion of it, I assure you,' returned Miss St.
+John. 'But, tell me, what makes you go through here always at the same
+hour with the same parcel under your arm?'
+
+'Ye winna tell naebody--will ye, mem, gin I tell you?'
+
+Miss St. John, amused, and interested besides in the contrast between
+the boy's oddly noble face and good bearing on the one hand, and on the
+other the drawl of his bluntly articulated speech and the coarseness of
+his tone, both seeming to her in the extreme of provincialism, promised;
+and Robert, entranced by all the qualities of her voice and speech, and
+nothing disenchanted by the nearer view of her lovely face, confided in
+her at once.
+
+'Ye see, mem,' he said, 'I cam' upo' my grandfather's fiddle. But my
+grandmither thinks the fiddle's no gude. And sae she tuik and she hed
+it. But I faun't it again. An' I daurna play i' the hoose, though my
+grannie's i' the country, for Betty hearin' me and tellin' her. And sae
+I gang to the auld fact'ry there. It belangs to my grannie, and sae does
+the yaird (garden). An' this hoose and yaird was ance my father's, and
+sae he had that door throu, they tell me. An' I thocht gin it suld be
+open, it wad be a fine thing for me, to haud fowk ohn seen me. But it
+was verra ill-bred to you, mem, I ken, to come throu your yaird ohn
+speirt leave. I beg yer pardon, mem, an' I'll jist gang back, and roon'
+by the ro'd. This is my fiddle I hae aneath my airm. We bude to pit back
+the case o' 't whaur it was afore, i' my grannie's bed, to haud her ohn
+kent 'at she had tint the grup o' 't.'
+
+Certainly Miss St. John could not have understood the half of the words
+Robert used, but she understood his story notwithstanding. Herself an
+enthusiast in music, her sympathies were at once engaged for the awkward
+boy who was thus trying to steal an entrance into the fairy halls
+of sound. But she forbore any further allusion to the violin for the
+present, and contented herself with assuring Robert that he was heartily
+welcome to go through the garden as often as he pleased. She accompanied
+her words with a smile that made Robert feel not only that she was
+the most beautiful of all princesses in fairy-tales, but that she had
+presented him with something beyond price in the most self-denying
+manner. He took off his cap, thanked her with much heartiness, if not
+with much polish, and hastened to the gate of his grandmother's little
+garden. A few years later such an encounter might have spoiled his
+dinner: I have to record no such evil result of the adventure.
+
+With Miss St. John, music was the highest form of human expression, as
+must often be the case with those whose feeling is much in advance of
+their thought, and to whom, therefore, may be called mental sensation
+is the highest known condition. Music to such is poetry in solution, and
+generates that infinite atmosphere, common to both musician and poet,
+which the latter fills with shining worlds.--But if my reader wishes to
+follow out for himself the idea herein suggested, he must be careful to
+make no confusion between those who feel musically or think poetically,
+and the musician or the poet. One who can only play the music of others,
+however exquisitely, is not a musician, any more than one who can read
+verse to the satisfaction, or even expound it to the enlightenment of
+the poet himself, is therefore a poet.--When Miss St. John would worship
+God, it was in music that she found the chariot of fire in which to
+ascend heavenward. Hence music was the divine thing in the world for
+her; and to find any one loving music humbly and faithfully was to find
+a brother or sister believer. But she had been so often disappointed in
+her expectations from those she took to be such, that of late she had
+become less sanguine. Still there was something about this boy that
+roused once more her musical hopes; and, however she may have restrained
+herself from the full indulgence of them, certain it is that the next
+day, when she saw Robert pass, this time leisurely, along the top of the
+garden, she put on her bonnet and shawl, and, allowing him time to reach
+his den, followed him, in the hope of finding out whether or not he
+could play. I do not know what proficiency the boy had attained, very
+likely not much, for a man can feel the music of his own bow, or of his
+own lines, long before any one else can discover it. He had already made
+a path, not exactly worn one, but trampled one, through the neglected
+grass, and Miss St. John had no difficulty in finding his entrance to
+the factory.
+
+She felt a little eerie, as Robert would have called it, when she passed
+into the waste silent place; for besides the wasteness and the silence,
+motionless machines have a look of death about them, at least when they
+bear such signs of disuse as those that filled these rooms. Hearing no
+violin, she waited for a while in the ground-floor of the building; but
+still hearing nothing, she ascended to the first floor. Here, likewise,
+all was silence. She hesitated, but at length ventured up the next
+stair, beginning, however, to feel a little troubled as well as eerie,
+the silence was so obstinately persistent. Was it possible that there
+was no violin in that brown paper? But that boy could not be a liar.
+Passing shelves piled-up with stores of old thread, she still went on,
+led by a curiosity stronger than her gathering fear. At last she came
+to a little room, the door of which was open, and there she saw Robert
+lying on the floor with his head in a pool of blood.
+
+Now Mary St. John was both brave and kind; and, therefore, though not
+insensible to the fact that she too must be in danger where violence had
+been used to a boy, she set about assisting him at once. His face was
+deathlike, but she did not think he was dead. She drew him out into the
+passage, for the room was close, and did all she could to recover him;
+but for some time he did not even breathe. At last his lips moved, and
+he murmured,
+
+'Sandy, Sandy, ye've broken my bonnie leddy.'
+
+Then he opened his eyes, and seeing a face to dream about bending in
+kind consternation over him, closed them again with a smile and a sigh,
+as if to prolong his dream.
+
+The blood now came fast into his forsaken cheeks, and began to flow
+again from the wound in his head. The lady bound it up with her
+handkerchief. After a little he rose, though with difficulty, and stared
+wildly about him, saying, with imperfect articulation, 'Father! father!'
+Then he looked at Miss St. John with a kind of dazed inquiry in his
+eyes, tried several times to speak, and could not.
+
+'Can you walk at all?' asked Miss St. John, supporting him, for she was
+anxious to leave the place.
+
+'Yes, mem, weel eneuch,' he answered.
+
+'Come along, then. I will help you home.'
+
+'Na, na,' he said, as if he had just recalled something. 'Dinna min' me.
+Rin hame, mem, or he'll see ye!'
+
+'Who will see me?'
+
+Robert stared more wildly, put his hand to his head, and made no reply.
+She half led, half supported him down the stair, as far as the first
+landing, when he cried out in a tone of anguish,
+
+'My bonny leddy!'
+
+'What is it?' asked Miss St. John, thinking he meant her.
+
+'My fiddle! my fiddle! She 'll be a' in bits,' he answered, and turned
+to go up again.
+
+'Sit down here,' said Miss St. John, 'and I'll fetch it.'
+
+Though not without some tremor, she darted back to the room. Then she
+turned faint for the first time, but determinedly supporting herself,
+she looked about, saw a brown-paper parcel on a shelf, took it, and
+hurried out with a shudder.
+
+Robert stood leaning against the wall. He stretched out his hands
+eagerly.
+
+'Gie me her. Gie me her.'
+
+'You had better let me carry it. You are not able.'
+
+'Na, na, mem. Ye dinna ken hoo easy she is to hurt.'
+
+'Oh, yes, I do!' returned Miss St. John, smiling, and Robert could not
+withstand the smile.
+
+'Weel, tak care o' her, as ye wad o' yer ain sel', mem,' he said,
+yielding.
+
+He was now much better, and before he had been two minutes in the
+open air, insisted that he was quite well. When they reached Captain
+Forsyth's garden he again held out his hands for his violin.
+
+'No, no,' said his new friend. 'You wouldn't have Betty see you like
+that, would you?'
+
+'No, mem; but I'll put in the fiddle at my ain window, and she sanna
+hae a chance o' seein' 't,' answered Robert, not understanding her;
+for though he felt a good deal of pain, he had no idea what a dreadful
+appearance he presented.
+
+'Don't you know that you have a wound on your head?' asked Miss St.
+John.
+
+'Na! hev I?' said Robert, putting up his hand. 'But I maun gang--there's
+nae help for 't,' he added.--'Gin I cud only win to my ain room ohn
+Betty seen me!--Eh! mem, I hae blaudit (spoiled) a' yer bonny goon.
+That's a sair vex.'
+
+'Never mind it,' returned Miss St. John, smiling. 'It is of no
+consequence. But you must come with me. I must see what I can do for
+your head. Poor boy!'
+
+'Eh, mem! but ye are kin'! Gin ye speik like that ye'll gar me greit.
+Naebody ever spak' to me like that afore. Maybe ye kent my mamma. Ye're
+sae like her.'
+
+This word mamma was the only remnant of her that lingered in his speech.
+Had she lived he would have spoken very differently. They were now
+walking towards the house.
+
+'No, I did not know your mamma. Is she dead?'
+
+'Lang syne, mem. And sae they tell me is yours.'
+
+'Yes; and my father too. Your father is alive, I hope?'
+
+Robert made no answer. Miss St. John turned.
+
+The boy had a strange look, and seemed struggling with something in his
+throat. She thought he was going to faint again, and hurried him into
+the drawing-room. Her aunt had not yet left her room, and her uncle was
+out.
+
+'Sit down,' she said--so kindly--and Robert sat down on the edge of
+a chair. Then she left the room, but presently returned with a little
+brandy. 'There,' she said, offering the glass, 'that will do you good.'
+
+'What is 't, mem?'
+
+'Brandy. There's water in it, of course.'
+
+'I daurna touch 't. Grannie cudna bide me to touch 't,'
+
+So determined was he, that Miss St. John was forced to yield. Perhaps
+she wondered that the boy who would deceive his grandmother about a
+violin should be so immovable in regarding her pleasure in the matter of
+a needful medicine. But in this fact I begin to see the very Falconer of
+my manhood's worship.
+
+'Eh, mem! gin ye wad play something upo' her,' he resumed, pointing
+to the piano, which, although he had never seen one before, he at once
+recognized, by some hidden mental operation, as the source of the sweet
+sounds heard at the window, 'it wad du me mair guid than a haill bottle
+o' brandy, or whusky either.'
+
+'How do you know that?' asked Miss St. John, proceeding to sponge the
+wound.
+
+''Cause mony's the time I hae stud oot there i' the street, hearkenin'.
+Dooble Sanny says 'at ye play jist as gin ye war my gran'father's fiddle
+hersel', turned into the bonniest cratur ever God made.'
+
+'How did you get such a terrible cut?'
+
+She had removed the hair, and found that the injury was severe.
+
+The boy was silent. She glanced round in his face. He was staring as if
+he saw nothing, heard nothing. She would try again.
+
+'Did you fall? Or how did you cut your head?'
+
+'Yes, yes, mem, I fell,' he answered, hastily, with an air of relief,
+and possibly with some tone of gratitude for the suggestion of a true
+answer.
+
+'What made you fall?'
+
+Utter silence again. She felt a kind of turn--I do not know another word
+to express what I mean: the boy must have fits, and either could not
+tell, or was ashamed to tell, what had befallen him. Thereafter she
+too was silent, and Robert thought she was offended. Possibly he felt a
+change in the touch of her fingers.
+
+'Mem, I wad like to tell ye,' he said, 'but I daurna.'
+
+'Oh! never mind,' she returned kindly.
+
+'Wad ye promise nae to tell naebody?'
+
+'I don't want to know,' she answered, confirmed in her suspicion, and at
+the same time ashamed of the alteration of feeling which the discovery
+had occasioned.
+
+An uncomfortable silence followed, broken by Robert.
+
+'Gin ye binna pleased wi' me, mem,' he said, 'I canna bide ye to gang on
+wi' siccan a job 's that.'
+
+How Miss St. John could have understood him, I cannot think; but she
+did.
+
+'Oh! very well,' she answered, smiling. 'Just as you please. Perhaps you
+had better take this piece of plaster to Betty, and ask her to finish
+the dressing for you.'
+
+Robert took the plaster mechanically, and, sick at heart and speechless,
+rose to go, forgetting even his bonny leddy in his grief.
+
+'You had better take your violin with you,' said Miss St. John, urged
+to the cruel experiment by a strong desire to see what the strange boy
+would do.
+
+He turned. The tears were streaming down his odd face. They went to her
+heart, and she was bitterly ashamed of herself.
+
+'Come along. Do sit down again. I only wanted to see what you would do.
+I am very sorry,' she said, in a tone of kindness such as Robert had
+never imagined.
+
+He sat down instantly, saying,
+
+'Eh, mem! it's sair to bide;' meaning, no doubt, the conflict between
+his inclination to tell her all, and his duty to be silent.
+
+The dressing was soon finished, his hair combed down over it, and Robert
+looking once more respectable.
+
+'Now, I think that will do,' said his nurse.
+
+'Eh, thank ye, mem!' answered Robert, rising. 'Whan I'm able to play
+upo' the fiddle as weel 's ye play upo' the piana, I'll come and play at
+yer window ilka nicht, as lang 's ye like to hearken.'
+
+She smiled, and he was satisfied. He did not dare again ask her to play
+to him. But she said of herself, 'Now I will play something to you, if
+you like,' and he resumed his seat devoutly.
+
+When she had finished a lovely little air, which sounded to Robert
+like the touch of her hands, and her breath on his forehead, she
+looked round, and was satisfied, from the rapt expression of the boy's
+countenance, that at least he had plenty of musical sensibility. As if
+despoiled of volition, he stood motionless till she said,
+
+'Now you had better go, or Betty will miss you.'
+
+Then he made her a bow in which awkwardness and grace were curiously
+mingled, and taking up his precious parcel, and holding it to his bosom
+as if it had been a child for whom he felt an access of tenderness, he
+slowly left the room and the house.
+
+Not even to Shargar did he communicate his adventure. And he went no
+more to the deserted factory to play there. Fate had again interposed
+between him and his bonny leddy.
+
+When he reached Bodyfauld he fancied his grandmother's eyes more
+watchful of him than usual, and he strove the more to resist the
+weariness, and even faintness, that urged him to go to bed. Whether he
+was able to hide as well a certain trouble that clouded his spirit I
+doubt. His wound he did manage to keep a secret, thanks to the care of
+Miss St. John, who had dressed it with court-plaster.
+
+When he woke the next morning, it was with the consciousness of having
+seen something strange the night before, and only when he found that he
+was not in his own room at his grandmother's, was he convinced that it
+must have been a dream and no vision. For in the night, he had awaked
+there as he thought, and the moon was shining with such clearness, that
+although it did not shine into his room, he could see the face of the
+clock, and that the hands were both together at the top. Close by the
+clock stood the bureau, with its end against the partition forming the
+head of his grannie's bed.
+
+All at once he saw a tall man, in a blue coat and bright buttons, about
+to open the lid of the bureau. The same moment he saw a little elderly
+man in a brown coat and a brown wig, by his side, who sought to remove
+his hand from the lock. Next appeared a huge stalwart figure, in shabby
+old tartans, and laid his hand on the head of each. But the wonder
+widened and grew; for now came a stately Highlander with his broadsword
+by his side, and an eagle's feather in his bonnet, who laid his hand on
+the other Highlander's arm.
+
+When Robert looked in the direction whence this last had appeared, the
+head of his grannie's bed had vanished, and a wild hill-side, covered
+with stones and heather, sloped away into the distance. Over it passed
+man after man, each with an ancestral air, while on the gray sea to the
+left, galleys covered with Norsemen tore up the white foam, and dashed
+one after the other up to the strand. How long he gazed, he did not
+know, but when he withdrew his eyes from the extended scene, there stood
+the figure of his father, still trying to open the lid of the bureau,
+his grandfather resisting him, the blind piper with his hand on the head
+of both, and the stately chief with his hand on the piper's arm. Then a
+mist of forgetfulness gathered over the whole, till at last he awoke and
+found himself in the little wooden chamber at Bodyfauld, and not in the
+visioned room. Doubtless his loss of blood the day before had something
+to do with the dream or vision, whichever the reader may choose to
+consider it. He rose, and after a good breakfast, found himself very
+little the worse, and forgot all about his dream, till a circumstance
+which took place not long after recalled it vividly to his mind.
+
+The enchantment of Bodyfauld soon wore off. The boys had no time to
+enter into the full enjoyment of country ways, because of those weary
+lessons, over the getting of which Mrs. Falconer kept as strict a watch
+as ever; while to Robert the evening journey, his violin and Miss St.
+John left at Rothieden, grew more than tame. The return was almost
+as happy an event to him as the first going. Now he could resume his
+lessons with the soutar.
+
+With Shargar it was otherwise. The freedom for so much longer from Mrs.
+Falconer's eyes was in itself so much of a positive pleasure, that
+the walk twice a day, the fresh air, and the scents and sounds of the
+country, only came in as supplementary. But I do not believe the boy
+even then had so much happiness as when he was beaten and starved by
+his own mother. And Robert, growing more and more absorbed in his own
+thoughts and pursuits, paid him less and less attention as the weeks
+went on, till Shargar at length judged it for a time an evil day on
+which he first had slept under old Ronald Falconer's kilt.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII. NATURE PUTS IN A CLAIM.
+
+Before the day of return arrived, Robert had taken care to remove the
+violin from his bedroom, and carry it once more to its old retreat in
+Shargar's garret. The very first evening, however, that grannie again
+spent in her own arm-chair, he hied from the house as soon as it grew
+dusk, and made his way with his brown-paper parcel to Sandy Elshender's.
+
+Entering the narrow passage from which his shop door opened, and hearing
+him hammering away at a sole, he stood and unfolded his treasure, then
+drew a low sigh from her with his bow, and awaited the result. He heard
+the lap-stone fall thundering on the floor, and, like a spider from his
+cavern, Dooble Sanny appeared in the door, with the bend-leather in one
+hand, and the hammer in the other.
+
+'Lordsake, man! hae ye gotten her again? Gie's a grup o' her!' he cried,
+dropping leather and hammer.
+
+'Na, na,' returned Robert, retreating towards the outer door. 'Ye maun
+sweir upo' her that, whan I want her, I sall hae her ohn demur, or I
+sanna lat ye lay roset upo' her.'
+
+'I swear 't, Robert; I sweir 't upo' her,' said the soutar hurriedly,
+stretching out both his hands as if to receive some human being into his
+embrace.
+
+Robert placed the violin in those grimy hands. A look of heavenly
+delight dawned over the hirsute and dirt-besmeared countenance, which
+drooped into tenderness as he drew the bow across the instrument, and
+wiled from her a thin wail as of sorrow at their long separation. He
+then retreated into his den, and was soon sunk in a trance, deaf to
+everything but the violin, from which no entreaties of Robert, who
+longed for a lesson, could rouse him; so that he had to go home
+grievously disappointed, and unrewarded for the risk he had run in
+venturing the stolen visit.
+
+Next time, however, he fared better; and he contrived so well that,
+from the middle of June to the end of August, he had two lessons a week,
+mostly upon the afternoons of holidays. For these his master thought
+himself well paid by the use of the instrument between. And Robert made
+great progress.
+
+Occasionally he saw Miss St. John in the garden, and once or twice met
+her in the town; but her desire to find in him a pupil had been greatly
+quenched by her unfortunate conjecture as to the cause of his accident.
+She had, however, gone so far as to mention the subject to her aunt, who
+assured her that old Mrs. Falconer would as soon consent to his being
+taught gambling as music. The idea, therefore, passed away; and beyond
+a kind word or two when she met him, there was no further communication
+between them. But Robert would often dream of waking from a swoon, and
+finding his head lying on her lap, and her lovely face bending over him
+full of kindness and concern.
+
+By the way, Robert cared nothing for poetry. Virgil was too troublesome
+to be enjoyed; and in English he had met with nothing but the dried
+leaves and gum-flowers of the last century. Miss Letty once lent him The
+Lady of the Lake; but before he had read the first canto through, his
+grandmother laid her hands upon it, and, without saying a word, dropped
+it behind a loose skirting-board in the pantry, where the mice soon made
+it a ruin sad to behold. For Miss Letty, having heard from the woful
+Robert of its strange disappearance, and guessing its cause, applied to
+Mrs. Falconer for the volume; who forthwith, the tongs aiding, extracted
+it from its hole, and, without shade of embarrassment, held it up like
+a drowned kitten before the eyes of Miss Letty, intending thereby, no
+doubt, to impress her with the fate of all seducing spirits that should
+attempt an entrance into her kingdom: Miss Letty only burst into merry
+laughter over its fate. So the lode of poetry failed for the present
+from Robert's life. Nor did it matter much; for had he not his violin?
+
+I have, I think, already indicated that his grandfather had been a
+linen manufacturer. Although that trade had ceased, his family had still
+retained the bleachery belonging to it, commonly called the bleachfield,
+devoting it now to the service of those large calico manufactures which
+had ruined the trade in linen, and to the whitening of such yarn as the
+country housewives still spun at home, and the webs they got woven of it
+in private looms. To Robert and Shargar it was a wondrous pleasure when
+the pile of linen which the week had accumulated at the office under the
+ga'le-room, was on Saturday heaped high upon the base of a broad-wheeled
+cart, to get up on it and be carried to the said bleachfield, which lay
+along the bank of the river. Soft laid and high-borne, gazing into the
+blue sky, they traversed the streets in a holiday triumph; and although,
+once arrived, the manager did not fail to get some labour out of them,
+yet the store of amusement was endless. The great wheel, which drove the
+whole machinery; the plash-mill, or, more properly, wauk-mill--a word
+Robert derived from the resemblance of the mallets to two huge feet, and
+of their motion to walking--with the water plashing and squirting from
+the blows of their heels; the beatles thundering in arpeggio upon the
+huge cylinder round which the white cloth was wound--each was haunted in
+its turn and season. The pleasure of the water itself was inexhaustible.
+Here sweeping in a mass along the race; there divided into branches and
+hurrying through the walls of the various houses; here sliding through
+a wooden channel across the floor to fall into the river in a
+half-concealed cataract, there bubbling up through the bottom of a huge
+wooden cave or vat, there resting placid in another; here gurgling along
+a spout; there flowing in a narrow canal through the green expanse of
+the well-mown bleachfield, or lifted from it in narrow curved wooden
+scoops, like fairy canoes with long handles, and flung in showers over
+the outspread yarn--the water was an endless delight.
+
+It is strange how some individual broidery or figure upon Nature's
+garment will delight a boy long before he has ever looked Nature in
+the face, or begun to love herself. But Robert was soon to become dimly
+conscious of a life within these things--a life not the less real that
+its operations on his mind had been long unrecognized.
+
+On the grassy bank of the gently-flowing river, at the other edge of
+whose level the little canal squabbled along, and on the grassy brae
+which rose immediately from the canal, were stretched, close beside each
+other, with scarce a stripe of green betwixt, the long white webs of
+linen, fastened down to the soft mossy ground with wooden pegs, whose
+tops were twisted into their edges. Strangely would they billow in the
+wind sometimes, like sea-waves, frozen and enchanted flat, seeking to
+rise and wallow in the wind with conscious depth and whelming mass. But
+generally they lay supine, saturated with light and its cleansing power.
+Falconer's jubilation in the white and green of a little boat, as we
+lay, one bright morning, on the banks of the Thames between Richmond
+and Twickenham, led to such a description of the bleachfield that I can
+write about it as if I had known it myself.
+
+One Saturday afternoon in the end of July, when the westering sun was
+hotter than at midday, he went down to the lower end of the field, where
+the river was confined by a dam, and plunged from the bank into deep
+water. After a swim of half-an-hour, he ascended the higher part of the
+field, and lay down upon a broad web to bask in the sun. In his ears
+was the hush rather than rush of the water over the dam, the occasional
+murmur of a belt of trees that skirted the border of the field, and
+the dull continuous sound of the beatles at their work below, like a
+persistent growl of thunder on the horizon.
+
+Had Robert possessed a copy of Robinson Crusoe, or had his grandmother
+not cast The Lady of the Lake, mistaking it for an idol, if not to the
+moles and the bats, yet to the mice and the black-beetles, he might
+have been lying reading it, blind and deaf to the face and the voice
+of Nature, and years might have passed before a response awoke in
+his heart. It is good that children of faculty, as distinguished from
+capacity, should not have too many books to read, or too much of early
+lessoning. The increase of examinations in our country will increase
+its capacity and diminish its faculty. We shall have more compilers and
+reducers and fewer thinkers; more modifiers and completers, and fewer
+inventors.
+
+He lay gazing up into the depth of the sky, rendered deeper and bluer by
+the masses of white cloud that hung almost motionless below it, until he
+felt a kind of bodily fear lest he should fall off the face of the round
+earth into the abyss. A gentle wind, laden with pine odours from the
+sun-heated trees behind him, flapped its light wing in his face: the
+humanity of the world smote his heart; the great sky towered up
+over him, and its divinity entered his soul; a strange longing after
+something 'he knew not nor could name' awoke within him, followed by
+the pang of a sudden fear that there was no such thing as that which he
+sought, that it was all a fancy of his own spirit; and then the voice
+of Shargar broke the spell, calling to him from afar to come and see
+a great salmon that lay by a stone in the water. But once aroused, the
+feeling was never stilled; the desire never left him; sometimes growing
+even to a passion that was relieved only by a flood of tears.
+
+Strange as it may sound to those who have never thought of such things
+save in connection with Sundays and Bibles and churches and sermons,
+that which was now working in Falconer's mind was the first dull and
+faint movement of the greatest need that the human heart possesses--the
+need of the God-Man. There must be truth in the scent of that pine-wood:
+some one must mean it. There must be a glory in those heavens that
+depends not upon our imagination: some power greater than they must
+dwell in them. Some spirit must move in that wind that haunts us with a
+kind of human sorrow; some soul must look up to us from the eye of that
+starry flower. It must be something human, else not to us divine.
+
+Little did Robert think that such was his need--that his soul was
+searching after One whose form was constantly presented to him, but as
+constantly obscured and made unlovely by the words without knowledge
+spoken in the religious assemblies of the land; that he was longing
+without knowing it on the Saturday for that from which on the Sunday he
+would be repelled without knowing it. Years passed before he drew nigh
+to the knowledge of what he sought.
+
+For weeks the mood broken by the voice of his companion did not return,
+though the forms of Nature were henceforth full of a pleasure he had
+never known before. He loved the grass; the water was more gracious to
+him; he would leave his bed early, that he might gaze on the clouds of
+the east, with their borders gold-blasted with sunrise; he would linger
+in the fields that the amber and purple, and green and red, of the
+sunset, might not escape after the sun unseen. And as long as he felt
+the mystery, the revelation of the mystery lay before and not behind
+him.
+
+And Shargar--had he any soul for such things? Doubtless; but how could
+he be other than lives behind Robert? For the latter had ancestors--that
+is, he came of people with a mental and spiritual history; while the
+former had been born the birth of an animal; of a noble sire, whose
+family had for generations filled the earth with fire, famine,
+slaughter, and licentiousness; and of a wandering outcast mother, who
+blindly loved the fields and woods, but retained her affection for her
+offspring scarcely beyond the period while she suckled them. The love
+of freedom and of wild animals that she had given him, however, was far
+more precious than any share his male ancestor had borne in his mental
+constitution. After his fashion he as well as Robert enjoyed the sun
+and the wind and the water and the sky; but he had sympathies with the
+salmon and the rooks and the wild rabbits even stronger than those of
+Robert.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX. ROBERT STEALS HIS OWN.
+
+The period of the hairst-play, that is, of the harvest holiday time,
+drew near, and over the north of Scotland thousands of half-grown hearts
+were beating with glad anticipation. Of the usual devices of boys to
+cheat themselves into the half-belief of expediting a blessed approach
+by marking its rate, Robert knew nothing: even the notching of sticks
+was unknown at Rothieden; but he had a mode notwithstanding. Although
+indifferent to the games of his school-fellows, there was one amusement,
+a solitary one nearly, and therein not so good as most amusements,
+into which he entered with the whole energy of his nature: it was
+kite-flying. The moment that the hairst-play approached near enough to
+strike its image through the eyes of his mind, Robert proceeded to
+make his kite, or draigon, as he called it. Of how many pleasures does
+pocket-money deprive the unfortunate possessor! What is the going into a
+shop and buying what you want, compared with the gentle delight of hours
+and days filled with gaining effort after the attainment of your end?
+Never boy that bought his kite, even if the adornment thereafter lay in
+his own hands, and the pictures were gorgeous with colour and gilding,
+could have half the enjoyment of Robert from the moment he went to the
+cooper's to ask for an old gird or hoop, to the moment when he said
+'Noo, Shargar!' and the kite rose slowly from the depth of the aerial
+flood. The hoop was carefully examined, the best portion cut away from
+it, that pared to a light strength, its ends confined to the proper
+curve by a string, and then away went Robert to the wright's shop. There
+a slip of wood, of proper length and thickness, was readily granted to
+his request, free as the daisies of the field. Oh! those horrid town
+conditions, where nothing is given for the asking, but all sold for
+money! In Robert's kite the only thing that cost money was the string to
+fly it with, and that the grandmother willingly provided, for not
+even her ingenuity could discover any evil, direct or implicated, in
+kite-flying. Indeed, I believe the old lady felt not a little sympathy
+with the exultation of the boy when he saw his kite far aloft,
+diminished to a speck in the vast blue; a sympathy, it may be, rooted in
+the religious aspirations which she did so much at once to rouse and to
+suppress in the bosom of her grandchild. But I have not yet reached the
+kite-flying, for I have said nothing of the kite's tail, for the sake of
+which principally I began to describe the process of its growth.
+
+As soon as the body of the dragon was completed, Robert attached to its
+spine the string which was to take the place of its caudal elongation,
+and at a proper distance from the body joined to the string the first
+of the cross-pieces of folded paper which in this animal represent the
+continued vertebral processes. Every morning, the moment he issued from
+his chamber, he proceeded to the garret where the monster lay, to add
+yet another joint to his tail, until at length the day should arrive
+when, the lessons over for a blessed eternity of five or six weeks, he
+would tip the whole with a piece of wood, to which grass, quantum suff.,
+might be added from the happy fields.
+
+Upon this occasion the dragon was a monster one. With a little help
+from Shargar, he had laid the skeleton of a six-foot specimen, and had
+carried the body to a satisfactory completion.
+
+The tail was still growing, having as yet only sixteen joints, when Mr.
+Lammie called with an invitation for the boys to spend their holidays
+with him. It was fortunate for Robert that he was in the room when Mr.
+Lammie presented his petition, otherwise he would never have heard of
+it till the day of departure arrived, and would thus have lost all the
+delights of anticipation. In frantic effort to control his ecstasy, he
+sped to the garret, and with trembling hands tied the second joint of
+the day to the tail of the dragon--the first time he had ever broken the
+law of its accretion. Once broken, that law was henceforth an object of
+scorn, and the tail grew with frightful rapidity. It was indeed a great
+dragon. And none of the paltry fields about Rothieden should be honoured
+with its first flight, but from Bodyfauld should the majestic child of
+earth ascend into the regions of upper air.
+
+My reader may here be tempted to remind me that Robert had been only too
+glad to return to Rothieden from his former visit. But I must in my turn
+remind him that the circumstances were changed. In the first place, the
+fiddle was substituted for grannie; and in the second, the dragon for
+the school.
+
+The making of this dragon was a happy thing for Shargar, and a yet
+happier thing for Robert, in that it introduced again for a time some
+community of interest between them. Shargar was happier than he had been
+for many a day because Robert used him; and Robert was yet happier than
+Shargar in that his conscience, which had reproached him for his neglect
+of him, was now silent. But not even his dragon had turned aside his
+attentions from his violin; and many were the consultations between the
+boys as to how best she might be transported to Bodyfauld, where endless
+opportunities of holding communion with her would not be wanting. The
+difficulty was only how to get her clear of Rothieden.
+
+The play commenced on a Saturday; but not till the Monday were they
+to be set at liberty. Wearily the hours of mental labour and bodily
+torpidity which the Scotch called the Sabbath passed away, and at length
+the millennial morning dawned. Robert and Shargar were up before
+the sun. But strenuous were the efforts they made to suppress all
+indications of excitement, lest grannie, fearing the immoral influence
+of gladness, should give orders to delay their departure for an awfully
+indefinite period, which might be an hour, a day, or even a week.
+Horrible conception! Their behaviour was so decorous that not even a
+hinted threat escaped the lips of Mrs. Falconer.
+
+They set out three hours before noon, carrying the great kite, and
+Robert's school bag, of green baize, full of sundries: a cart from
+Bodyfauld was to fetch their luggage later in the day. As soon as they
+were clear of the houses, Shargar lay down behind a dyke with the kite,
+and Robert set off at full speed for Dooble Sanny's shop, making a
+half-circuit of the town to avoid the chance of being seen by grannie or
+Betty. Having given due warning before, he found the brown-paper parcel
+ready for him, and carried it off in fearful triumph. He joined Shargar
+in safety, and they set out on their journey as rich and happy a pair of
+tramps as ever tramped, having six weeks of their own in their pockets
+to spend and not spare.
+
+A hearty welcome awaited them, and they were soon revelling in the
+glories of the place, the first instalment of which was in the shape of
+curds and cream, with oatcake and butter, as much as they liked. After
+this they would 'e'en to it like French falconers' with their kite, for
+the wind had been blowing bravely all the morning, having business to
+do with the harvest. The season of stubble not yet arrived, they were
+limited to the pasturage and moorland, which, however, large as their
+kite was, were spacious enough. Slowly the great-headed creature arose
+from the hands of Shargar, and ascended about twenty feet, when, as if
+seized with a sudden fit of wrath or fierce indignation, it turned right
+round and dashed itself with headlong fury to the earth, as if sooner
+than submit to such influences a moment longer it would beat out its
+brains at once.
+
+'It hasna half tail eneuch,' cried Robert. 'It's queer 'at things winna
+gang up ohn hauden them doon. Pu' a guid han'fu' o' clover, Shargar.
+She's had her fa', an' noo she'll gang up a' richt. She's nane the waur
+o' 't.'
+
+Upon the next attempt, the kite rose triumphantly. But just as it
+reached the length of the string it shot into a faster current of air,
+and Robert found himself first dragged along in spite of his efforts,
+and then lifted from his feet. After carrying him a few yards, the
+dragon broke its string, dropped him in a ditch, and, drifting away,
+went fluttering and waggling downwards in the distance.
+
+'Luik whaur she gangs, Shargar,' cried Robert, from the ditch.
+
+Experience coming to his aid, Shargar took landmarks of the direction in
+which it went; and ere long they found it with its tail entangled in the
+topmost branches of a hawthorn tree, and its head beating the ground at
+its foot. It was at once agreed that they would not fly it again till
+they got some stronger string.
+
+Having heard the adventure, Mr. Lammie produced a shilling from the
+pocket of his corduroys, and gave it to Robert to spend upon the needful
+string. He resolved to go to the town the next morning and make a grand
+purchase of the same. During the afternoon he roamed about the farm
+with his hands in his pockets, revolving if not many memories, yet
+many questions, while Shargar followed like a pup at the heels of
+Miss Lammie, to whom, during his former visit, he had become greatly
+attached.
+
+In the evening, resolved to make a confidant of Mr. Lammie, and indeed
+to cast himself upon the kindness of the household generally, Robert
+went up to his room to release his violin from its prison of brown
+paper. What was his dismay to find--not his bonny leddy, but her poor
+cousin, the soutar's auld wife! It was too bad. Dooble Sanny indeed!
+
+He first stared, then went into a rage, and then came out of it to go
+into a resolution. He replaced the unwelcome fiddle in the parcel, and
+came down-stairs gloomy and still wrathful, but silent. The evening
+passed over, and the inhabitants of the farmhouse went early to bed.
+Robert tossed about fuming on his. He had not undressed.
+
+About eleven o'clock, after all had been still for more than an hour,
+he took his shoes in one hand and the brown parcel in the other, and
+descending the stairs like a thief, undid the quiet wooden bar that
+secured the door, and let himself out. All was darkness, for the moon
+was not yet up, and he felt a strange sensation of ghostliness in
+himself--awake and out of doors, when he ought to be asleep and
+unconscious in bed. He had never been out so late before, and felt as
+if walking in the region of the dead, existing when and where he had no
+business to exist. For it was the time Nature kept for her own quiet,
+and having once put her children to bed--hidden them away with the world
+wiped out of them--enclosed them in her ebony box, as George Herbert
+says--she did not expect to have her hours of undress and meditation
+intruded upon by a venturesome school-boy. Yet she let him pass. He
+put on his shoes and hurried to the road. He heard a horse stamp in
+the stable, and saw a cat dart across the corn-yard as he went through.
+Those were all the signs of life about the place.
+
+It was a cloudy night and still. Nothing was to be heard but his own
+footsteps. The cattle in the fields were all asleep. The larch and
+spruce trees on the top of the hill by the foot of which his road wound
+were still as clouds. He could just see the sky through their stems. It
+was washed with the faintest of light, for the moon, far below, was yet
+climbing towards the horizon. A star or two sparkled where the clouds
+broke, but so little light was there, that, until he had passed the
+moorland on the hill, he could not get the horror of moss-holes, and
+deep springs covered with treacherous green, out of his head. But he
+never thought of turning. When the fears of the way at length fell back
+and allowed his own thoughts to rise, the sense of a presence, or of
+something that might grow to a presence, was the first to awake in him.
+The stillness seemed to be thinking all around his head. But the way
+grew so dark, where it lay through a corner of the pine-wood, that he
+had to feel the edge of the road with his foot to make sure that he was
+keeping upon it, and the sense of the silence vanished. Then he passed
+a farm, and the motions of horses came through the dark, and a doubtful
+crow from a young inexperienced cock, who did not yet know the moon from
+the sun. Then a sleepy low in his ear startled him, and made him quicken
+his pace involuntarily.
+
+By the time he reached Rothieden all the lights were out, and this was
+just what he wanted.
+
+The economy of Dooble Sanny's abode was this: the outer door was always
+left on the latch at night, because several families lived in the house;
+the soutar's workshop opened from the passage, close to the outer door,
+therefore its door was locked; but the key hung on a nail just inside
+the soutar's bedroom. All this Robert knew.
+
+Arrived at the house, he lifted the latch, closed the door behind him,
+took off his shoes once more, like a housebreaker, as indeed he was,
+although a righteous one, and felt his way to and up the stair to the
+bedroom. There was a sound of snoring within. The door was a little
+ajar. He reached the key and descended, his heart beating more and more
+wildly as he approached the realization of his hopes. Gently as he could
+he turned it in the lock. In a moment more he had his hands on the spot
+where the shoemaker always laid his violin. But his heart sank within
+him: there was no violin there. A blank of dismay held him both
+motionless and thoughtless; nor had he recovered his senses before he
+heard footsteps, which he well knew, approaching in the street. He slunk
+at once into a corner. Elshender entered, feeling his way carefully, and
+muttering at his wife. He was tipsy, most likely, but that had never yet
+interfered with the safety of his fiddle: Robert heard its faint echo
+as he laid it gently down. Nor was he too tipsy to lock the door behind
+him, leaving Robert incarcerated amongst the old boots and leather and
+rosin.
+
+For one moment only did the boy's heart fail him. The next he was in
+action, for a happy thought had already struck him. Hastily, that he
+might forestall sleep in the brain of the soutar, he undid his parcel,
+and after carefully enveloping his own violin in the paper, took the old
+wife of the soutar, and proceeded to perform upon her a trick which in
+a merry moment his master had taught him, and which, not without some
+feeling of irreverence, he had occasionally practised upon his own bonny
+lady.
+
+The shoemaker's room was overhead; its thin floor of planks was the
+ceiling of the workshop. Ere Dooble Sanny was well laid by the side of
+his sleeping wife, he heard a frightful sound from below, as of some one
+tearing his beloved violin to pieces. No sound of rending coffin-planks
+or rising dead would have been so horrible in the ears of the soutar.
+He sprang from his bed with a haste that shook the crazy tenement to its
+foundation.
+
+The moment Robert heard that, he put the violin in its place, and took
+his station by the door-cheek. The soutar came tumbling down the stair,
+and rushed at the door, but found that he had to go back for the key.
+When, with uncertain hand, he had opened at length, he went straight to
+the nest of his treasure, and Robert slipping out noiselessly, was in
+the next street before Dooble Sanny, having found the fiddle uninjured,
+and not discovering the substitution, had finished concluding that the
+whisky and his imagination had played him a very discourteous trick
+between them, and retired once more to bed. And not till Robert had cut
+his foot badly with a piece of glass, did he discover that he had left
+his shoes behind him. He tied it up with his handkerchief, and limped
+home the three miles, too happy to think of consequences.
+
+Before he had gone far, the moon floated up on the horizon, large, and
+shaped like the broadside of a barrel. She stared at him in amazement to
+see him out at such a time of the night. But he grasped his violin and
+went on. He had no fear now, even when he passed again over the desolate
+moss, although he saw the stagnant pools glimmering about him in the
+moonlight. And ever after this he had a fancy for roaming at night. He
+reached home in safety, found the door as he had left it, and ascended
+to his bed, triumphant in his fiddle.
+
+In the morning bloody prints were discovered on the stair, and traced to
+the door of his room. Miss Lammie entered in some alarm, and found him
+fast asleep on his bed, still dressed, with a brown-paper parcel in his
+arms, and one of his feet evidently enough the source of the frightful
+stain. She was too kind to wake him, and inquiry was postponed till
+they met at breakfast, to which he descended bare-footed, save for a
+handkerchief on the injured foot.
+
+'Robert, my lad,' said Mr. Lammie, kindly, 'hoo cam ye by that bluidy
+fut?'
+
+Robert began the story, and, guided by a few questions from his host, at
+length told the tale of the violin from beginning to end, omitting only
+his adventure in the factory. Many a guffaw from Mr. Lammie greeted its
+progress, and Miss Lammie laughed till the tears rolled unheeded down
+her cheeks, especially when Shargar, emboldened by the admiration Robert
+had awakened, imparted his private share in the comedy, namely, the
+entombment of Boston in a fifth-fold state; for the Lammies were none
+of the unco guid to be censorious upon such exploits. The whole business
+advanced the boys in favour at Bodyfauld; and the entreaties of
+Robert that nothing should reach his grandmother's ears were entirely
+unnecessary.
+
+After breakfast Miss Lammie dressed the wounded foot. But what was to
+be done for shoes, for Robert's Sunday pair had been left at home? Under
+ordinary circumstances it would have been no great hardship to him to
+go barefoot for the rest of the autumn, but the cut was rather a serious
+one. So his feet were cased in a pair of Mr. Lammie's Sunday boots,
+which, from their size, made it so difficult for him to get along, that
+he did not go far from the doors, but revelled in the company of his
+violin in the corn-yard amongst last year's ricks, in the barn, and in
+the hayloft, playing all the tunes he knew, and trying over one or two
+more from a very dirty old book of Scotch airs, which his teacher had
+lent him.
+
+In the evening, as they sat together after supper, Mr. Lammie said,
+
+'Weel, Robert, hoo's the fiddle?'
+
+'Fine, I thank ye, sir,' answered Robert.
+
+'Lat's hear what ye can do wi' 't.'
+
+Robert fetched the instrument and complied.
+
+'That's no that ill,' remarked the farmer. 'But eh! man, ye suld hae
+heard yer gran'father han'le the bow. That was something to hear--ance
+in a body's life. Ye wad hae jist thoucht the strings had been drawn
+frae his ain inside, he kent them sae weel, and han'led them sae fine.
+He jist fan' (felt) them like wi' 's fingers throu' the bow an' the
+horsehair an' a', an' a' the time he was drawin' the soun' like the sowl
+frae them, an' they jist did onything 'at he likit. Eh! to hear him play
+the Flooers o' the Forest wad hae garred ye greit.'
+
+'Cud my father play?' asked Robert.
+
+'Ay, weel eneuch for him. He could do onything he likit to try, better
+nor middlin'. I never saw sic a man. He played upo' the bagpipes, an'
+the flute, an' the bugle, an' I kenna what a'; but a'thegither they cam'
+na within sicht o' his father upo' the auld fiddle. Lat's hae a luik at
+her.'
+
+He took the instrument in his hands reverently, turned it over and over,
+and said,
+
+'Ay, ay; it's the same auld mill, an' I wat it grun' (ground) bonny
+meal.--That sma' crater noo 'ill be worth a hunner poun', I s' warran','
+he added, as he restored it carefully into Robert's hands, to whom it
+was honey and spice to hear his bonny lady paid her due honours. 'Can ye
+play the Flooers o' the Forest, no?' he added yet again.
+
+'Ay can I,' answered Robert, with some pride, and laid the bow on the
+violin, and played the air through without blundering a single note.
+
+'Weel, that's verra weel,' said Mr. Lammie. 'But it's nae mair like as
+yer gran'father played it, than gin there war twa sawyers at it, ane at
+ilka lug o' the bow, wi' the fiddle atween them in a saw-pit.'
+
+Robert's heart sank within him; but Mr. Lammie went on:
+
+'To hear the bow croudin' (cooing), and wailin', an' greitin' ower the
+strings, wad hae jist garred ye see the lands o' braid Scotlan' wi' a'
+the lasses greitin' for the lads that lay upo' reid Flodden side; lasses
+to cut, and lasses to gether, and lasses to bin', and lasses to stook,
+and lasses to lead, and no a lad amo' them a'. It's just the murnin' o'
+women, doin' men's wark as weel 's their ain, for the men that suld
+hae been there to du 't; and I s' warran' ye, no a word to the orra
+(exceptional, over-all) lad that didna gang wi' the lave (rest).'
+
+Robert had not hitherto understood it--this wail of a pastoral and
+ploughing people over those who had left their side to return no
+more from the field of battle. But Mr. Lammie's description of his
+grandfather's rendering laid hold of his heart.
+
+'I wad raither be grutten for nor kissed,' said he, simply.
+
+'Haud ye to that, my lad,' returned Mr. Lammie. 'Lat the lasses greit
+for ye gin they like; but haud oot ower frae the kissin'. I wadna mell
+wi' 't.'
+
+'Hoot, father, dinna put sic nonsense i' the bairns' heids,' said Miss
+Lammie.
+
+'Whilk 's the nonsense, Aggy?' asked her father, slily. 'But I doobt,'
+he added, 'he'll never play the Flooers o' the Forest as it suld be
+playt, till he's had a taste o' the kissin', lass.'
+
+'Weel, it's a queer instructor o' yowth, 'at says an' onsays i' the same
+breith.'
+
+'Never ye min'. I haena contradickit mysel' yet; for I hae said
+naething. But, Robert, my man, ye maun pit mair sowl into yer fiddlin'.
+Ye canna play the fiddle till ye can gar 't greit. It's unco ready
+to that o' 'ts ain sel'; an' it's my opingon that there's no anither
+instrument but the fiddle fit to play the Flooers o' the Forest upo',
+for that very rizzon, in a' his Maijesty's dominions.--My father playt
+the fiddle, but no like your gran'father.'
+
+Robert was silent. He spent the whole of the next morning in reiterated
+attempts to alter his style of playing the air in question, but in
+vain--as far at least as any satisfaction to himself was the result. He
+laid the instrument down in despair, and sat for an hour disconsolate
+upon the bedside. His visit had not as yet been at all so fertile in
+pleasure as he had anticipated. He could not fly his kite; he could not
+walk; he had lost his shoes; Mr. Lammie had not approved of his playing;
+and, although he had his will of the fiddle, he could not get his will
+out of it. He could never play so as to please Miss St. John. Nothing
+but manly pride kept him from crying. He was sorely disappointed and
+dissatisfied; and the world might be dreary even at Bodyfauld.
+
+Few men can wait upon the bright day in the midst of the dull one. Nor
+can many men even wait for it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX. JESSIE HEWSON.
+
+The wound on Robert's foot festered, and had not yet healed when the
+sickle was first put to the barley. He hobbled out, however, to the
+reapers, for he could not bear to be left alone with his violin, so
+dreadfully oppressive was the knowledge that he could not use it after
+its nature. He began to think whether his incapacity was not a judgment
+upon him for taking it away from the soutar, who could do so much more
+with it, and to whom, consequently, it was so much more valuable. The
+pain in his foot, likewise, had been very depressing; and but for the
+kindness of his friends, especially of Miss Lammie, he would have been
+altogether 'a weary wight forlorn.'
+
+Shargar was happier than ever he had been in his life. His white
+face hung on Miss Lammie's looks, and haunted her steps from spence
+(store-room, as in Devonshire) to milk-house, and from milk-house to
+chessel, surmounted by the glory of his red hair, which a farm-servant
+declared he had once mistaken for a fun-buss (whin-bush) on fire. This
+day she had gone to the field to see the first handful of barley cut,
+and Shargar was there, of course.
+
+It was a glorious day of blue and gold, with just wind enough to set the
+barley-heads a-talking. But, whether from the heat of the sun, or the
+pain of his foot operating on the general discouragement under which he
+laboured, Robert turned faint all at once, and dragged himself away to a
+cottage on the edge of the field.
+
+It was the dwelling of a cottar, whose family had been settled upon the
+farm of Bodyfauld from time immemorial. They were, indeed, like other
+cottars, a kind of feudal dependents, occupying an acre or two of the
+land, in return for which they performed certain stipulated labour,
+called cottar-wark. The greater part of the family was employed in the
+work of the farm, at the regular wages.
+
+Alas for Scotland that such families are now to seek! Would that the
+parliaments of our country held such a proportion of noble-minded men as
+was once to be found in the clay huts on a hill-side, or grouped about a
+central farm, huts whose wretched look would move the pity of many a
+man as inferior to their occupants as a King Charles's lap-dog is to a
+shepherd's colley. The utensils of their life were mean enough: the life
+itself was often elixir vitae--a true family life, looking up to the
+high, divine life. But well for the world that such life has been
+scattered over it, east and west, the seed of fresh growth in new lands.
+Out of offence to the individual, God brings good to the whole; for
+he pets no nation, but trains it for the perfect globular life of all
+nations--of his world--of his universe. As he makes families mingle, to
+redeem each from its family selfishness, so will he make nations
+mingle, and love and correct and reform and develop each other, till the
+planet-world shall go singing through space one harmony to the God of
+the whole earth. The excellence must vanish from one portion, that
+it may be diffused through the whole. The seed ripens on one favoured
+mound, and is scattered over the plain. We console ourselves with the
+higher thought, that if Scotland is worse, the world is better. Yea,
+even they by whom the offence came, and who have first to reap the woe
+of that offence, because they did the will of God to satisfy their own
+avarice in laying land to land and house to house, shall not reap their
+punishment in having their own will, and standing therefore alone in the
+earth when the good of their evil deeds returns upon it; but the tears
+of men that ascended to heaven in the heat of their burning dwellings
+shall descend in the dew of blessing even on the hearts of them that
+kindled the fire.--'Something too much of this.'
+
+Robert lifted the latch, and walked into the cottage. It was not quite
+so strange to him as it would be to most of my readers; still, he had
+not been in such a place before. A girl who was stooping by the small
+peat fire on the hearth looked up, and seeing that he was lame, came
+across the heights and hollows of the clay floor to meet him. Robert
+spoke so faintly that she could not hear.
+
+'What's yer wull?' she asked; then, changing her tone,--'Eh! ye're no
+weel,' she said. 'Come in to the fire. Tak a haud o' me, and come yer
+wa's butt.'
+
+She was a pretty, indeed graceful girl of about eighteen, with the
+elasticity rather than undulation of movement which distinguishes the
+peasant from the city girl. She led him to the chimla-lug (the ear of
+the chimney), carefully levelled a wooden chair to the inequalities of
+the floor, and said,
+
+'Sit ye doon. Will I fess a drappy o' milk?'
+
+'Gie me a drink o' water, gin ye please,' said Robert.
+
+She brought it. He drank, and felt better. A baby woke in a cradle on
+the other side of the fire, and began to cry. The girl went and took him
+up; and then Robert saw what she was like. Light-brown hair clustered
+about a delicately-coloured face and hazel eyes. Later in the harvest
+her cheeks would be ruddy--now they were peach-coloured. A white neck
+rose above a pink print jacket, called a wrapper; and the rest of her
+visible dress was a blue petticoat. She ended in pretty, brown bare
+feet. Robert liked her, and began to talk. If his imagination had not
+been already filled, he would have fallen in love with her, I dare
+say, at once; for, except Miss St. John, he had never seen anything he
+thought so beautiful. The baby cried now and then.
+
+'What ails the bairnie?' he asked.
+
+'Ow, it's jist cuttin' its teeth. Gin it greits muckle, I maun jist tak
+it oot to my mither. She'll sune quaiet it. Are ye haudin' better?'
+
+'Hoot, ay. I'm a' richt noo. Is yer mither shearin'?'
+
+'Na. She's gatherin'. The shearin' 's some sair wark for her e'en noo. I
+suld hae been shearin', but my mither wad fain hae a day o' the hairst.
+She thocht it wud du her gude. But I s' warran' a day o' 't 'll sair
+(satisfy) her, and I s' be at it the morn. She's been unco dowie
+(ailing) a' the summer; and sae has the bairnie.'
+
+'Ye maun hae had a sair time o' 't, than.'
+
+'Ay, some. But I aye got some sleep. I jist tuik the towie (string) into
+the bed wi' me, and whan the bairnie grat, I waukit, an' rockit it till
+'t fell asleep again. But whiles naething wad du but tak him till 's
+mammie.'
+
+All the time she was hushing and fondling the child, who went on
+fretting when not actually crying.
+
+'Is he yer brither, than?' asked Robert.
+
+'Ay, what ither? I maun tak him, I see. But ye can sit there as lang
+'s ye like; and gin ye gang afore I come back, jist turn the key 'i the
+door to lat onybody ken that there's naebody i' the hoose.'
+
+Robert thanked her, and remained in the shadow by the chimney, which
+was formed of two smoke-browned planks fastened up the wall, one on each
+side, and an inverted wooden funnel above to conduct the smoke through
+the roof. He sat for some time gloomily gazing at a spot of sunlight
+which burned on the brown clay floor. All was still as death. And he
+felt the white-washed walls even more desolate than if they had been
+smoke-begrimed.
+
+Looking about him, he found over his head something which he did not
+understand. It was as big as the stump of a great tree. Apparently
+it belonged to the structure of the cottage, but he could not, in the
+imperfect light, and the dazzling of the sun-spot at which he had
+been staring, make out what it was, or how it came to be up
+there--unsupported as far as he could see. He rose to examine it,
+lifted a bit of tarpaulin which hung before it, and found a rickety box,
+suspended by a rope from a great nail in the wall. It had two shelves in
+it full of books.
+
+Now, although there were more books in Mr. Lammie's house than in his
+grandmother's, the only one he had found that in the least enticed him
+to read, was a translation of George Buchanan's History of Scotland.
+This he had begun to read faithfully, believing every word of it, but
+had at last broken down at the fiftieth king or so. Imagine, then, the
+moon that arose on the boy when, having pulled a ragged and thumb-worn
+book from among those of James Hewson the cottar, he, for the first
+time, found himself in the midst of The Arabian Nights. I shrink from
+all attempt to set forth in words the rainbow-coloured delight that
+coruscated in his brain. When Jessie Hewson returned, she found him
+seated where she had left him, so buried in his volume that he did not
+lift his head when she entered.
+
+'Ye hae gotten a buik,' she said.
+
+'Ay have I,' answered Robert, decisively.
+
+'It's a fine buik, that. Did ye ever see 't afore?'
+
+'Na, never.'
+
+'There's three wolums o' 't about, here and there,' said Jessie; and
+with the child on one arm, she proceeded with the other hand to search
+for them in the crap o' the wa', that is, on the top of the wall where
+the rafters rest.
+
+There she found two or three books, which, after examining them, she
+placed on the dresser beside Robert.
+
+'There's nane o' them there,' she said; 'but maybe ye wad like to luik
+at that anes.'
+
+Robert thanked her, but was too busy to feel the least curiosity about
+any book in the world but the one he was reading. He read on, heart and
+soul and mind absorbed in the marvels of the eastern skald; the stories
+told in the streets of Cairo, amidst gorgeous costumes, and camels, and
+white-veiled women, vibrating here in the heart of a Scotch boy, in the
+darkest corner of a mud cottage, at the foot of a hill of cold-loving
+pines, with a barefooted girl and a baby for his companions.
+
+But the pleasure he had been having was of a sort rather to expedite
+than to delay the subjective arrival of dinner-time. There was, however,
+happily no occasion to go home in order to appease his hunger; he had
+but to join the men and women in the barley-field: there was sure to be
+enough, for Miss Lammie was at the head of the commissariat.
+
+When he had had as much milk-porridge as he could eat, and a good slice
+of swack (elastic) cheese, with a cap (wooden bowl) of ale, all of
+which he consumed as if the good of them lay in the haste of their
+appropriation, he hurried back to the cottage, and sat there reading The
+Arabian Nights, till the sun went down in the orange-hued west, and
+the gloamin' came, and with it the reapers, John and Elspet Hewson, and
+their son George, to their supper and early bed.
+
+John was a cheerful, rough, Roman-nosed, black-eyed man, who took snuff
+largely, and was not careful to remove the traces of the habit. He had
+a loud voice, and an original way of regarding things, which, with his
+vivacity, made every remark sound like the proclamation of a discovery.
+
+'Are ye there, Robert?' said he, as he entered. Robert rose, absorbed
+and silent.
+
+'He's been here a' day, readin' like a colliginer,' said Jessie.
+
+'What are ye readin' sae eident (diligent), man?' asked John.
+
+'A buik o' stories, here,' answered Robert, carelessly, shy of being
+supposed so much engrossed with them as he really was.
+
+I should never expect much of a young poet who was not rather ashamed of
+the distinction which yet he chiefly coveted. There is a modesty in all
+young delight. It is wild and shy, and would hide itself, like a boy's
+or maiden's first love, from the gaze of the people. Something like this
+was Robert's feeling over The Arabian Nights.
+
+'Ay,' said John, taking snuff from a small bone spoon, 'it's a gran'
+buik that. But my son Charley, him 'at 's deid an' gane hame, wad hae
+tell't ye it was idle time readin' that, wi' sic a buik as that ither
+lyin' at yer elbuck.'
+
+He pointed to one of the books Jessie had taken from the crap o' the wa'
+and laid down beside him on the well-scoured dresser. Robert took up the
+volume and opened it. There was no title-page.
+
+'The Tempest?' he said. 'What is 't? Poetry?'
+
+'Ay is 't. It's Shackspear.'
+
+'I hae heard o' him,' said Robert. 'What was he?'
+
+'A player kin' o' a chiel', wi' an unco sicht o' brains,' answered John.
+'He cudna hae had muckle time to gang skelpin' and sornin' aboot the
+country like maist o' thae cattle, gin he vrote a' that, I'm thinkin'.'
+
+'Whaur did he bide?'
+
+'Awa' in Englan'--maistly aboot Lonnon, I'm thinkin'. That's the place
+for a' by-ordinar fowk, they tell me.'
+
+'Hoo lang is 't sin he deid?'
+
+'I dinna ken. A hunner year or twa, I s' warran'. It's a lang time. But
+I'm thinkin' fowk than was jist something like what they are noo. But I
+ken unco little aboot him, for the prent 's some sma', and I'm some ill
+for losin' my characters, and sae I dinna win that far benn wi' him.
+Geordie there 'll tell ye mair aboot him.'
+
+But George Hewson had not much to communicate, for he had but lately
+landed in Shakspere's country, and had got but a little way inland yet.
+Nor did Robert much care, for his head was full of The Arabian Nights.
+This, however, was his first introduction to Shakspere.
+
+Finding himself much at home, he stopped yet a while, shared in the
+supper, and resumed his seat in the corner when the book was brought
+out for worship. The iron lamp, with its wick of rush-pith, which hung
+against the side of the chimney, was lighted, and John sat down to read.
+But as his eyes and the print, too, had grown a little dim with years,
+the lamp was not enough, and he asked for a 'fir-can'le.' A splint of
+fir dug from the peat-bog was handed to him. He lighted it at the lamp,
+and held it in his hand over the page. Its clear resinous flame enabled
+him to read a short psalm. Then they sang a most wailful tune, and John
+prayed. If I were to give the prayer as he uttered it, I might make my
+reader laugh, therefore I abstain, assuring him only that, although full
+of long words--amongst the rest, aspiration and ravishment--the prayer
+of the cheerful, joke-loving cottar contained evidence of a degree of
+religious development rare, I doubt, amongst bishops.
+
+When Robert left the cottage, he found the sky partly clouded and the
+air cold. The nearest way home was across the barley-stubble of the
+day's reaping, which lay under a little hill covered with various
+species of the pine. His own soul, after the restful day he had spent,
+and under the reaction from the new excitement of the stories he had
+been reading, was like a quiet, moonless night. The thought of his
+mother came back upon him, and her written words, 'O Lord, my heart is
+very sore'; and the thought of his father followed that, and he limped
+slowly home, laden with mournfulness. As he reached the middle of the
+field, the wind was suddenly there with a low sough from out of the
+north-west. The heads of barley in the sheaves leaned away with a soft
+rustling from before it; and Robert felt for the first time the sadness
+of a harvest-field. Then the wind swept away to the pine-covered hill,
+and raised a rushing and a wailing amongst its thin-clad branches, and
+to the ear of Robert the trees were singing over again in their night
+solitudes the air sung by the cottar's family. When he looked to the
+north-west, whence the wind came, he saw nothing but a pale cleft in the
+sky. The meaning, the music of the night awoke in his soul; he forgot
+his lame foot, and the weight of Mr. Lammie's great boots, ran home and
+up the stair to his own room, seized his violin with eager haste, nor
+laid it down again till he could draw from it, at will, a sound like the
+moaning of the wind over the stubble-field. Then he knew that he could
+play the Flowers of the Forest. The Wind that Shakes the Barley cannot
+have been named from the barley after it was cut, but while it stood in
+the field: the Flowers of the Forest was of the gathered harvest.
+
+He tried the air once over in the dark, and then carried his violin down
+to the room where Mr. and Miss Lammie sat.
+
+'I think I can play 't noo, Mr. Lammie,' he said abruptly.
+
+'Play what, callant?' asked his host.
+
+'The Flooers o' the Forest.'
+
+'Play awa' than.'
+
+And Robert played--not so well as he had hoped. I dare say it was
+a humble enough performance, but he gave something at least of the
+expression Mr. Lammie desired. For, the moment the tune was over, he
+exclaimed,
+
+'Weel dune, Robert man! ye'll be a fiddler some day yet!'
+
+And Robert was well satisfied with the praise.
+
+'I wish yer mother had been alive,' the farmer went on. 'She wad hae
+been rael prood to hear ye play like that. Eh! she likit the fiddle
+weel. And she culd play bonny upo' the piana hersel'. It was something
+to hear the twa o' them playing thegither, him on the fiddle--that verra
+fiddle o' 's father's 'at ye hae i' yer han'--and her on the piana.
+Eh! but she was a bonnie wuman as ever I saw, an' that quaiet! It's my
+belief she never thocht aboot her ain beowty frae week's en' to week's
+en', and that's no sayin' little--is 't, Aggy?'
+
+'I never preten't ony richt to think aboot sic,' returned Miss Lammie,
+with a mild indignation.
+
+'That's richt, lass. Od, ye're aye i' the richt--though I say 't 'at
+sudna.'
+
+Miss Lammie must indeed have been good-natured, to answer only with a
+genuine laugh. Shargar looked explosive with anger. But Robert would
+fain hear more of his mother.
+
+'What was my mother like, Mr. Lammie?' he asked.
+
+'Eh, my man! ye suld hae seen her upon a bonnie bay mere that yer father
+gae her. Faith! she sat as straught as a rash, wi' jist a hing i' the
+heid o' her, like the heid o' a halm o' wild aits.'
+
+'My father wasna that ill till her than?' suggested Robert.
+
+'Wha ever daured say sic a thing?' returned Mr. Lammie, but in a tone
+so far from satisfactory to Robert, that he inquired no more in that
+direction.
+
+I need hardly say that from that night Robert was more than ever
+diligent with his violin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI. THE DRAGON.
+
+Next day, his foot was so much better that he sent Shargar to Rothieden
+to buy the string, taking with him Robert's school-bag, in which to
+carry off his Sunday shoes; for as to those left at Dooble Sanny's, they
+judged it unsafe to go in quest of them: the soutar could hardly be in a
+humour fit to be intruded upon.
+
+Having procured the string, Shargar went to Mrs. Falconer's. Anxious not
+to encounter her, but, if possible, to bag the boots quietly, he
+opened the door, peeped in, and seeing no one, made his way towards
+the kitchen. He was arrested, however, as he crossed the passage by
+the voice of Mrs. Falconer calling, 'Wha's that?' There she was at the
+parlour door. It paralyzed him. His first impulse was to make a rush and
+escape. But the boots--he could not go without at least an attempt upon
+them. So he turned and faced her with inward trembling.
+
+'Wha's that?' repeated the old lady, regarding him fixedly. 'Ow, it's
+you! What duv ye want? Ye camna to see me, I'm thinkin'! What hae ye i'
+that bag?'
+
+'I cam to coff (buy) twine for the draigon,' answered Shargar.
+
+'Ye had twine eneuch afore!'
+
+'It bruik. It wasna strang eneuch.'
+
+'Whaur got ye the siller to buy mair? Lat's see 't?'
+
+Shargar took the string from the bag.
+
+'Sic a sicht o' twine! What paid ye for 't?'
+
+'A shillin'.'
+
+'Whaur got ye the shillin'?'
+
+'Mr. Lammie gae 't to Robert.'
+
+'I winna hae ye tak siller frae naebody. It's ill mainners. Hae!' said
+the old lady, putting her hand in her pocket, and taking out a shilling.
+'Hae,' she said. 'Gie Mr. Lammie back his shillin', an' tell 'im 'at I
+wadna hae ye learn sic ill customs as tak siller. It's eneuch to gang
+sornin' upon 'im (exacting free quarters) as ye du, ohn beggit for
+siller. Are they a' weel?'
+
+'Ay, brawly,' answered Shargar, putting the shilling in his pocket.
+
+In another moment Shargar had, without a word of adieu, embezzled the
+shoes, and escaped from the house without seeing Betty. He went straight
+to the shop he had just left, and bought another shilling's worth of
+string.
+
+When he got home, he concealed nothing from Robert, whom he found seated
+in the barn, with his fiddle, waiting his return.
+
+Robert started to his feet. He could appropriate his grandfather's
+violin, to which, possibly, he might have shown as good a right as his
+grandmother--certainly his grandfather would have accorded it him--but
+her money was sacred.
+
+'Shargar, ye vratch!' he cried, 'fess that shillin' here direckly. Tak
+the twine wi' ye, and gar them gie ye back the shillin'.'
+
+'They winna brak the bargain,' cried Shargar, beginning almost to
+whimper, for a savoury smell of dinner was coming across the yard.
+
+'Tell them it's stown siller, and they'll be in het watter aboot it gin
+they dinna gie ye 't back.'
+
+'I maun hae my denner first,' remonstrated Shargar.
+
+But the spirit of his grandmother was strong in Robert, and in a matter
+of rectitude there must be no temporizing. Therein he could be as
+tyrannical as the old lady herself.
+
+'De'il a bite or a sup s' gang ower your thrapple till I see that
+shillin'.'
+
+There was no help for it. Six hungry miles must be trudged by Shargar
+ere he got a morsel to eat. Two hours and a half passed before he
+reappeared. But he brought the shilling. As to how he recovered it,
+Robert questioned him in vain. Shargar, in his turn, was obstinate.
+
+'She's a some camstairy (unmanageable) wife, that grannie o' yours,'
+said Mr. Lammie, when Robert returned the shilling with Mrs. Falconer's
+message, 'but I reckon I maun pit it i' my pooch, for she will hae her
+ain gait, an' I dinna want to strive wi' her. But gin ony o' ye be in
+want o' a shillin' ony day, lads, as lang 's I'm abune the yird--this
+ane 'll be grown twa, or maybe mair, 'gen that time.'
+
+So saying, the farmer put the shilling into his pocket, and buttoned it
+up.
+
+The dragon flew splendidly now, and its strength was mighty. It was
+Robert's custom to drive a stake in the ground, slanting against the
+wind, and thereby tether the animal, as if it were up there grazing in
+its own natural region. Then he would lie down by the stake and read
+The Arabian Nights, every now and then casting a glance upward at the
+creature alone in the waste air, yet all in his power by the string at
+his side. Somehow the high-flown dragon was a bond between him and the
+blue; he seemed nearer to the sky while it flew, or at least the heaven
+seemed less far away and inaccessible. While he lay there gazing, all at
+once he would find that his soul was up with the dragon, feeling as it
+felt, tossing about with it in the torrents of the air. Out at his
+eyes it would go, traverse the dim stairless space, and sport with the
+wind-blown monster. Sometimes, to aid his aspiration, he would take a
+bit of paper, make a hole in it, pass the end of the string through the
+hole, and send the messenger scudding along the line athwart the depth
+of the wind. If it stuck by the way, he would get a telescope of Mr.
+Lammie's, and therewith watch its struggles till it broke loose, then
+follow it careering up to the kite. Away with each successive paper
+his imagination would fly, and a sense of air, and height, and freedom
+settled from his play into his very soul, a germ to sprout hereafter,
+and enrich the forms of his aspirations. And all his after-memories of
+kite-flying were mingled with pictures of eastern magnificence, for
+from the airy height of the dragon his eyes always came down upon the
+enchanted pages of John Hewson's book.
+
+Sometimes, again, he would throw down his book, and sitting up with his
+back against the stake, lift his bonny leddy from his side, and play as
+he had never played in Rothieden, playing to the dragon aloft, to keep
+him strong in his soaring, and fierce in his battling with the winds of
+heaven. Then he fancied that the monster swooped and swept in arcs, and
+swayed curving to and fro, in rhythmic response to the music floating up
+through the wind.
+
+What a full globated symbolism lay then around the heart of the boy in
+his book, his violin, his kite!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII. DR. ANDERSON.
+
+One afternoon, as they were sitting at their tea, a footstep in the
+garden approached the house, and then a figure passed the window. Mr.
+Lammie started to his feet.
+
+'Bless my sowl, Aggy! that's Anderson!' he cried, and hurried to the
+door.
+
+His daughter followed. The boys kept their seats. A loud and hearty
+salutation reached their ears; but the voice of the farmer was all
+they heard. Presently he returned, bringing with him the tallest and
+slenderest man Robert had ever seen. He was considerably over six feet,
+with a small head, and delicate, if not fine features, a gentle look
+in his blue eyes, and a slow clear voice, which sounded as if it were
+thinking about every word it uttered. The hot sun of India seemed to
+have burned out everything self-assertive, leaving him quietly and
+rather sadly contemplative.
+
+'Come in, come in,' repeated Mr. Lammie, overflowing with glad welcome.
+'What'll ye hae? There's a frien' o' yer ain,' he continued, pointing to
+Robert, 'an' a fine lad.' Then lowering his voice, he added: 'A son o'
+poor Anerew's, ye ken, doctor.'
+
+The boys rose, and Dr. Anderson, stretching his long arms across the
+table, shook hands kindly with Robert and Shargar. Then he sat down and
+began to help himself to the cakes (oat-cake), at which Robert wondered,
+seeing there was 'white breid' on the table. Miss Lammie presently came
+in with the teapot and some additional dainties, and the boys took the
+opportunity of beginning at the beginning again.
+
+Dr. Anderson remained for a few days at Bodyfauld, sending Shargar to
+Rothieden for some necessaries from The Boar's Head, where he had left
+his servant and luggage. During this time Mr. Lammie was much occupied
+with his farm affairs, anxious to get his harvest in as quickly as
+possible, because a change of weather was to be dreaded; so the doctor
+was left a good deal to himself. He was fond of wandering about, but,
+thoughtful as he was, did not object to the companionship which Robert
+implicitly offered him: before many hours were over, the two were
+friends.
+
+Various things attracted Robert to the doctor. First, he was a relation
+of his own, older than himself, the first he had known except his
+father, and Robert's heart was one of the most dutiful. Second, or
+perhaps I ought to have put this first, he was the only gentleman,
+except Eric Ericson, whose acquaintance he had yet made. Third, he was
+kind to him, and gentle to him, and, above all, respectful to him; and
+to be respected was a new sensation to Robert altogether. And lastly,
+he could tell stories of elephants and tiger hunts, and all The Arabian
+Nights of India. He did not volunteer much talk, but Robert soon found
+that he could draw him out.
+
+But what attracted the man to the boy?
+
+'Ah! Robert,' said the doctor one day, sadly, 'it's a sore thing to come
+home after being thirty years away.'
+
+He looked up at the sky, then all around at the hills: the face of
+Nature alone remained the same. Then his glance fell on Robert, and he
+saw a pair of black eyes looking up at him, brimful of tears. And thus
+the man was drawn to the boy.
+
+Robert worshipped Dr. Anderson. As long as he remained their visitor,
+kite and violin and all were forgotten, and he followed him like a dog.
+To have such a gentleman for a relation, was grand indeed. What could he
+do for him? He ministered to him in all manner of trifles--a little to
+the amusement of Dr. Anderson, but more to his pleasure, for he saw
+that the boy was both large-hearted and lowly-minded: Dr. Anderson had
+learned to read character, else he would never have been the honour to
+his profession that he was.
+
+But all the time Robert could not get him to speak about his father. He
+steadily avoided the subject.
+
+When he went away, the two boys walked with him to The Boar's Head,
+caught a glimpse of his Hindoo attendant, much to their wonderment,
+received from the doctor a sovereign apiece and a kind good-bye, and
+returned to Bodyfauld.
+
+Dr. Anderson remained a few days longer at Rothieden, and amongst others
+visited Mrs. Falconer, who was his first cousin. What passed between
+them Robert never heard, nor did his grandmother even allude to the
+visit. He went by the mail-coach from Rothieden to Aberdeen, and whether
+he should ever see him again Robert did not know.
+
+He flew his kite no more for a while, but betook himself to the work of
+the harvest-field, in which he was now able for a share. But his violin
+was no longer neglected.
+
+Day after day passed in the delights of labour, broken for Robert by The
+Arabian Nights and the violin, and for Shargar by attendance upon Miss
+Lammie, till the fields lay bare of their harvest, and the night-wind of
+autumn moaned everywhere over the vanished glory of the country, and it
+was time to go back to school.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII. AN AUTO DA FE.
+
+The morning at length arrived when Robert and Shargar must return to
+Rothieden. A keen autumnal wind was blowing far-off feathery clouds
+across a sky of pale blue; the cold freshened the spirits of the boys,
+and tightened their nerves and muscles, till they were like bow-strings.
+No doubt the winter was coming, but the sun, although his day's work was
+short and slack, was still as clear as ever. So gladsome was the world,
+that the boys received the day as a fresh holiday, and strenuously
+forgot to-morrow. The wind blew straight from Rothieden, and between
+sun and wind a bright thought awoke in Robert. The dragon should not be
+carried--he should fly home.
+
+After they had said farewell, in which Shargar seemed to suffer more
+than Robert, and had turned the corner of the stable, they heard the
+good farmer shouting after them,
+
+'There'll be anither hairst neist year, boys,' which wonderfully
+restored their spirits. When they reached the open road, Robert laid his
+violin carefully into a broom-bush. Then the tail was unrolled, and the
+dragon ascended steady as an angel whose work is done. Shargar took the
+stick at the end of the string, and Robert resumed his violin. But the
+creature was hard to lead in such a wind; so they made a loop on the
+string, and passed it round Shargar's chest, and he tugged the dragon
+home. Robert longed to take his share in the struggle, but he could not
+trust his violin to Shargar, and so had to walk beside ingloriously. On
+the way they laid their plans for the accommodation of the dragon. But
+the violin was the greater difficulty. Robert would not hear of the
+factory, for reasons best known to himself, and there were serious
+objections to taking it to Dooble Sanny. It was resolved that the only
+way was to seize the right moment, and creep upstairs with it before
+presenting themselves to Mrs. Falconer. Their intended manoeuvres with
+the kite would favour the concealment of this stroke.
+
+Before they entered the town they drew in the kite a little way, and cut
+off a dozen yards of the string, which Robert put in his pocket, with
+a stone tied to the end. When they reached the house, Shargar went into
+the little garden and tied the string of the kite to the paling between
+that and Captain Forsyth's. Robert opened the street door, and having
+turned his head on all sides like a thief, darted with his violin up
+the stairs. Having laid his treasure in one of the presses in Shargar's
+garret, he went to his own, and from the skylight threw the stone down
+into the captain's garden, fastening the other end of the string to the
+bedstead. Escaping as cautiously as he had entered, he passed hurriedly
+into their neighbour's garden, found the stone, and joined Shargar. The
+ends were soon united, and the kite let go. It sunk for a moment, then,
+arrested by the bedstead, towered again to its former 'pride of place,'
+sailing over Rothieden, grand and unconcerned, in the wastes of air.
+
+But the end of its tether was in Robert's garret. And that was to him a
+sense of power, a thought of glad mystery. There was henceforth, while
+the dragon flew, a relation between the desolate little chamber, in
+that lowly house buried among so many more aspiring abodes, and the
+unmeasured depths and spaces, the stars, and the unknown heavens. And
+in the next chamber lay the fiddle free once more,--yet another magical
+power whereby his spirit could forsake the earth and mount heavenwards.
+
+All that night, all the next day, all the next night, the dragon flew.
+
+Not one smile broke over the face of the old lady as she received them.
+Was it because she did not know what acts of disobedience, what breaches
+of the moral law, the two children of possible perdition might have
+committed while they were beyond her care, and she must not run the risk
+of smiling upon iniquity? I think it was rather that there was no smile
+in her religion, which, while it developed the power of a darkened
+conscience, overlaid and half-smothered all the lovelier impulses of her
+grand nature. How could she smile? Did not the world lie under the wrath
+and curse of God? Was not her own son in hell for ever? Had not the
+blood of the Son of God been shed for him in vain? Had not God meant
+that it should be in vain? For by the gift of his Spirit could he not
+have enabled him to accept the offered pardon? And for anything she
+knew, was not Robert going after him to the place of misery? How could
+she smile?
+
+'Noo be dooce,' she said, the moment she had shaken hands with them,
+with her cold hands, so clean and soft and smooth. With a volcanic heart
+of love, her outside was always so still and cold!--snow on the
+mountain sides, hot vein-coursing lava within. For her highest duty was
+submission to the will of God. Ah! if she had only known the God who
+claimed her submission! But there is time enough for every heart to know
+him.
+
+'Noo be dooce,' she repeated, 'an' sit doon, and tell me aboot the fowk
+at Bodyfauld. I houpe ye thankit them, or ye left, for their muckle
+kindness to ye.'
+
+The boys were silent.
+
+'Didna ye thank them?'
+
+'No, grannie; I dinna think 'at we did.'
+
+'Weel, that was ill-faured o' ye. Eh! but the hert is deceitfu' aboon
+a' thing, and desperately wicked. Who can know it? Come awa'. Come awa'.
+Robert, festen the door.'
+
+And she led them to the corner for prayer, and poured forth a confession
+of sin for them and for herself, such as left little that could have
+been added by her own profligate son, had he joined in the prayer.
+Either there are no degrees in guilt, or the Scotch language was equal
+only to the confession of children and holy women, and could provide no
+more awful words for the contrition of the prodigal or the hypocrite.
+But the words did little harm, for Robert's mind was full of the kite
+and the violin, and was probably nearer God thereby than if he had
+been trying to feel as wicked as his grandmother told God that he was.
+Shargar was even more divinely employed at the time than either; for
+though he had not had the manners to thank his benefactor, his heart had
+all the way home been full of tender thoughts of Miss Lammie's kindness;
+and now, instead of confessing sins that were not his, he was loving
+her over and over, and wishing to be back with her instead of with this
+awfully good woman, in whose presence there was no peace, for all the
+atmosphere of silence and calm in which she sat.
+
+Confession over, and the boys at liberty again, a new anxiety seized
+them. Grannie must find out that Robert's shoes were missing, and what
+account was to be given of the misfortune, for Robert would not, or
+could not lie? In the midst of their discussion a bright idea flashed
+upon Shargar, which, however, he kept to himself: he would steal them,
+and bring them home in triumph, emulating thus Robert's exploit in
+delivering his bonny leddy.
+
+The shoemaker sat behind his door to be out of the draught: Shargar
+might see a great part of the workshop without being seen, and he could
+pick Robert's shoes from among a hundred. Probably they lay just where
+Robert had laid them, for Dooble Sanny paid attention to any job only in
+proportion to the persecution accompanying it.
+
+So the next day Shargar contrived to slip out of school just as the
+writing lesson began, for he had great skill in conveying himself
+unseen, and, with his book-bag, slunk barefooted into the soutar's
+entry.
+
+The shop door was a little way open, and the red eyes of Shargar had
+only the corner next it to go peering about in. But there he saw the
+shoes. He got down on his hands and knees, and crept nearer. Yes, they
+were beyond a doubt Robert's shoes. He made a long arm, like a beast
+of prey, seized them, and, losing his presence of mind upon possession,
+drew them too hastily towards him. The shoemaker saw them as they
+vanished through the door, and darted after them. Shargar was off at
+full speed, and Sandy followed with hue and cry. Every idle person
+in the street joined in the pursuit, and all who were too busy or
+too respectable to run crowded to door and windows. Shargar made
+instinctively for his mother's old lair; but bethinking himself when he
+reached the door, he turned, and, knowing nowhere else to go, fled in
+terror to Mrs. Falconer's, still, however, holding fast by the shoes,
+for they were Robert's.
+
+As Robert came home from school, wondering what could have become of his
+companion, he saw a crowd about his grandmother's door, and pushing
+his way through it in some dismay, found Dooble Sanny and Shargar
+confronting each other before the stern justice of Mrs. Falconer.
+
+'Ye're a leear,' the soutar was panting out. 'I haena had a pair o'
+shune o' Robert's i' my han's this three month. Thae shune--lat me
+see them--they're--Here's Robert himsel'. Are thae shune yours, noo,
+Robert?'
+
+'Ay are they. Ye made them yersel'.'
+
+'Hoo cam they in my chop, than?'
+
+'Speir nae mair quest'ons nor's worth answerin',' said Robert, with a
+look meant to be significant. 'They're my shune, and I'll keep them.
+Aiblins ye dinna aye ken wha's shune ye hae, or whan they cam in to ye.'
+
+'What for didna Shargar come an' speir efter them, than, in place o'
+makin' a thief o' himsel' that gait?'
+
+'Ye may haud yer tongue,' returned Robert, with yet more significance.
+
+'I was aye a gowk (idiot),' said Shargar, in apologetic reflection,
+looking awfully white, and afraid to lift an eye to Mrs. Falconer, yet
+reassured a little by Robert's presence.
+
+Some glimmering seemed now to have dawned upon the soutar, for he began
+to prepare a retreat. Meantime Mrs. Falconer sat silent, allowing no
+word that passed to escape her. She wanted to be at the bottom of the
+mysterious affair, and therefore held her peace.
+
+'Weel, I'm sure, Robert, ye never tellt me aboot the shune,' said
+Alexander. 'I s' jist tak them back wi' me, and du what's wantit to
+them. And I'm sorry that I hae gien ye this tribble, Mistress Faukner;
+but it was a' that fule's wite there. I didna even ken it was him, till
+we war near-han' the hoose.'
+
+'Lat me see the shune,' said Mrs. Falconer, speaking almost for the
+first time. 'What's the maitter wi' them?'
+
+Examining the shoes, she saw they were in a perfectly sound state, and
+this confirmed her suspicion that there was more in the affair than had
+yet come out. Had she taken the straightforward measure of examining
+Robert, she would soon have arrived at the truth. But she had such a
+dread of causing a lie to be told, that she would adopt any roundabout
+way rather than ask a plain question of a suspected culprit. So she laid
+the shoes down beside her, saying to the soutar,
+
+'There's naething amiss wi' the shune. Ye can lea' them.'
+
+Thereupon Alexander went away, and Robert and Shargar would have
+given more than their dinner to follow him. Grannie neither asked any
+questions, however, nor made a single remark on what had passed. Dinner
+was served and eaten, and the boys returned to their afternoon school.
+
+No sooner was she certain that they were safe under the school-master's
+eye than the old lady put on her black silk bonnet and her black woollen
+shawl, took her green cotton umbrella, which served her for a staff,
+and, refusing Betty's proffered assistance, set out for Dooble Sanny's
+shop.
+
+As she drew near she heard the sounds of his violin. When she entered,
+he laid his auld wife carefully aside, and stood in an expectant
+attitude.
+
+'Mr. Elshender, I want to be at the boddom o' this,' said Mrs. Falconer.
+
+'Weel, mem, gang to the boddom o' 't,' returned Dooble Sanny, dropping
+on his stool, and taking his stone upon his lap and stroking it, as if
+it had been some quadrupedal pet. Full of rough but real politeness to
+women when in good humour, he lost all his manners along with his temper
+upon the slightest provocation, and her tone irritated him.
+
+'Hoo cam Robert's shune to be i' your shop?'
+
+'Somebody bude till hae brocht them, mem. In a' my expairience, and
+that's no sma', I never kent pair o' shune gang ohn a pair o' feet i'
+the wame o' them.'
+
+'Hoots! what kin' o' gait 's that to speyk till a body? Whase feet was
+inside the shune?'
+
+'De'il a bit o' me kens, mem.'
+
+'Dinna sweir, whatever ye du.'
+
+'De'il but I will sweir, mem; an' gin ye anger me, I'll jist sweir
+awfu'.'
+
+'I'm sure I hae nae wuss to anger ye, man! Canna ye help a body to win
+at the boddom o' a thing ohn angert an' sworn?'
+
+'Weel, I kenna wha brocht the shune, as I tellt ye a'ready.'
+
+'But they wantit nae men'in'.'
+
+'I micht hae men't them an' forgotten 't, mem.'
+
+'Noo ye're leein'.'
+
+'Gin ye gang on that gait, mem, I winna speyk a word o' trowth frae this
+moment foret.'
+
+'Jist tell me what ye ken aboot thae shune, an' I'll no say anither
+word.'
+
+'Weel, mem, I'll tell ye the trowth. The de'il brocht them in ae day in
+a lang taings; and says he, "Elshender, men' thae shune for puir
+Robby Faukner; an' dooble-sole them for the life o' ye; for that auld
+luckie-minnie o' his 'ill sune hae him doon oor gait, and the grun' 's
+het i' the noo; an' I dinna want to be ower sair upon him, for he's a
+fine chield, an' 'll mak a fine fiddler gin he live lang eneuch."'
+
+Mrs. Falconer left the shop without another word, but with an awful
+suspicion which the last heedless words of the shoemaker had aroused
+in her bosom. She left him bursting with laughter over his lapstone.
+He caught up his fiddle and played The De'il's i' the Women lustily and
+with expression. But he little thought what he had done.
+
+As soon as she reached her own room, she went straight to her bed and
+disinterred the bonny leddy's coffin. She was gone; and in her stead,
+horror of horrors! lay in the unhallowed chest that body of divinity
+known as Boston's Fourfold State. Vexation, anger, disappointment, and
+grief possessed themselves of the old woman's mind. She ranged the house
+like the 'questing beast' of the Round Table, but failed in finding the
+violin before the return of the boys. Not a word did she say all that
+evening, and their oppressed hearts foreboded ill. They felt that there
+was thunder in the clouds, a sleeping storm in the air; but how or when
+it would break they had no idea.
+
+Robert came home to dinner the next day a few minutes before Shargar. As
+he entered his grandmother's parlour, a strange odour greeted his sense.
+A moment more, and he stood rooted with horror, and his hair began to
+rise on his head. His violin lay on its back on the fire, and a yellow
+tongue of flame was licking the red lips of a hole in its belly. All
+its strings were shrivelled up save one, which burst as he gazed. And
+beside, stern as a Druidess, sat his grandmother in her chair, feeding
+her eyes with grim satisfaction on the detestable sacrifice. At length
+the rigidity of Robert's whole being relaxed in an involuntary howl
+like that of a wild beast, and he turned and rushed from the house in a
+helpless agony of horror. Where he was going he knew not, only a blind
+instinct of modesty drove him to hide his passion from the eyes of men.
+
+From her window Miss St. John saw him tearing like one demented along
+the top walk of the captain's garden, and watched for his return. He
+came far sooner than she expected.
+
+Before he arrived at the factory, Robert began to hear strange sounds in
+the desolate place. When he reached the upper floor, he found men with
+axe and hammer destroying the old woodwork, breaking the old jennies,
+pitching the balls of lead into baskets, and throwing the spools into
+crates. Was there nothing but destruction in the world? There, most
+horrible! his 'bonny leddy' dying of flames, and here, the temple of his
+refuge torn to pieces by unhallowed hands! What could it mean? Was his
+grandmother's vengeance here too? But he did not care. He only felt like
+the dove sent from the ark, that there was no rest for the sole of his
+foot, that there was no place to hide his head in his agony--that he was
+naked to the universe; and like a heartless wild thing hunted till its
+brain is of no more use, he turned and rushed back again upon his track.
+At one end was the burning idol, at the other the desecrated temple.
+
+No sooner had he entered the captain's garden than Miss St. John met
+him.
+
+'What is the matter with you, Robert?' she asked, kindly.
+
+'Oh, mem!' gasped Robert, and burst into a very storm of weeping.
+
+It was long before he could speak. He cowered before Miss St. John as if
+conscious of an unfriendly presence, and seeking to shelter himself by
+her tall figure from his grandmother's eyes. For who could tell but at
+the moment she might be gazing upon him from some window, or even from
+the blue vault above? There was no escaping her. She was the all-seeing
+eye personified--the eye of the God of the theologians of his country,
+always searching out the evil, and refusing to acknowledge the good. Yet
+so gentle and faithful was the heart of Robert, that he never thought of
+her as cruel. He took it for granted that somehow or other she must be
+right. Only what a terrible thing such righteousness was! He stood and
+wept before the lady.
+
+Her heart was sore for the despairing boy. She drew him to a little
+summer-seat. He entered with her, and sat down, weeping still. She did
+her best to soothe him. At last, sorely interrupted by sobs, he managed
+to let her know the fate of his 'bonnie leddy.' But when he came to the
+words, 'She's burnin' in there upo' granny's fire,' he broke out once
+more with that wild howl of despair, and then, ashamed of himself,
+ceased weeping altogether, though he could not help the intrusion of
+certain chokes and sobs upon his otherwise even, though low and sad
+speech.
+
+Knowing nothing of Mrs. Falconer's character, Miss St. John set her down
+as a cruel and heartless as well as tyrannical and bigoted old woman,
+and took the mental position of enmity towards her. In a gush of
+motherly indignation she kissed Robert on the forehead.
+
+From that chrism he arose a king.
+
+He dried his eyes; not another sob even broke from him; he gave one
+look, but no word of gratitude, to Miss St. John; bade her good-bye; and
+walked composedly into his grandmother's parlour, where the neck of the
+violin yet lay upon the fire only half consumed. The rest had vanished
+utterly.
+
+'What are they duin' doon at the fact'ry, grannie?' he asked.
+
+'What's wha duin', laddie?' returned his grandmother, curtly.
+
+'They're takin' 't doon.'
+
+'Takin' what doon?' she returned, with raised voice.
+
+'Takin' doon the hoose.'
+
+The old woman rose.
+
+'Robert, ye may hae spite in yer hert for what I hae dune this mornin',
+but I cud do no ither. An' it's an ill thing to tak sic amen's o' me, as
+gin I had dune wrang, by garrin' me troo 'at yer grandfather's property
+was to gang the gait o' 's auld, useless, ill-mainnert scraich o' a
+fiddle.'
+
+'She was the bonniest fiddle i' the country-side, grannie. And she
+never gae a scraich in her life 'cep' whan she was han'let in a mainner
+unbecomin'. But we s' say nae mair aboot her, for she's gane, an' no by
+a fair strae-deith (death on one's own straw) either. She had nae blude
+to cry for vengeance; but the snappin' o' her strings an' the crackin'
+o' her banes may hae made a cry to gang far eneuch notwithstandin'.'
+
+The old woman seemed for one moment rebuked under her grandson's
+eloquence. He had made a great stride towards manhood since the morning.
+
+'The fiddle's my ain,' she said, in a defensive tone. 'And sae is
+the fact'ry,' she added, as if she had not quite reassured herself
+concerning it.
+
+'The fiddle's yours nae mair, grannie. And for the fact'ry--ye winna
+believe me: gang and see yersel'.'
+
+Therewith Robert retreated to his garret.
+
+When he opened the door of it, the first thing he saw was the string of
+his kite, which, strange to tell, so steady had been the wind, was still
+up in the air--still tugging at the bedpost. Whether it was from the
+stinging thought that the true sky-soarer, the violin, having been
+devoured by the jaws of the fire-devil, there was no longer any
+significance in the outward and visible sign of the dragon, or from
+a dim feeling that the time of kites was gone by and manhood on the
+threshold, I cannot tell; but he drew his knife from his pocket, and
+with one down-stroke cut the string in twain. Away went the dragon,
+free, like a prodigal, to his ruin. And with the dragon, afar into the
+past, flew the childhood of Robert Falconer. He made one remorseful dart
+after the string as it swept out of the skylight, but it was gone beyond
+remeid. And never more, save in twilight dreams, did he lay hold on his
+childhood again. But he knew better and better, as the years rolled on,
+that he approached a deeper and holier childhood, of which that had been
+but the feeble and necessarily vanishing type.
+
+As the kite sank in the distance, Mrs. Falconer issued from the house,
+and went down the street towards the factory.
+
+Before she came back the cloth was laid for dinner, and Robert and
+Shargar were both in the parlour awaiting her return. She entered heated
+and dismayed, went into Robert's bedroom, and shut the door hastily.
+They heard her open the old bureau. In a moment after she came out with
+a more luminous expression upon her face than Robert had ever seen it
+bear. It was as still as ever, but there was a strange light in her
+eyes, which was not confined to her eyes, but shone in a measure from
+her colourless forehead and cheeks as well. It was long before Robert
+was able to interpret that change in her look, and that increase of
+kindness towards himself and Shargar, apparently such a contrast with
+the holocaust of the morning. Had they both been Benjamins they could
+not have had more abundant platefuls than she gave them that day. And
+when they left her to return to school, instead of the usual 'Noo be
+douce,' she said, in gentle, almost loving tones, 'Noo, be good lads,
+baith o' ye.'
+
+The conclusion at which Falconer did arrive was that his grandmother had
+hurried home to see whether the title-deeds of the factory were still in
+her possession, and had found that they were gone--taken, doubtless,
+by her son Andrew. At whatever period he had appropriated them, he must
+have parted with them but recently. And the hope rose luminous that
+her son had not yet passed into the region 'where all life dies, death
+lives.' Terrible consolation! Terrible creed, which made the hope that
+he was still on this side of the grave working wickedness, light up the
+face of the mother, and open her hand in kindness. Is it suffering,
+or is it wickedness, that is the awful thing? 'Ah! but they are both
+combined in the other world.' And in this world too, I answer; only,
+according to Mrs. Falconer's creed, in the other world God, for the sake
+of the suffering, renders the wickedness eternal!
+
+The old factory was in part pulled down, and out of its remains a
+granary constructed. Nor did the old lady interpose a word to arrest the
+alienation of her property.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV. BOOT FOR BALE.
+
+Mary St. John was the orphan daughter of an English clergyman, who had
+left her money enough to make her at least independent. Mrs. Forsyth,
+hearing that her niece was left alone in the world, had concluded
+that her society would be a pleasure to herself and a relief to the
+housekeeping. Even before her father's death, Miss St. John, having met
+with a disappointment, and concluded herself dead to the world, had been
+looking about for some way of doing good. The prospect of retirement,
+therefore, and of being useful to her sick aunt, had drawn her
+northwards.
+
+She was now about six-and-twenty, filled with two passions--one for
+justice, the other for music. Her griefs had not made her selfish,
+nor had her music degenerated into sentiment. The gentle style of
+the instruction she had received had never begotten a diseased
+self-consciousness; and if her religion lacked something of the
+intensity without which a character like hers could not be evenly
+balanced, its force was not spent on the combating of unholy doubts
+and selfish fears, but rose on the wings of her music in gentle
+thanksgiving. Tears had changed her bright-hued hopes into a
+dove-coloured submission, through which her mind was passing towards a
+rainbow dawn such as she had never dreamed of. To her as yet the Book
+of Common Prayer contained all the prayers that human heart had need
+to offer; what things lay beyond its scope must lie beyond the scope of
+religion. All such things must be parted with one day, and if they had
+been taken from her very soon, she was the sooner free from the painful
+necessity of watching lest earthly love should remove any of the old
+landmarks dividing what was God's from what was only man's. She had now
+retired within the pale of religion, and left the rest of her being, as
+she thought, 'to dull forgetfulness a prey.'
+
+She had little comfort in the society of her aunt. Indeed, she felt
+strongly tempted to return again to England the same month, and seek a
+divine service elsewhere. But it was not at all so easy then as it is
+now for a woman to find the opportunity of being helpful in the world of
+suffering.
+
+Mrs. Forsyth was one of those women who get their own way by the very
+vis inertiae of their silliness. No argument could tell upon her. She
+was so incapable of seeing anything noble that her perfect satisfaction
+with everything she herself thought, said, or did, remained
+unchallenged. She had just illness enough to swell her feeling of
+importance. She looked down upon Mrs. Falconer from such an immeasurable
+height that she could not be indignant with her for anything; she only
+vouchsafed a laugh now and then at her oddities, holding no further
+communication with her than a condescending bend of the neck when they
+happened to meet, which was not once a year. But, indeed, she would
+have patronized the angel Gabriel, if she had had a chance, and no doubt
+given him a hint or two upon the proper way of praising God. For the
+rest, she was good-tempered, looked comfortable, and quarrelled
+with nobody but her rough honest old bear of a husband, whom, in his
+seventieth year, she was always trying to teach good manners, with the
+frequent result of a storm of swearing.
+
+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.
+
+Mrs. Falconer saw that he still went away as he had been wont, and
+instituted observations, the result of which was the knowledge that
+he went to his own room. Her heart smote her, and she saw that the boy
+looked sad and troubled. There was scarce room in her heart for increase
+of love, but much for increase of kindness, and she did increase it. In
+truth, he needed the smallest crumb of comfort that might drop from the
+table of God's 'feastful friends.'
+
+Night after night he returned to the parlour cold to the very heart.
+God was not to be found, he said then. He said afterwards that even then
+'God was with him though he knew it not.'
+
+For the very first night, the moment that he knelt and cried, 'O Father
+in heaven, hear me, and let thy face shine upon me'--like a flash of
+burning fire the words shot from the door of his heart: 'I dinna care
+for him to love me, gin he doesna love ilka body;' and no more prayer
+went from the desolate boy that night, although he knelt an hour
+of agony in the freezing dark. Loyal to what he had been taught, he
+struggled hard to reduce his rebellious will to what he supposed to be
+the will of God. It was all in vain. Ever a voice within him--surely the
+voice of that God who he thought was not hearing--told him that what he
+wanted was the love belonging to his human nature, his human needs--not
+the preference of a court-favourite. He had a dim consciousness that
+he would be a traitor to his race if he accepted a love, even from God,
+given him as an exception from his kind. But he did not care to have
+such a love. It was not what his heart yearned for. It was not love.
+He could not love such a love. Yet he strove against it all--fought for
+religion against right as he could; struggled to reduce his rebellious
+feelings, to love that which was unlovely, to choose that which was
+abhorrent, until nature almost gave way under the effort. Often would he
+sink moaning on the floor, or stretch himself like a corpse, save that
+it was face downwards, on the boards of the bedstead. Night after night
+he returned to the battle, but with no permanent success. What a success
+that would have been! Night after night he came pale and worn from
+the conflict, found his grandmother and Shargar composed, and in the
+quietness of despair sat down beside them to his Latin version.
+
+He little thought, that every night, at the moment when he stirred to
+leave the upper room, a pale-faced, red-eyed figure rose from its
+seat on the top of the stair by the door, and sped with long-legged
+noiselessness to resume its seat by the grandmother before he should
+enter. Shargar saw that Robert was unhappy, and the nearest he could
+come to the sharing of his unhappiness was to take his place outside
+the door within which he had retreated. Little, too, did Shargar, on
+his part, think that Robert, without knowing it, was pleading for him
+inside--pleading for him and for all his race in the weeping that would
+not be comforted.
+
+Robert had not the vaguest fancy that God was with him--the spirit of
+the Father groaning with the spirit of the boy in intercession that
+could not be uttered. If God had come to him then and comforted him with
+the assurance of individual favour--but the very supposition is a taking
+of his name in vain--had Robert found comfort in the fancied assurance
+that God was his friend in especial, that some private favour was
+granted to his prayers, that, indeed, would have been to be left to
+his own inventions, to bring forth not fruits meet for repentance, but
+fruits for which repentance alone is meet. But God was with him, and was
+indeed victorious in the boy when he rose from his knees, for the
+last time, as he thought, saying, 'I cannot yield--I will pray no
+more.'--With a burst of bitter tears he sat down on the bedside till the
+loudest of the storm was over, then dried his dull eyes, in which
+the old outlook had withered away, and trod unknowingly in the silent
+footsteps of Shargar, who was ever one corner in advance of him, down
+to the dreary lessons and unheeded prayers; but, thank God, not to the
+sleepless night, for some griefs bring sleep the sooner.
+
+My reader must not mistake my use of the words especial and private, or
+suppose that I do not believe in an individual relation between every
+man and God, yes, a peculiar relation, differing from the relation
+between every other man and God! But this very individuality and
+peculiarity can only be founded on the broadest truths of the Godhood
+and the manhood.
+
+Mrs. Falconer, ere she went to sleep, gave thanks that the boys had been
+at their prayers together. And so, in a very deep sense, they had.
+
+And well they might have been; for Shargar was nearly as desolate as
+Robert, and would certainly, had his mother claimed him now, have gone
+on the tramp with her again. Wherein could this civilized life show
+itself to him better than that to which he had been born? For clothing
+he cared little, and he had always managed to kill his hunger or thirst,
+if at longer intervals, then with greater satisfaction. Wherein is the
+life of that man who merely does his eating and drinking and clothing
+after a civilized fashion better than that of the gipsy or tramp? If the
+civilized man is honest to boot, and gives good work in return for the
+bread or turtle on which he dines, and the gipsy, on the other hand,
+steals his dinner, I recognize the importance of the difference; but
+if the rich man plunders the community by exorbitant profits, or
+speculation with other people's money, while the gipsy adds a fowl or
+two to the produce of his tinkering; or, once again, if the gipsy is as
+honest as the honest citizen, which is not so rare a case by any means
+as people imagine, I return to my question: Wherein, I say, is the warm
+house, the windows hung with purple, and the table covered with fine
+linen, more divine than the tent or the blue sky, and the dipping in the
+dish? Why should not Shargar prefer a life with the mother God had given
+him to a life with Mrs. Falconer? Why should he prefer geography to
+rambling, or Latin to Romany? His purposelessness and his love for
+Robert alone kept him where he was.
+
+The next evening, having given up his praying, Robert sat with his
+Sallust before him. But the fount of tears began to swell, and the more
+he tried to keep it down, the more it went on swelling till his throat
+was filled with a lump of pain. He rose and left the room. But he could
+not go near the garret. That door too was closed. He opened the house
+door instead, and went out into the street. There, nothing was to be
+seen but faint blue air full of moonlight, solid houses, and shining
+snow. Bareheaded he wandered round the corner of the house to the window
+whence first he had heard the sweet sounds of the pianoforte. The fire
+within lighted up the crimson curtains, but no voice of music came
+forth. The window was as dumb as the pale, faintly befogged moon
+overhead, itself seeming but a skylight through which shone the sickly
+light of the passionless world of the dead. Not a form was in the
+street. The eyes of the houses gleamed here and there upon the snow.
+He leaned his elbow on the window-sill behind which stood that sealed
+fountain of lovely sound, looked up at the moon, careless of her or
+of aught else in heaven or on earth, and sunk into a reverie, in which
+nothing was consciously present but a stream of fog-smoke that flowed
+slowly, listlessly across the face of the moon, like the ghost of a
+dead cataract. All at once a wailful sound arose in his head. He did not
+think for some time whether it was born in his brain, or entered it from
+without. At length he recognized the Flowers of the Forest, played as
+only the soutar could play it. But alas! the cry responsive to his bow
+came only from the auld wife--no more from the bonny leddy! Then he
+remembered that there had been a humble wedding that morning on the
+opposite side of the way; in the street department of the jollity
+of which Shargar had taken a small share by firing a brass cannon,
+subsequently confiscated by Mrs. Falconer. But this was a strange tune
+to play at a wedding! The soutar half-way to his goal of drunkenness,
+had begun to repent for the fiftieth time that year, had with his
+repentance mingled the memory of the bonny leddy ruthlessly tortured
+to death for his wrong, and had glided from a strathspey into that
+sorrowful moaning. The lament interpreted itself to his disconsolate
+pupil as he had never understood it before, not even in the
+stubble-field; for it now spoke his own feelings of waste misery,
+forsaken loneliness. Indeed Robert learned more of music in those few
+minutes of the foggy winter night and open street, shut out of all
+doors, with the tones of an ancient grief and lamentation floating
+through the blotted moonlight over his ever-present sorrow, than he
+could have learned from many lessons even of Miss St. John. He was cold
+to the heart, yet went in a little comforted.
+
+Things had gone ill with him. Outside of Paradise, deserted of his
+angel, in the frost and the snow, the voice of the despised violin once
+more the source of a sad comfort! But there is no better discipline
+than an occasional descent from what we count well-being, to a former
+despised or less happy condition. One of the results of this taste of
+damnation in Robert was, that when he was in bed that night, his heart
+began to turn gently towards his old master. How much did he not owe
+him, after all! Had he not acted ill and ungratefully in deserting him?
+His own vessel filled to the brim with grief, had he not let the waters
+of its bitterness overflow into the heart of the soutar? The wail of
+that violin echoed now in Robert's heart, not for Flodden, not for
+himself, but for the debased nature that drew forth the plaint. Comrades
+in misery, why should they part? What right had he to forsake an old
+friend and benefactor because he himself was unhappy? He would go and
+see him the very next night. And he would make friends once more with
+the much 'suffering instrument' he had so wrongfully despised.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. THE STROKE.
+
+The following night, he left his books on the table, and the house
+itself behind him, and sped like a grayhound to Dooble Sanny's shop,
+lifted the latch, and entered.
+
+By the light of a single dip set on a chair, he saw the shoemaker seated
+on his stool, one hand lying on the lap of his leathern apron, his other
+hand hanging down by his side, and the fiddle on the ground at his feet.
+His wife stood behind him, wiping her eyes with her blue apron. Through
+all its accumulated dirt, the face of the soutar looked ghastly, and
+they were eyes of despair that he lifted to the face of the youth as
+he stood holding the latch in his hand. Mrs. Alexander moved towards
+Robert, drew him in, and gently closed the door behind him, resuming her
+station like a sculptured mourner behind her motionless husband.
+
+'What on airth's the maitter wi' ye, Sandy?' said Robert.
+
+'Eh, Robert!' returned the shoemaker, and a tone of affection tinged the
+mournfulness with which he uttered the strange words--'eh, Robert! the
+Almichty will gang his ain gait, and I'm in his grup noo.'
+
+'He's had a stroke,' said his wife, without removing her apron from her
+eyes.
+
+'I hae gotten my pecks (blows),' resumed the soutar, in a despairing
+voice, which gave yet more effect to the fantastic eccentricity of
+conscience which from the midst of so many grave faults chose such a one
+as especially bringing the divine displeasure upon him: 'I hae gotten my
+pecks for cryin' doon my ain auld wife to set up your bonny leddy. The
+tane's gane a' to aise an' stew (ashes and dust), an' frae the tither,'
+he went on, looking down on the violin at his feet as if it had been
+something dead in its youth--'an' frae the tither I canna draw a cheep,
+for my richt han' has forgotten her cunnin'. Man, Robert, I canna lift it
+frae my side.'
+
+'Ye maun gang to yer bed,' said Robert, greatly concerned.
+
+'Ow, ay, I maun gang to my bed, and syne to the kirkyaird, and syne to
+hell, I ken that weel eneuch. Robert, I lea my fiddle to you. Be guid to
+the auld wife, man--better nor I hae been. An auld wife's better nor nae
+fiddle.'
+
+He stooped, lifted the violin with his left hand, gave it to Robert,
+rose, and made for the door. They helped him up the creaking stair, got
+him half-undressed, and laid him in his bed. Robert put the violin on
+the top of a press within sight of the sufferer, left him groaning, and
+ran for the doctor. Having seen him set out for the patient's dwelling,
+he ran home to his grandmother.
+
+Now while Robert was absent, occasion had arisen to look for him:
+unusual occurrence, a visitor had appeared, no less a person than Mr.
+Innes, the school-master. Shargar had been banished in consequence
+from the parlour, and had seated himself outside Robert's room, never
+doubting that Robert was inside. Presently he heard the bell ring, and
+then Betty came up the stair, and said Robert was wanted. Thereupon
+Shargar knocked at the door, and as there was neither voice nor hearing,
+opened it, and found, with a well-known horror, that he had been
+watching an empty room. He made no haste to communicate the fact.
+Robert might return in a moment, and his absence from the house not be
+discovered. He sat down on the bedstead and waited. But Betty came up
+again, and before Shargar could prevent her, walked into the room with
+her candle in her hand. In vain did Shargar intreat her to go and say
+that Robert was coming. Betty would not risk the danger of discovery in
+connivance, and descended to open afresh the fountain of the old lady's
+anxiety. She did not, however, betray her disquietude to Mr. Innes.
+
+She had asked the school-master to visit her, in order that she might
+consult him about Robert's future. Mr. Innes expressed a high opinion of
+the boy's faculties and attainments, and strongly urged that he should
+be sent to college. Mrs. Falconer inwardly shuddered at the temptations
+to which this course would expose him; but he must leave home or be
+apprentice to some trade. She would have chosen the latter, I believe,
+but for religion towards the boy's parents, who would never have thought
+of other than a profession for him. While the school-master was dwelling
+on the argument that he was pretty sure to gain a good bursary, and she
+would thus be relieved for four years, probably for ever, from further
+expense on his account, Robert entered.
+
+'Whaur hae ye been, Robert?' asked Mrs. Falconer.
+
+'At Dooble Sanny's,' answered the boy.
+
+'What hae ye been at there?'
+
+'Helpin' him till 's bed.'
+
+'What's come ower him?'
+
+'A stroke.'
+
+'That's what comes o' playin' the fiddle.'
+
+'I never heard o' a stroke comin' frae a fiddle, grannie. It comes oot
+o' a clood whiles. Gin he had hauden till 's fiddle, he wad hae been
+playin' her the nicht, in place o' 's airm lyin' at 's side like a lang
+lingel (ligneul--shoemaker's thread).'
+
+'Hm!' said his grandmother, concealing her indignation at this freedom
+of speech, 'ye dinna believe in God's judgments!'
+
+'Nae upo' fiddles,' returned Robert.
+
+Mr. Innes sat and said nothing, with difficulty concealing his amusement
+at this passage of arms.
+
+It was but within the last few days that Robert had become capable of
+speaking thus. His nature had at length arrived at the point of so far
+casting off the incubus of his grandmother's authority as to assert some
+measure of freedom and act openly. His very hopelessness of a hearing
+in heaven had made him indifferent to things on earth, and therefore
+bolder. Thus, strange as it may seem, the blessing of God descended on
+him in the despair which enabled him to speak out and free his soul from
+the weight of concealment. But it was not despair alone that gave him
+strength. On his way home from the shoemaker's he had been thinking what
+he could do for him; and had resolved, come of it what might, that he
+would visit him every evening, and try whether he could not comfort
+him a little by playing upon his violin. So that it was loving-kindness
+towards man, as well as despair towards God, that gave him strength to
+resolve that between him and his grandmother all should be above-board
+from henceforth.
+
+'Nae upo' fiddles,' Robert had said.
+
+'But upo' them 'at plays them,' returned his grandmother.
+
+'Na; nor upo' them 'at burns them,' retorted Robert--impudently it must
+be confessed; for every man is open to commit the fault of which he is
+least capable.
+
+But Mrs. Falconer had too much regard to her own dignity to indulge her
+feelings. Possibly too her sense of justice, which Falconer always said
+was stronger than that of any other woman he had ever known, as well as
+some movement of her conscience interfered. She was silent, and Robert
+rushed into the breach which his last discharge had effected.
+
+'An' I want to tell ye, grannie, that I mean to gang an' play the fiddle
+to puir Sanny ilka nicht for the best pairt o' an hoor; an' excep' ye
+lock the door an' hide the key, I will gang. The puir sinner sanna be
+desertit by God an' man baith.'
+
+He scarcely knew what he was saying before it was out of his mouth; and
+as if to cover it up, he hurried on.
+
+'An' there's mair in 't.--Dr. Anderson gae Shargar an' me a sovereign
+the piece. An' Dooble Sanny s' hae them, to haud him ohn deid o' hunger
+an' cauld.'
+
+'What for didna ye tell me 'at Dr. Anderson had gien ye sic a sicht o'
+siller? It was ill-faured o' ye--an' him as weel.'
+
+''Cause ye wad hae sent it back till 'im; an' Shargar and me we thocht
+we wad raither keep it.'
+
+'Considerin' 'at I'm at sae muckle expense wi' ye baith, it wadna hae
+been ill-contrived to hae brocht the siller to me, an' latten me du wi'
+'t as I thocht fit.--Gang na awa', laddie,' she added, as she saw Robert
+about to leave the room.
+
+'I'll be back in a minute, grannie,' returned Robert.
+
+'He's a fine lad, that!' said Mr. Innes; 'an' guid 'll come o' 'm, and
+that 'll be heard tell o'.'
+
+'Gin he had but the grace o' God, there wadna be muckle to compleen o','
+acquiesced his grandmother.
+
+'There's time eneuch for that, Mrs. Faukner. Ye canna get auld heids
+upo' young shoothers, ye ken.'
+
+''Deed for that maitter, ye may get mony an auld heid upo' auld
+shoothers, and nae a spark o' grace in 't to lat it see hoo to lay
+itsel' doon i' the grave.'
+
+Robert returned before Mr. Innes had made up his mind as to whether the
+old lady intended a personal rebuke.
+
+'Hae, grannie,' he said, going up to her, and putting the two sovereigns
+in her white palm.
+
+He had found some difficulty in making Shargar give up his, else he
+would have returned sooner.
+
+'What's this o' 't, laddie?' said Mrs. Falconer. 'Hoots! I'm nae gaein'
+to tak yer siller. Lat the puir soutar-craturs hae 't. But dinna gie
+them mair nor a shillin' or twa at ance--jist to haud them in life. They
+deserve nae mair. But they maunna sterve. And jist ye tell them, laddie,
+at gin they spen' ae saxpence o' 't upo' whusky, they s' get nae mair.'
+
+'Ay, ay, grannie,' responded Robert, with a glimmer of gladness in his
+heart. 'And what aboot the fiddlin', grannie?' he added, half playfully,
+hoping for some kind concession therein as well.
+
+But he had gone too far. She vouchsafed no reply, and her face grew
+stern with offence. It was one thing to give bread to eat, another to
+give music and gladness. No music but that which sprung from effectual
+calling and the perseverance of the saints could be lawful in a world
+that was under the wrath and curse of God. Robert waited in vain for a
+reply.
+
+'Gang yer wa's,' she said at length. 'Mr. Innes and me has some business
+to mak an en' o', an' we want nae assistance.'
+
+Robert rejoined Shargar, who was still bemoaning the loss of his
+sovereign. His face brightened when he saw its well-known yellow shine
+once more, but darkened again as soon as Robert told him to what service
+it was now devoted.
+
+'It's my ain,' he said, with a suppressed expostulatory growl.
+
+Robert threw the coin on the floor.
+
+'Tak yer filthy lucre!' he exclaimed with contempt, and turned to leave
+Shargar alone in the garret with his sovereign.
+
+'Bob!' Shargar almost screamed, 'tak it, or I'll cut my throat.'
+
+This was his constant threat when he was thoroughly in earnest.
+
+'Cut it, an' hae dune wi' 't,' said Robert cruelly.
+
+Shargar burst out crying.
+
+'Len' me yer knife, than, Bob,' he sobbed, holding out his hand.
+
+Robert burst into a roar of laughter, caught up the sovereign from the
+floor, sped with it to the baker's, who refused to change it because he
+had no knowledge of anything representing the sum of twenty shillings
+except a pound-note, succeeded in getting silver for it at the bank, and
+then ran to the soutar's.
+
+After he left the parlour, the discussion of his fate was resumed and
+finally settled between his grandmother and the school-master. The
+former, in regard of the boy's determination to befriend the shoemaker
+in the matter of music as well as of money, would now have sent him
+at once to the grammar-school in Old Aberdeen, to prepare for the
+competition in the month of November; but the latter persuaded her that
+if the boy gave his whole attention to Latin till the next summer, and
+then went to the grammar-school for three months or so, he would have an
+excellent chance of success. As to the violin, the school-master said,
+wisely enough:
+
+'He that will to Cupar maun to Cupar; and gin ye kep (intercept) him
+upo' the shore-road, he'll tak to the hill-road; an' I s' warran' a braw
+lad like Robert 'll get mony a ane in Ebberdeen 'll be ready eneuch to
+gie him a lift wi' the fiddle, and maybe tak him into waur company nor
+the puir bed-ridden soutar; an' wi' you an' me to hing on to the tail o'
+'im like, he canna gang ower the scar (cliff) afore he learns wit.'
+
+'Hm!' was the old lady's comprehensive response.
+
+It was further arranged that Robert should be informed of their
+conclusion, and so roused to effort in anticipation of the trial upon
+which his course in life must depend.
+
+Nothing could have been better for Robert than the prospect of a college
+education. But his first thought at the news was not of the delights
+of learning nor of the honourable course that would ensue, but of
+Eric Ericson, the poverty-stricken, friendless descendant of yarls and
+sea-rovers. He would see him--the only man that understood him! Not
+until the passion of this thought had abated, did he begin to perceive
+the other advantages before him. But so practical and thorough was he
+in all his proposals and means, that ere half-an-hour was gone, he
+had begun to go over his Rudiments again. He now wrote a version, or
+translation from English into Latin, five times a week, and read Caeser,
+Virgil, or Tacitus, every day. He gained permission from his grandmother
+to remove his bed to his own garret, and there, from the bedstead at
+which he no longer kneeled, he would often rise at four in the morning,
+even when the snow lay a foot thick on the skylight, kindle his lamp
+by means of a tinder-box and a splinter of wood dipped in sulphur,
+and sitting down in the keen cold, turn half a page of Addison into
+something as near Ciceronian Latin as he could effect. This would take
+him from an hour and a half to two hours, when he would tumble again
+into bed, blue and stiff, and sleep till it was time to get up and go to
+the morning school before breakfast. His health was excellent, else it
+could never have stood such treatment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. 'THE END CROWNS ALL'.
+
+His sole relaxation almost lay in the visit he paid every evening to
+the soutar and his wife. Their home was a wretched place; but
+notwithstanding the poverty in which they were now sunk, Robert soon
+began to see a change, like the dawning of light, an alba, as the
+Italians call the dawn, in the appearance of something white here and
+there about the room. Robert's visits had set the poor woman trying to
+make the place look decent. It soon became at least clean, and there
+is a very real sense in which cleanliness is next to godliness. If the
+people who want to do good among the poor would give up patronizing
+them, would cease from trying to convert them before they have gained
+the smallest personal influence with them, would visit them as those who
+have just as good a right to be here as they have, it would be all the
+better for both, perhaps chiefly for themselves.
+
+For the first week or so, Alexander, unable either to work or play,
+and deprived of his usual consolation of drink, was very testy and
+unmanageable. If Robert, who strove to do his best, in the hope
+of alleviating the poor fellow's sufferings--chiefly those of the
+mind--happened to mistake the time or to draw a false note from the
+violin, Sandy would swear as if he had been the Grand Turk and Robert
+one of his slaves. But Robert was too vexed with himself, when he
+gave occasion to such an outburst, to mind the outburst itself.
+And invariably when such had taken place, the shoemaker would ask
+forgiveness before he went. Holding out his left hand, from which
+nothing could efface the stains of rosin and lamp-black and heel-ball,
+save the sweet cleansing of mother-earth, he would say,
+
+'Robert, ye'll jist pit the sweirin' doon wi' the lave (rest), an' score
+'t oot a'thegither. I'm an ill-tongued vratch, an' I'm beginnin' to see
+'t. But, man, ye're jist behavin' to me like God himsel', an' gin it
+warna for you, I wad jist lie here roarin' an' greitin' an' damnin' frae
+mornin' to nicht.--Ye will be in the morn's night--willna ye?' he would
+always end by asking with some anxiety.
+
+'Of coorse I will,' Robert would answer.
+
+'Gude nicht, than, gude nicht.--I'll try and get a sicht o' my sins ance
+mair,' he added, one evening. 'Gin I could only be a wee bit sorry for
+them, I reckon he wad forgie me. Dinna ye think he wad, Robert?'
+
+'Nae doobt, nae doobt,' answered Robert hurriedly. 'They a' say 'at gin
+a man repents the richt gait, he'll forgie him.'
+
+He could not say more than 'They say,' for his own horizon was all dark,
+and even in saying this much he felt like a hypocrite. A terrible waste,
+heaped thick with the potsherds of hope, lay outside that door of prayer
+which he had, as he thought, nailed up for ever.
+
+'An' what is the richt gait?' asked the soutar.
+
+''Deed, that's mair nor I ken, Sandy,' answered Robert mournfully.
+
+'Weel, gin ye dinna ken, what's to come o' me?' said Alexander
+anxiously.
+
+'Ye maun speir at himsel',' returned Robert, 'an' jist tell him 'at ye
+dinna ken, but ye'll do onything 'at he likes.'
+
+With these words he took his leave hurriedly, somewhat amazed to find
+that he had given the soutar the strange advice to try just what he had
+tried so unavailingly himself. And stranger still, he found himself,
+before he reached home, praying once more in his heart--both for Dooble
+Sanny and for himself. From that hour a faint hope was within him that
+some day he might try again, though he dared not yet encounter such
+effort and agony.
+
+All this time he had never doubted that there was God; nor had he
+ventured to say within himself that perhaps God was not good; he had
+simply come to the conclusion that for him there was no approach to the
+fountain of his being.
+
+In the course of a fortnight or so, when his system had covered over its
+craving after whisky, the irritability of the shoemaker almost vanished.
+It might have been feared that his conscience would then likewise relax
+its activity; but it was not so: it grew yet more tender. He now began
+to give Robert some praise, and make allowances for his faults, and
+Robert dared more in consequence, and played with more spirit. I do not
+say that his style could have grown fine under such a master, but at
+least he learned the difference between slovenliness and accuracy, and
+between accuracy and expression, which last is all of original that the
+best mere performer can claim.
+
+One evening he was scraping away at Tullochgorum when Mr. Maccleary
+walked in. Robert ceased. The minister gave him one searching glance,
+and sat down by the bedside. Robert would have left the room.
+
+'Dinna gang, Robert,' said Sandy, and Robert remained.
+
+The clergyman talked very faithfully as far as the shoemaker was
+concerned; though whether he was equally faithful towards God might be
+questioned. He was one of those prudent men, who are afraid of dealing
+out the truth freely lest it should fall on thorns or stony places.
+Hence of course the good ground came in for a scanty share too.
+Believing that a certain precise condition of mind was necessary for
+its proper reception, he would endeavour to bring about that condition
+first. He did not know that the truth makes its own nest in the ready
+heart, and that the heart may be ready for it before the priest
+can perceive the fact, seeing that the imposition of hands confers,
+now-a-days at least, neither love nor common-sense. He therefore dwelt
+upon the sins of the soutar, magnifying them and making them hideous, in
+the idea that thus he magnified the law, and made it honourable, while
+of the special tenderness of God to the sinner he said not a word.
+Robert was offended, he scarcely knew why, with the minister's mode
+of treating his friend; and after Mr. Maccleary had taken a far
+kinder leave of them than God could approve, if he resembled his
+representation, Robert sat still, oppressed with darkness.
+
+'It's a' true,' said the soutar; 'but, man Robert, dinna ye think the
+minister was some sair upo' me?'
+
+'I duv think it,' answered Robert.
+
+'Something beirs 't in upo' me 'at he wadna be sae sair upo' me himsel'.
+There's something i' the New Testament, some gait, 'at's pitten 't into
+my heid; though, faith, I dinna ken whaur to luik for 't. Canna ye help
+me oot wi' 't, man?'
+
+Robert could think of nothing but the parable of the prodigal son. Mrs.
+Alexander got him the New Testament, and he read it. She sat at the foot
+of the bed listening.
+
+'There!' cried the soutar, triumphantly, 'I telled ye sae! Not ae word
+aboot the puir lad's sins! It was a' a hurry an' a scurry to get the
+new shune upo' 'im, an' win at the calfie an' the fiddlin' an' the
+dancin'.--O Lord,' he broke out, 'I'm comin' hame as fest 's I can; but
+my sins are jist like muckle bauchles (shoes down at heel) upo' my feet
+and winna lat me. I expec' nae ring and nae robe, but I wad fain hae a
+fiddle i' my grup when the neist prodigal comes hame; an' gin I dinna
+fiddle weel, it s' no be my wyte.--Eh, man! but that is what I ca' gude,
+an' a' the minister said--honest man--'s jist blether till 't.--O Lord,
+I sweir gin ever I win up again, I'll put in ilka steek (stitch) as
+gin the shune war for the feet o' the prodigal himsel'. It sall be gude
+wark, O Lord. An' I'll never lat taste o' whusky intil my mou'--nor
+smell o' whusky intil my nose, gin sae be 'at I can help it--I sweir 't,
+O Lord. An' gin I binna raised up again--'
+
+Here his voice trembled and ceased, and silence endured for a short
+minute. Then he called his wife.
+
+'Come here, Bell. Gie me a kiss, my bonny lass. I hae been an ill man to
+you.'
+
+'Na, na, Sandy. Ye hae aye been gude to me--better nor I deserved. Ye
+hae been naebody's enemy but yer ain.'
+
+'Haud yer tongue. Ye're speykin' waur blethers nor the minister, honest
+man! I tell ye I hae been a damned scoon'rel to ye. I haena even hauden
+my han's aff o' ye. And eh! ye war a bonny lass whan I merried ye. I hae
+blaudit (spoiled) ye a'thegither. But gin I war up, see gin I wadna gie
+ye a new goon, an' that wad be something to make ye like yersel' again.
+I'm affrontet wi' mysel' 'at I had been sic a brute o' a man to ye.
+But ye maun forgie me noo, for I do believe i' my hert 'at the Lord's
+forgien me. Gie me anither kiss, lass. God be praised, and mony thanks
+to you! Ye micht hae run awa' frae me lang or noo, an' a'body wad hae
+said ye did richt.--Robert, play a spring.'
+
+Absorbed in his own thoughts, Robert began to play The Ewie wi' the
+Crookit Horn.
+
+'Hoots! hoots!' cried Sandy angrily. 'What are ye aboot? Nae mair o'
+that. I hae dune wi' that. What's i' the heid o' ye, man?'
+
+'What'll I play than, Sandy?' asked Robert meekly.
+
+'Play The Lan' o' the Leal, or My Nannie's Awa', or something o' that
+kin'. I'll be leal to ye noo, Bell. An' we winna pree o' the whusky nae
+mair, lass.'
+
+'I canna bide the smell o' 't,' cried Bell, sobbing.
+
+Robert struck in with The Lan' o' the Leal. When he had played it over
+two or three times, he laid the fiddle in its place, and departed--able
+just to see, by the light of the neglected candle, that Bell sat on the
+bedside stroking the rosiny hand of her husband, the rhinoceros-hide of
+which was yet delicate enough to let the love through to his heart.
+
+After this the soutar never called his fiddle his auld wife.
+
+Robert walked home with his head sunk on his breast. Dooble Sanny, the
+drinking, ranting, swearing soutar, was inside the wicket-gate; and he
+was left outside for all his prayers, with the arrows from the castle of
+Beelzebub sticking in his back. He would have another try some day--but
+not yet--he dared not yet.
+
+Henceforth Robert had more to do in reading the New Testament than in
+the fiddle to the soutar, though they never parted without an air or
+two. Sandy continued hopeful and generally cheerful, with alternations
+which the reading generally fixed on the right side for the night.
+Robert never attempted any comments, but left him to take from the
+word what nourishment he could. There was no return of strength to the
+helpless arm, and his constitution was gradually yielding.
+
+The rumour got abroad that he was a 'changed character,'--how is not far
+to seek, for Mr. Maccleary fancied himself the honoured instrument of
+his conversion, whereas paralysis and the New Testament were the chief
+agents, and even the violin had more share in it than the minister. For
+the spirit of God lies all about the spirit of man like a mighty sea,
+ready to rush in at the smallest chink in the walls that shut him out
+from his own--walls which even the tone of a violin afloat on the wind
+of that spirit is sometimes enough to rend from battlement to base, as
+the blast of the rams' horns rent the walls of Jericho. And now to the
+day of his death, the shoemaker had need of nothing. Food, wine, and
+delicacies were sent him by many who, while they considered him outside
+of the kingdom, would have troubled themselves in no way about him. What
+with visits of condolence and flattery, inquiries into his experience,
+and long prayers by his bedside, they now did their best to send him
+back among the swine. The soutar's humour, however, aided by his violin,
+was a strong antidote against these evil influences.
+
+'I doobt I'm gaein' to dee, Robert,' he said at length one evening as
+the lad sat by his bedside.
+
+'Weel, that winna do ye nae ill,' answered Robert, adding with just a
+touch of bitterness--'ye needna care aboot that.'
+
+'I do not care aboot the deein' o' 't. But I jist want to live lang
+eneuch to lat the Lord ken 'at I'm in doonricht earnest aboot it. I hae
+nae chance o' drinkin' as lang's I'm lyin' here.'
+
+'Never ye fash yer heid aboot that. Ye can lippen (trust) that to him,
+for it's his ain business. He'll see 'at ye're a' richt. Dinna ye think
+'at he'll lat ye aff.'
+
+'The Lord forbid,' responded the soutar earnestly. 'It maun be a' pitten
+richt. It wad be dreidfu' to be latten aff. I wadna hae him content wi'
+cobbler's wark.--I hae 't,' he resumed, after a few minutes' pause; 'the
+Lord's easy pleased, but ill to saitisfee. I'm sair pleased wi' your
+playin', Robert, but it's naething like the richt thing yet. It does me
+gude to hear ye, though, for a' that.'
+
+The very next night he found him evidently sinking fast. Robert took the
+violin, and was about to play, but the soutar stretched out his one left
+hand, and took it from him, laid it across his chest and his arm over
+it, for a few moments, as if he were bidding it farewell, then held it
+out to Robert, saying,
+
+'Hae, Robert. She's yours.--Death's a sair divorce.--Maybe they 'll hae
+an orra [3] fiddle whaur I'm gaein', though. Think o' a Rothieden soutar
+playin' afore his grace!'
+
+Robert saw that his mind was wandering, and mingled the paltry honours
+of earth with the grand simplicities of heaven. He began to play
+The Land o' the Leal. For a little while Sandy seemed to follow and
+comprehend the tones, but by slow degrees the light departed from his
+face. At length his jaw fell, and with a sigh, the body parted from
+Dooble Sanny, and he went to God.
+
+His wife closed mouth and eyes without a word, laid the two arms,
+equally powerless now, straight by his sides, then seating herself on
+the edge of the bed, said,
+
+'Dinna bide, Robert. It's a' ower noo. He's gang hame. Gin I war only
+wi' 'im wharever he is!'
+
+She burst into tears, but dried her eyes a moment after, and seeing that
+Robert still lingered, said,
+
+'Gang, Robert, an' sen' Mistress Downie to me. Dinna greit--there's a
+gude lad; but tak yer fiddle an' gang. Ye can be no more use.'
+
+Robert obeyed. With his violin in his hand, he went home; and, with his
+violin still in his hand, walked into his grandmother's parlour.
+
+'Hoo daur ye bring sic a thing into my hoose?' she said, roused by the
+apparent defiance of her grandson. 'Hoo daur ye, efter what's come an'
+gane?'
+
+''Cause Dooble Sanny's come and gane, grannie, and left naething but
+this ahint him. And this ane's mine, whase ever the ither micht be. His
+wife's left wi'oot a plack, an' I s' warran' the gude fowk o' Rothieden
+winna mak sae muckle o' her noo 'at her man's awa'; for she never was
+sic a randy as he was, an' the triumph o' grace in her 's but sma',
+therefore. Sae I maun mak the best 'at I can o' the fiddle for her. An'
+ye maunna touch this ane, grannie; for though ye may think it richt
+to burn fiddles, ither fowk disna; and this has to do wi' ither fowk,
+grannie; it's no atween you an' me, ye ken,' Robert went on, fearful
+lest she might consider herself divinely commissioned to extirpate the
+whole race of stringed instruments,--'for I maun sell 't for her.'
+
+'Tak it oot o' my sicht,' said Mrs. Falconer, and said no more.
+
+He carried the instrument up to his room, laid it on his bed, locked his
+door, put the key in his pocket, and descended to the parlour.
+
+'He's deid, is he?' said his grandmother, as he re-entered.
+
+'Ay is he, grannie,' answered Robert. 'He deid a repentant man.'
+
+'An' a believin'?' asked Mrs. Falconer.
+
+'Weel, grannie, I canna say 'at he believed a' thing 'at ever was, for a
+body michtna ken a' thing.'
+
+'Toots, laddie! Was 't savin' faith?'
+
+'I dinna richtly ken what ye mean by that; but I'm thinkin' it was
+muckle the same kin' o' faith 'at the prodigal had; for they baith rase
+an' gaed hame.'
+
+''Deed, maybe ye're richt, laddie,' returned Mrs. Falconer, after a
+moment's thought. 'We'll houp the best.'
+
+All the remainder of the evening she sat motionless, with her eyes
+fixed on the rug before her, thinking, no doubt, of the repentance and
+salvation of the fiddler, and what hope there might yet be for her own
+lost son.
+
+The next day being Saturday, 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
+gratitude 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 snatching 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 goddess.
+
+'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 classic 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 God.
+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 grass with
+the homely name, than I can tell what the glory of God 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 shore 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 God, whose vision alone is life.
+
+Just as the sun rushed across the horizon he heard the tramp of a heavy
+horse in the yard, passing from the stable to the cart that was to carry
+his trunk to the turnpike road, three miles off, where the coach would
+pass. 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 God 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 surpass 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 butter, 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 COMPETITION.
+
+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 God. 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 shore 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 passed 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 space that had caught them up on its awful shoreless sweep. November
+came, 'chill and drear,' with its heartless, hopeless nothingness; but
+as if to mock the poor competitors, 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 assembly, 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 assembly
+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 passed
+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 sex in the middle of it, and
+in the accusative of a future participle passive--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, God 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 passage 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
+assembled, 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.'
+
+The man left Robert in the hall, which was spread with tiger and
+leopard skins, and had a bright fire burning in a large stove. Returning
+presently, he led him through noiseless swing-doors covered with cloth
+into a large library. Never had Robert conceived such luxury. What with
+Turkey carpet, crimson curtains, easy-chairs, grandly-bound books and
+morocco-covered writing-table, it seemed the very ideal of comfort. But
+Robert liked the grandeur too much to be abashed by it.
+
+'Sit ye doon there,' said the servant, 'and the doctor 'ill be wi' ye in
+ae minute.'
+
+He was hardly out of the room before a door opened in the middle of
+the books, and the doctor appeared in a long dressing-gown. He looked
+inquiringly at Robert for one moment, then made two long strides like a
+pair of eager compasses, holding out his hand.
+
+'I'm Robert Faukner,' said the boy. 'Ye'll min', maybe, doctor, 'at ye
+war verra kin' to me ance, and tellt me lots o' stories--at Bodyfauld,
+ye ken.'
+
+'I'm very glad to see you, Robert,' said Dr. Anderson. 'Of course I
+remember you perfectly; but my servant did not bring your name, and I
+did not know but it might be the other boy--I forget his name.'
+
+'Ye mean Shargar, sir. It's no him.'
+
+'I can see that,' said the doctor, laughing, 'although you are altered.
+You have grown quite a man! I am very glad to see you,' he repeated,
+shaking hands with him again. 'When did you come to town?'
+
+'I hae been at the grammer school i' the auld toon for the last three
+months,' said Robert.
+
+'Three months!' exclaimed Dr. Anderson. 'And never came to see me till
+now! That was too bad of you, Robert.'
+
+'Weel, ye see, sir, I didna ken better. An' I had a heap to do, an' a'
+for naething, efter a'. But gin I had kent 'at ye wad like to see me, I
+wad hae likit weel to come to ye.'
+
+'I have been away most of the summer,' said the doctor; 'but I have been
+at home for the last month. You haven't had your dinner, have you?'
+
+'Weel, I dinna exackly ken what to say, sir. Ye see, I wasna that
+sharp-set the day, sae I had jist a mou'fu' o' breid and cheese. I'm
+turnin' hungry, noo, I maun confess.'
+
+The doctor rang the bell.
+
+'You must stop and dine with me.--Johnston,' he continued, as his
+servant entered, 'tell the cook that I have a gentleman to dinner with
+me to-day, and she must be liberal.'
+
+'Guidsake, sir!' said Robert, 'dinna set the woman agen me.'
+
+He had no intention of saying anything humorous, but Dr. Anderson
+laughed heartily.
+
+'Come into my room till dinner-time,' he said, opening the door by which
+he had entered.
+
+To Robert's astonishment, he found himself in a room bare as that of
+the poorest cottage. A small square window, small as the window in
+John Hewson's, looked out upon a garden neatly kept, but now 'having no
+adorning but cleanliness.' The place was just the benn end of a cottage.
+The walls were whitewashed, the ceiling was of bare boards, and the
+floor was sprinkled with a little white sand. The table and chairs were
+of common deal, white and clean, save that the former was spotted with
+ink. A greater contrast to the soft, large, richly-coloured room they
+had left could hardly be imagined. A few bookshelves on the wall were
+filled with old books. A fire blazed cheerily in the little grate. A bed
+with snow-white coverlet stood in a recess.
+
+'This is the nicest room in the house, Robert,' said the doctor. 'When I
+was a student like you--'
+
+Robert shook his head,
+
+'I'm nae student yet,' he said; but the doctor went on:
+
+'I had the benn end of my father's cottage to study in, for he treated
+me like a stranger-gentleman when I came home from college. The father
+respected the son for whose advantage he was working like a slave from
+morning till night. My heart is sometimes sore with the gratitude I feel
+to him. Though he's been dead for thirty years--would you believe it,
+Robert?--well, I can't talk more about him now. I made this room as like
+my father's benn end as I could, and I am happier here than anywhere in
+the world.'
+
+By this time Robert was perfectly at home. Before the dinner was ready
+he had not only told Dr. Anderson his present difficulty, but his whole
+story as far back as he could remember. The good man listened eagerly,
+gazed at the boy with more and more of interest, which deepened till
+his eyes glistened as he gazed, and when a ludicrous passage intervened,
+welcomed the laughter as an excuse for wiping them. When dinner was
+announced, he rose without a word and led the way to the dining-room.
+Robert followed, and they sat down to a meal simple enough for such a
+house, but which to Robert seemed a feast followed by a banquet.
+For after they had done eating--on the doctor's part a very meagre
+performance--they retired to his room again, and then Robert found the
+table covered with a snowy cloth, and wine and fruits arranged upon it.
+
+It was far into the night before he rose to go home. As he passed
+through a thick rain of pin-point drops, he felt that although those
+cold granite houses, with glimmering dead face, stood like rows of
+sepulchres, he was in reality walking through an avenue of homes. Wet
+to the skin long before he reached Mrs. Fyvie's in the auld toon, he was
+notwithstanding as warm as the under side of a bird's wing. For he had
+to sit down and write to his grandmother informing her that Dr. Anderson
+had employed him to copy for the printers a book of his upon the Medical
+Boards of India, and that as he was going to pay him for that and other
+work at a rate which would secure him ten shillings a week, it would be
+a pity to lose a year for the chance of getting a bursary next winter.
+
+The doctor did want the manuscript copied; and he knew that the only
+chance of getting Mrs. Falconer's consent to Robert's receiving any
+assistance from him, was to make some business arrangement of the sort.
+He wrote to her the same night, and after mentioning the unexpected
+pleasure of Robert's visit, not only explained the advantage to himself
+of the arrangement he had proposed, but set forth the greater advantage
+to Robert, inasmuch as he would thus be able in some measure to keep a
+hold of him. He judged that although Mrs. Falconer had no great opinion
+of his religion, she would yet consider his influence rather on the side
+of good than otherwise in the case of a boy else abandoned to his own
+resources.
+
+The end of it all was that his grandmother yielded, and Robert was
+straightway a Bejan, or Yellow-beak.
+
+Three days had he been clothed in the red gown of the Aberdeen student,
+and had attended the Humanity and Greek class-rooms. On the evening of
+the third day he was seated at his table preparing his Virgil for the
+next, when he found himself growing very weary, and no wonder, for,
+except the walk of a few hundred yards to and from the college, he had
+had no open air for those three days. It was raining in a persistent
+November fashion, and he thought of the sea, away through the dark
+and the rain, tossing uneasily. Should he pay it a visit? He sat for a
+moment,
+
+     This way and that dividing the swift mind, [4]
+
+when his eye fell on his violin. He had been so full of his new position
+and its requirements, that he had not touched it since the session
+opened. Now it was just what he wanted. He caught it up eagerly, and
+began to play. The power of the music seized upon him, and he went on
+playing, forgetful of everything else, till a string broke. It was
+all too short for further use. Regardless of the rain or the depth of
+darkness to be traversed before he could find a music-shop, he caught up
+his cap, and went to rush from the house.
+
+His door opened immediately on the top step of the stair, without any
+landing. There was a door opposite, to which likewise a few steps led
+immediately up. The stairs from the two doors united a little below. So
+near were the doors that one might stride across the fork. The opposite
+door was open, and in it stood Eric Ericson.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. ERIC ERICSON.
+
+Robert sprang across the dividing chasm, clasped Ericson's hand in both
+of his, looked up into his face, and stood speechless. Ericson returned
+the salute with a still kindness--tender and still. His face was like a
+gray morning sky of summer from whose level cloud-fields rain will fall
+before noon.
+
+'So it was you,' he said, 'playing the violin so well?'
+
+'I was doin' my best,' answered Robert. 'But eh! Mr. Ericson, I wad hae
+dune better gin I had kent ye was hearkenin'.'
+
+'You couldn't do better than your best,' returned Eric, smiling.
+
+'Ay, but yer best micht aye grow better, ye ken,' persisted Robert.
+
+'Come into my room,' said Ericson. 'This is Friday night, and there is
+nothing but chapel to-morrow. So we'll have talk instead of work.'
+
+In another moment they were seated by a tiny coal fire in a room one
+side of which was the slope of the roof, with a large, low skylight in
+it looking seawards. The sound of the distant waves, unheard in Robert's
+room, beat upon the drum of the skylight, through all the world of mist
+that lay between it and them--dimly, vaguely--but ever and again with a
+swell of gathered force, that made the distant tumult doubtful no more.
+
+'I am sorry I have nothing to offer you,' said Ericson.
+
+'You remind me of Peter and John at the Beautiful Gate of the temple,'
+returned Robert, attempting to speak English like the Northerner, but
+breaking down as his heart got the better of him. 'Eh! Mr. Ericson,
+gin ye kent what it is to me to see the face o' ye, ye wadna speyk like
+that. Jist lat me sit an' leuk at ye. I want nae mair.'
+
+A smile broke up the cold, sad, gray light of the young eagle-face.
+Stern at once and gentle when in repose, its smile was as the summer of
+some lovely land where neither the heat nor the sun shall smite them.
+The youth laid his hand upon the boy's head, then withdrew it hastily,
+and the smile vanished like the sun behind a cloud. Robert saw it, and
+as if he had been David before Saul, rose instinctively and said,
+
+'I'll gang for my fiddle.--Hoots! I hae broken ane o' the strings. We
+maun bide till the morn. But I want nae fiddle mysel' whan I hear the
+great water oot there.'
+
+'You're young yet, my boy, or you might hear voices in that water--!
+I've lived in the sound of it all my days. When I can't rest at night, I
+hear a moaning and crying in the dark, and I lie and listen till I can't
+tell whether I'm a man or some God-forsaken sea in the sunless north.'
+
+'Sometimes I believe in naething but my fiddle,' answered Robert.
+
+'Yes, yes. But when it comes into you, my boy! You won't hear much music
+in the cry of the sea after that. As long as you've got it at arm's
+length, it's all very well. It's interesting then, and you can talk to
+your fiddle about it, and make poetry about it,' said Ericson, with a
+smile of self-contempt. 'But as soon as the real earnest comes that is
+all over. The sea-moan is the cry of a tortured world then. Its hollow
+bed is the cup of the world's pain, ever rolling from side to side and
+dashing over its lip. Of all that might be, ought to be, nothing to be
+had!--I could get music out of it once. Look here. I could trifle like
+that once.'
+
+He half rose, then dropped on his chair. But Robert's believing eyes
+justified confidence, and Ericson had never had any one to talk to. He
+rose again, opened a cupboard at his side, took out some papers, threw
+them on the table, and, taking his hat, walked towards the door.
+
+'Which of your strings is broken?' he asked.
+
+'The third,' answered Robert.
+
+'I will get you one,' said Ericson; and before Robert could reply he was
+down the stair. Robert heard him cough, then the door shut, and he was
+gone in the rain and fog.
+
+Bewildered, unhappy, ready to fly after him, yet irresolute, Robert
+almost mechanically turned over the papers upon the little deal table.
+He was soon arrested by the following verses, headed:
+
+A NOONDAY MELODY.
+
+     Everything goes to its rest;
+       The hills are asleep in the noon;
+     And life is as still in its nest
+       As the moon when she looks on a moon
+     In the depths of a calm river's breast
+       As it steals through a midnight in June.
+
+     The streams have forgotten the sea
+       In the dream of their musical sound;
+     The sunlight is thick on the tree,
+       And the shadows lie warm on the ground--
+     So still, you may watch them and see
+       Every breath that awakens around.
+
+     The churchyard lies still in the heat,
+       With its handful of mouldering bone;
+     As still as the long stalk of wheat
+       In the shadow that sits by the stone,
+     As still as the grass at my feet
+       When I walk in the meadows alone.
+
+     The waves are asleep on the main,
+       And the ships are asleep on the wave;
+     And the thoughts are as still in my brain
+       As the echo that sleeps in the cave;
+     All rest from their labour and pain--
+       Then why should not I in my grave?
+
+His heart ready to burst with a sorrow, admiration, and devotion, which
+no criticism interfered to qualify, Robert rushed out into the darkness,
+and sped, fleet-footed, along the only path which Ericson could have
+taken. He could not bear to be left in the house while his friend was
+out in the rain.
+
+He was sure of joining him before he reached the new town, for he was
+fleet-footed, and there was a path only on one side of the way, so that
+there was no danger of passing him in the dark. As he ran he heard the
+moaning of the sea. There must be a storm somewhere, away in the deep
+spaces of its dark bosom, and its lips muttered of its far unrest. When
+the sun rose it would be seen misty and gray, tossing about under the
+one rain cloud that like a thinner ocean overspread the heavens--tossing
+like an animal that would fain lie down and be at peace but could not
+compose its unwieldy strength.
+
+Suddenly Robert slackened his speed, ceased running, stood, gazed
+through the darkness at a figure a few yards before him.
+
+An old wall, bowed out with age and the weight behind it, flanked the
+road in this part. Doors in this wall, with a few steps in front of them
+and more behind, led up into gardens upon a slope, at the top of which
+stood the houses to which they belonged. Against one of these doors the
+figure stood with its head bowed upon its hands. When Robert was within
+a few feet, it descended and went on.
+
+'Mr. Ericson!' exclaimed Robert. 'Ye'll get yer deith gin ye stan' that
+gait i' the weet.'
+
+'Amen,' said Ericson, turning with a smile that glimmered wan through
+the misty night. Then changing his tone, he went on: 'What are you
+after, Robert?'
+
+'You,' answered Robert. 'I cudna bide to be left my lane whan I micht be
+wi' ye a' the time--gin ye wad lat me. Ye war oot o' the hoose afore I
+weel kent what ye was aboot. It's no a fit nicht for ye to be oot at a',
+mair by token 'at ye're no the ablest to stan' cauld an' weet.'
+
+'I've stood a great deal of both in my time,' returned Ericson; 'but
+come along. We'll go and get that fiddle-string.'
+
+'Dinna ye think it wad be fully better to gang hame?' Robert ventured to
+suggest.
+
+'What would be the use? I'm in no mood for Plato to-night,' he answered,
+trying hard to keep from shivering.
+
+'Ye hae an ill cauld upo' ye,' persisted Robert; 'an' ye maun be as weet
+'s a dishcloot.'
+
+Ericson laughed--a strange, hollow laugh.
+
+'Come along,' he said. 'A walk will do me good. We'll get the string,
+and then you shall play to me. That will do me more good yet.'
+
+Robert ceased opposing him, and they walked together to the new town.
+Robert bought the string, and they set out, as he thought, to return.
+
+But not yet did Ericson seem inclined to go home. He took the lead, and
+they emerged upon the quay.
+
+There were not many vessels. One of them was the Antwerp tub, already
+known to Robert. He recognized her even in the dull light of the quay
+lamps. Her captain being a prudent and well-to-do Dutchman, never slept
+on shore; he preferred saving his money; and therefore, as the friends
+passed, Robert caught sight of him walking his own deck and smoking a
+long clay pipe before turning in.
+
+'A fine nicht, capt'n,' said Robert.
+
+'It does rain,' returned the captain. 'Will you come on board and have
+one schnapps before you turn in?'
+
+'I hae a frien' wi' me here,' said Robert, feeling his way.
+
+'Let him come and be welcomed.'
+
+Ericson making no objection, they went on board, and down into the neat
+little cabin, which was all the roomier for the straightness of the
+vessel's quarter. The captain got out a square, coffin-shouldered
+bottle, and having respect to the condition of their garments, neither
+of the young men refused his hospitality, though Robert did feel a
+little compunction at the thought of the horror it would have caused his
+grandmother. Then the Dutchman got out his violin and asked Robert to
+play a Scotch air. But in the middle of it his eyes fell on Ericson,
+and he stopped at once. Ericson was sitting on a locker, leaning back
+against the side of the vessel: his eyes were open and fixed, and he
+seemed quite unconscious of what was passing. Robert fancied at first
+that the hollands he had taken had gone to his head, but he saw at the
+same moment, from his glass, that he had scarcely tasted the spirit. In
+great alarm they tried to rouse him, and at length succeeded. He closed
+his eyes, opened them again, rose up, and was going away.
+
+'What's the maitter wi' ye, Mr. Ericson?' said Robert, in distress.
+
+'Nothing, nothing,' answered Ericson, in a strange voice. 'I fell
+asleep, I believe. It was very bad manners, captain. I beg your pardon.
+I believe I am overtired.'
+
+The Dutchman was as kind as possible, and begged Ericson to stay the
+night and occupy his berth. But he insisted on going home, although he
+was clearly unfit for such a walk. They bade the skipper good-night,
+went on shore, and set out, Ericson leaning rather heavily upon Robert's
+arm. Robert led him up Marischal Street.
+
+The steep ascent was too much for Ericson. He stood still upon the
+bridge and leaned over the wall of it. Robert stood beside, almost in
+despair about getting him home.
+
+'Have patience with me, Robert,' said Ericson, in his natural voice. 'I
+shall be better presently. I don't know what's come to me. If I had been
+a Celt now, I should have said I had a touch of the second sight. But I
+am, as far as I know, pure Northman.'
+
+'What did you see?' asked Robert, with a strange feeling that miles of
+the spirit world, if one may be allowed such a contradiction in words,
+lay between him and his friend.
+
+Ericson returned no answer. Robert feared he was going to have a
+relapse; but in a moment more he lifted himself up and bent again to the
+brae.
+
+They got on pretty well till they were about the middle of the
+Gallowgate.
+
+'I can't,' said Ericson feebly, and half leaned, half fell against the
+wall of a house.
+
+'Come into this shop,' said Robert. 'I ken the man. He'll lat ye sit
+doon.'
+
+He managed to get him in. He was as pale as death. The bookseller got
+a chair, and he sank into it. Robert was almost at his wit's end. There
+was no such thing as a cab in Aberdeen for years and years after
+the date of my story. He was holding a glass of water to Ericson's
+lips,--when he heard his name, in a low earnest whisper, from the door.
+There, round the door-cheek, peered the white face and red head of
+Shargar.
+
+'Robert! Robert!' said Shargar.
+
+'I hear ye,' returned Robert coolly: he was too anxious to be surprised
+at anything. 'Haud yer tongue. I'll come to ye in a minute.'
+
+Ericson recovered a little, refused the whisky offered by the
+bookseller, rose, and staggered out.
+
+'If I were only home!' he said. 'But where is home?'
+
+'We'll try to mak ane,' returned Robert. 'Tak a haud o' me. Lay yer
+weicht upo' me.--Gin it warna for yer len'th, I cud cairry ye weel
+eneuch. Whaur's that Shargar?' he muttered to himself, looking up and
+down the gloomy street.
+
+But no Shargar was to be seen. Robert peered in vain into every dark
+court they crept past, till at length he all but came to the conclusion
+that Shargar was only 'fantastical.'
+
+When they had reached the hollow, and were crossing the canal-bridge
+by Mount Hooly, Ericson's strength again failed him, and again he leaned
+upon the bridge. Nor had he leaned long before Robert found that he had
+fainted. In desperation he began to hoist the tall form upon his back,
+when he heard the quick step of a runner behind him and the words--
+
+'Gie 'im to me, Robert; gie 'im to me. I can carry 'im fine.'
+
+'Haud awa' wi' ye,' returned Robert; and again Shargar fell behind.
+
+For a few hundred yards he trudged along manfully; but his strength,
+more from the nature of his burden than its weight, soon gave way. He
+stood still to recover. The same moment Shargar was by his side again.
+
+'Noo, Robert,' he said, pleadingly.
+
+Robert yielded, and the burden was shifted to Shargar's back.
+
+How they managed it they hardly knew themselves; but after many changes
+they at last got Ericson home, and up to his own room. He had revived
+several times, but gone off again. In one of his faints, Robert
+undressed him and got him into bed. He had so little to cover him, that
+Robert could not help crying with misery. He himself was well provided,
+and would gladly have shared with Ericson, but that was hopeless. He
+could, however, make him warm in bed. Then leaving Shargar in charge, he
+sped back to the new town to Dr. Anderson. The doctor had his carriage
+out at once, wrapped Robert in a plaid and brought him home with him.
+
+Ericson came to himself, and seeing Shargar by his bedside, tried to sit
+up, asking feebly,
+
+'Where am I?'
+
+'In yer ain bed, Mr. Ericson,' answered Shargar.
+
+'And who are you?' asked Ericson again, bewildered.
+
+Shargar's pale face no doubt looked strange under his crown of red hair.
+
+'Ow! I'm naebody.'
+
+'You must be somebody, or else my brain's in a bad state,' returned
+Ericson.
+
+'Na, na, I'm naebody. Naething ava (at all). Robert 'll be hame in ae
+meenit.--I'm Robert's tyke (dog),' concluded Shargar, with a sudden
+inspiration.
+
+This answer seemed to satisfy Ericson, for he closed his eyes and lay
+still; nor did he speak again till Robert arrived with the doctor.
+
+Poor food, scanty clothing, undue exertion in travelling to and from the
+university, hard mental effort against weakness, disquietude of mind,
+all borne with an endurance unconscious of itself, had reduced Eric
+Ericson to his present condition. Strength had given way at last, and he
+was now lying in the low border wash of a dead sea of fever.
+
+The last of an ancient race of poor men, he had no relative but a second
+cousin, and no means except the little he advanced him, chiefly in
+kind, to be paid for when Eric had a profession. This cousin was in the
+herring trade, and the chief assistance he gave him was to send him by
+sea, from Wick to Aberdeen, a small barrel of his fish every session.
+One herring, with two or three potatoes, formed his dinner as long as
+the barrel lasted. But at Aberdeen or elsewhere no one carried his head
+more erect than Eric Ericson--not from pride, but from simplicity and
+inborn dignity; and there was not a man during his curriculum more
+respected than he. An excellent classical scholar--as scholarship went
+in those days--he was almost the only man in the university who made
+his knowledge of Latin serve towards an acquaintance with the Romance
+languages. He had gained a small bursary, and gave lessons when he
+could.
+
+But having no level channel for the outgoing of the waters of one of
+the tenderest hearts that ever lived, those waters had sought to break
+a passage upwards. Herein his experience corresponded in a considerable
+degree to that of Robert; only Eric's more fastidious and more
+instructed nature bred a thousand difficulties which he would meet
+one by one, whereas Robert, less delicate and more robust, would break
+through all the oppositions of theological science falsely so called,
+and take the kingdom of heaven by force. But indeed the ruins of the
+ever falling temple of theology had accumulated far more heavily over
+Robert's well of life, than over that of Ericson: the obstructions to
+his faith were those that rolled from the disintegrating mountains of
+humanity, rather than the rubbish heaped upon it by the careless masons
+who take the quarry whence they hew the stones for the temple--built
+without hands eternal in the heavens.
+
+When Dr. Anderson entered, Ericson opened his eyes wide. The doctor
+approached, and taking his hand began to feel his pulse. Then first
+Ericson comprehended his visit.
+
+'I can't,' he said, withdrawing his hand. 'I am not so ill as to need a
+doctor.'
+
+'My dear sir,' said Dr. Anderson, courteously, 'there will be no
+occasion to put you to any pain.'
+
+'Sir,' said Eric, 'I have no money.'
+
+The doctor laughed.
+
+'And I have more than I know how to make a good use of.'
+
+'I would rather be left alone,' persisted Ericson, turning his face
+away.
+
+'Now, my dear sir,' said the doctor, with gentle decision, 'that is very
+wrong. With what face can you offer a kindness when your turn comes, if
+you won't accept one yourself?'
+
+Ericson held out his wrist. Dr. Anderson questioned, prescribed, and,
+having given directions, went home, to call again in the morning.
+
+And now Robert was somewhat in the position of the old woman who 'had
+so many children she didn't know what to do.' Dr. Anderson ordered
+nourishment for Ericson, and here was Shargar upon his hands as well!
+Shargar and he could share, to be sure, and exist: but for Ericson--?
+
+Not a word did Robert exchange with Shargar till he had gone to the
+druggist's and got the medicine for Ericson, who, after taking it, fell
+into a troubled sleep. Then, leaving the two doors open, Robert joined
+Shargar in his own room. There he made up a good fire, and they sat and
+dried themselves.
+
+'Noo, Shargar,' said Robert at length, 'hoo cam ye here?'
+
+His question was too like one of his grandmother's to be pleasant to
+Shargar.
+
+'Dinna speyk to me that gait, Robert, or I'll cut my throat,' he
+returned.
+
+'Hoots! I maun ken a' aboot it,' insisted Robert, but with much modified
+and partly convicted tone.
+
+'Weel, I never said I wadna tell ye a' aboot it. The fac' 's this--an'
+I'm no' up to the leein' as I used to be, Robert: I hae tried it ower
+an' ower, but a lee comes rouch throw my thrapple (windpipe) noo. Faith!
+I cud hae leed ance wi' onybody, barrin' the de'il. I winna lee. I'm nae
+leein'. The fac's jist this: I cudna bide ahin' ye ony langer.'
+
+'But what the muckle lang-tailed deevil! am I to do wi' ye?' returned
+Robert, in real perplexity, though only pretended displeasure.
+
+'Gie me something to ate, an' I'll tell ye what to do wi' me,' answered
+Shargar. 'I dinna care a scart (scratch) what it is.'
+
+Robert rang the bell and ordered some porridge, and while it was
+preparing, Shargar told his story--how having heard a rumour of
+apprenticeship to a tailor, he had the same night dropped from the
+gable window to the ground, and with three halfpence in his pocket had
+wandered and begged his way to Aberdeen, arriving with one halfpenny
+left.
+
+'But what am I to do wi' ye?' said Robert once more, in as much
+perplexity as ever.
+
+'Bide till I hae tellt ye, as I said I wad,' answered Shargar. 'Dinna ye
+think I'm the haveless (careless and therefore helpless) crater I used
+to be. I hae been in Aberdeen three days! Ay, an' I hae seen you ilka
+day in yer reid goon, an' richt braw it is. Luik ye here!'
+
+He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out what amounted to two or
+three shillings, chiefly in coppers, which he exposed with triumph on
+the table.
+
+'Whaur got ye a' that siller, man?' asked Robert.
+
+'Here and there, I kenna whaur; but I hae gien the weicht o' 't for 't
+a' the same--rinnin' here an' rinnin' there, cairryin' boxes till an'
+frae the smacks, an' doin' a'thing whether they bade me or no. Yesterday
+mornin' I got thrippence by hingin' aboot the Royal afore the coches
+startit. I luikit a' up and doon the street till I saw somebody hine awa
+wi' a porkmanty. Till 'im I ran, an' he was an auld man, an' maist at
+the last gasp wi' the weicht o' 't, an' gae me 't to carry. An' wha duv
+ye think gae me a shillin' the verra first nicht?--Wha but my brither
+Sandy?'
+
+'Lord Rothie?'
+
+'Ay, faith. I kent him weel eneuch, but little he kent me. There he was
+upo' Black Geordie. He's turnin' auld noo.'
+
+'Yer brither?'
+
+'Na. He's young eneuch for ony mischeef; but Black Geordie. What on
+earth gars him gang stravaguin' aboot upo' that deevil? I doobt he's a
+kelpie, or a hell-horse, or something no canny o' that kin'; for faith!
+brither Sandy's no ower canny himsel', I'm thinkin'. But Geordie--the
+aulder the waur set (inclined). An' sae I'm thinkin' wi' his maister.'
+
+'Did ye iver see yer father, Shargar?'
+
+'Na. Nor I dinna want to see 'im. I'm upo' my mither's side. But that's
+naething to the pint. A' that I want o' you 's to lat me come hame at
+nicht, an' lie upo' the flure here. I sweir I'll lie i' the street gin
+ye dinna lat me. I'll sleep as soun' 's Peter MacInnes whan Maccleary's
+preachin'. An' I winna ate muckle--I hae a dreidfu' pooer o' aitin'--an'
+a' 'at I gether I'll fess hame to you, to du wi' 't as ye like.--Man, I
+cairriet a heap o' things the day till the skipper o' that boat 'at
+ye gaed intil wi' Maister Ericson the nicht. He's a fine chiel' that
+skipper!'
+
+Robert was astonished at the change that had passed upon Shargar.
+His departure had cast him upon his own resources, and allowed the
+individuality repressed by every event of his history, even by his
+worship of Robert, to begin to develop itself. Miserable for a few
+weeks, he had revived in the fancy that to work hard at school would
+give him some chance of rejoining Robert. Thence, too, he had watched to
+please Mrs. Falconer, and had indeed begun to buy golden opinions from
+all sorts of people. He had a hope in prospect. But into the midst fell
+the whisper of the apprenticeship like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky.
+He fled at once.
+
+'Weel, ye can hae my bed the nicht,' said Robert, 'for I maun sit up wi'
+Mr. Ericson.'
+
+''Deed I'll hae naething o' the kin'. I'll sleep upo' the flure, or else
+upo' the door-stane. Man, I'm no clean eneuch efter what I've come throu
+sin' I drappit frae the window-sill i' the ga'le-room. But jist len' me
+yer plaid, an' I'll sleep upo' the rug here as gin I war i' Paradees.
+An' faith, sae I am, Robert. Ye maun gang to yer bed some time the nicht
+forby (besides), or ye winna be fit for yer wark the morn. Ye can jist
+gie me a kick, an' I'll be up afore ye can gie me anither.'
+
+Their supper arrived from below, and, each on one side of the fire,
+they ate the porridge, conversing all the while about old times--for
+the youngest life has its old times, its golden age--and old
+adventures,--Dooble Sanny, Betty, &c., &c. There were but two subjects
+which Robert avoided--Miss St. John and the Bonnie Leddy. Shargar was at
+length deposited upon the little bit of hearthrug which adorned rather
+than enriched the room, with Robert's plaid of shepherd tartan around
+him, and an Ainsworth's dictionary under his head for a pillow.
+
+'Man, I fin' mysel' jist like a muckle colley (sheep-dog),' he said.
+'Whan I close my een, I'm no sure 'at I'm no i' the inside o' yer auld
+luckie-daiddie's kilt. The Lord preserve me frae ever sic a fricht again
+as yer grannie an' Betty gae me the nicht they fand me in 't! I dinna
+believe it's in natur' to hae sic a fricht twise in ae lifetime. Sae
+I'll fa' asleep at ance, an' say nae mair--but as muckle o' my prayers
+as I can min' upo' noo 'at grannie's no at my lug.'
+
+'Haud yer impidence, an' yer tongue thegither,' said Robert. 'Min' 'at
+my grannie's been the best frien' ye ever had.'
+
+''Cep' my ain mither,' returned Shargar, with a sleepy doggedness in his
+tone.
+
+During their conference, Ericson had been slumbering. Robert had visited
+him from time to time, but he had not awaked. As soon as Shargar was
+disposed of, he took his candle and sat down by him. He grew more
+uneasy. Robert guessed that the candle was the cause, and put it out.
+Ericson was quieter. So Robert sat in the dark.
+
+But the rain had now ceased. Some upper wind had swept the clouds from
+the sky, and the whole world of stars was radiant over the earth and its
+griefs.
+
+'O God, where art thou?' he said in his heart, and went to his own room
+to look out.
+
+There was no curtain, and the blind had not been drawn down, therefore
+the earth looked in at the storm-window. The sea neither glimmered nor
+shone. It lay across the horizon like a low level cloud, out of which
+came a moaning. Was this moaning all of the earth, or was there trouble
+in the starry places too? thought Robert, as if already he had begun to
+suspect the truth from afar--that save in the secret place of the Most
+High, and in the heart that is hid with the Son of Man in the bosom of
+the Father, there is trouble--a sacred unrest--everywhere--the moaning
+of a tide setting homewards, even towards the bosom of that Father.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. A HUMAN PROVIDENCE.
+
+Robert kept himself thoroughly awake the whole night, and it was well
+that he had not to attend classes in the morning. As the gray of the
+world's reviving consciousness melted in at the window, the things
+around and within him looked and felt ghastly. Nothing is liker the gray
+dawn than the soul of one who has been watching by a sick bed all the
+long hours of the dark, except, indeed, it be the first glimmerings of
+truth on the mind lost in the dark of a godless life.
+
+Ericson had waked often, and Robert had administered his medicine
+carefully. But he had been mostly between sleeping and waking, and
+had murmured strange words, whose passing shadows rather than glimmers
+roused the imagination of the youth as with messages from regions
+unknown.
+
+As the light came he found his senses going, and went to his own room
+again to get a book that he might keep himself awake by reading at the
+window. To his surprise Shargar was gone, and for a moment he doubted
+whether he had not been dreaming all that had passed between them the
+night before. His plaid was folded up and laid upon a chair, as if it
+had been there all night, and his Ainsworth was on the table. But beside
+it was the money Shargar had drawn from his pockets.
+
+About nine o'clock Dr. Anderson arrived, found Ericson not so much worse
+as he had expected, comforted Robert, and told him he must go to bed.
+
+'But I cannot leave Mr. Ericson,' said Robert.
+
+'Let your friend--what's his odd name?--watch him during the day.'
+
+'Shargar, you mean, sir. But that's his nickname. His rale name they say
+his mither says, is George Moray--wi' an o an' no a u-r.--Do you see,
+sir?' concluded Robert significantly.
+
+'No, I don't,' answered the doctor.
+
+'They say he's a son o' the auld Markis's, that's it. His mither's a
+randy wife 'at gangs aboot the country--a gipsy they say. There's nae
+doobt aboot her. An' by a' accoonts the father's likly eneuch.'
+
+'And how on earth did you come to have such a questionable companion?'
+
+'Shargar's as fine a crater as ever God made,' said Robert warmly.
+'Ye'll alloo 'at God made him, doctor; though his father an' mither
+thochtna muckle aboot him or God either whan they got him atween them?
+An' Shargar couldna help it. It micht ha' been you or me for that
+maitter, doctor.'
+
+'I beg your pardon, Robert,' said Dr. Anderson quietly, although
+delighted with the fervour of his young kinsman: 'I only wanted to know
+how he came to be your companion.'
+
+'I beg your pardon, doctor--but I thoucht ye was some scunnert at
+it; an' I canna bide Shargar to be luikit doon upo'. Luik here,' he
+continued, going to his box, and bringing out Shargar's little heap of
+coppers, in which two sixpences obscurely shone, 'he brocht a' that hame
+last nicht, an' syne sleepit upo' the rug i' my room there. We'll want
+a' 'at he can mak an' me too afore we get Mr. Ericson up again.'
+
+'But ye haena tellt me yet,' said the doctor, so pleased with the lad
+that he relapsed into the dialect of his youth, 'hoo ye cam to forgather
+wi' 'im.'
+
+'I tellt ye a' aboot it, doctor. It was a' my grannie's doin', God bless
+her--for weel he may, an' muckle she needs 't.'
+
+'Oh! yes; I remember now all your grandmother's part in the story,'
+returned the doctor. 'But I still want to know how he came here.'
+
+'She was gaein' to mak a taylor o' 'm: an' he jist ran awa', an' cam to
+me.'
+
+'It was too bad of him that--after all she had done for him.'
+
+'Ow, 'deed no, doctor. Even whan ye boucht a man an' paid for
+him, accordin' to the Jewish law, ye cudna mak a slave o' 'im for
+a'thegither, ohn him seekin' 't himsel'.--Eh! gin she could only get my
+father hame!' sighed Robert, after a pause.
+
+'What should she want him home for?' asked Dr. Anderson, still making
+conversation.
+
+'I didna mean hame to Rothieden. I believe she cud bide never seein' 'im
+again, gin only he wasna i' the ill place. She has awfu' notions aboot
+burnin' ill sowls for ever an' ever. But it's no hersel'. It's the wyte
+o' the ministers. Doctor, I do believe she wad gang an' be brunt hersel'
+wi' a great thanksgivin', gin it wad lat ony puir crater oot o' 't--no
+to say my father. An' I sair misdoobt gin mony o' them 'at pat it in her
+heid wad do as muckle. I'm some feared they're like Paul afore he was
+convertit: he wadna lift a stane himsel', but he likit weel to stan' oot
+by an' luik on.'
+
+A deep sigh, almost a groan, from the bed, reminded them that they were
+talking too much and too loud for a sick-room. It was followed by the
+words, muttered, but articulate,
+
+'What's the good when you don't know whether there's a God at all?'
+
+''Deed, that's verra true, Mr. Ericson,' returned Robert. 'I wish ye wad
+fin' oot an' tell me. I wad be blithe to hear what ye had to say anent
+it--gin it was ay, ye ken.'
+
+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 protege 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 virtue [5]
+     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.
+
+Some people take comfort from the true eyes of a dog--and a precious
+thing to the loving heart is the love of even a dumb animal. [6] What
+comfort then must not such a boy as Robert have been to such a man as
+Ericson! Often and often when he was lying asleep as Robert thought,
+he was watching the face of his watcher. When the human soul is not yet
+able to receive the vision of the God-man, God sometimes--might I not
+say always?--reveals himself, or at least gives himself, in some
+human being whose face, whose hands are the ministering angels of his
+unacknowledged presence, to keep alive the fire of love on the altar
+of the heart, until God hath provided the sacrifice--that is, until the
+soul is strong enough to draw it from the concealing thicket. Here were
+two, each thinking that God had forsaken him, or was not to be found
+by him, and each the very love of God, commissioned to tend the other's
+heart. In each was he present to the other. The one thought himself the
+happiest of mortals in waiting upon his big brother, whose least smile
+was joy enough for one day; the other wondered at the unconscious
+goodness of the boy, and while he gazed at his ruddy-brown face,
+believed in God.
+
+For some time after Ericson was taken ill, he was too depressed and
+miserable to ask how he was cared for. But by slow degrees it dawned
+upon him that a heart deep and gracious, like that of a woman, watched
+over him. True, Robert was uncouth, but his uncouthness was that of a
+half-fledged angel. The heart of the man and the heart of the boy were
+drawn close together. Long before Ericson was well he loved Robert
+enough to be willing to be indebted to him, and would lie pondering--not
+how to repay him, but how to return his kindness.
+
+How much Robert's ambition to stand well in the eyes of Miss St. John
+contributed to his progress I can only imagine; but certainly his
+ministrations to Ericson did not interfere with his Latin and Greek. I
+venture to think that they advanced them, for difficulty adds to result,
+as the ramming of the powder sends the bullet the further. I have heard,
+indeed, that when a carrier wants to help his horse up hill, he sets a
+boy on his back.
+
+Ericson made little direct acknowledgment to Robert: his tones, his
+gestures, his looks, all thanked him; but he shrunk from words, with
+the maidenly shamefacedness that belongs to true feeling. He would even
+assume the authoritative, and send him away to his studies, but Robert
+knew how to hold his own. The relation of elder brother and younger was
+already established between them. Shargar likewise took his share in the
+love and the fellowship, worshipping in that he believed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. A FATHER AND A DAUGHTER.
+
+The presence at the street door of which Ericson's over-acute sense had
+been aware on a past evening, was that of Mr. Lindsay, walking home
+with bowed back and bowed head from the college library, where he was
+privileged to sit after hours as long as he pleased over books too big
+to be comfortably carried home to his cottage. He had called to inquire
+after Ericson, whose acquaintance he had made in the library, and
+cultivated until almost any Friday evening Ericson was to be found
+seated by Mr. Lindsay's parlour fire.
+
+As he entered the room that same evening, a young girl raised herself
+from a low seat by the fire to meet him. There was a faint rosy flush
+on her cheek, and she held a volume in her hand as she approached her
+father. They did not kiss: kisses were not a legal tender in Scotland
+then: possibly there has been a depreciation in the value of them since
+they were.
+
+'I've been to ask after Mr. Ericson,' said Mr. Lindsay.
+
+'And how is he?' asked the girl.
+
+'Very poorly indeed,' answered her father.
+
+'I am sorry. You'll miss him, papa.'
+
+'Yes, my dear. Tell Jenny to bring my lamp.'
+
+'Won't you have your tea first, papa?'
+
+'Oh yes, if it's ready.'
+
+'The kettle has been boiling for a long time, but I wouldn't make the
+tea till you came in.'
+
+Mr. Lindsay was an hour later than usual, but Mysie was quite unaware of
+that: she had been absorbed in her book, too much absorbed even to ring
+for better light than the fire afforded. When her father went to put off
+his long, bifurcated greatcoat, she returned to her seat by the fire,
+and forgot to make the tea. It was a warm, snug room, full of dark,
+old-fashioned, spider-legged furniture; low-pitched, with a bay-window,
+open like an ear to the cries of the German Ocean at night, and like an
+eye during the day to look out upon its wide expanse. This ear or eye
+was now curtained with dark crimson, and the room, in the firelight,
+with the young girl for a soul to it, affected one like an ancient book
+in which he reads his own latest thought.
+
+Mysie was nothing over the middle height--delicately-fashioned, at once
+slender and round, with extremities neat as buds. Her complexion was
+fair, and her face pale, except when a flush, like that of a white rose,
+overspread it. Her cheek was lovelily curved, and her face rather short.
+But at first one could see nothing for her eyes. They were the largest
+eyes; and their motion reminded one of those of Sordello in the
+Purgatorio:
+
+     E nel muover degli occhi onesta e tarda:
+
+they seemed too large to move otherwise than with a slow turning like
+that of the heavens. At first they looked black, but if one ventured
+inquiry, which was as dangerous as to gaze from the battlements of
+Elsinore, he found them a not very dark brown. In her face, however,
+especially when flushed, they had all the effect of what Milton
+describes as
+
+     Quel sereno fulgor d'amabil nero.
+
+A wise observer would have been a little troubled in regarding her
+mouth. The sadness of a morbid sensibility hovered about it--the sign
+of an imagination wrought upon from the centre of self. Her lips were
+neither thin nor compressed--they closed lightly, and were richly
+curved; but there was a mobility almost tremulous about the upper lip
+that gave sign of the possibility of such an oscillation of feeling as
+might cause the whole fabric of her nature to rock dangerously.
+
+The moment her father re-entered, she started from her stool on the rug,
+and proceeded to make the tea. Her father took no notice of her neglect,
+but drew a chair to the table, helped himself to a piece of oat-cake,
+hastily loaded it with as much butter as it could well carry, and while
+eating it forgot it and everything else in the absorption of a volume he
+had brought in with him from his study, in which he was tracing out some
+genealogical thread of which he fancied he had got a hold. Mysie was
+very active now, and lost the expression of far-off-ness which had
+hitherto characterized her countenance; till, having poured out the tea,
+she too plunged at once into her novel, and, like her father, forgot
+everything and everybody near her.
+
+Mr. Lindsay was a mild, gentle man, whose face and hair seemed to have
+grown gray together. He was very tall, and stooped much. He had a mouth
+of much sensibility, and clear blue eyes, whose light was rarely shed
+upon any one within reach except his daughter--they were so constantly
+bent downwards, either on the road as he walked, or on his book as he
+sat. He had been educated for the church, but had never risen above
+the position of a parish school-master. He had little or no impulse to
+utterance, was shy, genial, and, save in reading, indolent. Ten years
+before this point of my history he had been taken up by an active lawyer
+in Edinburgh, from information accidentally supplied by Mr. Lindsay
+himself, as the next heir to a property to which claim was laid by the
+head of a county family of wealth. Probabilities were altogether in
+his favour, when he gave up the contest upon the offer of a comfortable
+annuity from the disputant. To leave his schooling and his possible
+estate together, and sit down comfortably by his own fireside, with the
+means of buying books, and within reach of a good old library--that
+of King's College by preference--was to him the sum of all that was
+desirable. The income offered him was such that he had no doubt
+of laying aside enough for his only child, Mysie; but both were so
+ill-fitted for saving, he from looking into the past, she from looking
+into--what shall I call it? I can only think of negatives--what was
+neither past, present, nor future, neither material nor eternal, neither
+imaginative in any true sense, nor actual in any sense, that up to
+the present hour there was nothing in the bank, and only the money for
+impending needs in the house. He could not be called a man of learning;
+he was only a great bookworm; for his reading lay all in the nebulous
+regions of history. Old family records, wherever he could lay hold upon
+them, were his favourite dishes; old, musty books, that looked as if
+they knew something everybody else had forgotten, made his eyes gleam,
+and his white taper-fingered hand tremble with eagerness. With such
+a book in his grasp he saw something ever beckoning him on, a dimly
+precious discovery, a wonderful fact just the shape of some missing
+fragment in the mosaic of one of his pictures of the past. To tell the
+truth, however, his discoveries seldom rounded themselves into pictures,
+though many fragments of the minutely dissected map would find
+their places, whereupon he rejoiced like a mild giant refreshed with
+soda-water. But I have already said more about him than his place
+justifies; therefore, although I could gladly linger over the portrait,
+I will leave it. He had taught his daughter next to nothing. Being his
+child, he had the vague feeling that she inherited his wisdom, and that
+what he knew she knew. So she sat reading novels, generally trashy ones,
+while he knew no more of what was passing in her mind than of what the
+Admirable Crichton might, at the moment, be disputing with the angels.
+
+I would not have my reader suppose that Mysie's mind was corrupted. It
+was so simple and childlike, leaning to what was pure, and looking up
+to what was noble, that anything directly bad in the books she
+happened--for it was all haphazard--to read, glided over her as a black
+cloud may glide over a landscape, leaving it sunny as before.
+
+I cannot therefore say, however, that she was nothing the worse. If
+the darkening of the sun keep the fruits of the earth from growing,
+the earth is surely the worse, though it be blackened by no deposit of
+smoke. And where good things do not grow, the wild and possibly noxious
+will grow more freely. There may be no harm in the yellow tanzie--there
+is much beauty in the red poppy; but they are not good for food. The
+result in Mysie's case would be this--not that she would call evil good
+and good evil, but that she would take the beautiful for the true and
+the outer shows of goodness for goodness itself--not the worst result,
+but bad enough, and involving an awful amount of suffering and possibly
+of defilement. He who thinks to climb the hill of happiness thus, will
+find himself floundering in the blackest bog that lies at the foot of
+its precipices. I say he, not she, advisedly. All will acknowledge it of
+the woman: it is as true of the man, though he may get out easier. Will
+he? I say, checking myself. I doubt it much. In the world's eye, yes;
+but in God's? Let the question remain unanswered.
+
+When he had eaten his toast, and drunk his tea, apparently without any
+enjoyment, Mr. Lindsay rose with his book in his hand, and withdrew to
+his study.
+
+He had not long left the room when Mysie was startled by a loud knock
+at the back door, which opened on a lane, leading along the top of the
+hill. But she had almost forgotten it again, when the door of the room
+opened, and a gentleman entered without any announcement--for Jenny
+had never heard of the custom. When she saw him, Mysie started from her
+seat, and stood in visible embarrassment. The colour went and came on
+her lovely face, and her eyelids grew very heavy. She had never seen the
+visitor before: whether he had ever seen her before, I cannot certainly
+say. She felt herself trembling in his presence, while he advanced
+with perfect composure. He was a man no longer young, but in the full
+strength and show of manhood--the Baron of Rothie. Since the time of my
+first description of him, he had grown a moustache, which improved his
+countenance greatly, by concealing his upper lip with its tusky curves.
+On a girl like Mysie, with an imagination so cultivated, and with no
+opportunity of comparing its fancies with reality, such a man would make
+an instant impression.
+
+'I beg your pardon, Miss--Lindsay, I presume?--for intruding upon you so
+abruptly. I expected to see your father--not one of the graces.'
+
+She blushed all the colour of her blood now. The baron was quite
+enough like the hero of whom she had just been reading to admit of her
+imagination jumbling the two. Her book fell. He lifted it and laid it
+on the table. She could not speak even to thank him. Poor Mysie was
+scarcely more than sixteen.
+
+'May I wait here till your father is informed of my visit?' he asked.
+
+Her only answer was to drop again upon her low stool.
+
+Now Jenny had left it to Mysie to acquaint her father with the fact of
+the baron's presence; but before she had time to think of the necessity
+of doing something, he had managed to draw her into conversation. He
+was as great a hypocrite as ever walked the earth, although he flattered
+himself that he was none, because he never pretended to cultivate
+that which he despised--namely, religion. But he was a hypocrite
+nevertheless; for the falser he knew himself, the more honour he judged
+it to persuade women of his truth.
+
+It is unnecessary to record the slight, graceful, marrowless talk into
+which he drew Mysie, and by which he both bewildered and bewitched her.
+But at length she rose, admonished by her inborn divinity, to seek her
+father. As she passed him, the baron took her hand and kissed it. She
+might well tremble. Even such contact was terrible. Why? Because there
+was no love in it. When the sense of beauty which God had given him
+that he might worship, awoke in Lord Rothie, he did not worship, but
+devoured, that he might, as he thought, possess! The poison of asps was
+under those lips. His kiss was as a kiss from the grave's mouth, for his
+throat was an open sepulchre. This was all in the past, reader. Baron
+Rothie was a foam-flake of the court of the Prince Regent. There are no
+such men now-a-days! It is a shame to speak of such, and therefore they
+are not! Decency has gone so far to abolish virtue. Would to God that a
+writer could be decent and honest! St. Paul counted it a shame to speak
+of some things, and yet he did speak of them--because those to whom he
+spoke did them.
+
+Lord Rothie had, in five minutes, so deeply interested Mr. Lindsay in
+a question of genealogy, that he begged his lordship to call again in a
+few days, when he hoped to have some result of research to communicate.
+
+One of the antiquarian's weaknesses, cause and result both of his
+favourite pursuits, was an excessive reverence for rank. Had its claims
+been founded on mediated revelation, he could not have honoured it more.
+Hence when he communicated to his daughter the name of their visitor,
+it was 'with bated breath and whispering humbleness,' which deepened
+greatly the impression made upon her by the presence and conversation of
+the baron. Mysie was in danger.
+
+Shargar was late that evening, for he had a job that detained him. As he
+handed over his money to Robert, he said,
+
+'I saw Black Geordie the nicht again, stan'in' at a back door, an' Jock
+Mitchell, upo' Reid Rorie, haudin' him.'
+
+'Wha's Jock Mitchell?' asked Robert.
+
+'My brither Sandy's ill-faured groom,' answered Shargar. 'Whatever
+mischeef Sandy's up till, Jock comes in i' the heid or tail o' 't.'
+
+'I wonner what he's up till noo.'
+
+'Faith! nae guid. But I aye like waur to meet Sandy by himsel' upo' that
+reekit deevil o' his. Man, it's awfu' whan Black Geordie turns the white
+o' 's ee, an' the white o' 's teeth upo' ye. It's a' the white 'at there
+is about 'im.'
+
+'Wasna yer brither i' the airmy, Shargar?'
+
+'Ow, 'deed ay. They tell me he was at Watterloo. He's a cornel, or
+something like that.'
+
+'Wha tellt ye a' that?'
+
+'My mither whiles,' answered Shargar.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. ROBERT'S VOW.
+
+Ericson was recovering slowly. He could sit up in bed the greater part
+of the day, and talk about getting out of it. He was able to give Robert
+an occasional help with his Greek, and to listen with pleasure to his
+violin. The night-watching grew less needful, and Ericson would have
+dispensed with it willingly, but Robert would not yet consent.
+
+But Ericson had seasons of great depression, during which he could not
+away with music, or listen to the words of the New Testament. During one
+of these Robert had begun to read a chapter to him, in the faint hope
+that he might draw some comfort from it.
+
+'Shut the book,' he said. 'If it were the word of God to men, it would
+have brought its own proof with it.'
+
+'Are ye sure it hasna?' asked Robert.
+
+'No,' answered Ericson. 'But why should a fellow that would give his
+life--that's not much, but it's all I've got--to believe in God, not be
+able? Only I confess that God in the New Testament wouldn't satisfy
+me. There's no help. I must just die, and go and see.--She'll be left
+without anybody. 'What does it matter? She would not mind a word I
+said. And the God they talk about will just let her take her own way. He
+always does.'
+
+He had closed his eyes and forgotten that Robert heard him. He opened
+them now, and fixed them on him with an expression that seemed to ask,
+'Have I been saying anything I ought not?'
+
+Robert knelt by the bedside, and said, slowly, with strongly repressed
+emotion,
+
+'Mr. Ericson, I sweir by God, gin there be ane, that gin ye dee, I'll
+tak up what ye lea' ahin' ye. Gin there be onybody ye want luikit
+efter, I'll luik efter her. I'll do what I can for her to the best o' my
+abeelity, sae help me God--aye savin' what I maun do for my ain father,
+gin he be in life, to fess (bring) him back to the richt gait, gin there
+be a richt gait. Sae ye can think aboot whether there's onything ye wad
+like to lippen till me.'
+
+A something grew in Ericson's eyes as Robert spoke. Before he had
+finished, they beamed on the boy.
+
+'I think there must be a God somewhere after all,' he said, half
+soliloquizing. 'I should be sorry you hadn't a God, Robert. Why should
+I wish it for your sake? How could I want one for myself if there never
+was one? If a God had nothing to do with my making, why should I feel
+that nobody but God can set things right? Ah! but he must be such a God
+as I could imagine--altogether, absolutely true and good. If we came
+out of nothing, we could not invent the idea of a God--could we, Robert?
+Nothing would be our God. If we come from God, nothing is more natural,
+nothing so natural, as to want him, and when we haven't got him, to try
+to find him.--What if he should be in us after all, and working in us
+this way? just this very way of crying out after him?'
+
+'Mr. Ericson,' cried Robert, 'dinna say ony mair 'at ye dinna believe in
+God. Ye duv believe in 'im--mair, I'm thinkin', nor onybody 'at I ken,
+'cep', maybe, my grannie--only hers is a some queer kin' o' a God to
+believe in. I dinna think I cud ever manage to believe in him mysel'.'
+
+Ericson sighed and was silent. Robert remained kneeling by his bedside,
+happier, clearer-headed, and more hopeful than he had ever been. What if
+all was right at the heart of things--right, even as a man, if he could
+understand, would say was right; right, so that a man who understood in
+part could believe it to be ten times more right than he did understand!
+Vaguely, dimly, yet joyfully, Robert saw something like this in the
+possibility of things. His heart was full, and the tears filled his
+eyes. Ericson spoke again.
+
+'I have felt like that often for a few moments,' he said; 'but
+always something would come and blow it away. I remember one spring
+morning--but if you will bring me that bundle of papers, I will show you
+what, if I can find it, will let you understand--'
+
+Robert rose, went to the cupboard, and brought the pile of loose leaves.
+Ericson turned them over, and, Robert was glad to see, now and then
+sorted them a little. At length he drew out a sheet, carelessly written,
+carelessly corrected, and hard to read.
+
+'It is not finished, or likely to be,' he said, as he put the paper in
+Robert's hand.
+
+'Won't you read it to me yourself, Mr. Ericson?' suggested Robert.
+
+'I would sooner put it in the fire,' he answered--'it's fate, anyhow. I
+don't know why I haven't burnt them all long ago. Rubbish, and diseased
+rubbish! Read it yourself, or leave it.'
+
+Eagerly Robert took it, and read. The following was the best he could
+make of it:
+
+     Oh that a wind would call
+     From the depths of the leafless wood!
+     Oh that a voice would fall
+     On the ear of my solitude!
+     Far away is the sea,
+     With its sound and its spirit-tone:
+     Over it white clouds flee,
+     But I am alone, alone.
+
+     Straight and steady and tall
+     The trees stand on their feet;
+     Fast by the old stone wall
+     The moss grows green and sweet;
+     But my heart is full of fears,
+     For the sun shines far away;
+     And they look in my face through tears,
+     And the light of a dying day.
+
+     My heart was glad last night,
+     As I pressed it with my palm;
+     Its throb was airy and light
+     As it sang some spirit-psalm;
+     But it died away in my breast
+     As I wandered forth to-day--
+     As a bird sat dead on its nest,
+     While others sang on the spray.
+
+     O weary heart of mine,
+     Is there ever a truth for thee?
+     Will ever a sun outshine
+     But the sun that shines on me?
+     Away, away through the air
+     The clouds and the leaves are blown;
+     And my heart hath need of prayer,
+     For it sitteth alone, alone.
+
+And Robert looked with sad reverence at Ericson,--nor ever thought that
+there was one who, in the face of the fact, and in recognition of it,
+had dared say, 'Not a sparrow shall fall on the ground without your
+Father.' The sparrow does fall--but he who sees it is yet the Father.
+
+And we know only the fall, and not the sparrow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. THE GRANITE CHURCH.
+
+The next day was Sunday. Robert sat, after breakfast, by his friend's
+bed.
+
+'You haven't been to church for a long time, Robert: wouldn't you like
+to go to-day?' said Ericson.
+
+'I dinna want to lea' you, Mr. Ericson; I can bide wi' ye a' day the
+day, an' that's better nor goin' to a' the kirks in Aberdeen.'
+
+'I should like you to go to-day, though; and see if, after all, there
+may not be a message for us. If the church be the house of God, as they
+call it, there should be, now and then at least, some sign of a pillar
+of fire about it, some indication of the presence of God whose house
+it is. I wish you would go and see. I haven't been to church for a long
+time, except to the college-chapel, and I never saw anything more than a
+fog there.'
+
+'Michtna the fog be the torn-edge like, o' the cloody pillar?' suggested
+Robert.
+
+'Very likely,' assented Ericson; 'for, whatever truth there may be in
+Christianity, I'm pretty sure the mass of our clergy have never got
+beyond Judaism. They hang on about the skirts of that cloud for ever.'
+
+'Ye see, they think as lang 's they see the fog, they hae a grup o'
+something. But they canna get a grup o' the glory that excelleth, for
+it's not to luik at, but to lat ye see a' thing.'
+
+Ericson regarded him with some surprise. Robert hastened to be honest.
+
+'It's no that I ken onything aboot it, Mr. Ericson. I was only
+bletherin' (talking nonsense)--rizzonin' frae the twa symbols o' the
+cloud an' the fire--kennin' nothing aboot the thing itsel'. I'll awa' to
+the kirk, an' see what it's like. Will I gie ye a buik afore I gang?'
+
+'No, thank you. I'll just lie quiet till you come back--if I can.'
+
+Robert instructed Shargar to watch for the slightest sound from the
+sick-room, and went to church.
+
+As he approached the granite cathedral, the only one in the world, I
+presume, its stern solidity, so like the country and its men, laid hold
+of his imagination for the first time. No doubt the necessity imposed
+by the unyielding material had its share, and that a large one, in the
+character of the building: whence else that simplest of west windows,
+seven lofty, narrow slits of light, parted by granite shafts of equal
+width, filling the space between the corner buttresses of the nave, and
+reaching from door to roof? whence else the absence of tracery in the
+windows--except the severely gracious curves into which the mullions
+divide?--But this cause could not have determined those towers, so
+strong that they might have borne their granite weight soaring aloft,
+yet content with the depth of their foundation, and aspiring not. The
+whole aspect of the building is an outcome, an absolute blossom of the
+northern nature.
+
+There is but the nave of the church remaining. About 1680, more than
+a century after the Reformation, the great tower fell, destroying the
+choir, chancel, and transept, which have never been rebuilt. May the
+reviving faith of the nation in its own history, and God at the heart of
+it, lead to the restoration of this grand old monument of the belief
+of their fathers. Deformed as the interior then was with galleries, and
+with Gavin Dunbar's flat ceiling, an awe fell upon Robert as he entered
+it. When in after years he looked down from between the pillars of the
+gallery, that creeps round the church through the thickness of the wall,
+like an artery, and recalled the service of this Sunday morning, he felt
+more strongly than ever that such a faith had not reared that cathedral.
+The service was like the church only as a dead body is like a man. There
+was no fervour in it, no aspiration. The great central tower was gone.
+
+That morning prayers and sermon were philosophically dull, and
+respectable as any after-dinner speech. Nor could it well be otherwise:
+one of the favourite sayings of its minister was, that a clergyman is
+nothing but a moral policeman. As such, however, he more resembled one
+of Dogberry's watch. He could not even preach hell with any vigour; for
+as a gentleman he recoiled from the vulgarity of the doctrine, yielding
+only a few feeble words on the subject as a sop to the Cerberus that
+watches over the dues of the Bible--quite unaware that his notion of the
+doctrine had been drawn from the AEneid, and not from the Bible.
+
+'Well, have you got anything, Robert?' asked Ericson, as he entered his
+room.
+
+'Nothing,' answered Robert.
+
+'What was the sermon about?'
+
+'It was all to prove that God is a benevolent being.'
+
+'Not a devil, that is,' answered Ericson. 'Small consolation that.'
+
+'Sma' eneuch,' responded Robert. 'I cudna help thinkin' I kent mony
+a tyke (dog) that God had made wi' mair o' what I wad ca' the divine
+natur' in him nor a' that Dr. Soulis made oot to be in God himsel'. He
+had no ill intentions wi' us--it amuntit to that. He wasna ill-willy,
+as the bairns say. But the doctor had some sair wark, I thoucht, to mak
+that oot, seein' we war a' the children o' wrath, accordin' to him, born
+in sin, and inheritin' the guilt o' Adam's first trespass. I dinna think
+Dr. Soulis cud say that God had dune the best he cud for 's. But he
+never tried to say onything like that. He jist made oot that he was a
+verra respectable kin' o' a God, though maybe no a'thing we micht wuss.
+We oucht to be thankfu' that he gae's a wee blink o' a chance o' no
+bein' brunt to a' eternity, wi' nae chance ava. I dinna say that he said
+that, but that's what it a' seemed to me to come till. He said a hantle
+aboot the care o' Providence, but a' the gude that he did seemed to me
+to be but a haudin' aff o' something ill that he had made as weel. Ye
+wad hae thocht the deevil had made the warl', and syne God had pitten us
+intil 't, and jist gied a bit wag o' 's han' whiles to haud the deevil
+aff o' 's whan he was like to destroy the breed a'thegither. For
+the grace that he spak aboot, that was less nor the nature an' the
+providence. I cud see unco little o' grace intil 't.'
+
+Here Ericson broke in--fearful, apparently, lest his boyfriend should be
+actually about to deny the God in whom he did not himself believe.
+
+'Robert,' he said solemnly, 'one thing is certain: if there be a God at
+all, he is not like that. If there be a God at all, we shall know him by
+his perfection--his grand perfect truth, fairness, love--a love to make
+life an absolute good--not a mere accommodation of difficulties, not a
+mere preponderance of the balance on the side of well-being. Love only
+could have been able to create. But they don't seem jealous for the
+glory of God, those men. They don't mind a speck, or even a blot, here
+and there upon him. The world doesn't make them miserable. They can get
+over the misery of their fellow-men without being troubled about them,
+or about the God that could let such things be. [7] They represent a God
+who does wonderfully well, on the whole, after a middling fashion. I
+want a God who loves perfectly. He may kill; he may torture even; but if
+it be for love's sake, Lord, here am I. Do with me as thou wilt.'
+
+Had Ericson forgotten that he had no proof of such a God? The next
+moment the intellectual demon was awake.
+
+'But what's the good of it all?' he said. 'I don't even know that there
+is anything outside of me.'
+
+'Ye ken that I'm here, Mr. Ericson,' suggested Robert.
+
+'I know nothing of the sort. You may be another phantom--only clearer.'
+
+'Ye speik to me as gin ye thocht me somebody.'
+
+'So does the man to his phantoms, and you call him mad. It is but a
+yielding to the pressure of constant suggestion. I do not know--I cannot
+know if there is anything outside of me.'
+
+'But gin there warna, there wad be naebody for ye to love, Mr. Ericson.'
+
+'Of course not.'
+
+'Nor naebody to love you, Mr. Ericson.'
+
+'Of course not.'
+
+'Syne ye wad be yer ain God, Mr. Ericson.'
+
+'Yes. That would follow.'
+
+'I canna imagine a waur hell--closed in amo' naething--wi' naething a'
+aboot ye, luikin' something a' the time--kennin' 'at it 's a' a lee, and
+nae able to win clear o' 't.'
+
+'It is hell, my boy, or anything worse you can call it.'
+
+'What for suld ye believe that, than, Mr. Ericson? I wadna believe sic
+an ill thing as that. I dinna think I cud believe 't, gin ye war to pruv
+'t to me.'
+
+'I don't believe it. Nobody could prove that either, even if it were so.
+I am only miserable that I can't prove the contrary.'
+
+'Suppose there war a God, Mr. Ericson, do ye think ye bude (behoved) to
+be able to pruv that? Do ye think God cud stan' to be pruved as gin he
+war something sma' eneuch to be turned roon' and roon', and luikit at
+upo' ilka side? Gin there war a God, wadna it jist be sae--that we cudna
+prove him to be, I mean?'
+
+'Perhaps. That is something. I have often thought of that. But then you
+can't prove anything about it.'
+
+'I canna help thinkin' o' what Mr. Innes said to me ance. I was but
+a laddie, but I never forgot it. I plaguit him sair wi' wantin' to
+unnerstan' ilka thing afore I wad gang on wi' my questons (sums). Says
+he, ae day, "Robert, my man, gin ye will aye unnerstan' afore ye du as
+ye're tellt, ye'll never unnerstan' onything. But gin ye du the thing I
+tell ye, ye'll be i' the mids o' 't afore ye ken 'at ye're gaein' intil
+'t." I jist thocht I wad try him. It was at lang division that I boglet
+maist. Weel, I gaed on, and I cud du the thing weel eneuch, ohn made
+ae mistak. And aye I thocht the maister was wrang, for I never kent
+the rizzon o' a' that beginnin' at the wrang en', an' takin' doon an'
+substrackin', an' a' that. Ye wad hardly believe me, Mr. Ericson: it was
+only this verra day, as I was sittin' i' the kirk--it was a lang
+psalm they war singin'--that ane wi' the foxes i' the tail o' 't--lang
+division came into my heid again; and first aye bit glimmerin' o' licht
+cam in, and syne anither, an' afore the psalm was dune I saw throu' the
+haill process o' 't. But ye see, gin I hadna dune as I was tauld, and
+learnt a' aboot hoo it was dune aforehan', I wad hae had naething to
+gang rizzonin' aboot, an' wad hae fun' oot naething.'
+
+'That's good, Robert. But when a man is dying for food, he can't wait.'
+
+'He micht try to get up and luik, though. He needna bide in 's bed till
+somebody comes an' sweirs till him 'at he saw a haddie (haddock) i' the
+press.'
+
+'I have been looking, Robert--for years.'
+
+'Maybe, like me, only for the rizzon o' 't, Mr. Ericson--gin ye'll
+forgie my impidence.'
+
+'But what's to be done in this case, Robert? Where's the work that you
+can do in order to understand? Where's your long division, man?'
+
+'Ye're ayont me noo. I canna tell that, Mr. Ericson. It canna be gaein'
+to the kirk, surely. Maybe it micht be sayin' yer prayers and readin'
+yer Bible.'
+
+Ericson did not reply, and the conversation dropped. Is it strange that
+neither of these disciples should have thought of turning to the story
+of Jesus, finding some word that he had spoken, and beginning to do that
+as a first step towards a knowledge of the doctrine that Jesus was the
+incarnate God, come to visit his people--a very unlikely thing to
+man's wisdom, yet an idea that has notwithstanding ascended above man's
+horizon, and shown itself the grandest idea in his firmament?
+
+In the evening Ericson asked again for his papers, from which he handed
+Robert the following poem:--
+
+WORDS IN THE NIGHT.
+
+     I woke at midnight, and my heart,
+     My beating heart said this to me:
+     Thou seest the moon how calm and bright
+     The world is fair by day and night,
+     But what is that to thee?
+     One touch to me--down dips the light
+     Over the land and sea.
+     All is mine, all is my own!
+     Toss the purple fountain high!
+     The breast of man is a vat of stone;
+     I am alive, I, only I!
+
+     One little touch and all is dark;
+     The winter with its sparkling moons
+     The spring with all her violets,
+     The crimson dawns and rich sunsets,
+     The autumn's yellowing noons.
+     I only toss my purple jets,
+     And thou art one that swoons
+     Upon a night of gust and roar,
+     Shipwrecked among the waves, and seems
+     Across the purple hills to roam;
+     Sweet odours touch him from the foam,
+     And downward sinking still he dreams
+     He walks the clover field at home,
+     And hears the rattling teams.
+     All is mine; all is my own!
+     Toss the purple fountain high!
+     The breast of man is a vat of stone;
+     I am alive, I, only I!
+
+     Thou hast beheld a throated fountain spout
+     Full in the air, and in the downward spray
+     A hovering Iris span the marble tank,
+     Which as the wind came, ever rose and sank
+     Violet and red; so my continual play
+     Makes beauty for the Gods with many a prank
+     Of human excellence, while they,
+     Weary of all the noon, in shadows sweet
+     Supine and heavy-eyed rest in the boundless heat:
+     Let the world's fountain play!
+     Beauty is pleasant in the eyes of Jove;
+     Betwixt the wavering shadows where he lies
+     He marks the dancing column with his eyes
+     Celestial, and amid his inmost grove
+     Upgathers all his limbs, serenely blest,
+     Lulled by the mellow noise of the great world's unrest.
+
+     One heart beats in all nature, differing
+     But in the work it works; its doubts and clamours
+     Are but the waste and brunt of instruments
+     Wherewith a work is done; or as the hammers
+     On forge Cyclopean plied beneath the rents
+     Of lowest Etna, conquering into shape
+     The hard and scattered ore:
+     Choose thou narcotics, and the dizzy grape
+     Outworking passion, lest with horrid crash
+     Thy life go from thee in a night of pain.
+     So tutoring thy vision, shall the flash
+     Of dove white-breasted be to thee no more
+     Than a white stone heavy upon the plain.
+
+     Hark the cock crows loud!
+     And without, all ghastly and ill,
+     Like a man uplift in his shroud,
+     The white white morn is propped on the hill;
+     And adown from the eaves, pointed and chill,
+     The icicles 'gin to glitter;
+     And the birds with a warble short and shrill,
+     Pass by the chamber-window still--
+     With a quick uneasy twitter.
+     Let me pump warm blood, for the cold is bitter;
+     And wearily, wearily, one by one,
+     Men awake with the weary sun.
+
+     Life is a phantom shut in thee;
+     I am the master and keep the key;
+     So let me toss thee the days of old,
+     Crimson and orange and green and gold;
+     So let me fill thee yet again
+     With a rush of dreams from my spout amain;
+     For all is mine; all is my own;
+     Toss the purple fountain high!
+     The breast of man is a vat of stone;
+     And I am alive, I, only I.
+
+Robert having read, sat and wept in silence. Ericson saw him, and said
+tenderly,
+
+'Robert, my boy, I'm not always so bad as that. Read this one--though
+I never feel like it now. Perhaps it may come again some day, though. I
+may once more deceive myself and be happy.'
+
+'Dinna say that, Mr. Ericson. That's waur than despair. That's flat
+unbelief. Ye no more ken that ye're deceivin' yersel' than ye ken that
+ye're no doin' 't.'
+
+Ericson did not reply; and Robert read the following sonnet aloud,
+feeling his way delicately through its mazes:--
+
+     Lie down upon the ground, thou hopeless one!
+     Press thy face in the grass, and do not speak.
+     Dost feel the green globe whirl?  Seven times a week
+     Climbeth she out of darkness to the sun,
+     Which is her god; seven times she doth not shun
+     Awful eclipse, laying her patient cheek
+     Upon a pillow ghost-beset with shriek
+     Of voices utterless which rave and run
+     Through all the star-penumbra, craving light
+     And tidings of the dawn from East and West.
+     Calmly she sleepeth, and her sleep is blest
+     With heavenly visions, and the joy of Night
+     Treading aloft with moons.  Nor hath she fright
+     Though cloudy tempests beat upon her breast.
+
+Ericson turned his face to the wall, and Robert withdrew to his own
+chamber.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. SHARGAR'S ARM.
+
+Not many weeks passed before Shargar knew Aberdeen better than most
+Aberdonians. From the Pier-head to the Rubislaw Road, he knew, if not
+every court, yet every thoroughfare and short cut. And Aberdeen began
+to know him. He was very soon recognized as trustworthy, and had pretty
+nearly as much to do as he could manage. Shargar, therefore, was all
+over the city like a cracker, and could have told at almost any hour
+where Dr. Anderson was to be found--generally in the lower parts of
+it, for the good man visited much among the poor; giving them almost
+exclusively the benefit of his large experience. Shargar delighted in
+keeping an eye upon the doctor, carefully avoiding to show himself.
+
+One day as he was hurrying through the Green (a non virendo) on a
+mission from the Rothieden carrier, he came upon the doctor's chariot
+standing in one of the narrowest streets, and, as usual, paused to
+contemplate the equipage and get a peep of the owner. The morning
+was very sharp. There was no snow, but a cold fog, like vaporized
+hoar-frost, filled the air. It was weather in which the East Indian
+could not venture out on foot, else he could have reached the place by
+a stair from Union Street far sooner than he could drive thither. His
+horses apparently liked the cold as little as himself. They had been
+moving about restlessly for some time before the doctor made his
+appearance. The moment he got in and shut the door, one of them reared,
+while the other began to haul on his traces, eager for a gallop.
+Something about the chain gave way, the pole swerved round under the
+rearing horse, and great confusion and danger would have ensued, had
+not Shargar rushed from his coign of vantage, sprung at the bit of the
+rearing horse, and dragged him off the pole, over which he was just
+casting his near leg. As soon as his feet touched the ground he too
+pulled, and away went the chariot and down went Shargar. But in a moment
+more several men had laid hold of the horses' heads, and stopped them.
+
+'Oh Lord!' cried Shargar, as he rose with his arm dangling by his side,
+'what will Donal' Joss say? I'm like to swarf (faint). Haud awa' frae
+that basket, ye wuddyfous (withy-fowls, gallows-birds),' he cried,
+darting towards the hamper he had left in the entry of a court, round
+which a few ragged urchins had gathered; but just as he reached it he
+staggered and fell. Nor did he know anything more till he found the
+carriage stopping with himself and the hamper inside it.
+
+As soon as the coachman had got his harness put to rights, the doctor
+had driven back to see how the lad had fared, for he had felt the
+carriage go over something. They had found him lying beside his hamper,
+had secured both, and as a preliminary measure were proceeding to
+deliver the latter.
+
+'Whaur am I? whaur the deevil am I?' cried Shargar, jumping up and
+falling back again.
+
+'Don't you know me, Moray?' said the doctor, for he felt shy of calling
+the poor boy by his nickname: he had no right to do so.
+
+'Na, I dinna ken ye. Lat me awa'.--I beg yer pardon, doctor: I thocht ye
+was ane o' thae wuddyfous rinnin' awa' wi' Donal' Joss's basket. Eh
+me! sic a stoun' i' my airm! But naebody ca's me Moray. They a' ca'
+me Shargar. What richt hae I to be ca'd Moray?' added the poor boy,
+feeling, I almost believe for the first time, the stain upon his birth.
+Yet he had as good a right before God to be called Moray as any other
+son of that worthy sire, the Baron of Rothie included. Possibly the
+trumpet-blowing angels did call him Moray, or some better name.
+
+'The coachman will deliver your parcel, Moray,' said the doctor, this
+time repeating the name with emphasis.
+
+'Deil a bit o' 't!' cried Shargar. 'He daurna lea' his box wi' thae
+deevils o' horses. What gars he keep sic horses, doctor? They'll play
+some mischeef some day.'
+
+'Indeed, they've played enough already, my poor boy. They've broken your
+arm.'
+
+'Never min' that. That's no muckle. Ye're welcome, doctor, to my twa
+airms for what ye hae dune for Robert an' that lang-leggit frien' o'
+his--the Lord forgie me--Mr. Ericson. But ye maun jist pay him what I
+canna mak for a day or twa, till 't jines again--to haud them gaein', ye
+ken.--It winna be muckle to you, doctor,' added Shargar, beseechingly.
+
+'Trust me for that, Moray,' returned Dr. Anderson. 'I owe you a good
+deal more than that. My brains might have been out by this time.'
+
+'The Lord be praised!' said Shargar, making about his first profession
+of Christianity. 'Robert 'ill think something o' me noo.'
+
+During this conversation the coachman sat expecting some one to appear
+from the shop, and longing to pitch into the 'camstary' horse, but not
+daring to lift his whip beyond its natural angle. No one came. All at
+once Shargar knew where he was.
+
+'Guid be here! we're at Donal's door! Guid day to ye, doctor; an' I'm
+muckle obleeged to ye. Maybe, gin ye war comin' oor gait, the morn, or
+the neist day, to see Maister Ericson, ye wad tie up my airm, for it
+gangs wallopin' aboot, an' that canna be guid for the stickin' o' 't
+thegither again.'
+
+'My poor boy! you don't think I'm going to leave you here, do you?' said
+the doctor, proceeding to open the carriage-door.
+
+'But whaur's the hamper?' said Shargar, looking about him in dismay.
+
+'The coachman has got it on the box,' answered the doctor.
+
+'Eh! that'll never do. Gin thae rampaugin' brutes war to tak a start
+again, what wad come o' the bit basket? I maun get it doon direckly.'
+
+'Sit still. I will get it down, and deliver it myself.' As he spoke the
+doctor got out.
+
+'Tak care o' 't, sir; tak care o' 't. William Walker said there was a
+jar o' drained hinney i' the basket; an' the bairns wad miss 't sair gin
+'t war spult.'
+
+'I will take good care of it,' responded the doctor.
+
+He delivered the basket, returned to the carriage, and told the coachman
+to drive home.
+
+'Whaur are ye takin' me till?' exclaimed Shargar. 'Willie hasna payed me
+for the parcel.'
+
+'Never mind Willie. I'll pay you,' said the doctor.
+
+'But Robert wadna like me to tak siller whaur I did nae wark for 't,'
+objected Shargar. 'He's some pernickety (precise)--Robert. But I'll jist
+say 'at ye garred me, doctor. Maybe that 'll saitisfee him. An' faith!
+I'm queer aboot my left fin here.'
+
+'We'll soon set it all right,' said the doctor.
+
+When they reached his house he led the way to his surgery, and there put
+the broken limb in splints. He then told Johnston to help the patient to
+bed.
+
+'I maun gang hame,' objected Shargar. 'What wad Robert think?'
+
+'I will tell him all about it,' said the doctor.
+
+'Yersel, sir?' stipulated Shargar.
+
+'Yes, myself.'
+
+'Afore nicht?'
+
+'Directly,' answered the doctor, and Shargar yielded.
+
+'But what will Robert say?' were his last words, as he fell asleep,
+appreciating, no doubt, the superiority of the bed to his usual lair
+upon the hearthrug.
+
+Robert was delighted to hear how well Shargar had acquitted himself.
+Followed a small consultation about him; for the accident had ripened
+the doctor's intentions concerning the outcast.
+
+'As soon as his arm is sound again, he shall go to the grammar-school,'
+he said.
+
+'An' the college?' asked Robert.
+
+'I hope so,' answered the doctor. 'Do you think he will do well? He has
+plenty of courage, at all events, and that is a fine thing.'
+
+'Ow ay,' answered Robert; 'he's no ill aff for smeddum (spirit)--that
+is, gin it be for ony ither body. He wad never lift a han' for himsel';
+an' that's what garred me tak till him sae muckle. He's a fine crater.
+He canna gang him lane, but he'll gang wi' onybody--and haud up wi'
+him.'
+
+'What do you think him fit for, then?'
+
+Now Robert had been building castles for Shargar out of the hopes which
+the doctor's friendliness had given him. Therefore he was ready with his
+answer.
+
+'Gin ye cud ensure him no bein' made a general o', he wad mak a gran'
+sojer. Set's face foret, and say "quick mairch," an' he'll ca his
+bagonet throu auld Hornie. But lay nae consequences upo' him, for he
+cudna stan' unner them.'
+
+Dr. Anderson laughed, but thought none the less, and went home to see
+how his patient was getting on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. MYSIE'S FACE.
+
+Meantime Ericson grew better. A space of hard, clear weather, in which
+everything sparkled with frost and sunshine, did him good. But not yet
+could he use his brain. He turned with dislike even from his friend
+Plato. He would sit in bed or on his chair by the fireside for hours,
+with his hands folded before him, and his eyelids drooping, and let his
+thoughts flow, for he could not think. And that these thoughts flowed
+not always with other than sweet sounds over the stones of question, the
+curves of his lip would testify to the friendly, furtive glance of the
+watchful Robert. None but the troubled mind knows its own consolations;
+and I believe the saddest life has its own presence--however it may
+be unrecognized as such--of the upholding Deity. Doth God care for
+the hairs that perish from our heads? To a mind like Ericson's the
+remembered scent, the recurring vision of a flower loved in childhood,
+is enough to sustain anxiety with beauty, for the lovely is itself
+healing and hope-giving, because it is the form and presence of the
+true. To have such a presence is to be; and while a mind exists in
+any high consciousness, the intellectual trouble that springs from
+the desire to know its own life, to be assured of its rounded law and
+security, ceases, for the desire itself falls into abeyance.
+
+But although Ericson was so weak, he was always able and ready to help
+Robert in any difficulty not unfrequently springing from his imperfect
+preparation in Greek; for while Mr. Innes was an excellent Latin
+scholar, his knowledge of Greek was too limited either to compel
+learning or inspire enthusiasm. And with the keen instinct he possessed
+in everything immediate between man and man, Robert would sometimes
+search for a difficulty in order to request its solution; for then
+Ericson would rouse himself to explain as few men could have explained:
+where a clear view was to be had of anything, Ericson either had it or
+knew that he had it not. Hence Robert's progress was good; for one word
+from a wise helper will clear off a whole atmosphere of obstructions.
+
+At length one day when Robert came home he found him seated at the
+table, with his slate, working away at the Differential Calculus. After
+this he recovered more rapidly, and ere another week was over began
+to attend one class a day. He had been so far in advance before, that
+though he could not expect prizes, there was no fear of his passing.
+
+One morning, Robert, coming out from a lecture, saw Ericson in the
+quadrangle talking to an elderly gentleman. When they met in the
+afternoon Ericson told him that that was Mr. Lindsay, and that he had
+asked them both to spend the evening at his house. Robert would go
+anywhere to be with his friend.
+
+He got out his Sunday clothes, and dressed himself with anxiety: he had
+visited scarcely at all, and was shy and doubtful. He then sat down to
+his books, till Ericson came to his door--dressed, and hence in Robert's
+eyes ceremonial--a stately, graceful gentleman. Renewed awe came upon
+him at the sight, and renewed gratitude. There was a flush on Ericson's
+cheek, and a fire in his eye. Robert had never seen him look so grand.
+But there was a something about him that rendered him uneasy--a look
+that made Ericson seem strange, as if his life lay in some far-off
+region.
+
+'I want you to take your violin with you, Robert,' he said.
+
+'Hoots!' returned Robert, 'hoo can I do that? To tak her wi' me the
+first time I gang to a strange hoose, as gin I thocht a'body wad think
+as muckle o' my auld wife as I do mysel'! That wadna be mainners--wad it
+noo, Mr. Ericson?'
+
+'But I told Mr. Lindsay that you could play well. The old gentleman is
+fond of Scotch tunes, and you will please him if you take it.'
+
+'That maks a' the differ,' answered Robert.
+
+'Thank you,' said Ericson, as Robert went towards his instrument;
+and, turning, would have walked from the house without any additional
+protection.
+
+'Whaur are ye gaein' that gait, Mr. Ericson? Tak yer plaid, or ye'll be
+laid up again, as sure's ye live.'
+
+'I'm warm enough,' returned Ericson.
+
+'That's naething. The cauld 's jist lyin' i' the street like a verra
+deevil to get a grup o' ye. Gin ye dinna pit on yer plaid, I winna tak
+my fiddle.'
+
+Ericson yielded; and they set out together.
+
+I will account for Ericson's request about the violin.
+
+He went to the episcopal church on Sundays, and sat where he could see
+Mysie--sat longing and thirsting ever till the music returned. Yet the
+music he never heard; he watched only its transmutation into form, never
+taking his eyes off Mysie's face. Reflected thence in a metamorphosed
+echo, he followed all its changes. Never was one powerless to produce
+it more strangely responsive to its influence. She had no voice; she had
+never been taught the use of any instrument. A world of musical feeling
+was pent up in her, and music raised the suddener storms in her mobile
+nature, that she was unable to give that feeling utterance. The waves of
+her soul dashed the more wildly against their shores, inasmuch as those
+shores were precipitous, and yielded no outlet to the swelling waters.
+It was that his soul might hover like a bird of Paradise over the lovely
+changes of her countenance, changes more lovely and frequent than those
+of an English May, that Ericson persuaded Robert to take his violin.
+
+The last of the sunlight was departing, and a large full moon was
+growing through the fog on the horizon. The sky was almost clear of
+clouds, and the air was cold and penetrating. Robert drew Eric's plaid
+closer over his chest. Eric thanked him lightly, but his voice sounded
+eager; and it was with a long hasty stride that he went up the hill
+through the gathering of the light frosty mist. He stopped at the stair
+upon which Robert had found him that memorable night. They went up. The
+door had been left on the latch for their entrance. They went up more
+steps between rocky walls. When in after years he read the Purgatorio,
+as often as he came to one of its ascents, Robert saw this stair with
+his inward eye. At the top of the stair was the garden, still ascending,
+and at the top of the garden shone the glow of Mr. Lindsay's parlour
+through the red-curtained window. To Robert it shone a refuge for
+Ericson from the night air; to Ericson it shone the casket of the
+richest jewel of the universe. Well might the ruddy glow stream forth to
+meet him! Only in glowing red could such beauty be rightly closed. With
+trembling hand he knocked at the door.
+
+They were shown at once into the parlour. Mysie was putting away her
+book as they entered, and her back was towards them. When she turned, it
+seemed even to Robert as if all the light in the room came only from her
+eyes. But that light had been all gathered out of the novel she had just
+laid down. She held out her hand to Eric, and her sweet voice was yet
+more gentle than wont, for he had been ill. His face flushed at the
+tone. But although she spoke kindly, he could hardly have fancied that
+she showed him special favour.
+
+Robert stood with his violin under his arm, feeling as awkward as if he
+had never handled anything more delicate than a pitchfork. But Mysie sat
+down to the table, and began to pour out the tea, and he came to himself
+again. Presently her father entered. His greeting was warm and mild and
+sleepy. He had come from poring over Spotiswood, in search of some Will
+o' the wisp or other, and had grown stupid from want of success. But
+he revived after a cup of tea, and began to talk about northern
+genealogies; and Ericson did his best to listen. Robert wondered at the
+knowledge he displayed: he had been tutor the foregoing summer in one
+of the oldest and poorest, and therefore proudest families in Caithness.
+But all the time his host talked Ericson's eyes hovered about Mysie,
+who sat gazing before her with look distraught, with wide eyes and
+scarce-moving eyelids, beholding something neither on sea or shore;
+and Mr. Lindsay would now and then correct Ericson in some egregious
+blunder; while Mysie would now and then start awake and ask Robert or
+Ericson to take another cup of tea. Before the sentence was
+finished, however, she would let it die away, speaking the last words
+mechanically, as her consciousness relapsed into dreamland. Had not
+Robert been with Ericson, he would have found it wearisome enough; and
+except things took a turn, Ericson could hardly be satisfied with the
+pleasure of the evening. Things did take a turn.
+
+'Robert has brought his fiddle,' said Ericson, as the tea was removed.
+
+'I hope he will be kind enough to play something,' said Mr. Lindsay.
+
+'I'll do that,' answered Robert, with alacrity. 'But ye maunna expec'
+ower muckle, for I'm but a prentice-han',' he added, as he got the
+instrument ready.
+
+Before he had drawn the bow once across it, attention awoke in Mysie's
+eyes; and before he had finished playing, Ericson must have had quite as
+much of the 'beauty born of murmuring sound' as was good for him. Little
+did Mysie think of the sky of love, alive with silent thoughts, that
+arched over her. The earth teems with love that is unloved. The universe
+itself is one sea of infinite love, from whose consort of harmonies if a
+stray note steal across the sense, it starts bewildered.
+
+Robert played better than usual. His touch grew intense, and put on all
+its delicacy, till it was like that of the spider, which, as Pope so
+admirably says,
+
+     Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.
+
+And while Ericson watched its shadows, the music must have taken hold of
+him too; for when Robert ceased, he sang a wild ballad of the northern
+sea, to a tune strange as itself. It was the only time Robert ever heard
+him sing. Mysie's eyes grew wider and wider as she listened. When it was
+over,
+
+'Did ye write that sang yersel', Mr. Ericson?' asked Robert.
+
+'No,' answered Ericson. 'An old shepherd up in our parts used to say it
+to me when I was a boy.'
+
+'Didna he sing 't?' Robert questioned further.
+
+'No, he didn't. But I heard an old woman crooning it to a child in a
+solitary cottage on the shore of Stroma, near the Swalchie whirlpool,
+and that was the tune she sang it to, if singing it could be called.'
+
+'I don't quite understand it, Mr. Ericson,' said Mysie. 'What does it
+mean?'
+
+'There was once a beautiful woman lived there-away,' began Ericson.--But
+I have not room to give the story as he told it, embellishing it,
+no doubt, as with such a mere tale was lawful enough, from his own
+imagination. The substance was that a young man fell in love with a
+beautiful witch, who let him go on loving her till he cared for nothing
+but her, and then began to kill him by laughing at him. For no witch can
+fall in love herself, however much she may like to be loved. She mocked
+him till he drowned himself in a pool on the seashore. Now the witch did
+not know that; but as she walked along the shore, looking for things,
+she saw his hand lying over the edge of a rocky basin. Nothing is more
+useful to a witch than the hand of a man, so she went to pick it up.
+When she found it fast to an arm, she would have chopped it off, but
+seeing whose it was, she would, for some reason or other best known to
+a witch, draw off his ring first. For it was an enchanted ring which she
+had given him to bewitch his love, and now she wanted both it and the
+hand to draw to herself the lover of a young maiden whom she hated. But
+the dead hand closed its fingers upon hers, and her power was powerless
+against the dead. And the tide came rushing up, and the dead hand held
+her till she was drowned. She lies with her lover to this day at the
+bottom of the Swalchie whirlpool; and when a storm is at hand, strange
+moanings rise from the pool, for the youth is praying the witch lady for
+her love, and she is praying him to let go her hand.
+
+While Ericson told the story the room still glimmered about Robert as
+if all its light came from Mysie's face, upon which the flickering
+firelight alone played. Mr. Lindsay sat a little back from the rest,
+with an amused expression: legends of such sort did not come within the
+scope of his antiquarian reach, though he was ready enough to believe
+whatever tempted his own taste, let it be as destitute of likelihood as
+the story of the dead hand. When Ericson ceased, Mysie gave a deep sigh,
+and looked full of thought, though I daresay it was only feeling. Mr.
+Lindsay followed with an old tale of the Sinclairs, of which he said
+Ericson's reminded him, though the sole association was that the
+foregoing was a Caithness story, and the Sinclairs are a Caithness
+family. As soon as it was over, Mysie, who could not hide all her
+impatience during its lingering progress, asked Robert to play again. He
+took up his violin, and with great expression gave the air of Ericson's
+ballad two or three times over, and then laid down the instrument. He
+saw indeed that it was too much for Mysie, affecting her more, thus
+presented after the story, than the singing of the ballad itself.
+Thereupon Ericson, whose spirits had risen greatly at finding that he
+could himself secure Mysie's attention, and produce the play of soul in
+feature which he so much delighted to watch, offered another story;
+and the distant rush of the sea, borne occasionally into the 'grateful
+gloom' upon the cold sweep of a February wind, mingled with one tale
+after another, with which he entranced two of his audience, while the
+third listened mildly content.
+
+The last of the tales Ericson told was as follows:--
+
+'One evening-twilight in spring, a young English student, who had
+wandered northwards as far as the outlying fragments of Scotland called
+the Orkney and Shetland islands, found himself on a small island of
+the latter group, caught in a storm of wind and hail, which had come on
+suddenly. It was in vain to look about for any shelter; for not only did
+the storm entirely obscure the landscape, but there was nothing around
+him save a desert moss.
+
+'At length, however, as he walked on for mere walking's sake, he found
+himself on the verge of a cliff, and saw, over the brow of it, a few
+feet below him, a ledge of rock, where he might find some shelter from
+the blast, which blew from behind. Letting himself down by his hands, he
+alighted upon something that crunched beneath his tread, and found the
+bones of many small animals scattered about in front of a little cave
+in the rock, offering the refuge he sought, He went in, and sat upon
+a stone. The storm increased in violence, and as the darkness grew he
+became uneasy, for he did not relish the thought of spending the night
+in the cave. He had parted from his companions on the opposite side of
+the island, and it added to his uneasiness that they must be full of
+apprehension about him. At last there came a lull in the storm, and the
+same instant he heard a footfall, stealthy and light as that of a wild
+beast, upon the bones at the mouth of the cave. He started up in some
+fear, though the least thought might have satisfied him that there could
+be no very dangerous animals upon the island. Before he had time to
+think, however, the face of a woman appeared in the opening. Eagerly the
+wanderer spoke. She started at the sound of his voice. He could not see
+her well, because she was turned towards the darkness of the cave.
+
+'"Will you tell me how to find my way across the moor to Shielness?" he
+asked.
+
+'"You cannot find it to-night," she answered, in a sweet tone, and with
+a smile that bewitched him, revealing the whitest of teeth.
+
+'"What am I to do, then?" he asked.
+
+'"My mother will give you shelter, but that is all she has to offer."
+
+'"And that is far more than I expected a minute ago," he replied. "I
+shall be most grateful."
+
+'She turned in silence and left the cave. The youth followed.
+
+'She was barefooted, and her pretty brown feet went catlike over the
+sharp stones, as she led the way down a rocky path to the shore. Her
+garments were scanty and torn, and her hair blew tangled in the wind.
+She seemed about five-and-twenty, lithe and small. Her long fingers kept
+clutching and pulling nervously at her skirts as she went. Her face
+was very gray in complexion, and very worn, but delicately formed, and
+smooth-skinned. Her thin nostrils were tremulous as eyelids, and
+her lips, whose curves were faultless, had no colour to give sign of
+indwelling blood. What her eyes were like he could not see, for she had
+never lifted the delicate films of her eyelids.
+
+'At the foot of the cliff they came upon a little hut leaning against
+it, and having for its inner apartment a natural hollow within it. Smoke
+was spreading over the face of the rock, and the grateful odour of
+food gave hope to the hungry student. His guide opened the door of the
+cottage; he followed her in, and saw a woman bending over a fire in the
+middle of the floor. On the fire lay a large fish boiling. The daughter
+spoke a few words, and the mother turned and welcomed the stranger. She
+had an old and very wrinkled, but honest face, and looked troubled. She
+dusted the only chair in the cottage, and placed it for him by the side
+of the fire, opposite the one window, whence he saw a little patch of
+yellow sand over which the spent waves spread themselves out listlessly.
+Under this window was a bench, upon which the daughter threw herself in
+an unusual posture, resting her chin upon her hand. A moment after the
+youth caught the first glimpse of her blue eyes. They were fixed upon
+him with a strange look of greed, amounting to craving, but as if aware
+that they belied or betrayed her, she dropped them instantly. The moment
+she veiled them, her face, notwithstanding its colourless complexion,
+was almost beautiful.
+
+'When the fish was ready the old woman wiped the deal table, steadied it
+upon the uneven floor, and covered it with a piece of fine table-linen.
+She then laid the fish on a wooden platter, and invited the guest to
+help himself. Seeing no other provision, he pulled from his pocket a
+hunting-knife, and divided a portion from the fish, offering it to the
+mother first.
+
+'"Come, my lamb," said the old woman; and the daughter approached the
+table. But her nostrils and mouth quivered with disgust.
+
+'The next moment she turned and hurried from the hut.
+
+'"She doesn't like fish," said the old woman, "and I haven't anything
+else to give her."
+
+'"She does not seem in good health," he rejoined.
+
+'The woman answered only with a sigh, and they ate their fish with the
+help of a little rye-bread. As they finished their supper, the youth
+heard the sound as of the pattering of a dog's feet upon the sand close
+to the door; but ere he had time to look out of the window, the door
+opened and the young woman entered. She looked better, perhaps from
+having just washed her face. She drew a stool to the corner of the fire
+opposite him. But as she sat down, to his bewilderment, and even horror,
+the student spied a single drop of blood on her white skin within her
+torn dress. The woman brought out a jar of whisky, put a rusty old
+kettle on the fire, and took her place in front of it. As soon as the
+water boiled, she proceeded to make some toddy in a wooden bowl.
+
+'Meantime the youth could not take his eyes off the young woman, so that
+at length he found himself fascinated, or rather bewitched. She kept her
+eyes for the most part veiled with the loveliest eyelids fringed with
+darkest lashes, and he gazed entranced; for the red glow of the little
+oil-lamp covered all the strangeness of her complexion. But as soon as
+he met a stolen glance out of those eyes unveiled, his soul shuddered
+within him. Lovely face and craving eyes alternated fascination and
+repulsion.
+
+'The mother placed the bowl in his hands. He drank sparingly, and passed
+it to the girl. She lifted it to her lips, and as she tasted--only
+tasted it--looked at him. He thought the drink must have been drugged
+and have affected his brain. Her hair smoothed itself back, and drew her
+forehead backwards with it; while the lower part of her face projected
+towards the bowl, revealing, ere she sipped, her dazzling teeth in
+strange prominence. But the same moment the vision vanished; she
+returned the vessel to her mother, and rising, hurried out of the
+cottage.
+
+'Then, the old woman pointed to a bed of heather in one corner with a
+murmured apology; and the student, wearied both with the fatigues of the
+day and the strangeness of the night, threw himself upon it, wrapped in
+his cloak. The moment he lay down, the storm began afresh, and the wind
+blew so keenly through the crannies of the hut, that it was only by
+drawing his cloak over his head that he could protect himself from its
+currents. Unable to sleep, he lay listening to the uproar which grew in
+violence, till the spray was dashing against the window. At length the
+door opened, and the young woman came in, made up the fire, drew the
+bench before it, and lay down in the same strange posture, with her chin
+propped on her hand and elbow, and her face turned towards the youth. He
+moved a little; she dropped her head, and lay on her face, with her arms
+crossed beneath her forehead. The mother had disappeared.
+
+'Drowsiness crept over him. A movement of the bench roused him, and he
+fancied he saw some four-footed creature as tall as a large dog trot
+quietly out of the door. He was sure he felt a rush of cold wind. Gazing
+fixedly through the darkness, he thought he saw the eyes of the damsel
+encountering his, but a glow from the falling together of the remnants
+of the fire, revealed clearly enough that the bench was vacant.
+Wondering what could have made her go out in such a storm, he fell fast
+asleep.
+
+'In the middle of the night he felt a pain in his shoulder, came broad
+awake, and saw the gleaming eyes and grinning teeth of some animal close
+to his face. Its claws were in his shoulder, and its mouth was in the
+act of seeking his throat. Before it had fixed its fangs, however,
+he had its throat in one hand, and sought his knife with the other.
+A terrible struggle followed; but regardless of the tearing claws, he
+found and opened his knife. He had made one futile stab, and was
+drawing it for a surer, when, with a spring of the whole body, and one
+wildly-contorted effort, the creature twisted its neck from his hold,
+and with something betwixt a scream and a howl, darted from him.
+Again he heard the door open; again the wind blew in upon him, and it
+continued blowing; a sheet of spray dashed across the floor, and over
+his face. He sprung from his couch and bounded to the door.
+
+'It was a wild night--dark, but for the flash of whiteness from the
+waves as they broke within a few yards of the cottage; the wind was
+raving, and the rain pouring down the air. A gruesome sound as of
+mingled weeping and howling came from somewhere in the dark. He turned
+again into the hut and closed the door, but could find no way of
+securing it.
+
+'The lamp was nearly out, and he could not be certain whether the
+form of the young woman was upon the bench or not. Overcoming a strong
+repugnance, he approached it, and put out his hands--there was nothing
+there. He sat down and waited for the daylight: he dared not sleep any
+more.
+
+'When the day dawned at length, he went out yet again, and looked
+around. The morning was dim and gusty and gray. The wind had fallen,
+but the waves were tossing wildly. He wandered up and down the little
+strand, longing for more light.
+
+'At length he heard a movement in the cottage. By and by the voice of
+the old woman called to him from the door.
+
+'"You're up early, sir. I doubt you didn't sleep well."
+
+'"Not very well," he answered. "But where is your daughter?"
+
+'"She's not awake yet," said the mother. "I'm afraid I have but a poor
+breakfast for you. But you'll take a dram and a bit of fish. It's all
+I've got."
+
+'Unwilling to hurt her, though hardly in good appetite, he sat down at
+the table. While they were eating the daughter came in, but turned her
+face away and went to the further end of the hut. When she came forward
+after a minute or two, the youth saw that her hair was drenched, and her
+face whiter than before. She looked ill and faint, and when she raised
+her eyes, all their fierceness had vanished, and sadness had taken its
+place. Her neck was now covered with a cotton handkerchief. She was
+modestly attentive to him, and no longer shunned his gaze. He was
+gradually yielding to the temptation of braving another night in the
+hut, and seeing what would follow, when the old woman spoke.
+
+'"The weather will be broken all day, sir," she said. "You had better be
+going, or your friends will leave without you."
+
+'Ere he could answer, he saw such a beseeching glance on the face of the
+girl, that he hesitated, confused. Glancing at the mother, he saw the
+flash of wrath in her face. She rose and approached her daughter, with
+her hand lifted to strike her. The young woman stooped her head with a
+cry. He darted round the table to interpose between them. But the mother
+had caught hold of her; the handkerchief had fallen from her neck; and
+the youth saw five blue bruises on her lovely throat--the marks of
+the four fingers and the thumb of a left hand. With a cry of horror he
+rushed from the house, but as he reached the door he turned. His hostess
+was lying motionless on the floor, and a huge gray wolf came bounding
+after him.'
+
+An involuntary cry from Mysie interrupted the story-teller. He changed
+his tone at once.
+
+'I beg your pardon, Miss Lindsay, for telling you such a horrid tale. Do
+forgive me. I didn't mean to frighten you more than a little.'
+
+'Only a case of lycanthropia,' remarked Mr. Lindsay, as coolly as if
+that settled everything about it and lycanthropia, horror and all, at
+once.
+
+'Do tell us the rest,' pleaded Mysie, and Ericson resumed.
+
+'There was no weapon at hand; and if there had been, his inborn chivalry
+would never have allowed him to harm a woman even under the guise of a
+wolf. Instinctively, he set himself firm, leaning a little forward, with
+half outstretched arms, and hands curved ready to clutch again at the
+throat upon which he had left those pitiful marks. But the creature as
+she sprang eluded his grasp, and just as he expected to feel her fangs,
+he found a woman weeping on his bosom, with her arms around his neck.
+The next instant, the gray wolf broke from him, and bounded howling up
+the cliff. Recovering himself as he best might, the youth followed, for
+it was the only way to the moor above, across which he must now make his
+way to find his companions.
+
+'All at once he heard the sound of a crunching of bones--not as if a
+creature was eating them, but as if they were ground by the teeth of
+rage and disappointment: looking up, he saw close above him the mouth of
+the little cavern in which he had taken refuge the day before. Summoning
+all his resolution, he passed it slowly and softly. From within came the
+sounds of a mingled moaning and growling.
+
+'Having reached the top, he ran at full speed for some distance across
+the moor before venturing to look behind him. When at length he did so
+he saw, against the sky, the girl standing on the edge of the cliff,
+wringing her hands. One solitary wail crossed the space between. She
+made no attempt to follow him, and he reached the opposite shore in
+safety.'
+
+Mysie tried to laugh, but succeeded badly. Robert took his violin, and
+its tones had soon swept all the fear from her face, leaving in its
+stead a trouble that has no name--the trouble of wanting one knows not
+what--or how to seek it.
+
+It was now time to go home. Mysie gave each an equally warm good-night
+and thanks, Mr. Lindsay accompanied them to the door, and the students
+stepped into the moonlight. Across the links the sound of the sea came
+with a swell.
+
+As they went down the garden, Ericson stopped. Robert thought he was
+looking back to the house, and went on. When Ericson joined him, he was
+pale as death.
+
+'What is the maitter wi' ye, Mr. Ericson?' he asked in terror.
+
+'Look there!' said Ericson, pointing, not to the house, but to the sky.
+
+Robert looked up. Close about the moon were a few white clouds. Upon
+these white clouds, right over the moon, and near as the eyebrow to
+an eye, hung part of an opalescent halo, bent into the rude, but
+unavoidable suggestion of an eyebrow; while, close around the edge
+of the moon, clung another, a pale storm-halo. To this pale iris and
+faint-hued eyebrow the full moon itself formed the white pupil: the
+whole was a perfect eye of ghastly death, staring out of the winter
+heaven. The vision may never have been before, may never have been
+again, but this Ericson and Robert saw that night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV. THE LAST OF THE COALS.
+
+The next Sunday Robert went with Ericson to the episcopal chapel, and
+for the first time in his life heard the epic music of the organ. It was
+a new starting-point in his life. The worshipping instrument flooded
+his soul with sound, and he stooped beneath it as a bather on the shore
+stoops beneath the broad wave rushing up the land. But I will not linger
+over this portion of his history. It is enough to say that he sought
+the friendship of the organist, was admitted to the instrument; touched,
+trembled, exulted; grew dissatisfied, fastidious, despairing;
+gathered hope and tried again, and yet again; till at last, with
+constantly-recurring fits of self-despite, he could not leave the grand
+creature alone. It became a rival even to his violin. And once before
+the end of March, when the organist was ill, and another was not to
+be had, he ventured to occupy his place both at morning and evening
+service.
+
+Dr. Anderson kept George Moray in bed for a few days, after which
+he went about for a while with his arm in a sling. But the season of
+bearing material burdens was over for him now. Dr. Anderson had an
+interview with the master of the grammar-school; a class was assigned to
+Moray, and with a delight, resting chiefly on his social approximation
+to Robert, which in one week elevated the whole character of his person
+and countenance and bearing, George Moray bent himself to the task
+of mental growth. Having good helpers at home, and his late-developed
+energy turning itself entirely into the new channel, he got on
+admirably. As there was no other room to be had in Mrs. Fyvie's house,
+he continued for the rest of the session to sleep upon the rug, for he
+would not hear of going to another house. The doctor had advised Robert
+to drop the nickname as much as possible; but the first time he called
+him Moray, Shargar threatened to cut his throat, and so between the two
+the name remained.
+
+I presume that by this time Doctor Anderson had made up his mind to
+leave his money to Robert, but thought it better to say nothing about
+it, and let the boy mature his independence. He had him often to his
+house. Ericson frequently accompanied him; and as there was a good deal
+of original similarity between the doctor and Ericson, the latter soon
+felt his obligation no longer a burden. Shargar likewise, though
+more occasionally, made one of the party, and soon began, in his new
+circumstances, to develop the manners of a gentleman. I say develop
+advisedly, for Shargar had a deep humanity in him, as abundantly
+testified by his devotion to Robert, and humanity is the body of which
+true manners is the skin and ordinary manifestation: true manners are
+the polish which lets the internal humanity shine through, just as the
+polish on marble reveals its veined beauty. Many talks did the elderly
+man hold with the three youths, and his experience of life taught
+Ericson and Robert much, especially what he told them about his Brahmin
+friend in India. Moray, on the other hand, was chiefly interested in his
+tales of adventure when on service in the Indian army, or engaged in the
+field sports of that region so prolific in monsters. His gipsy blood and
+lawless childhood, spent in wandering familiarity with houseless nature,
+rendered him more responsive to these than the others, and his kindled
+eye and pertinent remarks raised in the doctor's mind an early question
+whether a commission in India might not be his best start in life.
+
+Between Ericson and Robert, as the former recovered his health,
+communication from the deeper strata of human need became less frequent.
+Ericson had to work hard to recover something of his leeway; Robert had
+to work hard that prizes might witness for him to his grandmother and
+Miss St. John. To the latter especially, as I think I have said before,
+he was anxious to show well, wiping out the blot, as he considered it,
+of his all but failure in the matter of a bursary. For he looked up
+to her as to a goddess who just came near enough to the earth to be
+worshipped by him who dwelt upon it.
+
+The end of the session came nigh. Ericson passed his examinations with
+honour. Robert gained the first Greek and third Latin prize. The
+evening of the last day arrived, and on the morrow the students would be
+gone--some to their homes of comfort and idleness, others to hard
+labour in the fields; some to steady reading, perhaps to school again
+to prepare for the next session, and others to be tutors all the summer
+months, and return to the wintry city as to freedom and life. Shargar
+was to remain at the grammar-school.
+
+That last evening Robert sat with Ericson in his room. It was a cold
+night--the night of the last day of March. A bitter wind blew about the
+house, and dropped spiky hailstones upon the skylight. The friends were
+to leave on the morrow, but to leave together; for they had already sent
+their boxes, one by the carrier to Rothieden, the other by a sailing
+vessel to Wick, and had agreed to walk together as far as Robert's home,
+where he was in hopes of inducing his friend to remain for a few days
+if he found his grandmother agreeable to the plan. Shargar was asleep on
+the rug for the last time, and Robert had brought his coal-scuttle into
+Ericson's room to combine their scanty remains of well-saved fuel in a
+common glow, over which they now sat.
+
+'I wonder what my grannie 'ill say to me,' said Robert.
+
+'She'll be very glad to see you, whatever she may say,' remarked
+Ericson.
+
+'She'll say "Noo, be dooce," the minute I hae shacken hands wi' her,'
+said Robert.
+
+'Robert,' returned Ericson solemnly, 'if I had a grandmother to go home
+to, she might box my ears if she liked--I wouldn't care. You do not know
+what it is not to have a soul belonging to you on the face of the earth.
+It is so cold and so lonely!'
+
+'But you have a cousin, haven't you?' suggested Robert.
+
+Ericson laughed, but good-naturedly.
+
+'Yes,' he answered, 'a little man with a fishy smell, in a blue
+tail-coat with brass buttons, and a red and black nightcap.'
+
+'But,' Robert ventured to hint, 'he might go in a kilt and top-boots,
+like Satan in my grannie's copy o' the Paradise Lost, for onything I
+would care.'
+
+'Yes, but he's just like his looks. The first thing he'll do the next
+morning after I go home, will be to take me into his office, or shop,
+as he calls it, and get down his books, and show me how many barrels of
+herring I owe him, with the price of each. To do him justice, he only
+charges me wholesale.'
+
+'What'll he do that for?'
+
+'To urge on me the necessity of diligence, and the choice of a
+profession,' answered Ericson, with a smile of mingled sadness and
+irresolution. 'He will set forth what a loss the interest of the money
+is, even if I should pay the principal; and remind me that although he
+has stood my friend, his duty to his own family imposes limits. And he
+has at least a couple of thousand pounds in the county bank. I don't
+believe he would do anything for me but for the honour it will be to
+the family to have a professional man in it. And yet my father was the
+making of him.'
+
+'Tell me about your father. What was he?'
+
+'A gentle-minded man, who thought much and said little. He farmed the
+property that had been his father's own, and is now leased by my fishy
+cousin afore mentioned.'
+
+'And your mother?'
+
+'She died just after I was born, and my father never got over it.'
+
+'And you have no brothers or sisters?'
+
+'No, not one. Thank God for your grandmother, and do all you can to
+please her.'
+
+A silence followed, during which Robert's heart swelled and heaved
+with devotion to Ericson; for notwithstanding his openness, there was a
+certain sad coldness about him that restrained Robert from letting out
+all the tide of his love. The silence became painful, and he broke it
+abruptly.
+
+'What are you going to be, Mr. Ericson?'
+
+'I wish you could tell me, Robert. What would you have me to be? Come
+now.'
+
+Robert thought for a moment.
+
+'Weel, ye canna be a minister, Mr. Ericson, 'cause ye dinna believe in
+God, ye ken,' he said simply.
+
+'Don't say that, Robert,' Ericson returned, in a tone of pain with which
+no displeasure was mingled. 'But you are right. At best I only hope in
+God; I don't believe in him.'
+
+'I'm thinkin' there canna be muckle differ atween houp an' faith,' said
+Robert. 'Mony a ane 'at says they believe in God has unco little houp o'
+onything frae 's han', I'm thinkin'.'
+
+My reader may have observed a little change for the better in Robert's
+speech. Dr. Anderson had urged upon him the necessity of being able at
+least to speak English; and he had been trying to modify the antique
+Saxon dialect they used at Rothieden with the newer and more refined
+English. But even when I knew him, he would upon occasion, especially
+when the subject was religion or music, fall back into the broadest
+Scotch. It was as if his heart could not issue freely by any other gate
+than that of his grandmother tongue.
+
+Fearful of having his last remark contradicted--for he had an
+instinctive desire that it should lie undisturbed where he had cast it
+in the field of Ericson's mind, he hurried to another question.
+
+'What for shouldna ye be a doctor?'
+
+'Now you'll think me a fool, Robert, if I tell you why.'
+
+'Far be it frae me to daur think sic a word, Mr. Ericson!' said Robert
+devoutly.
+
+'Well, I'll tell you, whether or not,' returned Ericson. 'I could, I
+believe, amputate a living limb with considerable coolness; but put a
+knife in a dead body I could not.'
+
+'I think I know what you mean. Then you must be a lawyer.'
+
+'A lawyer! O Lord!' said Ericson.
+
+'Why not?' asked Robert, in some wonderment; for he could not imagine
+Ericson acting from mere popular prejudice or fancy.
+
+'Just think of spending one's life in an atmosphere of squabbles.
+It's all very well when one gets to be a judge and dispense justice;
+but--well, it's not for me. I could not do the best for my clients. And
+a lawyer has nothing to do with the kingdom of heaven--only with his
+clients. He must be a party-man. He must secure for one so often at the
+loss of the rest. My duty and my conscience would always be at strife.'
+
+'Then what will you be, Mr. Ericson?'
+
+'To tell the truth, I would rather be a watchmaker than anything else I
+know. I might make one watch that would go right, I suppose, if I lived
+long enough. But no one would take an apprentice of my age. So I suppose
+I must be a tutor, knocked about from one house to another, patronized
+by ex-pupils, and smiled upon as harmless by mammas and sisters to the
+end of the chapter. And then something of a pauper's burial, I suppose.
+Che sara sara.'
+
+Ericson had sunk into one of his worst moods. But when he saw Robert
+looking unhappy, he changed his tone, and would be--what he could not
+be--merry.
+
+'But what's the use of talking about it?' he said. 'Get your fiddle,
+man, and play The Wind that Shakes the Barley.'
+
+'No, Mr. Ericson,' answered Robert; 'I have no heart for the fiddle. I
+would rather have some poetry.'
+
+'Oh!--Poetry!' returned Ericson, in a tone of contempt--yet not very
+hearty contempt.
+
+'We're gaein' awa', Mr. Ericson,' said Robert; 'an' the Lord 'at we ken
+naething aboot alane kens whether we'll ever meet again i' this place.
+And sae--'
+
+'True enough, my boy,' interrupted Ericson. 'I have no need to trouble
+myself about the future. I believe that is the real secret of it after
+all. I shall never want a profession or anything else.'
+
+'What do you mean, Mr. Ericson?' asked Robert, in half-defined terror.
+
+'I mean, my boy, that I shall not live long. I know that--thank God!'
+
+'How do you know it?'
+
+'My father died at thirty, and my mother at six-and-twenty, both of the
+same disease. But that's not how I know it.'
+
+'How do you know it then?'
+
+Ericson returned no answer. He only said--
+
+'Death will be better than life. One thing I don't like about it
+though,' he added, 'is the coming on of unconsciousness. I cannot bear
+to lose my consciousness even in sleep. It is such a terrible thing!'
+
+'I suppose that's ane o' the reasons that we canna be content withoot
+a God,' responded Robert. 'It's dreidfu' to think even o' fa'in' asleep
+withoot some ane greater an' nearer than the me watchin' ower 't. But
+I'm jist sayin' ower again what I hae read in ane o' your papers, Mr.
+Ericson. Jist lat me luik.'
+
+Venturing more than he had ever yet ventured, Robert rose and went to
+the cupboard where Ericson's papers lay. His friend did not check him.
+On the contrary, he took the papers from his hand, and searched for the
+poem indicated.
+
+'I'm not in the way of doing this sort of thing, Robert,' he said.
+
+'I know that,' answered Robert.
+
+And Ericson read.
+
+SLEEP.
+
+     Oh, is it Death that comes
+     To have a foretaste of the whole?
+       To-night the planets and the stars
+       Will glimmer through my window-bars,
+     But will not shine upon my soul.
+
+     For I shall lie as dead,
+     Though yet I am above the ground;
+       All passionless, with scarce a breath,
+       With hands of rest and eyes of death,
+     I shall be carried swiftly round.
+
+     Or if my life should break
+     The idle night with doubtful gleams
+       Through mossy arches will I go,
+       Through arches ruinous and low,
+     And chase the true and false in dreams.
+
+     Why should I fall asleep?
+     When I am still upon my bed,
+       The moon will shine, the winds will rise,
+       And all around and through the skies
+     The light clouds travel o'er my head.
+
+     O, busy, busy things!
+     Ye mock me with your ceaseless life;
+       For all the hidden springs will flow,
+       And all the blades of grass will grow,
+     When I have neither peace nor strife.
+
+     And all the long night through,
+     The restless streams will hurry by;
+       And round the lands, with endless roar,
+       The white waves fall upon the shore,
+     And bit by bit devour the dry.
+
+     Even thus, but silently,
+     Eternity, thy tide shall flow--
+       And side by side with every star
+       Thy long-drawn swell shall bear me far,
+     An idle boat with none to row.
+
+     My senses fail with sleep;
+     My heart beats thick; the night is noon;
+       And faintly through its misty folds
+       I hear a drowsy clock that holds
+     Its converse with the waning moon.
+
+     Oh, solemn mystery!
+     That I should be so closely bound
+       With neither terror nor constraint
+       Without a murmur of complaint,
+     And lose myself upon such ground!
+
+'Rubbish!' said Ericson, as he threw down the sheets, disgusted with his
+own work, which so often disappoints the writer, especially if he is by
+any chance betrayed into reading it aloud.
+
+'Dinna say that, Mr. Ericson,' returned Robert. 'Ye maunna say that.
+Ye hae nae richt to lauch at honest wark, whether it be yer ain or ony
+ither body's. The poem noo--'
+
+'Don't call it a poem,' interrupted Ericson. 'It's not worthy of the
+name.'
+
+'I will ca' 't a poem,' persisted Robert; 'for it's a poem to me,
+whatever it may be to you. An' hoo I ken 'at it's a poem is jist this:
+it opens my een like music to something I never saw afore.'
+
+'What is that?' asked Ericson, not sorry to be persuaded that there
+might after all be some merit in the productions painfully despised of
+himself.
+
+'Jist this: it's only whan ye dinna want to fa' asleep 'at it luiks
+fearsome to ye. An' maybe the fear o' death comes i' the same way: we're
+feared at it 'cause we're no a'thegither ready for 't; but whan the
+richt time comes, it'll be as nat'ral as fa'in' asleep whan we're
+doonricht sleepy. Gin there be a God to ca' oor Father in heaven, I'm
+no thinkin' that he wad to sae mony bonny tunes pit a scraich for the
+hinder end. I'm thinkin', gin there be onything in 't ava--ye ken I'm no
+sayin', for I dinna ken--we maun jist lippen till him to dee dacent an'
+bonny, an' nae sic strange awfu' fash aboot it as some fowk wad mak a
+religion o' expeckin'.'
+
+Ericson looked at Robert with admiration mingled with something akin to
+merriment.
+
+'One would think it was your grandfather holding forth, Robert,' he
+said. 'How came you to think of such things at your age?'
+
+'I'm thinkin',' answered Robert, 'ye warna muckle aulder nor mysel' whan
+ye took to sic things, Mr. Ericson. But, 'deed, maybe my luckie-daddie
+(grandfather) pat them i' my heid, for I had a heap ado wi' his fiddle
+for a while. She's deid noo.'
+
+Not understanding him, Ericson began to question, and out came the story
+of the violins. They talked on till the last of their coals was burnt
+out, and then they went to bed.
+
+Shargar had undertaken to rouse them early, that they might set out on
+their long walk with a long day before them. But Robert was awake before
+Shargar. The all but soulless light of the dreary season awoke him,
+and he rose and looked out. Aurora, as aged now as her loved Tithonus,
+peered, gray-haired and desolate, over the edge of the tossing sea, with
+hardly enough of light in her dim eyes to show the broken crests of the
+waves that rushed shorewards before the wind of her rising. Such an east
+wind was the right breath to issue from such a pale mouth of hopeless
+revelation as that which opened with dead lips across the troubled sea
+on the far horizon. While he gazed, the east darkened; a cloud of hail
+rushed against the window; and Robert retreated to his bed. But ere he
+had fallen asleep, Ericson was beside him; and before he was dressed,
+Ericson appeared again, with his stick in his hand. They left Shargar
+still asleep, and descended the stairs, thinking to leave the house
+undisturbed. But Mrs. Fyvie was watching for them, and insisted on
+their taking the breakfast she had prepared. They then set out on their
+journey of forty miles, with half a loaf in their pockets, and money
+enough to get bread and cheese, and a bottle of the poorest ale, at the
+far-parted roadside inns.
+
+When Shargar awoke, he wept in desolation, then crept into Robert's bed,
+and fell fast asleep again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI. A STRANGE NIGHT.
+
+The youths had not left the city a mile behind, when a thick snowstorm
+came on. It did not last long, however, and they fought their way
+through it into a glimpse of sun. To Robert, healthy, powerful, and
+except at rare times, hopeful, it added to the pleasure of the journey
+to contend with the storm, and there was a certain steely indifference
+about Ericson that carried him through. They trudged on steadily for
+three hours along a good turnpike road, with great black masses of cloud
+sweeping across the sky, which now sent them a glimmer of sunlight, and
+now a sharp shower of hail. The country was very dreary--a succession of
+undulations rising into bleak moorlands, and hills whose heather would
+in autumn flush the land with glorious purple, but which now looked
+black and cheerless, as if no sunshine could ever warm them. Now and
+then the moorland would sweep down to the edge of the road, diversified
+with dark holes from which peats were dug, and an occasional quarry
+of gray granite. At one moment endless pools would be shining in the
+sunlight, and the next the hail would be dancing a mad fantastic dance
+all about them: they pulled their caps over their brows, bent their
+heads, and struggled on.
+
+At length they reached their first stage, and after a meal of bread and
+cheese and an offered glass of whisky, started again on their journey.
+They did not talk much, for their force was spent on their progress.
+
+After some consultation whether to keep the road or take a certain short
+cut across the moors, which would lead them into it again with a saving
+of several miles, the sun shining out with a little stronger promise
+than he had yet given, they resolved upon the latter. But in the middle
+of the moorland the wind and the hail came on with increased violence,
+and they were glad to tack from one to another of the huge stones that
+lay about, and take a short breathing time under the lee of each; so
+that when they recovered the road, they had lost as many miles in
+time and strength as they had saved in distance. They did not give in,
+however, but after another rest and a little more refreshment, started
+again.
+
+The evening was now growing dusk around them, and the fatigue of the day
+was telling so severely on Ericson, that when in the twilight they heard
+the blast of a horn behind them, and turning saw the two flaming eyes
+of a well-known four-horse coach come fluctuating towards them, Robert
+insisted on their getting up and riding the rest of the way.
+
+'But I can't afford it,' said Ericson.
+
+'But I can,' said Robert.
+
+'I don't doubt it,' returned Ericson. 'But I owe you too much already.'
+
+'Gin ever we win hame--I mean to the heart o' hame--ye can pay me
+there.'
+
+'There will be no need then.'
+
+'Whaur's the need than to mak sic a wark aboot a saxpence or twa atween
+this and that? I thocht ye cared for naething that time or space
+or sense could grip or measure. Mr. Ericson, ye're no half sic a
+philosopher as ye wad set up for.--Hillo!'
+
+Ericson laughed a weary laugh, and as the coach stopped in obedience to
+Robert's hail, he scrambled up behind.
+
+The guard knew Robert, was pitiful over the condition of the travellers,
+would have put them inside, but that there was a lady there, and their
+clothes were wet, got out a great horse-rug and wrapped Robert in it,
+put a spare coat of his own, about an inch thick, upon Ericson, drew out
+a flask, took a pull at it, handed it to his new passengers, and blew
+a vigorous blast on his long horn, for they were approaching a desolate
+shed where they had to change their weary horses for four fresh
+thorough-breds.
+
+Away they went once more, careering through the gathering darkness. It
+was delightful indeed to have to urge one weary leg past the other
+no more, but be borne along towards food, fire, and bed. But their
+adventures were not so nearly over as they imagined. Once more the hail
+fell furiously--huge hailstones, each made of many, half-melted and
+welded together into solid lumps of ice. The coachman could scarcely
+hold his face to the shower, and the blows they received on their faces
+and legs, drove the thin-skinned, high-spirited horses nearly mad. At
+length they would face it no longer. At a turn in the road, where it
+crossed a brook by a bridge with a low stone wall, the wind met them
+right in the face with redoubled vehemence; the leaders swerved from it,
+and were just rising to jump over the parapet, when the coachman, whose
+hands were nearly insensible with cold, threw his leg over the reins,
+and pulled them up. One of the leaders reared, and fell backwards; one
+of the wheelers kicked vigorously; a few moments, and in spite of the
+guard at their heads, all was one struggling mass of bodies and legs,
+with a broken pole in the midst. The few passengers got down; and
+Robert, fearing that yet worse might happen and remembering the lady,
+opened the door. He found her quite composed. As he helped her out,
+
+'What is the matter?' asked the voice dearest to him in the world--the
+voice of Miss St. John.
+
+He gave a cry of delight. Wrapped in the horse-cloth, Miss St. John did
+not know him.
+
+'What is the matter?' she repeated.
+
+'Ow, naething, mem--naething. Only I doobt we winna get ye hame the
+nicht.'
+
+'Is it you, Robert?' she said, gladly recognizing his voice.
+
+'Ay, it's me, and Mr. Ericson. We'll tak care o' ye, mem.'
+
+'But surely we shall get home!'
+
+Robert had heard the crack of the breaking pole.
+
+''Deed, I doobt no.'
+
+'What are we to do, then?'
+
+'Come into the lythe (shelter) o' the bank here, oot o' the gait o' thae
+brutes o' horses,' said Robert, taking off his horse-cloth and wrapping
+her in it.
+
+The storm hissed and smote all around them. She took Robert's arm.
+Followed by Ericson, they left the coach and the struggling horses, and
+withdrew to a bank that overhung the road. As soon as they were out of
+the wind, Robert, who had made up his mind, said,
+
+'We canna be mony yairds frae the auld hoose o' Bogbonnie. We micht win
+throu the nicht there weel eneuch. I'll speir at the gaird, the minute
+the horses are clear. We war 'maist ower the brig, I heard the coachman
+say.'
+
+'I know quite well where the old house is,' said Ericson. 'I went in the
+last time I walked this way.'
+
+'Was the door open?' asked Robert.
+
+'I don't know,' answered Ericson. 'I found one of the windows open in
+the basement.'
+
+'We'll get the len' o' ane o' the lanterns, an' gang direckly. It canna
+be mair nor the breedth o' a rig or twa frae the burn.'
+
+'I can take you by the road,' said Ericson.
+
+'It will be very cold,' said Miss St. John,--already shivering, partly
+from disquietude.
+
+'There's timmer eneuch there to haud 's warm for a twalmonth,' said
+Robert.
+
+He went back to the coach. By this time the horses were nearly
+extricated. Two of them stood steaming in the lamplight, with their
+sides going at twenty bellows' speed. The guard would not let him have
+one of the coach lamps, but gave him a small lantern of his own. When he
+returned with it, he found Ericson and Miss St. John talking together.
+
+Ericson led the way, and the others followed.
+
+'Whaur are ye gaein', gentlemen?' asked the guard, as they passed the
+coach.
+
+'To the auld hoose,' answered Robert.
+
+'Ye canna do better. I maun bide wi' the coch till the lave gang back
+to Drumheid wi' the horses, on' fess anither pole. Faith, it'll be weel
+into the mornin' or we win oot o' this. Tak care hoo ye gang. There's
+holes i' the auld hoose, I doobt.'
+
+'We'll tak gude care, ye may be sure, Hector,' said Robert, as they left
+the bridge.
+
+The house to which Ericson was leading them was in the midst of a field.
+There was just light enough to show a huge mass standing in the dark,
+without a tree or shelter of any sort. When they reached it, all that
+Miss St. John could distinguish was a wide broken stair leading up
+to the door, with glimpses of a large, plain, ugly, square front. The
+stones of the stair sloped and hung in several directions; but it was
+plain to a glance that the place was dilapidated through extraordinary
+neglect, rather than by the usual wear of time. In fact, it belonged
+only to the beginning of the preceding century, somewhere in Queen
+Anne's time. There was a heavy door to it, but fortunately for Miss
+St. John, who would not quite have relished getting in at the window of
+which Ericson had spoken, it stood a little ajar. The wind roared in the
+gap and echoed in the empty hall into which they now entered. Certainly
+Robert was right: there was wood enough to keep them warm; for that
+hall, and every room into which they went, from top to bottom of the
+huge house, was lined with pine. No paint-brush had ever passed upon it.
+Neither was there a spot to be seen upon the grain of the wood: it was
+clean as the day when the house was finished, only it had grown much
+browner. A close gallery, with window-frames which had never been
+glazed, at one story's height, leading across from the one side of the
+first floor to the other, looked down into the great echoing hall, which
+rose in the centre of the building to the height of two stories; but
+this was unrecognizable in the poor light of the guard's lantern. All
+the rooms on every floor opened each into the other;--but why should I
+give such a minute description, making my reader expect a ghost story,
+or at least a nocturnal adventure? I only want him to feel something
+of what our party felt as they entered this desolate building, which,
+though some hundred and twenty years old, bore not a single mark
+upon the smooth floors or spotless walls to indicate that article of
+furniture had ever stood in it, or human being ever inhabited it.
+There was a strange and unusual horror about the place--a feeling quite
+different from that belonging to an ancient house, however haunted it
+might be. It was like a body that had never had a human soul in it.
+There was no sense of a human history about it. Miss St. John's feeling
+of eeriness rose to the height when, in wandering through the many rooms
+in search of one where the windows were less broken, she came upon one
+spot in the floor. It was only a hole worn down through floor after
+floor, from top to bottom, by the drip of the rains from the broken
+roof: it looked like the disease of the desolate place, and she
+shuddered.
+
+Here they must pass the night, with the wind roaring awfully through the
+echoing emptiness, and every now and then the hail clashing against what
+glass remained in the windows. They found one room with the window well
+boarded up, for until lately some care had been taken of the place
+to keep it from the weather. There Robert left his companions, who
+presently heard the sounds of tearing and breaking below, necessity
+justifying him in the appropriation of some of the wood-work for their
+own behoof. He tore a panel or two from the walls, and returning with
+them, lighted a fire on the empty hearth, where, from the look of the
+stone and mortar, certainly never fire had blazed before. The wood was
+dry as a bone, and burnt up gloriously.
+
+Then first Robert bethought himself that they had nothing to eat. He
+himself was full of merriment, and cared nothing about eating; for had
+he not Miss St. John and Ericson there? but for them something must be
+provided. He took his lantern and went back through the storm. The hail
+had ceased, but the wind blew tremendously. The coach stood upon the
+bridge like a stranded vessel, its two lamps holding doubtful battle
+with the wind, now flaring out triumphantly, now almost yielding up the
+ghost. Inside, the guard was snoring in defiance of the pother o'er his
+head.
+
+'Hector! Hector!' cried Robert.
+
+'Ay, ay,' answered Hector. 'It's no time to wauken yet.'
+
+'Hae ye nae basket, Hector, wi' something to eat in 't--naething gaein'
+to Rothieden 'at a body micht say by yer leave till?'
+
+'Ow! it's you, is 't?' returned Hector, rousing himself. 'Na. Deil ane.
+An' gin I had, I daurna gie ye 't.'
+
+'I wad mak free to steal 't, though, an' tak my chance,' said Robert.
+'But ye say ye hae nane?'
+
+'Nane, I tell ye. Ye winna hunger afore the mornin', man.'
+
+'I'll stan' hunger as weel 's you ony day, Hector. It's no for mysel'.
+There's Miss St. John.'
+
+'Hoots!' said Hector, peevishly, for he wanted to go to sleep again,
+'gang and mak luve till her. Nae lass 'll think o' meat as lang 's ye do
+that. That 'll haud her ohn hungert.'
+
+The words were like blasphemy in Robert's ear. He make love to Miss St.
+John! He turned from the coach-door in disgust. But there was no place
+he knew of where anything could be had, and he must return empty-handed.
+
+The light of the fire shone through a little hole in the boards that
+closed the window. His lamp had gone out, but, guided by that, he found
+the road again, and felt his way up the stairs. When he entered the room
+he saw Miss St. John sitting on the floor, for there was nowhere else to
+sit, with the guard's coat under her. She had taken off her bonnet.
+Her back leaned against the side of the chimney, and her eyes were bent
+thoughtfully on the ground. In their shine Robert read instinctively
+that Ericson had said something that had set her thinking. He lay on the
+floor at some distance, leaning on his elbow, and his eye had the flash
+in it that indicates one who has just ceased speaking. They had not
+found his absence awkward at least.
+
+'I hae been efter something to eat,' said Robert; 'but I canna fa' in
+wi' onything. We maun jist tell stories or sing sangs, as fowk do in
+buiks, or else Miss St. John 'ill think lang.'
+
+They did sing songs, and they did tell stories. I will not trouble my
+reader with more than the sketch of one which Robert told--the story
+of the old house wherein they sat--a house without a history, save the
+story of its no history. It had been built for the jointure-house of a
+young countess, whose husband was an old man. A lover to whom she
+had turned a deaf ear had left the country, begging ere he went her
+acceptance of a lovely Italian grayhound. She was weak enough to receive
+the animal. Her husband died the same year, and before the end of it
+the dog went mad, and bit her. According to the awful custom of the
+time they smothered her between two feather-beds, just as the house
+of Bogbonnie was ready to receive her furniture, and become her future
+dwelling. No one had ever occupied it.
+
+If Miss St. John listened to story and song without as much show of
+feeling as Mysie Lindsay would have manifested, it was not that she
+entered into them less deeply. It was that she was more, not felt less.
+
+Listening at her window once with Robert, Eric Ericson had heard Mary
+St. John play: this was their first meeting. Full as his mind was of
+Mysie, he could not fail to feel the charm of a noble, stately womanhood
+that could give support, instead of rousing sympathy for helplessness.
+There was in the dignified simplicity of Mary St. John that which made
+every good man remember his mother; and a good man will think this grand
+praise, though a fast girl will take it for a doubtful compliment.
+
+Seeing her begin to look weary, the young men spread a couch for her as
+best they could, made up the fire, and telling her they would be in the
+hall below, retired, kindled another fire, and sat down to wait for
+the morning. They held a long talk. At length Robert fell asleep on the
+floor.
+
+Ericson rose. One of his fits of impatient doubt was upon him. In the
+dying embers of the fire he strode up and down the waste hall, with
+the storm raving around it. He was destined to an early death; he would
+leave no one of his kin to mourn for him; the girl whose fair face
+had possessed his imagination, would not give one sigh to his memory,
+wandering on through the regions of fancy all the same; and the
+death-struggle over, he might awake in a godless void, where, having
+no creative power in himself, he must be tossed about, a conscious yet
+helpless atom, to eternity. It was not annihilation he feared, although
+he did shrink from the thought of unconsciousness; it was life without
+law that he dreaded, existence without the bonds of a holy necessity,
+thought without faith, being without God.
+
+For all her fatigue Miss St. John could not sleep. The house quivered in
+the wind which howled more and more madly through its long passages
+and empty rooms; and she thought she heard cries in the midst of the
+howling. In vain she reasoned with herself: she could not rest. She rose
+and opened the door of her room, with a vague notion of being nearer to
+the young men.
+
+It opened upon the narrow gallery, already mentioned as leading from one
+side of the first floor to the other at mid-height along the end of the
+hall. The fire below shone into this gallery, for it was divided from
+the hall only by a screen of crossing bars of wood, like unglazed
+window-frames, possibly intended to hold glass. Of the relation of the
+passage to the hall Mary St. John knew nothing, till, approaching the
+light, she found herself looking down into the red dusk below. She stood
+riveted; for in the centre of the hall, with his hands clasped over his
+head like the solitary arch of a ruined Gothic aisle, stood Ericson.
+
+His agony had grown within him--the agony of the silence that brooded
+immovable throughout the infinite, whose sea would ripple to no breath
+of the feeble tempest of his prayers. At length it broke from him in low
+but sharp sounds of words.
+
+'O God,' he said, 'if thou art, why dost thou not speak? If I am thy
+handiwork--dost thou forget that which thou hast made?'
+
+He paused, motionless, then cried again:
+
+'There can be no God, or he would hear.'
+
+'God has heard me!' said a full-toned voice of feminine tenderness
+somewhere in the air. Looking up, Ericson saw the dim form of Mary
+St. John half-way up the side of the lofty hall. The same moment she
+vanished--trembling at the sound of her own voice.
+
+Thus to Ericson as to Robert had she appeared as an angel.
+
+And was she less of a divine messenger because she had a human body,
+whose path lay not through the air? The storm of misery folded its wings
+in Eric's bosom, and, at the sound of her voice, there was a great calm.
+Nor if we inquire into the matter shall we find that such an effect
+indicated anything derogatory to the depth of his feelings or the
+strength of his judgment. It is not through the judgment that a troubled
+heart can be set at rest. It needs a revelation, a vision; a something
+for the higher nature that breeds and infolds the intellect, to
+recognize as of its own, and lay hold of by faithful hope. And what
+fitter messenger of such hope than the harmonious presence of a woman,
+whose form itself tells of highest law, and concord, and uplifting
+obedience; such a one whose beauty walks the upper air of noble
+loveliness; whose voice, even in speech, is one of the 'sphere-born
+harmonious sisters? The very presence of such a being gives Unbelief the
+lie, deep as the throat of her lying. Harmony, which is beauty and
+law, works necessary faith in the region capable of truth. It needs the
+intervention of no reasoning. It is beheld. This visible Peace, with
+that voice of woman's truth, said, 'God has heard me!' What better
+testimony could an angel have brought him? Or why should an angel's
+testimony weigh more than such a woman's? The mere understanding of a
+man like Ericson would only have demanded of an angel proof that he was
+an angel, proof that angels knew better than he did in the matter in
+question, proof that they were not easy-going creatures that took for
+granted the rumours of heaven. The best that a miracle can do is to
+give hope; of the objects of faith it can give no proof; one spiritual
+testimony is worth a thousand of them. For to gain the sole proof of
+which these truths admit, a man must grow into harmony with them. If
+there are no such things he cannot become conscious of a harmony that
+has no existence; he cannot thus deceive himself; if there are, they
+must yet remain doubtful until the harmony between them and his own
+willing nature is established. The perception of this harmony is their
+only and incommunicable proof. For this process time is needful; and
+therefore we are saved by hope. Hence it is no wonder that before
+another half-hour was over, Ericson was asleep by Robert's side.
+
+They were aroused in the cold gray light of the morning by the blast
+of Hector's horn. Miss St. John was ready in a moment. The coach was
+waiting for them at the end of the grassy road that led from the house.
+Hector put them all inside. Before they reached Rothieden the events of
+the night began to wear the doubtful aspect of a dream. No allusion
+was made to what had occurred while Robert slept; but all the journey
+Ericson felt towards Miss St. John as Wordsworth felt towards the
+leech-gatherer, who, he says, was
+
+          like a man from some far region sent,
+     To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.
+
+And Robert saw a certain light in her eyes which reminded him of how she
+looked when, having repented of her momentary hardness towards him, she
+was ministering to his wounded head.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII. HOME AGAIN.
+
+When Robert opened the door of his grandmother's parlour, he found the
+old lady seated at breakfast. She rose, pushed back her chair, and met
+him in the middle of the room; put her old arms round him, offered her
+smooth white cheek to him, and wept. Robert wondered that she did not
+look older; for the time he had been away seemed an age, although in
+truth only eight months.
+
+'Hoo are ye, laddie?' she said. 'I'm richt glaid, for I hae been
+thinkin' lang to see ye. Sit ye doon.'
+
+Betty rushed in, drying her hands on her apron. She had not heard him
+enter.
+
+'Eh losh!' she cried, and put her wet apron to her eyes. 'Sic a man as
+ye're grown, Robert! A puir body like me maunna be speykin to ye noo.'
+
+'There's nae odds in me, Betty,' returned Robert.
+
+''Deed but there is. Ye're sax feet an' a hairy ower, I s' warran'.'
+
+'I said there was nae odds i' me, Betty,' persisted Robert, laughing.
+
+'I kenna what may be in ye,' retorted Betty; 'but there's an unco' odds
+upo' ye.'
+
+'Haud yer tongue, Betty,' said her mistress. 'Ye oucht to ken better nor
+stan' jawin' wi' young men. Fess mair o' the creamy cakes.'
+
+'Maybe Robert wad like a drappy o' parritch.'
+
+'Onything, Betty,' said Robert. 'I'm at deith's door wi' hunger.'
+
+'Rin, Betty, for the cakes. An' fess a loaf o' white breid; we canna
+bide for the parritch.'
+
+Robert fell to his breakfast, and while he ate--somewhat ravenously--he
+told his grandmother the adventures of the night, and introduced the
+question whether he might not ask Ericson to stay a few days with him.
+
+'Ony frien' o' yours, laddie,' she replied, qualifying her words only
+with the addition--'gin he be a frien'.--Whaur is he noo?'
+
+'He's up at Miss Naper's.'
+
+'Hoots! What for didna ye fess him in wi' ye?--Betty!'
+
+'Na, na, grannie. The Napers are frien's o' his. We maunna interfere wi'
+them. I'll gang up mysel' ance I hae had my brakfast.'
+
+'Weel, weel, laddie. Eh! I'm blythe to see ye! Hae ye gotten ony prizes
+noo?'
+
+'Ay have I. I'm sorry they're nae baith o' them the first. But I hae the
+first o' ane an' the third o' the ither.'
+
+'I am pleased at that, Robert. Ye'll be a man some day gin ye haud frae
+drink an' frae--frae leein'.'
+
+'I never tellt a lee i' my life, grannie.'
+
+'Na. I dinna think 'at ever ye did.--An' what's that crater Shargar
+aboot?'
+
+'Ow, jist gaein' to be a croon o' glory to ye, grannie. He vroucht like
+a horse till Dr. Anderson took him by the han', an' sent him to the
+schuil. An' he's gaein' to mak something o' 'im, or a' be dune. He's a
+fine crater, Shargar.'
+
+'He tuik a munelicht flittin' frae here,' rejoined the old lady, in a
+tone of offence. 'He micht hae said gude day to me, I think.'
+
+'Ye see he was feart at ye, grannie.'
+
+'Feart at me, laddie! Wha ever was feart at me? I never feart onybody i'
+my life.'
+
+So little did the dear old lady know that she was a terror to her
+neighbourhood!--simply because, being a law to herself, she would
+therefore be a law to other people,--a conclusion that cannot be
+concluded.
+
+Mrs. Falconer's courtesy did not fail. Her grandson had ceased to be
+a child; her responsibility had in so far ceased; her conscience was
+relieved at being rid of it; and the humanity of her great heart came
+out to greet the youth. She received Ericson with perfect hospitality,
+made him at home as far as the stately respect she showed him would
+admit of his being so, and confirmed in him the impression of her which
+Robert had given him. They held many talks together; and such was the
+circumspection of Ericson that, not saying a word he did not believe,
+he so said what he did believe, or so avoided the points upon which they
+would have differed seriously, that although his theology was of course
+far from satisfying her, she yet affirmed her conviction that the root
+of the matter was in him. This distressed Ericson, however, for he
+feared he must have been deceitful, if not hypocritical.
+
+It was with some grumbling that the Napiers, especially Miss Letty,
+parted with him to Mrs. Falconer. The hearts of all three had so taken
+to the youth, that he found himself more at home in that hostelry than
+anywhere else in the world. Miss Letty was the only one that spoke
+lightly of him--she even went so far as to make good-natured game of him
+sometimes--all because she loved him more than the others--more indeed
+than she cared to show, for fear of exposing 'an old woman's ridiculous
+fancy,' as she called her predilection.--'A lang-leggit, prood, landless
+laird,' she would say, with a moist glimmer in her loving eyes, 'wi' the
+maist ridiculous feet ye ever saw--hardly room for the five taes atween
+the twa! Losh!'
+
+When Robert went forth into the streets, he was surprised to find how
+friendly every one was. Even old William MacGregor shook him kindly by
+the hand, inquired after his health, told him not to study too hard,
+informed him that he had a copy of a queer old book that he would like
+to see, &c., &c. Upon reflection Robert discovered the cause: though
+he had scarcely gained a bursary, he had gained prizes; and in a little
+place like Rothieden--long may there be such places!--everybody with any
+brains at all took a share in the distinction he had merited.
+
+Ericson stayed only a few days. He went back to the twilight of the
+north, his fishy cousin, and his tutorship at Sir Olaf Petersen's.
+Robert accompanied him ten miles on his journey, and would have gone
+further, but that he was to play on his violin before Miss St. John the
+next day for the first time.
+
+When he told his grandmother of the appointment he had made, she only
+remarked, in a tone of some satisfaction,
+
+'Weel, she's a fine lass, Miss St. John; and gin ye tak to ane anither,
+ye canna do better.'
+
+But Robert's thoughts were so different from Mrs. Falconer's that he did
+not even suspect what she meant. He no more dreamed of marrying Miss St.
+John than of marrying his forbidden grandmother. Yet she was no loss at
+this period the ruling influence of his life; and if it had not been for
+the benediction of her presence and power, this part of his history
+too would have been torn by inward troubles. It is not good that a man
+should batter day and night at the gate of heaven. Sometimes he can do
+nothing else, and then nothing else is worth doing; but the very noise
+of the siege will sometimes drown the still small voice that calls from
+the open postern. There is a door wide to the jewelled wall not far from
+any one of us, even when he least can find it.
+
+Robert, however, notwithstanding the pedestal upon which Miss St. John
+stood in his worshipping regard, began to be aware that his feeling
+towards her was losing something of its placid flow, and I doubt whether
+Miss St. John did not now and then see that in his face which made her
+tremble a little, and doubt whether she stood on safe ground with a
+youth just waking into manhood--tremble a little, not for herself, but
+for him. Her fear would have found itself more than justified, if she
+had surprised him kissing her glove, and then replacing it where he had
+found it, with the air of one consciously guilty of presumption.
+
+Possibly also Miss St. John may have had to confess to herself that
+had she not had her history already, and been ten years his senior, she
+might have found no little attraction in the noble bearing and handsome
+face of young Falconer. The rest of his features had now grown into
+complete harmony of relation with his whilom premature and therefore
+portentous nose; his eyes glowed and gleamed with humanity, and his
+whole countenance bore self-evident witness of being a true face and no
+mask, a revelation of his individual being, and not a mere inheritance
+from a fine breed of fathers and mothers. As it was, she could admire
+and love him without danger of falling in love with him; but not without
+fear lest he should not assume the correlative position. She saw no
+way of prevention, however, without running a risk of worse. She shrunk
+altogether from putting on anything; she abhorred tact, and pretence
+was impracticable with Mary St. John. She resolved that if she saw any
+definite ground for uneasiness she would return to England, and leave
+any impression she might have made to wear out in her absence and
+silence. Things did not seem to render this necessary yet.
+
+Meantime the violin of the dead shoemaker blended its wails with the
+rich harmonies of Mary St. John's piano, and the soul of Robert went
+forth upon the level of the sound and hovered about the beauty of his
+friend. Oftener than she approved was she drawn by Robert's eagerness
+into these consorts.
+
+But the heart of the king is in the hands of the Lord.
+
+While Robert thus once more for a season stood behind the cherub with
+the flaming sword, Ericson was teaching two stiff-necked youths in a
+dreary house in the midst of one of the moors of Caithness. One day he
+had a slight attack of blood-spitting, and welcomed it as a sign from
+what heaven there might be beyond the grave.
+
+He had not received the consolation of Miss St. John without, although
+unconsciously, leaving something in her mind in return. No human being
+has ever been allowed to occupy the position of a pure benefactor.
+The receiver has his turn, and becomes the giver. From her talk with
+Ericson, and even more from the influence of his sad holy doubt, a fresh
+touch of the actinism of the solar truth fell upon the living seed
+in her heart, and her life burst forth afresh, began to bud in new
+questions that needed answers, and new prayers that sought them.
+
+But she never dreamed that Robert was capable of sympathy with such
+thoughts and feelings: he was but a boy. Nor in power of dealing with
+truth was he at all on the same level with her, for however poor he
+might have considered her theories, she had led a life hitherto, had
+passed through sorrow without bitterness, had done her duty without
+pride, had hoped without conceit of favour, had, as she believed, heard
+the voice of God saying, 'This is the way.' Hence she was not afraid
+when the mists of prejudice began to rise from around her path, and
+reveal a country very different from what she had fancied it. She
+was soon able to perceive that it was far more lovely and full of
+righteousness and peace than she had supposed. But this anticipates;
+only I shall have less occasion to speak of Miss St. John by the time
+she has come into this purer air of the uphill road.
+
+Robert was happier than he ever could have expected to be in his
+grandmother's house. She treated him like an honoured guest, let him do
+as he would, and go where he pleased. Betty kept the gable-room in the
+best of order for him, and, pattern of housemaids, dusted his table
+without disturbing his papers. For he began to have papers; nor were
+they occupied only with the mathematics to which he was now giving his
+chief attention, preparing, with the occasional help of Mr. Innes, for
+his second session.
+
+He had fits of wandering, though; visited all the old places; spent a
+week or two more than once at Bodyfauld; rode Mr. Lammie's half-broke
+filly; revelled in the glories of the summer once more; went out to tea
+occasionally, or supped with the school-master; and, except going to
+church on Sunday, which was a weariness to every inch of flesh upon his
+bones, enjoyed everything.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII. A GRAVE OPENED.
+
+One thing that troubled Robert on this his return home, was the
+discovery that the surroundings of his childhood had deserted him. There
+they were, as of yore, but they seemed to have nothing to say to him--no
+remembrance of him. It was not that everything looked small and
+narrow; it was not that the streets he saw from his new quarters, the
+gable-room, were awfully still after the roar of Aberdeen, and a passing
+cart seemed to shudder at the loneliness of the noise itself made; it
+was that everything seemed to be conscious only of the past and care
+nothing for him now. The very chairs with their inlaid backs had an
+embalmed look, and stood as in a dream. He could pass even the walled-up
+door without emotion, for all the feeling that had been gathered about
+the knob that admitted him to Mary St. John, had transferred itself to
+the brass bell-pull at her street-door.
+
+But one day, after standing for a while at the window, looking down
+on the street where he had first seen the beloved form of Ericson,
+a certain old mood began to revive in him. He had been working at
+quadratic equations all the morning; he had been foiled in the attempt
+to find the true algebraic statement of a very tough question involving
+various ratios; and, vexed with himself, he had risen to look out,
+as the only available zeitvertreib. It was one of those rainy days
+of spring which it needs a hopeful mood to distinguish from autumnal
+ones--dull, depressing, persistent: there might be sunshine in Mercury
+or Venus--but on the earth could be none, from his right hand round by
+India and America to his left; and certainly there was none between--a
+mood to which all sensitive people are liable who have not yet learned
+by faith in the everlasting to rule their own spirits. Naturally enough
+his thoughts turned to the place where he had suffered most--his old
+room in the garret. Hitherto he had shrunk from visiting it; but now he
+turned away from the window, went up the steep stairs, with their one
+sharp corkscrew curve, pushed the door, which clung unwillingly to the
+floor, and entered. It was a nothing of a place--with a window that
+looked only to heaven. There was the empty bedstead against the wall,
+where he had so often kneeled, sending forth vain prayers to a deaf
+heaven! Had they indeed been vain prayers, and to a deaf heaven? or had
+they been prayers which a hearing God must answer not according to the
+haste of the praying child, but according to the calm course of his own
+infinite law of love?
+
+Here, somehow or other, the things about him did not seem so much
+absorbed in the past, notwithstanding those untroubled rows of papers
+bundled in red tape. True, they looked almost awful in their lack of
+interest and their non-humanity, for there is scarcely anything that
+absolutely loses interest save the records of money; but his mother's
+workbox lay behind them. And, strange to say, the side of that bed drew
+him to kneel down: he did not yet believe that prayer was in vain. If
+God had not answered him before, that gave no certainty that he would
+not answer him now. It was, he found, still as rational as it had ever
+been to hope that God would answer the man that cried to him. This came,
+I think, from the fact that God had been answering him all the time,
+although he had not recognized his gifts as answers. Had he not given
+him Ericson, his intercourse with whom and his familiarity with whose
+doubts had done anything but quench his thirst after the higher life?
+For Ericson's, like his own, were true and good and reverent doubts, not
+merely consistent with but in a great measure springing from devoutness
+and aspiration. Surely such doubts are far more precious in the sight of
+God than many beliefs?
+
+He kneeled and sent forth one cry after the Father, arose, and turned
+towards the shelves, removed some of the bundles of letters, and drew
+out his mother's little box.
+
+There lay the miniature, still and open-eyed as he had left it. There
+too lay the bit of paper, brown and dry, with the hymn and the few words
+of sorrow written thereon. He looked at the portrait, but did not open
+the folded paper. Then first he thought whether there might not be
+something more in the box: what he had taken for the bottom seemed to
+be a tray. He lifted it by two little ears of ribbon, and there,
+underneath, lay a letter addressed to his father, in the same
+old-fashioned handwriting as the hymn. It was sealed with brown wax,
+full of spangles, impressed with a bush of something--he could not tell
+whether rushes or reeds or flags. Of course he dared not open it. His
+holy mother's words to his erring father must be sacred even from the
+eyes of their son. But what other or fitter messenger than himself could
+bear it to its destination? It was for this that he had been guided to
+it.
+
+For years he had regarded the finding of his father as the first duty of
+his manhood: it was as if his mother had now given her sanction to the
+quest, with this letter to carry to the husband who, however he might
+have erred, was yet dear to her. He replaced it in the box, but the
+box no more on the forsaken shelf with its dreary barricade of soulless
+records. He carried it with him, and laid it in the bottom of his box,
+which henceforth he kept carefully locked: there lay as it were the
+pledge of his father's salvation, and his mother's redemption from an
+eternal grief.
+
+He turned to his equation: it had cleared itself up; he worked it out in
+five minutes. Betty came to tell him that the dinner was ready, and he
+went down, peaceful and hopeful, to his grandmother.
+
+While at home he never worked in the evenings: it was bad enough to have
+to do so at college. Hence nature had a chance with him again. Blessings
+on the wintry blasts that broke into the first youth of Summer! They
+made him feel what summer was! Blessings on the cheerless days of rain,
+and even of sleet and hail, that would shove the reluctant year back
+into January. The fair face of Spring, with her tears dropping upon her
+quenchless smiles, peeped in suppressed triumph from behind the growing
+corn and the budding sallows on the river-bank. Nay, even when the snow
+came once more in defiance of calendars, it was but a background from
+which the near genesis should 'stick fiery off.'
+
+In general he had a lonely walk after his lesson with Miss St. John was
+over: there was no one at Rothieden to whom his heart and intellect
+both were sufficiently drawn to make a close friendship possible. He had
+companions, however: Ericson had left his papers with him. The influence
+of these led him into yet closer sympathy with Nature and all her moods;
+a sympathy which, even in the stony heart of London, he not only did
+not lose but never ceased to feel. Even there a breath of wind would not
+only breathe upon him, it would breathe into him; and a sunset seen from
+the Strand was lovely as if it had hung over rainbow seas. On his
+way home he would often go into one of the shops where the neighbours
+congregated in the evenings, and hold a little talk; and although, with
+Miss St. John filling his heart, his friend's poems his imagination, and
+geometry and algebra his intellect, great was the contrast between his
+own inner mood and the words by which he kept up human relations with
+his townsfolk, yet in after years he counted it one of the greatest
+blessings of a lowly birth and education that he knew hearts and
+feelings which to understand one must have been young amongst them. He
+would not have had a chance of knowing such as these if he had been the
+son of Dr. Anderson and born in Aberdeen.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX. ROBERT MEDIATES.
+
+One lovely evening in the first of the summer Miss St. John had
+dismissed him earlier than usual, and he had wandered out for a walk.
+After a round of a couple of miles, he returned by a fir-wood, through
+which went a pathway. He had heard Mary St. John say that she was going
+to see the wife of a labourer who lived at the end of this path. In the
+heart of the trees it was growing very dusky; but when he came to a spot
+where they stood away from each other a little space, and the blue sky
+looked in from above with one cloud floating in it from which the rose
+of the sunset was fading, he seated himself on a little mound of moss
+that had gathered over an ancient stump by the footpath, and drew out
+his friend's papers. Absorbed in his reading, he was not aware of an
+approach till the rustle of silk startled him. He lifted up his eyes,
+and saw Miss St. John a few yards from him on the pathway. He rose.
+
+'It's almost too dark to read now, isn't it, Robert?' she said.
+
+'Ah!' said. Robert, 'I know this writing so well that I could read it by
+moonlight. I wish I might read some of it to you. You would like it.'
+
+'May I ask whose it is, then? Poetry, too!'
+
+'It's Mr. Ericson's. But I'm feared he wouldna like me to read it to
+anybody but myself. And yet--'
+
+'I don't think he would mind me,' returned Miss St. John. 'I do know him
+a little. It is not as if I were quite a stranger, you know. Did he tell
+you not?'
+
+'No. But then he never thought of such a thing. I don't know if it's
+fair, for they are carelessly written, and there are words and lines
+here and there that I am sure he would alter if he cared for them ae
+hair.'
+
+'Then if he doesn't care for them, he won't mind my hearing them.
+There!' she said, seating herself on the stump. 'You sit down on the
+grass and read me--one at least.'
+
+'You'll remember they were never intended to be read?' urged Robert, not
+knowing what he was doing, and so fulfilling his destiny.
+
+'I will be as jealous of his honour as ever you can wish,' answered Miss
+St. John gaily.
+
+Robert laid himself on the grass at her feet, and read:--
+
+MY TWO GENIUSES.
+
+     One is a slow and melancholy maid:
+     I know not if she cometh from the skies,
+     Or from the sleepy gulfs, but she will rise
+     Often before me in the twilight shade
+     Holding a bunch of poppies, and a blade
+     Of springing wheat: prostrate my body lies
+     Before her on the turf, the while she ties
+     A fillet of the weed about my head;
+     And in the gaps of sleep I seem to hear
+     A gentle rustle like the stir of corn,
+     And words like odours thronging to my ear:
+     'Lie still, beloved, still until the morn;
+     Lie still with me upon this rolling sphere,
+     Still till the judgment--thou art faint and worn.'
+
+     The other meets me in the public throng:
+     Her hair streams backward from her loose attire;
+     She hath a trumpet and an eye of fire;
+     She points me downward steadily and long--
+     'There is thy grave--arise, my son, be strong!
+     Hands are upon thy crown; awake, aspire
+     To immortality; heed not the lyre
+     Of the enchantress, nor her poppy-song;
+     But in the stillness of the summer calm,
+     Tremble for what is godlike in thy being.
+     Listen awhile, and thou shalt hear the psalm
+     Of victory sung by creatures past thy seeing;
+     And from far battle-fields there comes the neighing
+     Of dreadful onset, though the air is balm.'
+
+     Maid with the poppies, must I let thee go?
+     Alas!  I may not; thou art likewise dear;
+     I am but human, and thou hast a tear,
+     When she hath nought but splendour, and the glow
+     Of a wild energy that mocks the flow
+     Of the poor sympathies which keep us here.
+     Lay past thy poppies, and come twice as near,
+     And I will teach thee, and thou too shalt grow;
+     And thou shalt walk with me in open day
+     Through the rough thoroughfares with quiet grace;
+     And the wild-visaged maid shall lead the way,
+     Timing her footsteps to a gentler pace,
+     As her great orbs turn ever on thy face,
+     Drinking in draughts of loving help alway.
+
+Miss St. John did not speak.
+
+'War ye able to follow him?' asked Robert.
+
+'Quite, I assure you,' she answered, with a tremulousness in her voice
+which delighted Robert as evidence of his friend's success.
+
+'But they're nae a' so easy to follow, I can tell ye, mem. Just hearken
+to this,' he said, with some excitement.
+
+          When the storm was proudest,
+          And the wind was loudest,
+     I heard the hollow caverns drinking down below;
+          When the stars were bright,
+          And the ground was white,
+     I heard the grasses springing underneath the snow.
+
+          Many voices spake--
+          The river to the lake,
+     The iron-ribbed sky was talking to the sea;
+          And every starry spark
+          Made music with the dark,
+     And said how bright and beautiful everything must be.
+
+'That line, mem,' remarked Robert, ''s only jist scrattit in, as gin he
+had no intention o' leavin' 't, an' only set it there to keep room for
+anither. But we'll jist gang on wi' the lave o' 't. I ouchtna to hae
+interruppit it.'
+
+          When the sun was setting,
+          All the clouds were getting
+     Beautiful and silvery in the rising moon;
+          Beneath the leafless trees
+          Wrangling in the breeze,
+     I could hardly see them for the leaves of June.
+
+          When the day had ended,
+          And the night descended,
+     I heard the sound of streams that I heard not through the day
+          And every peak afar,
+          Was ready for a star,
+     And they climbed and rolled around until the morning gray.
+
+          Then slumber soft and holy
+          Came down upon me slowly;
+     And I went I know not whither, and I lived I know not how;
+          My glory had been banished,
+          For when I woke it vanished,
+     But I waited on it's coming, and I am waiting now.
+
+'There!' said Robert, ending, 'can ye mak onything o' that, Miss St.
+John?'
+
+'I don't say I can in words,' she answered; 'but I think I could put it
+all into music.'
+
+'But surely ye maun hae some notion o' what it's aboot afore you can do
+that.'
+
+'Yes; but I have some notion of what it's about, I think. Just lend it
+to me; and by the time we have our next lesson, you will see whether I'm
+not able to show you I understand it. I shall take good care of it,'
+she added, with a smile, seeing Robert's reluctance to part with it. 'It
+doesn't matter my having it, you know, now that you've read it to me, I
+want to make you do it justice.--But it's quite time I were going home.
+Besides, I really don't think you can see to read any more.'
+
+'Weel, it's better no to try, though I hae them maistly upo' my tongue:
+I might blunder, and that wad blaud them.--Will you let me go home with
+you?' he added, in pure tremulous English.
+
+'Certainly, if you like,' she answered; and they walked towards the
+town.
+
+Robert opened the fountain of his love for Ericson, and let it gush like
+a river from a hillside. He talked on and on about him, with admiration,
+gratitude, devotion. And Miss St. John was glad of the veil of the
+twilight over her face as she listened, for the boy's enthusiasm
+trembled through her as the wind through an AEolian harp. Poor Robert! He
+did not know, I say, what he was doing, and so was fulfilling his sacred
+destiny.
+
+'Bring your manuscripts when you come next,' she said, as they walked
+along--gently adding, 'I admire your friend's verses very much, and
+should like to hear more of them.'
+
+'I'll be sure an' do that,' answered Robert, in delight that he had
+found one to sympathize with him in his worship of Ericson, and that one
+his other idol.
+
+When they reached the town, Miss St. John, calling to mind its natural
+propensity to gossip, especially on the evening of a market-day, when
+the shopkeepers, their labours over, would be standing in a speculative
+mood at their doors, surrounded by groups of friends and neighbours,
+felt shy of showing herself on the square with Robert, and proposed that
+they should part, giving as a by-the-bye reason that she had a little
+shopping to do as she went home. Too simple to suspect the real reason,
+but with a heart that delighted in obedience, Robert bade her good-night
+at once, and took another way.
+
+As he passed the door of Merson the haberdasher's shop, there stood
+William MacGregor, the weaver, looking at nothing and doing nothing. We
+have seen something of him before: he was a remarkable compound of good
+nature and bad temper. People were generally afraid of him, because he
+had a biting satire at his command, amounting even to wit, which found
+vent in verse--not altogether despicable even from a literary point of
+view. The only person he, on his part, was afraid of, was his own wife;
+for upon her, from lack of apprehension, his keenest irony fell, as
+he said, like water on a duck's back, and in respect of her he had,
+therefore, no weapon of offence to strike terror withal. Her dulness was
+her defence. He liked Robert. When he saw him, he wakened up, laid hold
+of him by the button, and drew him in.
+
+'Come in, lad,' he said, 'an' tak a pinch. I'm waitin' for Merson.' As
+he spoke he took from his pocket his mull, made of the end of a ram's
+horn, and presented it to Robert, who accepted the pledge of friendship.
+While he was partaking, MacGregor drew himself with some effort upon the
+counter, saying in a half-comical, half-admonitory tone,
+
+'Weel, and hoo's the mathematics, Robert?'
+
+'Thrivin',' answered Robert, falling into his humour.
+
+'Weel, that's verra weel. Duv ye min', Robert, hoo, whan ye was aboot
+the age o' aucht year aul', ye cam to me ance at my shop aboot something
+yer gran'mither, honest woman, wantit, an' I, by way o' takin' my fun o'
+ye, said to ye, "Robert, ye hae grown desperate; ye're a man clean;
+ye hae gotten the breeks on." An' says ye, "Ay, Mr. MacGregor, I want
+naething noo but a watch an' a wife"?'
+
+'I doobt I've forgotten a' aboot it, Mr. MacGregor,' answered Robert.
+'But I've made some progress, accordin' to your story, for Dr. Anderson,
+afore I cam hame, gae me a watch. An' a fine crater it is, for it aye
+does its best, an' sae I excuse its shortcomin's.'
+
+'There's just ae thing, an' nae anither,' returned the manufacturer,
+'that I cannot excuse in a watch. Gin a watch gangs ower fest, ye
+fin' 't oot. Gin she gangs ower slow, ye fin' 't oot, an' ye can
+aye calculate upo' 't correck eneuch for maitters sublunairy, as Mr.
+Maccleary says. An' gin a watch stops a'thegither, ye ken it's failin',
+an' ye ken whaur it sticks, an' a' 'at ye say 's "Tut, tut, de'il hae
+'t for a watch!" But there's ae thing that God nor man canna bide in a
+watch, an' that's whan it stan's still for a bittock, an' syne gangs on
+again. Ay, ay! tic, tic, tic! wi' a fair face and a leein' hert. It wad
+gar ye believe it was a' richt, and time for anither tum'ler, whan it's
+twal o'clock, an' the kirkyaird fowk thinkin' aboot risin'. Fegs, I had
+a watch o' my father's, an' I regairdit it wi' a reverence mair like a
+human bein': the second time it played me that pliskie, I dang oot its
+guts upo' the loupin'-on-stane at the door o' the chop. But lat the
+watch sit: whaur's the wife? Ye canna be a man yet wantin' the wife--by
+yer ain statement.'
+
+'The watch cam unsoucht, Mr. MacGregor, an' I'm thinkin' sae maun the
+wife,' answered Robert, laughing.
+
+'Preserve me for ane frae a wife that comes unsoucht,' returned the
+weaver. 'But, my lad, there may be some wives that winna come whan they
+are soucht. Preserve me frae them too!--Noo, maybe ye dinna ken what I
+mean--but tak ye tent what ye're aboot. Dinna ye think 'at ilka bonnie
+lass 'at may like to haud a wark wi' ye 's jist ready to mairry ye aff
+han' whan ye say, "Noo, my dawtie."--An' ae word mair, Robert: Young
+men, especially braw lads like yersel', 's unco ready to fa' in love wi'
+women fit to be their mithers. An' sae ye see--'
+
+He was interrupted by the entrance of a girl. She had a shawl over her
+head, notwithstanding it was summer weather, and crept in hesitatingly,
+as if she were not quite at one with herself as to her coming purchase.
+Approaching a boy behind the counter on the opposite side of the shop,
+she asked for something, and he proceeded to serve her. Robert could not
+help thinking, from the one glimpse of her face he had got through the
+dusk, that he had seen her before. Suddenly the vision of an earthen
+floor with a pool of brown sunlight upon it, bare feet, brown hair, and
+soft eyes, mingled with a musk odour wafted from Arabian fairyland, rose
+before him: it was Jessie Hewson.
+
+'I ken that lassie,' he said, and moved to get down from the counter on
+which he too had seated himself.
+
+'Na, na,' whispered the manufacturer, laying, like the Ancient Mariner,
+a brown skinny hand of restraint upon Robert's arm--'na, na, never heed
+her. Ye maunna speyk to ilka lass 'at ye ken.--Poor thing! she's been
+doin' something wrang, to gang slinkin' aboot i' the gloamin' like a
+baukie (bat), wi' her plaid ower her heid. Dinna fash wi' her.'
+
+'Nonsense!' returned Robert, with indignation. 'What for shouldna I
+speik till her? She's a decent lassie--a dochter o' James Hewson, the
+cottar at Bodyfauld. I ken her fine.'
+
+He said this in a whisper; but the girl seemed to hear it, for she left
+the shop with a perturbation which the dimness of the late twilight
+could not conceal. Robert hesitated no longer, but followed her,
+heedless of the louder expostulations of MacGregor. She was speeding
+away down the street, but he took longer strides than she, and was
+almost up with her, when she drew her shawl closer about her head, and
+increased her pace.
+
+'Jessie!' said Robert, in a tone of expostulation. But she made no
+answer. Her head sunk lower on her bosom, and she hurried yet faster. He
+gave a long stride or two and laid his hand on her shoulder. She stood
+still, trembling.
+
+'Jessie, dinna ye ken me--Robert Faukner? Dinna be feart at me. What's
+the maitter wi' ye, 'at ye winna speik till a body? Hoo's a' the fowk at
+hame?'
+
+She burst out crying, cast one look into Robert's face, and fled. What
+a change was in that face? The peach-colour was gone from her cheek; it
+was pale and thin. Her eyes were hollow, with dark shadows under them,
+the shadows of a sad sunset. A foreboding of the truth arose in his
+heart, and the tears rushed up into his eyes. The next moment the
+eidolon of Mary St. John, moving gracious and strong, clothed in worship
+and the dignity which is its own defence, appeared beside that of Jessie
+Hewson, her bowed head shaken with sobs, and her weak limbs urged to
+ungraceful flight. As if walking in the vision of an eternal truth, he
+went straight to Captain Forsyth's door.
+
+'I want to speak to Miss St. John, Isie,' said Robert.
+
+'She'll be doon in a minit.'
+
+'But isna yer mistress i' the drawin'-room?--I dinna want to see her.'
+
+'Ow, weel,' said the girl, who was almost fresh from the country, 'jist
+rin up the stair, an' chap at the door o' her room.'
+
+With the simplicity of a child, for what a girl told him to do must be
+right, Robert sped up the stair, his heart going like a fire-engine.
+He had never approached Mary's room from this side, but instinct or
+something else led him straight to her door. He knocked.
+
+'Come in,' she said, never doubting it was the maid, and Robert entered.
+
+She was brushing her hair by the light of a chamber candle. Robert was
+seized with awe, and his limbs trembled. He could have kneeled before
+her--not to beg forgiveness, he did not think of that--but to worship,
+as a man may worship a woman. It is only a strong, pure heart like
+Robert's that ever can feel all the inroad of the divine mystery of
+womanhood. But he did not kneel. He had a duty to perform. A flush rose
+in Miss St. John's face, and sank away, leaving it pale. It was not
+that she thought once of her own condition, with her hair loose on her
+shoulders, but, able only to conjecture what had brought him thither,
+she could not but regard Robert's presence with dismay. She stood with
+her ivory brush in her right hand uplifted, and a great handful of hair
+in her left. She was soon relieved, however, although what with his
+contemplated intercession, the dim vision of Mary's lovely face
+between the masses of her hair, and the lavender odour that filled the
+room--perhaps also a faint suspicion of impropriety sufficient to
+give force to the rest--Robert was thrown back into the abyss of his
+mother-tongue, and out of this abyss talked like a Behemoth.
+
+'Robert!' said Mary, in a tone which, had he not been so eager after his
+end, he might have interpreted as one of displeasure.
+
+'Ye maun hearken till me, mem.--Whan I was oot at Bodyfauld,' he began
+methodically, and Mary, bewildered, gave one hasty brush to her handful
+of hair and again stood still: she could imagine no connection between
+this meeting and their late parting--'Whan I was was oot at Bodyfauld ae
+simmer, I grew acquant wi' a bonnie lassie there, the dochter o' Jeames
+Hewson, an honest cottar, wi' Shakspeare an' the Arabian Nichts upo' a
+skelf i' the hoose wi' 'im. I gaed in ae day whan I wasna weel; an' she
+jist ministert to me, as nane ever did but yersel', mem. An' she was
+that kin' an' mither-like to the wee bit greitin' bairnie 'at she had
+to tak care o' 'cause her mither was oot wi' the lave shearin'! Her face
+was jist like a simmer day, an' weel I likit the luik o' the lassie!--I
+met her again the nicht. Ye never saw sic a change. A white face, an'
+nothing but greitin' to come oot o' her. She ran frae me as gin I had
+been the de'il himsel'. An' the thocht o' you, sae bonnie an' straucht
+an' gran', cam ower me.'
+
+Yielding to a masterful impulse, Robert did kneel now. As if sinner, and
+not mediator, he pressed the hem of her garment to his lips.
+
+'Dinna be angry at me, Miss St. John,' he pleaded, 'but be mercifu' to
+the lassie. Wha's to help her that can no more luik a man i' the face,
+but the clear-e'ed lass that wad luik the sun himsel' oot o' the lift
+gin he daured to say a word against her. It's ae woman that can uphaud
+anither. Ye ken what I mean, an' I needna say mair.'
+
+He rose and turned to leave the room.
+
+Bewildered and doubtful, Miss St. John did not know what to answer, but
+felt that she must make some reply.
+
+'You haven't told me where to find the girl, or what you want me to do
+with her.'
+
+'I'll fin' oot whaur she bides,' he said, moving again towards the door.
+
+'But what am I to do with her, Robert?'
+
+'That's your pairt. Ye maun fin' oot what to do wi' her. I canna tell ye
+that. But gin I was you, I wad gie her a kiss to begin wi'. She's nane
+o' yer brazen-faced hizzies, yon. A kiss wad be the savin' o' her.'
+
+'But you may be--. But I have nothing to go upon. She would resent my
+interference.'
+
+'She's past resentin' onything. She was gaein' aboot the toon like ane
+o' the deid 'at hae naething to say to onybody, an' naebody onything to
+say to them. Gin she gangs on like that she'll no be alive lang.'
+
+That night Jessie Hewson disappeared. A mile or two up the river under a
+high bank, from which the main current had receded, lay an awful, swampy
+place--full of reeds, except in the middle where was one round space
+full of dark water and mud. Near this Jessie Hewson was seen about an
+hour after Robert had thus pled for her with his angel.
+
+The event made a deep impression upon Robert. The last time that he
+saw them, James and his wife were as cheerful as usual, and gave him a
+hearty welcome. Jessie was in service, and doing well, they said. The
+next time he opened the door of the cottage it was like the entrance to
+a haunted tomb. Not a smile was in the place. James's cheeriness was all
+gone. He was sitting at the table with his head leaning on his hand. His
+Bible was open before him, but he was not reading a word. His wife was
+moving listlessly about. They looked just as Jessie had looked that
+night--as if they had died long ago, but somehow or other could not get
+into their graves and be at rest. The child Jessie had nursed with such
+care was toddling about, looking rueful with loss. George had gone to
+America, and the whole of that family's joy had vanished from the earth.
+
+The subject was not resumed between Miss St. John and Robert. The next
+time he saw her, he knew by her pale troubled face that she had heard
+the report that filled the town; and she knew by his silence that it
+had indeed reference to the same girl of whom he had spoken to her. The
+music would not go right that evening. Mary was distraite, and Robert
+was troubled. It was a week or two before there came a change. When the
+turn did come, over his being love rushed up like a spring-tide from the
+ocean of the Infinite.
+
+He was accompanying her piano with his violin. He made blunders, and
+her playing was out of heart. They stopped as by consent, and a moment's
+silence followed. All at once she broke out with something Robert had
+never heard before. He soon found that it was a fantasy upon Ericson's
+poem. Ever through a troubled harmony ran a silver thread of melody from
+far away. It was the caverns drinking from the tempest overhead, the
+grasses growing under the snow, the stars making music with the dark,
+the streams filling the night with the sounds the day had quenched, the
+whispering call of the dreams left behind in 'the fields of sleep,'--in
+a word, the central life pulsing in aeonian peace through the outer
+ephemeral storms. At length her voice took up the theme. The silvery
+thread became song, and through all the opposing, supporting harmonies
+she led it to the solution of a close in which the only sorrow was in
+the music itself, for its very life is an 'endless ending.' She found
+Robert kneeling by her side. As she turned from the instrument his
+head drooped over her knee. She laid her hand on his clustering curls,
+bethought herself, and left the room. Robert wandered out as in a dream.
+At midnight he found himself on a solitary hill-top, seated in the
+heather, with a few tiny fir-trees about him, and the sounds of a wind,
+ethereal as the stars overhead, flowing through their branches: he heard
+the sound of it, but it did not touch him.
+
+Where was God?
+
+In him and his question.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX. ERICSON LOSES TO WIN.
+
+If Mary St. John had been an ordinary woman, and if, notwithstanding,
+Robert had been in love with her, he would have done very little in
+preparation for the coming session. But although she now possessed him,
+although at times he only knew himself as loving her, there was such a
+mountain air of calm about her, such an outgoing divinity of peace, such
+a largely moulded harmony of being, that he could not love her otherwise
+than grandly. For her sake, weary with loving her, he would yet turn to
+his work, and, to be worthy of her, or rather, for he never dreamed of
+being worthy of her, to be worthy of leave to love her, would forget her
+enough to lay hold of some abstract truth of lines, angles, or symbols.
+A strange way of being in love, reader? You think so? I would there were
+more love like it: the world would be centuries nearer its redemption
+if a millionth part of the love in it were of the sort. All I insist,
+however, on my reader's believing is, that it showed, in a youth like
+Robert, not less but more love that he could go against love's sweetness
+for the sake of love's greatness. Literally, not figuratively, Robert
+would kiss the place where her foot had trod; but I know that once he
+rose from such a kiss 'to trace the hyperbola by means of a string.'
+
+It had been arranged between Ericson and Robert, in Miss Napier's
+parlour, the old lady knitting beside, that Ericson should start, if
+possible, a week earlier than usual, and spend the difference with
+Robert at Rothieden. But then the old lady had opened her mouth and
+spoken. And I firmly believe, though little sign of tenderness passed
+between them, it was with an elder sister's feeling for Letty's
+admiration of the 'lan'less laird,' that she said as follows:--
+
+'Dinna ye think, Mr. Ericson, it wad be but fair to come to us neist
+time? Mistress Faukner, honest lady, an' lang hae I kent her, 's no sae
+auld a frien' to you, Mr. Ericson, as oorsel's--nae offence to her, ye
+ken. A'body canna be frien's to a'body, ane as lang 's anither, ye ken.'
+
+''Deed I maun alloo, Miss Naper,' interposed Robert, 'it's only fair. Ye
+see, Mr. Ericson, I cud see as muckle o' ye almost, the tae way as the
+tither. Miss Naper maks me welcome as weel's you.'
+
+'An' I will mak ye welcome, Robert, as lang's ye're a gude lad, as ye
+are, and gang na efter--nae ill gait. But lat me hear o' yer doin' as
+sae mony young gentlemen do, espeacially whan they're ta'en up by their
+rich relations, an', public-hoose as this is, I'll close the door o' 't
+i' yer face.'
+
+'Bless me, Miss Naper!' said Robert, 'what hae I dune to set ye at me
+that gait? Faith, I dinna ken what ye mean.'
+
+'Nae mair do I, laddie. I hae naething against ye whatever. Only ye see
+auld fowk luiks aheid, an' wad fain be as sure o' what's to come as o'
+what's gane.'
+
+'Ye maun bide for that, I doobt,' said Robert.
+
+'Laddie,' retorted Miss Napier, 'ye hae mair sense nor ye hae ony richt
+till. Haud the tongue o' ye. Mr. Ericson 's to come here neist.'
+
+And the old lady laughed such good humour into her stocking-sole, that
+the foot destined to wear it ought never to have been cold while it
+lasted. So it was then settled; and a week before Robert was to start
+for Aberdeen, Ericson walked into The Boar's Head. Half-an-hour after
+that, Crookit Caumill was shown into the ga'le-room with the message to
+Maister Robert that Maister Ericson was come, and wanted to see him.
+
+Robert pitched Hutton's Mathematics into the grate, sprung to his feet,
+all but embraced Crookit Caumill on the spot, and was deterred only
+by the perturbed look the man wore. Crookit Caumill was a very human
+creature, and hadn't a fault but the drink, Miss Napier said. And very
+little of that he would have had if she had been as active as she was
+willing.
+
+'What's the maitter, Caumill?' asked Robert, in considerable alarm.
+
+'Ow, naething, sir,' returned Campbell.
+
+'What gars ye look like that, than?' insisted Robert.
+
+'Ow, naething. But whan Miss Letty cried doon the close upo' me, she had
+her awpron till her een, an' I thocht something bude to be wrang; but I
+hadna the hert to speir.'
+
+Robert darted to the door, and rushed to the inn, leaving Caumill
+describing iambi on the road behind him.
+
+When he reached The Boar's Head there was nobody to be seen. He darted
+up the stair to the room where he had first waited upon Ericson.
+
+Three or four maids stood at the door. He asked no question, but went
+in, a dreadful fear at his heart. Two of the sisters and Dr. Gow stood
+by the bed.
+
+Ericson lay upon it, clear-eyed, and still. His cheek was flushed. The
+doctor looked round as Robert entered.
+
+'Robert,' he said, 'you must keep your friend here quiet. He's broken
+a blood-vessel--walked too much, I suppose. He'll be all right soon,
+I hope; but we can't be too careful. Keep him quiet--that's the main
+thing. He mustn't speak a word.'
+
+So saying he took his leave.
+
+Ericson held out his thin hand. Robert grasped it. Ericson's lips moved
+as if he would speak.
+
+'Dinna speik, Mr. Ericson,' said Miss Letty, whose tears were flowing
+unheeded down her cheeks, 'dinna speik. We a' ken what ye mean an' what
+ye want wi'oot that.'
+
+Then she turned to Robert, and said in a whisper,
+
+'Dr. Gow wadna hae ye sent for; but I kent weel eneuch 'at he wad be a'
+the quaieter gin ye war here. Jist gie a chap upo' the flure gin ye want
+onything, an' I'll be wi' ye in twa seconds.'
+
+The sisters went away. Robert drew a chair beside the bed, and once more
+was nurse to his friend. The doctor had already bled him at the arm:
+such was the ordinary mode of treatment then.
+
+Scarcely was he seated, when Ericson spoke--a smile flickering over his
+worn face.
+
+'Robert, my boy,' he said.
+
+'Dinna speak,' said Robert, in alarm; 'dinna speak, Mr. Ericson.'
+
+'Nonsense,' returned Ericson, feebly. 'They're making a work about
+nothing. I've done as much twenty times since I saw you last, and I'm
+not dead yet. But I think it's coming.'
+
+'What's coming?' asked Robert, rising in alarm.
+
+'Nothing,' answered Ericson, soothingly,--'only death.--I should like to
+see Miss St. John once before I die. Do you think she would come and see
+me if I were really dying?'
+
+'I'm sure she wad. But gin ye speik like this, Miss Letty winna lat me
+come near ye, no to say her. Oh, Mr. Ericson! gin ye dee, I sanna care
+to live.'
+
+Bethinking himself that such was not the way to keep Ericson quiet,
+he repressed his emotion, sat down behind the curtain, and was silent.
+Ericson fell fast asleep. Robert crept from the room, and telling Miss
+Letty that he would return presently, went to Miss St. John.
+
+'How can I go to Aberdeen without him?' he thought as he walked down the
+street.
+
+Neither was a guide to the other; but the questioning of two may give
+just the needful points by which the parallax of a truth may be gained.
+
+'Mr. Ericson's here, Miss St. John,' he said, the moment he was shown
+into her presence.
+
+Her face flushed. Robert had never seen her look so beautiful.
+
+'He's verra ill,' he added.
+
+Her face grew pale--very pale.
+
+'He asked if I thought you would go and see him--that is if he were
+going to die.'
+
+A sunset flush, but faint as on the clouds of the east, rose over her
+pallor.
+
+'I will go at once,' she said, rising.
+
+'Na, na,' returned Robert, hastily. 'It has to be manage. It's no to be
+dune a' in a hurry. For ae thing, there's Dr. Gow says he maunna
+speak ae word; and for anither, there's Miss Letty 'ill jist be like a
+watch-dog to haud a'body oot ower frae 'im. We maun bide oor time. But
+gin ye say ye'll gang, that 'll content him i' the meantime. I'll tell
+him.'
+
+'I will go any moment,' she said. 'Is he very ill?'
+
+'I'm afraid he is. I doobt I'll hae to gang to Aberdeen withoot him.'
+
+A week after, though he was better, his going was out of the question.
+Robert wanted to stay with him, but he would not hear of it. He would
+follow in a week or so, he said, and Robert must start fair with the
+rest of the semies.
+
+But all the removal he was ever able to bear was to the 'red room,' the
+best in the house, opening, as I have already mentioned, from an outside
+stair in the archway. They put up a great screen inside the door, and
+there the lan'less laird lay like a lord.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI. SHARGAR ASPIRES.
+
+Robert's heart was dreary when he got on the box-seat of the mail-coach
+at Rothieden--it was yet drearier when he got down at The Royal Hotel in
+the street of Ben Accord--and it was dreariest of all when he turned his
+back on Ericson's, and entered his own room at Mrs. Fyvie's.
+
+Shargar had met him at the coach. Robert had scarcely a word to say to
+him. And Shargar felt as dreary as Robert when he saw him sit down, and
+lay his head on the table without a word.
+
+'What's the maitter wi' ye, Robert?' he faltered out at last. 'Gin ye
+dinna speyk to me, I'll cut my throat. I will, faith!'
+
+'Haud yer tongue wi' yer nonsense, Shargar. Mr. Ericson's deein'.'
+
+'O lord!' said Shargar, and said nothing more for the space of ten
+minutes.
+
+Then he spoke again--slowly and sententiously.
+
+'He hadna you to tak care o' him, Robert. Whaur is he?'
+
+'At The Boar's Heid.'
+
+'That's weel. He'll be luikit efter there.'
+
+'A body wad like to hae their ain han' in 't, Shargar.'
+
+'Ay. I wiss we had him here again.'
+
+The ice of trouble thus broken, the stream of talk flowed more freely.
+
+'Hoo are ye gettin' on at the schule, man?' asked Robert.
+
+'Nae that ill,' answered Shargar. 'I was at the heid o' my class
+yesterday for five meenits.'
+
+'An' hoo did ye like it?'
+
+'Man, it was fine. I thocht I was a gentleman a' at ance.'
+
+'Haud ye at it, man,' said Robert, as if from the heights of age and
+experience, 'and maybe ye will be a gentleman some day.'
+
+'Is 't poassible, Robert? A crater like me grow intil a gentleman?' said
+Shargar, with wide eyes.
+
+'What for no?' returned Robert.
+
+'Eh, man!' said Shargar.
+
+He stood up, sat down again, and was silent.
+
+'For ae thing,' resumed Robert, after a pause, during which he had been
+pondering upon the possibilities of Shargar's future--'for ae thing, I
+doobt whether Dr. Anderson wad hae ta'en ony fash aboot ye, gin he hadna
+thocht ye had the makin' o' a gentleman i' ye.'
+
+'Eh, man!' said Shargar.
+
+He stood up again, sat down again, and was finally silent.
+
+Next day Robert went to see Dr. Anderson, and told him about Ericson.
+The doctor shook his head, as doctors have done in such cases from
+AEsculapius downwards. Robert pressed no further questions.
+
+'Will he be taken care of where he is?' asked the doctor.
+
+'Guid care o',' answered Robert.
+
+'Has he any money, do you think?'
+
+'I hae nae doobt he has some, for he's been teachin' a' the summer. The
+like o' him maun an' will work whether they're fit or no.'
+
+'Well, at all events, you write, Robert, and give him the hint that he's
+not to fash himself about money, for I have more than he'll want. And
+you may just take the hint yourself at the same time, Robert, my boy,'
+he added in, if possible, a yet kinder tone.
+
+Robert's way of showing gratitude was the best way of all. He returned
+kindness with faith.
+
+'Gin I be in ony want, doctor, I'll jist rin to ye at ance. An' gin I
+want ower muckle ye maun jist say na.'
+
+'That's a good fellow. You take things as a body means them.'
+
+'But hae ye naething ye wad like me to do for ye this session, sir?'
+
+'No. I won't have you do anything but your own work. You have more to
+do than you had last year. Mind your work; and as often as you get tired
+over your books, shut them up and come to me. You may bring Shargar with
+you sometimes, but we must take care and not make too much of him all at
+once.'
+
+'Ay, ay, doctor. But he's a fine crater, Shargar, an' I dinna think
+he'll be that easy to blaud. What do you think he's turnin' ower i' that
+reid heid o' his noo?'
+
+'I can't tell that. But there's something to come out of the red head, I
+do believe. What is he thinking of?'
+
+'Whether it be possible for him ever to be a gentleman. Noo I tak that
+for a good sign i' the likes o' him.'
+
+'No doubt of it. What did you say to him?'
+
+'I tellt him 'at hoo I didna think ye wad hae ta'en sae muckle fash gin
+ye hadna had some houps o' the kin' aboot him.'
+
+'You said well. Tell him from me that I expect him to be a gentleman.
+And by the way, Robert, do try a little, as I think I said to you once
+before, to speak English. I don't mean that you should give up Scotch,
+you know.'
+
+'Weel, sir, I hae been tryin'; but what am I to do whan ye speyk to me
+as gin ye war my ain father? I canna min' upo' a word o' English whan ye
+do that.'
+
+Dr. Anderson laughed, but his eyes glittered.
+
+Robert found Shargar busy over his Latin version. With a 'Weel,
+Shargar,' he took his books and sat down. A few moments after, Shargar
+lifted his head, stared a while at Robert, and then said,
+
+'Duv you railly think it, Robert?'
+
+'Think what? What are ye haverin' at, ye gowk?'
+
+'Duv ye think 'at I ever could grow intil a gentleman?'
+
+'Dr. Anderson says he expecs 't o' ye.'
+
+'Eh, man!'
+
+A long pause followed, and Shargar spoke again.
+
+'Hoo am I to begin, Robert?'
+
+'Begin what?'
+
+'To be a gentleman.'
+
+Robert scratched his head, like Brutus, and at length became oracular.
+
+'Speyk the truth,' he said.
+
+'I'll do that. But what aboot--my father?'
+
+'Naebody 'ill cast up yer father to ye. Ye need hae nae fear o' that.'
+
+'My mither, than?' suggested Shargar, with hesitation.
+
+'Ye maun haud yer face to the fac'.'
+
+'Ay, ay. But gin they said onything, ye ken--aboot her.'
+
+'Gin ony man-body says a word agen yer mither, ye maun jist knock him
+doon upo' the spot.'
+
+'But I michtna be able.'
+
+'Ye could try, ony gait.'
+
+'He micht knock me down, ye ken.'
+
+'Weel, gae doon than.'
+
+'Ay.'
+
+This was all the instruction Robert ever gave Shargar in the duties of
+a gentleman. And I doubt whether Shargar sought further enlightenment by
+direct question of any one. He worked harder than ever; grew cleanly
+in his person, even to fastidiousness; tried to speak English; and a
+wonderful change gradually, but rapidly, passed over his outer man.
+He grew taller and stronger, and as he grew stronger, his legs grew
+straighter, till the defect of approximating knees, the consequence of
+hardship, all but vanished. His hair became darker, and the albino look
+less remarkable, though still he would remind one of a vegetable grown
+in a cellar.
+
+Dr. Anderson thought it well that he should have another year at the
+grammar-school before going to college.--Robert now occupied Ericson's
+room, and left his own to Shargar.
+
+Robert heard every week from Miss St. John about Ericson. Her reports
+varied much; but on the whole he got a little better as the winter
+went on. She said that the good women at The Boar's Head paid him every
+attention: she did not say that almost the only way to get him to eat
+was to carry him delicacies which she had prepared with her own hands.
+
+She had soon overcome the jealousy with which Miss Letty regarded her
+interest in their guest, and before many days had passed she would walk
+into the archway and go up to his room without seeing any one, except
+the sister whom she generally found there. By what gradations their
+intimacy grew I cannot inform my reader, for on the events lying
+upon the boundary of my story, I have received very insufficient
+enlightenment; but the result it is easy to imagine. I have already
+hinted at an early disappointment of Miss St. John. She had grown
+greatly since, and her estimate of what she had lost had altered
+considerably in consequence. But the change was more rapid after she
+became acquainted with Ericson. She would most likely have found the
+young man she thought she was in love with in the days gone by a very
+commonplace person now. The heart which she had considered dead to the
+world had, even before that stormy night in the old house, begun
+to expostulate against its owner's mistake, by asserting a fair
+indifference to that portion of its past history. And now, to her large
+nature the simplicity, the suffering, the patience, the imagination, the
+grand poverty of Ericson, were irresistibly attractive. Add to this
+that she became his nurse, and soon saw that he was not indifferent to
+her--and if she fell in love with him as only a full-grown woman can
+love, without Ericson's lips saying anything that might not by Love's
+jealousy be interpreted as only of grateful affection, why should she
+not?
+
+And what of Marjory Lindsay? Ericson had not forgotten her. But the
+brightest star must grow pale as the sun draws near; and on Ericson
+there were two suns rising at once on the low sea-shore of life whereon
+he had been pacing up and down moodily for three-and-twenty years,
+listening evermore to the unprogressive rise and fall of the tidal
+waves, all talking of the eternal, all unable to reveal it--the sun of
+love and the sun of death. Mysie and he had never met. She pleased his
+imagination; she touched his heart with her helplessness; but she gave
+him no welcome to the shrine of her beauty: he loved through admiration
+and pity. He broke no faith to her; for he had never offered her any
+save in looks, and she had not accepted it. She was but a sickly plant
+grown in a hot-house. On his death-bed he found a woman a hiding-place
+from the wind, a covert from the tempest, the shadow of a great rock in
+a weary land! A strong she-angel with mighty wings, Mary St. John came
+behind him as he fainted out of life, tempered the burning heat of the
+Sun of Death, and laid him to sleep in the cool twilight of her glorious
+shadow. In the stead of trouble about a wilful, thoughtless girl, he
+found repose and protection and motherhood in a great-hearted woman.
+
+For Ericson's sake, Robert made some effort to preserve the acquaintance
+of Mr. Lindsay and his daughter. But he could hardly keep up a
+conversation with Mr. Lindsay, and Mysie showed herself utterly
+indifferent to him even in the way of common friendship. He told her of
+Ericson's illness: she said she was sorry to hear it, and looked miles
+away. He could never get within a certain atmosphere of--what shall
+I call it? avertedness that surrounded her. She had always lived in a
+dream of unrealities; and the dream had almost devoured her life.
+
+One evening Shargar was later than usual in coming home from the walk,
+or ramble rather, without which he never could settle down to his work.
+He knocked at Robert's door.
+
+'Whaur do ye think I've been, Robert?'
+
+'Hoo suld I ken, Shargar?' answered Robert, puzzling over a problem.
+
+'I've been haein' a glaiss wi' Jock Mitchell.'
+
+'Wha's Jock Mitchell?'
+
+'My brither Sandy's groom, as I tellt ye afore.'
+
+'Ye dinna think I can min' a' your havers, Shargar. Whaur was the comin'
+gentleman whan ye gaed to drink wi' a chield like that, wha, gin
+my memory serves me, ye tauld me yersel' was i' the mids o' a' his
+maister's deevilry?'
+
+'Yer memory serves ye weel eneuch to be doon upo' me,' said Shargar.
+'But there's a bit wordy 'at they read at the cathedral kirk the last
+Sunday 'at's stucken to me as gin there was something by ordinar' in
+'t.'
+
+'What's that?' asked Robert, pretending to go on with his calculations
+all the time.
+
+'Ow, nae muckle; only this: "Judge not, that ye be not judged."--I
+took a lesson frae Jeck the giant-killer, wi' the Welsh giant--was 't
+Blunderbore they ca'd him?--an' poored the maist o' my glaiss doon my
+breist. It wasna like ink; it wadna du my sark ony ill.'
+
+'But what garred ye gang wi' 'im at a'? He wasna fit company for a
+gentleman.'
+
+'A gentleman 's some saft gin he be ony the waur o' the company he gangs
+in till. There may be rizzons, ye ken. Ye needna du as they du. Jock
+Mitchell was airin' Reid Rorie an' Black Geordie. An' says I--for I
+wantit to ken whether I was sic a breme-buss (broom-bush) as I used to
+be--says I, "Hoo are ye, Jock Mitchell?" An' says Jock, "Brawly. Wha
+the deevil are ye?" An' says I, "Nae mair o' a deevil nor yersel', Jock
+Mitchell, or Alexander, Baron Rothie, either--though maybe that's no
+little o' ane." "Preserve me!" cried Jock, "it's Shargar."--"Nae mair o'
+that, Jock," says I. "Gin I bena a gentleman, or a' be dune,"--an' there
+I stack, for I saw I was a muckle fule to lat oot onything o' the kin'
+to Jock. And sae he seemed to think, too, for he brak oot wi' a great
+guffaw; an' to win ower 't, I jined, an' leuch as gin naething was
+farrer aff frae my thochts than ever bein' a gentleman. "Whaur do ye
+pit up, Jock?" I said. "Oot by here," he answert, "at Luckie
+Maitlan's."--"That's a queer place for a baron to put up, Jock," says I.
+"There's rizzons," says he, an' lays his forefinger upo' the side o'
+'s nose, o' whilk there was hardly eneuch to haud it ohn gane intil the
+opposit ee. "We're no far frae there," says I--an' deed I can hardly
+tell ye, Robert, what garred me say sae, but I jist wantit to ken what
+that gentleman-brither o' mine was efter; "tak the horse hame," says
+I--"I'll jist loup upo' Black Geordie--an' we'll hae a glaiss thegither.
+I'll stan' treat." Sae he gae me the bridle, an' I lap on. The deevil
+tried to get a moufu' o' my hip, but, faith! I was ower swack for 'im;
+an' awa we rade.'
+
+'I didna ken 'at ye cud ride, Shargar.'
+
+'Hoots! I cudna help it. I was aye takin' the horse to the watter at
+The Boar's Heid, or The Royal Oak, or Lucky Happit's, or The Aucht an'
+Furty. That's hoo I cam to ken Jock sae weel. We war guid eneuch frien's
+whan I didna care for leein' or sweirin', an' sic like.'
+
+'And what on earth did ye want wi' 'im noo?'
+
+'I tell ye I wantit to ken what that ne'er-do-weel brither o' mine was
+efter. I had seen the horses stan'in' aboot twa or three times i' the
+gloamin'; an' Sandy maun be aboot ill gin he be aboot onything.'
+
+'What can 't maitter to you, Shargar, what a man like him 's aboot?'
+
+'Weel, ye see, Robert, my mither aye broucht me up to ken a' 'at fowk
+was aboot, for she said ye cud never tell whan it micht turn oot to the
+weelfaur o' yer advantage--gran' words!--I wonner whaur she forgathert
+wi' them. But she was a terrible wuman, my mither, an' kent a heap o'
+things--mair nor 'twas gude to ken, maybe. She gaed aboot the country
+sae muckle, an' they say the gipsies she gaed amang 's a dreadfu' auld
+fowk, an' hae the wisdom o' the Egyptians 'at Moses wad hae naething to
+do wi'.'
+
+'Whaur is she noo?'
+
+'I dinna ken. She may turn up ony day.'
+
+'There's ae thing, though, Shargar: gin ye want to be a gentleman, ye
+maunna gang keekin' that gate intil ither fowk's affairs.'
+
+'Weel, I maun gie 't up. I winna say a word o' what Jock Mitchell tellt
+me aboot Lord Sandy.'
+
+'Ow, say awa'.'
+
+'Na, na; ye wadna like to hear aboot ither fowk's affairs. My mither
+tellt me he did verra ill efter Watterloo till a fremt (stranger) lass
+at Brussels. But that's neither here nor there. I maun set aboot my
+version, or I winna get it dune the nicht.'
+
+'What is Lord Sandy after? What did the rascal tell you? Why do you make
+such a mystery of it?' said Robert, authoritatively, and in his best
+English.
+
+''Deed I cudna mak naething o' 'm. He winkit an' he mintit (hinted) an'
+he gae me to unnerstan' 'at the deevil was efter some lass or ither, but
+wha--my lad was as dumb 's the graveyard about that. Gin I cud only win
+at that, maybe I cud play him a plisky. But he coupit ower three glasses
+o' whusky, an' the mair he drank the less he wad say. An' sae I left
+him.'
+
+'Well, take care what you're about, Shargar. I don't think Dr. Anderson
+would like you to be in such company,' said Robert; and Shargar departed
+to his own room and his version.
+
+Towards the end of the session Miss St. John's reports of Ericson were
+worse. Yet he was very hopeful himself, and thought he was getting
+better fast. Every relapse he regarded as temporary; and when he got a
+little better, thought he had recovered his original position. It was
+some relief to Miss St. John to communicate her anxiety to Robert.
+
+After the distribution of the prizes, of which he gained three, Robert
+went the same evening to visit Dr. Anderson, intending to go home the
+next day. The doctor gave him five golden sovereigns--a rare sight in
+Scotland. Robert little thought in what service he was about to spend
+them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII. ROBERT IN ACTION.
+
+It was late when he left his friend. As he walked through the
+Gallowgate, an ancient narrow street, full of low courts, some one
+touched him upon the arm. He looked round. It was a young woman. He
+turned again to walk on.
+
+'Mr Faukner,' she said, in a trembling voice, which Robert thought he
+had heard before.
+
+He stopped.
+
+'I don't know you,' he said. 'I can't see your face. Tell me who you
+are.'
+
+She returned no answer, but stood with her head aside. He could see that
+her hands shook.
+
+'What do you want with me--if you won't say who you are?'
+
+'I want to tell you something,' she said; 'but I canna speyk here. Come
+wi' me.'
+
+'I won't go with you without knowing who you are or where you're going
+to take me.'
+
+'Dinna ye ken me?' she said pitifully, turning a little towards the
+light of the gas-lamp, and looking up in his face.
+
+'It canna be Jessie Hewson?' said Robert, his heart swelling at the
+sight of the pale worn countenance of the girl.
+
+'I was Jessie Hewson ance,' she said, 'but naebody here kens me by that
+name but yersel'. Will ye come in? There's no a crater i' the hoose but
+mysel'.'
+
+Robert turned at once. 'Go on,' he said.
+
+She led the way up a narrow stone stair between two houses. A door high
+up in the gable admitted them. The boards bent so much under his weight
+that Robert feared the floor would fall.
+
+'Bide ye there, sir, till I fess a licht,' she said.
+
+This was Robert's first introduction to a phase of human life with which
+he became familiar afterwards.
+
+'Mind hoo ye gang, sir,' she resumed, returning with a candle. 'There's
+nae flurin' there. Haud i' the middle efter me, or ye'll gang throu.'
+
+She led him into a room, with nothing in it but a bed, a table, and a
+chair. On the table was a half-made shirt. In the bed lay a tiny baby,
+fast asleep. It had been locked up alone in the dreary garret. Robert
+approached to look at the child, for his heart felt very warm to poor
+Jessie.
+
+'A bonnie bairnie,' he said,
+
+'Isna he, sir? Think o' 'im comin' to me! Nobody can tell the mercy o'
+'t. Isna it strange that the verra sin suld bring an angel frae haven
+upo' the back o' 't to uphaud an' restore the sinner? Fowk thinks it's a
+punishment; but eh me! it's a mercifu' ane. It's a wonner he didna think
+shame to come to me. But he cam to beir my shame.'
+
+Robert wondered at her words. She talked of her sin with such a meek
+openness! She looked her shame in the face, and acknowledged it hers.
+Had she been less weak and worn, perhaps she could not have spoken thus.
+
+'But what am I aboot!' she said, checking herself. 'I didna fess ye here
+to speyk aboot mysel'. He's efter mair mischeef, and gin onything cud be
+dune to haud him frae 't--'
+
+'Wha's efter mischeef, Jessie?' interrupted Robert.
+
+'Lord Rothie. He's gaein' aff the nicht in Skipper Hornbeck's boat to
+Antwerp, I think they ca' 't, an' a bonnie young leddy wi' 'im. They war
+to sail wi' the first o' the munelicht.--Surely I'm nae ower late,' she
+added, going to the window. 'Na, the mune canna be up yet.'
+
+'Na,' said Robert; 'I dinna think she rises muckle afore twa o'clock the
+nicht. But hoo ken ye? Are ye sure o' 't? It's an awfu' thing to think
+o'.'
+
+'To convence ye, I maun jist tell ye the trowth. The hoose we're in
+hasna a gude character. We're middlin' dacent up here; but the lave o'
+the place is dreadfu'. Eh for the bonnie leys o' Bodyfauld! Gin ye see
+my father, tell him I'm nane waur than I was.'
+
+'They think ye droont i' the Dyer's Pot, as they ca' 't.'
+
+'There I am again!' she said--'miles awa' an' nae time to be lost!--My
+lord has a man they ca' Mitchell. Ower weel I ken him. There's a wuman
+doon the stair 'at he comes to see whiles; an' twa or three nichts ago,
+I heard them lauchin' thegither. Sae I hearkened. They war baith some
+fou, I'm thinkin'. I cudna tell ye a' 'at they said. That's a punishment
+noo, gin ye like--to see and hear the warst o' yer ain ill doin's. He
+tellt the limmer a heap o' his lord's secrets. Ay, he tellt her aboot
+me, an' hoo I had gane and droont mysel'. I could hear 'maist ilka word
+'at he said; for ye see the flurin' here 's no verra soon', and I was
+jist 'at I cudna help hearkenin'. My lord's aff the nicht, as I tell ye.
+It's a queer gait, but a quaiet, he thinks, nae doobt. Gin onybody wad
+but tell her hoo mony een the baron's made sair wi' greitin'!'
+
+'But hoo's that to be dune?' said Robert.
+
+'I dinna ken. But I hae been watchin' to see you ever sin' syne. I hae
+seen ye gang by mony a time. Ye're the only man I ken 'at I could speyk
+till aboot it. Ye maun think what ye can do. The warst o' 't is I canna
+tell wha she is or whaur she bides.'
+
+'In that case, I canna see what's to be dune.'
+
+'Cudna ye watch them aboord, an' slip a letter intil her han'? Or ye cud
+gie 't to the skipper to gie her.'
+
+'I ken the skipper weel eneuch. He's a respectable man. Gin he kent what
+the baron was efter, he wadna tak him on boord.'
+
+'That wad do little guid. He wad only hae her aff some ither gait.'
+
+'Weel,' said Robert, rising, 'I'll awa' hame, an' think aboot it as I
+gang.--Wad ye tak a feow shillin's frae an auld frien'?' he added with
+hesitation, putting his hand in his pocket.
+
+'Na--no a baubee,' she answered. 'Nobody sall say it was for mysel' I
+broucht ye here. Come efter me, an' min' whaur ye pit doon yer feet.
+It's no sicker.'
+
+She led him to the door. He bade her good-night.
+
+'Tak care ye dinna fa' gaein' doon the stair. It's maist as steep 's a
+wa'.'
+
+As Robert came from between the houses, he caught a glimpse of a man in
+a groom's dress going in at the street door of that he had left.
+
+All the natural knighthood in him was roused. But what could he do? To
+write was a sneaking way. He would confront the baron. The baron and the
+girl would both laugh at him. The sole conclusion he could arrive at was
+to consult Shargar.
+
+He lost no time in telling him the story.
+
+'I tauld ye he was up to some deevilry or ither,' said Shargar. 'I can
+shaw ye the verra hoose he maun be gaein' to tak her frae.'
+
+'Ye vratch! what for didna ye tell me that afore?'
+
+'Ye wadna hear aboot ither fowk's affairs. Na, not you! But some fowk
+has no richt to consideration. The verra stanes they say 'ill cry oot
+ill secrets like brither Sandy's.'
+
+'Whase hoose is 't?'
+
+'I dinna ken. I only saw him come oot o' 't ance, an' Jock Mitchell was
+haudin' Black Geordie roon' the neuk. It canna be far frae Mr. Lindsay's
+'at you an' Mr. Ericson used to gang till.'
+
+'Come an' lat me see 't direckly,' cried Robert, starting up, with a
+terrible foreboding at his heart.
+
+They were in the street in a moment. Shargar led the way by a country
+lane to the top of the hill on the right, and then turning to the left,
+brought him to some houses standing well apart from each other. It was a
+region unknown to Robert. They were the backs of the houses of which Mr.
+Lindsay's was one.
+
+'This is the hoose,' said Shargar.
+
+Robert rushed into action. He knocked at the door. Mr. Lindsay's Jenny
+opened it.
+
+'Is yer mistress in, Jenny?' he asked at once.
+
+'Na. Ay. The maister's gane to Bors Castle.'
+
+'It's Miss Lindsay I want to see.'
+
+'She's up in her ain room wi' a sair heid.'
+
+Robert looked her hard in the face, and knew she was lying.
+
+'I want to see her verra partic'lar,' he said.
+
+'Weel, ye canna see her,' returned Jenny angrily. 'I'll tell her
+onything ye like.'
+
+Concluding that little was to be gained by longer parley, but quite
+uncertain whether Mysie was in the house or not, Robert turned to
+Shargar, took him by the arm, and walked away in silence. When they were
+beyond earshot of Jenny, who stood looking after them,
+
+'Ye're sure that's the hoose, Shargar?' said Robert quietly.
+
+'As sure's deith, and maybe surer, for I saw him come oot wi' my ain
+een.'
+
+'Weel, Shargar, it's grown something awfu' noo. It's Miss Lindsay. Was
+there iver sic a villain as that Lord Rothie--that brither o' yours!'
+
+'I disoun 'im frae this verra 'oor,' said Shargar solemnly.
+
+'Something maun be dune. We'll awa' to the quay, an' see what'll turn
+up. I wonner hoo's the tide.'
+
+'The tide's risin'. They'll never try to win oot till it's slack
+watter--furbye 'at the Amphitrite, for as braid 's she is, and her bows
+modelled efter the cheeks o' a resurrection cherub upo' a gravestane,
+draws a heap o' watter: an' the bar they say 's waur to win ower nor
+usual: it's been gatherin' again.'
+
+As they spoke, the boys were making for the new town, eagerly. Just
+opposite where the Amphitrite lay was a public-house: into that they
+made up their minds to go, and there to write a letter, which they
+would give to Miss Lindsay if they could, or, if not, leave with Skipper
+Hoornbeek. Before they reached the river, a thick rain of minute drops
+began to fall, rendering the night still darker, so that they could
+scarcely see the vessels from the pavement on the other side of the
+quay, along which they were hurrying, to avoid the cables, rings, and
+stone posts that made its margin dangerous in the dim light. When they
+came to The Smack Inn they crossed right over to reach the Amphitrite.
+A growing fear kept them silent as they approached her berth. It was
+empty. They turned and stared at each other in dismay.
+
+One of those amphibious animals that loiter about the borders of the
+water was seated on a stone smoking, probably fortified against the rain
+by the whisky inside him.
+
+'Whaur's the Amphitrite, Alan?' asked Shargar, for Robert was dumb with
+disappointment and rage.
+
+'Half doon to Stanehive by this time, I'm thinkin',' answered Alan. 'For
+a brewin' tub like her, she fummles awa nae ill wi' a licht win' astarn
+o' her. But I'm doobtin' afore she win across the herrin-pot her fine
+passengers 'll win at the boddom o' their stamacks. It's like to blaw
+a bonnetfu', and she rows awfu' in ony win'. I dinna think she cud
+capsize, but for wamlin' she's waur nor a bairn with the grips.'
+
+In absolute helplessness, the boys had let him talk on: there was
+nothing more to be done; and Alan was in a talkative mood.
+
+'Fegs! gin 't come on to blaw,' he resumed, 'I wadna wonner gin they
+got the skipper to set them ashore at Stanehive. I heard auld Horny
+say something aboot lyin' to there for a bit, to tak a keg or something
+aboord.'
+
+The boys looked at each other, bade Alan good-night, and walked away.
+
+'Hoo far is 't to Stonehaven, Shargar?' said Robert.
+
+'I dinna richtly ken. Maybe frae twal to fifteen mile.'
+
+Robert stood still. Shargar saw his face pale as death, and contorted
+with the effort to control his feelings.
+
+'Shargar,' he said, 'what am I to do? I vowed to Mr. Ericson that, gin
+he deid, I wad luik efter that bonny lassie. An' noo whan he's lyin'
+a' but deid, I hae latten her slip throu' my fingers wi' clean
+carelessness. What am I to do? Gin I cud only win to Stonehaven afore
+the Amphitrite! I cud gang aboord wi' the keg, and gin I cud do naething
+mair, I wad hae tried to do my best. Gin I do naething, my hert 'll brak
+wi' the weicht o' my shame.'
+
+Shargar burst into a roar of laughter. Robert was on the point of
+knocking him down, but took him by the throat as a milder proceeding,
+and shook him.
+
+'Robert! Robert!' gurgled Shargar, as soon as his choking had overcome
+his merriment, 'ye're an awfu' Hielan'man. Hearken to me. I beg--g--g
+yer pardon. What I was thinkin' o' was--'
+
+Robert relaxed his hold. But Shargar, notwithstanding the lesson Robert
+had given him, could hardly speak yet for the enjoyment of his own
+device.
+
+'Gin we could only get rid o' Jock Mitchell!--' he crowed; and burst out
+again.
+
+'He's wi' a wuman i' the Gallowgate,' said Robert.
+
+'Losh, man!' exclaimed Shargar, and started off at full speed.
+
+He was no match for his companion, however.
+
+'Whaur the deevil are ye rinnin' till, ye wirrycow (scarecrow)?' panted
+Robert, as he laid hold of his collar.
+
+'Lat me gang, Robert,' gasped Shargar. 'Losh, man! ye'll be on Black
+Geordie in anither ten meenits, an' me ahin' ye upo' Reid Rorie.
+An' faith gin we binna at Stanehive afore the Dutchman wi' 's boddom
+foremost, it'll be the faut o' the horse and no o' the men.'
+
+Robert's heart gave a bound of hope.
+
+'Hoo 'ill ye get them, Shargar?' he asked eagerly.
+
+'Steal them,' answered Shargar, struggling to get away from the grasp
+still upon his collar.
+
+'We micht be hanged for that.'
+
+'Weel, Robert, I'll tak a' the wyte o' 't. Gin it hadna been for you, I
+micht ha' been hangt by this time for ill doin': for your sake I'll be
+hangt for weel doin', an' welcome. Come awa'. To steal a mairch upo'
+brither Sandy wi' aucht (eight) horse-huves o' 's ain! Ha! ha! ha!'
+
+They sped along, now running themselves out of breath, now walking
+themselves into it again, until they reached a retired hostelry between
+the two towns. Warning Robert not to show himself, Shargar disappeared
+round the corner of the house.
+
+Robert grew weary, and then anxious. At length Shargar's face came
+through the darkness.
+
+'Robert,' he whispered, 'gie 's yer bonnet. I'll be wi' ye in a moment
+noo.'
+
+Robert obeyed, too anxious to question him. In about three minutes more
+Shargar reappeared, leading what seemed the ghost of a black horse; for
+Robert could see only his eyes, and his hoofs made scarcely any noise.
+How he had managed it with a horse of Black Geordie's temper, I do not
+know, but some horses will let some persons do anything with them: he
+had drawn his own stockings over his fore feet, and tied their two caps
+upon his hind hoofs.
+
+'Lead him awa' quaietly up the road till I come to ye,' said Shargar, as
+he took the mufflings off the horse's feet. 'An' min' 'at he doesna
+tak a nip o' ye. He's some ill for bitin'. I'll be efter ye direckly.
+Rorie's saiddlet an' bridled. He only wants his carpet-shune.'
+
+Robert led the horse a few hundred yards, then stopped and waited.
+Shargar soon joined him, already mounted on Red Roderick.
+
+'Here's yer bonnet, Robert. It's some foul, I doobt. But I cudna help
+it. Gang on, man. Up wi' ye. Maybe I wad hae better keepit Geordie
+mysel'. But ye can ride. Ance ye're on, he canna bite ye.'
+
+But Robert needed no encouragement from Shargar. In his present mood
+he would have mounted a griffin. He was on horseback in a moment. They
+trotted gently through the streets, and out of the town. Once over the
+Dee, they gave their horses the rein, and off they went through the dark
+drizzle. Before they got half-way they were wet to the skin; but little
+did Robert, or Shargar either, care for that. Not many words passed
+between them.
+
+'Hoo 'ill ye get the horse (plural) in again, Shargar?' asked Robert.
+
+'Afore I get them back,' answered Shargar, 'they'll be tired eneuch to
+gang hame o' themsel's. Gin we had only had the luck to meet Jock!--that
+wad hae been gran'.'
+
+'What for that?'
+
+'I wad hae cawed Reid Rorie ower the heid o' 'm, an' left him lyin'--the
+coorse villain!'
+
+The horses never flagged till they drew up in the main street of
+Stonehaven. Robert ran down to the harbour to make inquiry, and left
+Shargar to put them up.
+
+The moon had risen, but the air was so full of vapour that she only
+succeeded in melting the darkness a little. The sea rolled in front,
+awful in its dreariness, under just light enough to show a something
+unlike the land. But the rain had ceased, and the air was clearer.
+Robert asked a solitary man, with a telescope in his hand, whether he
+was looking out for the Amphitrite. The man asked him gruffly in return
+what he knew of her. Possibly the nature of the keg to be put on board
+had something to do with his Scotch reply. Robert told him he was a
+friend of the captain, had missed the boat, and would give any one five
+shillings to put him on board. The man went away and returned with a
+companion. After some further questioning and bargaining, they agreed
+to take him. Robert loitered about the pier full of impatience. Shargar
+joined him.
+
+Day began to break over the waves. They gleamed with a blue-gray leaden
+sheen. The men appeared coming along the harbour, and descended by a
+stair into a little skiff, where a barrel, or something like one, lay
+under a tarpaulin. Robert bade Shargar good-bye, and followed. They
+pushed off, rowed out into the bay, and lay on their oars waiting
+for the vessel. The light grew apace, and Robert fancied he could
+distinguish the two horses with one rider against the sky on the top of
+the cliffs, moving northwards. Turning his eyes to the sea, he saw the
+canvas of the brig, and his heart beat fast. The men bent to their oars.
+She drew nearer, and lay to. When they reached her he caught the
+rope the sailors threw, was on board in a moment, and went aft to the
+captain. The Dutchman stared. In a few words Robert made him understand
+his object, offering to pay for his passage, but the good man would not
+hear of it. He told him that the lady and gentleman had come on board as
+brother and sister: the baron was too knowing to run his head into the
+noose of Scotch law.
+
+'I cannot throw him over the board,' said the skipper; 'and what am I to
+do? I am afraid it is of no use. Ah! poor thing!'
+
+By this time the vessel was under way. The wind freshened. Mysie had
+been ill ever since they left the mouth of the river: now she was much
+worse. Before another hour passed, she was crying to be taken home to
+her papa. Still the wind increased, and the vessel laboured much.
+
+Robert never felt better, and if it had not been for the cause of his
+sea-faring, would have thoroughly enjoyed it. He put on some sea-going
+clothes of the captain's, and set himself to take his share in working
+the brig, in which he was soon proficient enough to be useful. When the
+sun rose, they were in a tossing wilderness of waves. With the sunrise,
+Robert began to think he had been guilty of a great folly. For what
+could he do? How was he to prevent the girl from going off with her
+lover the moment they landed? But his poor attempt would verify his
+willingness.
+
+The baron came on deck now and then, looking bored. He had not
+calculated on having to nurse the girl. Had Mysie been well, he could
+have amused himself with her, for he found her ignorance interesting.
+As it was, he felt injured, and indeed disgusted at the result of the
+experiment.
+
+On the third day the wind abated a little; but towards night it blew
+hard again, and it was not until they reached the smooth waters of the
+Scheldt that Mysie made her appearance on deck, looking dreadfully ill,
+and altogether like a miserable, unhappy child. Her beauty was greatly
+gone, and Lord Rothie did not pay her much attention.
+
+Robert had as yet made no attempt to communicate with her, for there was
+scarcely a chance of her concealing a letter from the baron. But as soon
+as they were in smooth water, he wrote one, telling her in the simplest
+language that the baron was a bad man, who had amused himself by making
+many women fall in love with him, and then leaving them miserable: he
+knew one of them himself.
+
+Having finished his letter, he began to look abroad over the smooth
+water, and the land smooth as the water. He saw tall poplars, the spires
+of the forest, and rows of round-headed dumpy trees, like domes. And
+he saw that all the buildings like churches, had either spires like
+poplars, or low round domes like those other trees. The domes gave an
+eastern aspect to the country. The spire of Antwerp cathedral especially
+had the poplar for its model. The pinnacles which rose from the base of
+each successive start of its narrowing height were just the clinging,
+upright branches of the poplar--a lovely instance of Art following
+Nature's suggestion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII. ROBERT FINDS A NEW INSTRUMENT.
+
+At length the vessel lay alongside the quay, and as Mysie stepped from
+its side the skipper found an opportunity of giving her Robert's letter.
+It was the poorest of chances, but Robert could think of no other.
+She started on receiving it, but regarding the skipper's significant
+gestures put it quietly away. She looked anything but happy, for her
+illness had deprived her of courage, and probably roused her conscience.
+Robert followed the pair, saw them enter The Great Labourer--what
+could the name mean? could it mean The Good Shepherd?--and turned away
+helpless, objectless indeed, for he had done all that he could, and that
+all was of no potency. A world of innocence and beauty was about to be
+hurled from its orbit of light into the blackness of outer chaos; he
+knew it, and was unable to speak word or do deed that should frustrate
+the power of a devil who so loved himself that he counted it an honour
+to a girl to have him for her ruin. Her after life had no significance
+for him, save as a trophy of his victory. He never perceived that such
+victory was not yielded to him; that he gained it by putting on the
+garments of light; that if his inward form had appeared in its own
+ugliness, not one of the women whose admiration he had secured would not
+have turned from him as from the monster of an old tale.
+
+Robert wandered about till he was so weary that his head ached with
+weariness. At length he came upon the open space before the cathedral,
+whence the poplar-spire rose aloft into a blue sky flecked with white
+clouds. It was near sunset, and he could not see the sun, but the upper
+half of the spire shone glorious in its radiance. From the top his eye
+sank to the base. In the base was a little door half open. Might
+not that be the lowly narrow entrance through the shadow up to the
+sun-filled air? He drew near with a kind of tremor, for never before
+had he gazed upon visible grandeur growing out of the human soul, in
+the majesty of everlastingness--a tree of the Lord's planting. Where had
+been but an empty space of air and light and darkness, had risen, and
+had stood for ages, a mighty wonder awful to the eye, solid to the
+hand. He peeped through the opening of the door: there was the foot of
+a stair--marvellous as the ladder of Jacob's dream--turning away towards
+the unknown. He pushed the door and entered. A man appeared and barred
+his advance. Robert put his hand in his pocket and drew out some silver.
+The man took one piece--looked at it--turned it over--put it in his
+pocket, and led the way up the stair. Robert followed and followed and
+followed.
+
+He came out of stone walls upon an airy platform whence the spire
+ascended heavenwards. His conductor led upward still, and he followed,
+winding within a spiral network of stone, through which all the world
+looked in. Another platform, and yet another spire springing from its
+basement. Still up they went, and at length stood on a circle of stone
+surrounding like a coronet the last base of the spire which lifted its
+apex untrodden. Then Robert turned and looked below. He grasped the
+stones before him. The loneliness was awful.
+
+There was nothing between him and the roofs of the houses, four hundred
+feet below, but the spot where he stood. The whole city, with its red
+roofs, lay under him. He stood uplifted on the genius of the builder,
+and the town beneath him was a toy. The all but featureless flat spread
+forty miles on every side, and the roofs of the largest buildings below
+were as dovecots. But the space between was alive with awe--so vast, so
+real!
+
+He turned and descended, winding through the network of stone which was
+all between him and space. The object of the architect must have been
+to melt away the material from before the eyes of the spirit. He hung
+in the air in a cloud of stone. As he came in his descent within the
+ornaments of one of the basements, he found himself looking through two
+thicknesses of stone lace on the nearing city. Down there was the beast
+of prey and his victim; but for the moment he was above the region of
+sorrow. His weariness and his headache had vanished utterly. With his
+mind tossed on its own speechless delight, he was slowly descending
+still, when he saw on his left hand a door ajar. He would look what
+mystery lay within. A push opened it. He discovered only a little
+chamber lined with wood. In the centre stood something--a bench-like
+piece of furniture, plain and worn. He advanced a step; peered over the
+top of it; saw keys, white and black; saw pedals below: it was an organ!
+Two strides brought him in front of it. A wooden stool, polished
+and hollowed with centuries of use, was before it. But where was the
+bellows? That might be down hundreds of steps below, for he was half-way
+only to the ground. He seated himself musingly, and struck, as he
+thought, a dumb chord. Responded, up in the air, far overhead, a mighty
+booming clang. Startled, almost frightened, even as if Mary St. John had
+said she loved him, Robert sprung from the stool, and, without knowing
+why, moved only by the chastity of delight, flung the door to the
+post. It banged and clicked. Almost mad with the joy of the titanic
+instrument, he seated himself again at the keys, and plunged into a
+tempest of clanging harmony. One hundred bells hang in that tower of
+wonder, an instrument for a city, nay, for a kingdom. Often had Robert
+dreamed that he was the galvanic centre of a thunder-cloud of harmony,
+flashing off from every finger the willed lightning tone: such was the
+unexpected scale of this instrument--so far aloft in the sunny air
+rang the responsive notes, that his dream appeared almost realized. The
+music, like a fountain bursting upwards, drew him up and bore him aloft.
+From the resounding cone of bells overhead he no longer heard their
+tones proceed, but saw level-winged forms of light speeding off with
+a message to the nations. It was only his roused phantasy; but a
+sweet tone is nevertheless a messenger of God; and a right harmony and
+sequence of such tones is a little gospel.
+
+At length he found himself following, till that moment unconsciously,
+the chain of tunes he well remembered having played on his violin the
+night he went first with Ericson to see Mysie, ending with his strange
+chant about the witch lady and the dead man's hand.
+
+Ere he had finished the last, his passion had begun to fold its wings,
+and he grew dimly aware of a beating at the door of the solitary
+chamber in which he sat. He knew nothing of the enormity of which he
+was guilty--presenting unsought the city of Antwerp with a glorious
+phantasia. He did not know that only upon grand, solemn, world-wide
+occasions, such as a king's birthday or a ball at the Hotel de Ville,
+was such music on the card. When he flung the door to, it had
+closed with a spring lock, and for the last quarter of an hour
+three gens-d'arme, commanded by the sacristan of the tower, had been
+thundering thereat. He waited only to finish the last notes of the
+wild Orcadian chant, and opened the door. He was seized by the collar,
+dragged down the stair into the street, and through a crowd of wondering
+faces--poor unconscious dreamer! it will not do to think on the
+house-top even, and you had been dreaming very loud indeed in the church
+spire--away to the bureau of the police.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV. DEATH.
+
+I need not recount the proceedings of the Belgian police; how they
+interrogated Robert concerning a letter from Mary St. John which they
+found in an inner pocket; how they looked doubtful over a copy of Horace
+that lay in his coat, and put evidently a momentous question about
+some algebraical calculations on the fly-leaf of it. Fortunately or
+unfortunately--I do not know which--Robert did not understand a word
+they said to him. He was locked up, and left to fret for nearly a week;
+though what he could have done had he been at liberty, he knew as little
+as I know. At last, long after it was useless to make any inquiry about
+Miss Lindsay, he was set at liberty. He could just pay for a steerage
+passage to London, whence he wrote to Dr. Anderson for a supply, and was
+in Aberdeen a few days after.
+
+This was Robert's first cosmopolitan experience. He confided the whole
+affair to the doctor, who approved of all, saying it could have been of
+no use, but he had done right. He advised him to go home at once, for
+he had had letters inquiring after him. Ericson was growing steadily
+worse--in fact, he feared Robert might not see him alive.
+
+If this news struck Robert to the heart, his pain was yet not without
+some poor alleviation:--he need not tell Ericson about Mysie, but might
+leave him to find out the truth when, free of a dying body, he would
+be better able to bear it. That very night he set off on foot for
+Rothieden. There was no coach from Aberdeen till eight the following
+morning, and before that he would be there.
+
+It was a dreary journey without Ericson. Every turn of the road reminded
+him of him. And Ericson too was going a lonely unknown way.
+
+Did ever two go together upon that way? Might not two die together and
+not lose hold of each other all the time, even when the sense of the
+clasping hands was gone, and the soul had withdrawn itself from the
+touch? Happy they who prefer the will of God to their own even in this,
+and would, as the best friend, have him near who can be near--him who
+made the fourth in the fiery furnace! Fable or fact, reader, I do not
+care. The One I mean is, and in him I hope.
+
+Very weary was Robert when he walked into his grandmother's house.
+
+Betty came out of the kitchen at the sound of his entrance.
+
+'Is Mr. Ericson--?'
+
+'Na; he's nae deid,' she answered. 'He'll maybe live a day or twa, they
+say.'
+
+'Thank God!' said Robert, and went to his grandmother.
+
+'Eh, laddie!' said Mrs. Falconer, the first greetings over, 'ane 's
+ta'en an' anither 's left! but what for 's mair nor I can faddom.
+There's that fine young man, Maister Ericson, at deith's door; an' here
+am I, an auld runklet wife, left to cry upo' deith, an' he winna hear
+me.'
+
+'Cry upo' God, grannie, an' no upo' deith,' said Robert, catching at the
+word as his grandmother herself might have done. He had no such unfair
+habit when I knew him, and always spoke to one's meaning, not one's
+words. But then he had a wonderful gift of knowing what one's meaning
+was.
+
+He did not sit down, but, tired as he was, went straight to The Boar's
+Head. He met no one in the archway, and walked up to Ericson's room.
+When he opened the door, he found the large screen on the other side,
+and hearing a painful cough, lingered behind it, for he could not
+control his feelings sufficiently. Then he heard a voice--Ericson's
+voice; but oh, how changed!--He had no idea that he ought not to listen.
+
+'Mary,' the voice said, 'do not look like that. I am not suffering. It
+is only my body. Your arm round me makes me so strong! Let me lay my
+head on your shoulder.'
+
+A brief pause followed.
+
+'But, Eric,' said Mary's voice, 'there is one that loves you better than
+I do.'
+
+'If there is,' returned Ericson, feebly, 'he has sent his angel to
+deliver me.'
+
+'But you do believe in him, Eric?'
+
+The voice expressed anxiety no less than love.
+
+'I am going to see. There is no other way. When I find him, I shall
+believe in him. I shall love him with all my heart, I know. I love the
+thought of him now.'
+
+'But that's not himself, my--darling!' she said.
+
+'No. But I cannot love himself till I find him. Perhaps there is no
+Jesus.'
+
+'Oh, don't say that. I can't bear to hear you talk so,'
+
+'But, dear heart, if you're so sure of him, do you think he would turn
+me away because I don't do what I can't do? I would if I could with all
+my heart. If I were to say I believed in him, and then didn't trust him,
+I could understand it. But when it's only that I'm not sure about what I
+never saw, or had enough of proof to satisfy me of, how can he be vexed
+at that? You seem to me to do him great wrong, Mary. Would you now
+banish me for ever, if I should, when my brain is wrapped in the clouds
+of death, forget you along with everything else for a moment?'
+
+'No, no, no. Don't talk like that, Eric, dear. There may be reasons, you
+know.'
+
+'I know what they say well enough. But I expect Him, if there is a Him,
+to be better even than you, my beautiful--and I don't know a fault in
+you, but that you believe in a God you can't trust. If I believed in
+a God, wouldn't I trust him just? And I do hope in him. We'll see, my
+darling. When we meet again I think you'll say I was right.'
+
+Robert stood like one turned into marble. Deep called unto deep in his
+soul. The waves and the billows went over him.
+
+Mary St. John answered not a word. I think she must have been
+conscience-stricken. Surely the Son of Man saw nearly as much faith in
+Ericson as in her. Only she clung to the word as a bond that the Lord
+had given her: she would rather have his bond.
+
+Ericson had another fit of coughing. Robert heard the rustling of
+ministration. But in a moment the dying man again took up the word. He
+seemed almost as anxious about Mary's faith as she was about his.
+
+'There's Robert,' he said: 'I do believe that boy would die for me, and
+I never did anything to deserve it. Now Jesus Christ must be as good as
+Robert at least. I think he must be a great deal better, if he's Jesus
+Christ at all. Now Robert might be hurt if I didn't believe in him. But
+I've never seen Jesus Christ. It's all in an old book, over which the
+people that say they believe in it the most, fight like dogs and cats. I
+beg your pardon, my Mary; but they do, though the words are ugly.'
+
+'Ah! but if you had tried it as I've tried it, you would know better,
+Eric.'
+
+'I think I should, dear. But it's too late now. I must just go and see.
+There's no other way left.'
+
+The terrible cough came again. As soon as the fit was over, with a grand
+despair in his heart, Robert went from behind the screen.
+
+Ericson was on a couch. His head lay on Mary St. John's bosom. Neither
+saw him.
+
+'Perhaps,' said Ericson, panting with death, 'a kiss in heaven may be as
+good as being married on earth, Mary.'
+
+She saw Robert and did not answer. Then Eric saw him. He smiled; but
+Mary grew very pale.
+
+Robert came forward, stooped and kissed Ericson's forehead, kneeled and
+kissed Mary's hand, rose and went out.
+
+From that moment they were both dead to him. Dead, I say--not lost, not
+estranged, but dead--that is, awful and holy. He wept for Eric. He did
+not weep for Mary yet. But he found a time.
+
+Ericson died two days after.
+
+Here endeth Robert's youth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV. IN MEMORIAM.
+
+In memory of Eric Ericson, I add a chapter of sonnets gathered from his
+papers, almost desiring that those only should read them who turn to
+the book a second time. How his papers came into my possession, will be
+explained afterwards.
+
+     Tumultuous rushing o'er the outstretched plains;
+     A wildered maze of comets and of suns;
+     The blood of changeless God that ever runs
+     With quick diastole up the immortal veins;
+     A phantom host that moves and works in chains;
+     A monstrous fiction which, collapsing, stuns
+     The mind to stupor and amaze at once;
+     A tragedy which that man best explains
+     Who rushes blindly on his wild career
+     With trampling hoofs and sound of mailed war,
+     Who will not nurse a life to win a tear,
+     But is extinguished like a falling star:--
+     Such will at times this life appear to me,
+     Until I learn to read more perfectly.
+
+     HOM.  IL. v. 403.
+
+     If thou art tempted by a thought of ill,
+     Crave not too soon for victory, nor deem
+     Thou art a coward if thy safety seem
+     To spring too little from a righteous will:
+     For there is nightmare on thee, nor until
+     Thy soul hath caught the morning's early gleam
+     Seek thou to analyze the monstrous dream
+     By painful introversion; rather fill
+     Thine eye with forms thou knowest to be truth:
+     But see thou cherish higher hope than this;
+     A hope hereafter that thou shalt be fit
+     Calm-eyed to face distortion, and to sit
+     Transparent among other forms of youth
+     Who own no impulse save to God and bliss.
+
+     And must I ever wake, gray dawn, to know
+     Thee standing sadly by me like a ghost?
+     I am perplexed with thee, that thou shouldst cost
+     This Earth another turning: all aglow
+     Thou shouldst have reached me, with a purple show
+     Along far-mountain tops: and I would post
+     Over the breadth of seas though I were lost
+     In the hot phantom-chase for life, if so
+     Thou camest ever with this numbing sense
+     Of chilly distance and unlovely light;
+     Waking this gnawing soul anew to fight
+     With its perpetual load: I drive thee hence--
+     I have another mountain-range from whence
+     Bursteh a sun unutterably bright.
+
+     GALILEO.
+
+     'And yet it moves!'  Ah, Truth, where wert thou then,
+     When all for thee they racked each piteous limb?
+     Wert though in Heaven, and busy with thy hymn,
+     When those poor hands convulsed that held thy pen?
+     Art thou a phantom that deceivest men
+     To their undoing? or dost thou watch him
+     Pale, cold, and silent in his dungeon dim?
+     And wilt thou ever speak to him again?
+     'It moves, it moves!  Alas, my flesh was weak;
+     That was a hideous dream!  I'll cry aloud
+     How the green bulk wheels sunward day by day!
+     Ah me! ah me! perchance my heart was proud
+     That I alone should know that word to speak;
+     And now, sweet Truth, shine upon these, I pray.'
+
+     If thou wouldst live the Truth in very deed,
+     Thou hast thy joy, but thou hast more of pain.
+     Others will live in peace, and thou be fain
+     To bargain with despair, and in thy need
+     To make thy meal upon the scantiest weed.
+     These palaces, for thee they stand in vain;
+     Thine is a ruinous hut; and oft the rain
+     Shall drench thee in the midnight; yea the speed
+     Of earth outstrip thee pilgrim, while thy feet
+     Move slowly up the heights.  Yet will there come
+     Through the time-rents about thy moving cell,
+     An arrow for despair, and oft the hum
+     Of far-off populous realms where spirits dwell.
+
+     TO * * * *
+
+     Speak, Prophet of the Lord!  We may not start
+     To find thee with us in thine ancient dress,
+     Haggard and pale from some bleak wilderness,
+     Empty of all save God and thy loud heart:
+     Nor with like rugged message quick to dart
+     Into the hideous fiction mean and base:
+     But yet, O prophet man, we need not less,
+     But more of earnest; though it is thy part
+     To deal in other words, if thou wouldst smite
+     The living Mammon, seated, not as then
+     In bestial quiescence grimly dight,
+     But thrice as much an idol-god as when
+     He stared at his own feet from morn to night. [8]
+
+     THE WATCHER.
+
+     From out a windy cleft there comes a gaze
+     Of eyes unearthly which go to and fro
+     Upon the people's tumult, for below
+     The nations smite each other: no amaze
+     Troubles their liquid rolling, or affrays
+     Their deep-set contemplation: steadily glow
+     Those ever holier eye-balls, for they grow
+     Liker unto the eyes of one that prays.
+     And if those clasped hands tremble, comes a power
+     As of the might of worlds, and they are holden
+     Blessing above us in the sunrise golden;
+     And they will be uplifted till that hour
+     Of terrible rolling which shall rise and shake
+     This conscious nightmare from us and we wake.
+
+     THE BELOVED DISCIPLE.
+
+     I
+
+     One do I see and twelve; but second there
+     Methinks I know thee, thou beloved one;
+     Not from thy nobler port, for there are none
+     More quiet-featured; some there are who bear
+     Their message on their brows, while others wear
+     A look of large commission, nor will shun
+     The fiery trial, so their work is done:
+     But thou hast parted with thine eyes in prayer--
+     Unearthly are they both; and so thy lips
+     Seem like the porches of the spirit land;
+     For thou hast laid a mighty treasure by,
+     Unlocked by Him in Nature, and thine eye
+     Burns with a vision and apocalypse
+     Thy own sweet soul can hardly understand.
+
+     II
+
+     A Boanerges too!  Upon my heart
+     It lay a heavy hour: features like thine
+     Should glow with other message than the shine
+     Of the earth-burrowing levin, and the start
+     That cleaveth horrid gulfs.  Awful and swart
+     A moment stoodest thou, but less divine--
+     Brawny and clad in ruin!--till with mine
+     Thy heart made answering signals, and apart
+     Beamed forth thy two rapt eye-balls doubly clear,
+     And twice as strong because thou didst thy duty,
+     And though affianced to immortal Beauty,
+     Hiddest not weakly underneath her veil
+     The pest of Sin and Death which maketh pale:
+     Henceforward be thy spirit doubly dear. [9]
+
+     THE LILY OF THE VALLEY.
+
+     There is not any weed but hath its shower,
+     There is not any pool but hath its star;
+     And black and muddy though the waters are,
+     We may not miss the glory of a flower,
+     And winter moons will give them magic power
+     To spin in cylinders of diamond spar;
+     And everything hath beauty near and far,
+     And keepeth close and waiteth on its hour.
+     And I when I encounter on my road
+     A human soul that looketh black and grim,
+     Shall I more ceremonious be than God?
+     Shall I refuse to watch one hour with him
+     Who once beside our deepest woe did bud
+     A patient watching flower about the brim.
+
+     'Tis not the violent hands alone that bring
+     The curse, the ravage, and the downward doom
+     Although to these full oft the yawning tomb
+     Owes deadly surfeit; but a keener sting,
+     A more immortal agony, will cling
+     To the half-fashioned sin which would assume
+     Fair Virtue's garb.  The eye that sows the gloom
+     With quiet seeds of Death henceforth to spring
+     What time the sun of passion burning fierce
+     Breaks through the kindly cloud of circumstance;
+     The bitter word, and the unkindly glance,
+     The crust and canker coming with the years,
+     Are liker Death than arrows, and the lance
+     Which through the living heart at once doth pierce.
+
+     SPOKEN OF SEVERAL PHILOSOPHERS.
+
+     I pray you, all ye men, who put your trust
+     In moulds and systems and well-tackled gear,
+     Holding that Nature lives from year to year
+     In one continual round because she must--
+     Set me not down, I pray you, in the dust
+     Of all these centuries, like a pot of beer,
+     A pewter-pot disconsolately clear,
+     Which holds a potful, as is right and just.
+     I will grow clamorous--by the rood, I will,
+     If thus ye use me like a pewter pot.
+     Good friend, thou art a toper and a sot--
+     I will not be the lead to hold thy swill,
+     Nor any lead: I will arise and spill
+     Thy silly beverage, spill it piping hot.
+
+     Nature, to him no message dost thou bear,
+     Who in thy beauty findeth not the power
+     To gird himself more strongly for the hour
+     Of night and darkness.  Oh, what colours rare
+     The woods, the valleys, and the mountains wear
+     To him who knows thy secret, and in shower
+     And fog, and ice-cloud, hath a secret bower
+     Where he may rest until the heavens are fair!
+     Not with the rest of slumber, but the trance
+     Of onward movement steady and serene,
+     Where oft in struggle and in contest keen
+     His eyes will opened be, and all the dance
+     Of life break on him, and a wide expanse
+     Roll upward through the void, sunny and green.
+
+     TO JUNE.
+
+     Ah, truant, thou art here again, I see!
+     For in a season of such wretched weather
+     I thought that thou hadst left us altogether,
+     Although I could not choose but fancy thee
+     Skulking about the hill-tops, whence the glee
+     Of thy blue laughter peeped at times, or rather
+     Thy bashful awkwardness, as doubtful whether
+     Thou shouldst be seen in such a company
+     Of ugly runaways, unshapely heaps
+     Of ruffian vapour, broken from restraint
+     Of their slim prison in the ocean deeps.
+     But yet I may not, chide: fall to thy books,
+     Fall to immediately without complaint--
+     There they are lying, hills and vales and brooks.
+
+     WRITTEN ABOUT THE LONGEST DAY.
+
+     Summer, sweet Summer, many-fingered Summer!
+     We hold thee very dear, as well we may:
+     It is the kernel of the year to-day--
+     All hail to thee!  Thou art a welcome corner!
+     If every insect were a fairy drummer,
+     And I a fifer that could deftly play,
+     We'd give the old Earth such a roundelay
+     That she would cast all thought of labour from her
+     Ah! what is this upon my window-pane?
+     Some sulky drooping cloud comes pouting up,
+     Stamping its glittering feet along the plain!
+     Well, I will let that idle fancy drop.
+     Oh, how the spouts are bubbling with the rain!
+     And all the earth shines like a silver cup!
+
+     ON A MIDGE.
+
+     Whence do ye come, ye creature?  Each of you
+     Is perfect as an angel; wings and eyes
+     Stupendous in their beauty--gorgeous dyes
+     In feathery fields of purple and of blue!
+     Would God I saw a moment as ye do!
+     I would become a molecule in size,
+     Rest with you, hum with you, or slanting rise
+     Along your one dear sunbeam, could I view
+     The pearly secret which each tiny fly,
+     Each tiny fly that hums and bobs and stirs,
+     Hides in its little breast eternally
+     From you, ye prickly grim philosophers,
+     With all your theories that sound so high:
+     Hark to the buzz a moment, my good sirs!
+
+     ON A WATERFALL.
+
+     Here stands a giant stone from whose far top
+     Comes down the sounding water.  Let me gaze
+     Till every sense of man and human ways
+     Is wrecked and quenched for ever, and I drop
+     Into the whirl of time, and without stop
+     Pass downward thus!  Again my eyes I raise
+     To thee, dark rock; and through the mist and haze
+     My strength returns when I behold thy prop
+     Gleam stern and steady through the wavering wrack
+     Surely thy strength is human, and like me
+     Thou bearest loads of thunder on thy back!
+     And, lo, a smile upon thy visage black--
+     A breezy tuft of grass which I can see
+     Waving serenely from a sunlit crack!
+
+     Above my head the great pine-branches tower
+     Backwards and forwards each to the other bends,
+     Beckoning the tempest-cloud which hither wends
+     Like a slow-laboured thought, heavy with power;
+     Hark to the patter of the coming shower!
+     Let me be silent while the Almighty sends
+     His thunder-word along; but when it ends
+     I will arise and fashion from the hour
+     Words of stupendous import, fit to guard
+     High thoughts and purposes, which I may wave,
+     When the temptation cometh close and hard,
+     Like fiery brands betwixt me and the grave
+     Of meaner things--to which I am a slave
+     If evermore I keep not watch and ward.
+
+     I do remember how when very young,
+     I saw the great sea first, and heard its swell
+     As I drew nearer, caught within the spell
+     Of its vast size and its mysterious tongue.
+     How the floor trembled, and the dark boat swung
+     With a man in it, and a great wave fell
+     Within a stone's cast!  Words may never tell
+     The passion of the moment, when I flung
+     All childish records by, and felt arise
+     A thing that died no more!  An awful power
+     I claimed with trembling hands and eager eyes,
+     Mine, mine for ever, an immortal dower.--
+     The noise of waters soundeth to this hour,
+     When I look seaward through the quiet skies.
+
+     ON THE SOURCE OF THE ARVE.
+
+     Hear'st thou the dash of water loud and hoarse
+     With its perpetual tidings upward climb,
+     Struggling against the wind?  Oh, how sublime!
+     For not in vain from its portentous source,
+     Thy heart, wild stream, hath yearned for its full force,
+     But from thine ice-toothed caverns dark as time
+     At last thou issuest, dancing to the rhyme
+     Of thy outvolleying freedom!  Lo, thy course
+     Lies straight before thee as the arrow flies,
+     Right to the ocean-plains.  Away, away!
+     Thy parent waits thee, and her sunset dyes
+     Are ruffled for thy coming, and the gray
+     Of all her glittering borders flashes high
+     Against the glittering rocks: oh, haste, and fly!
+
+
+
+
+PART III.--HIS MANHOOD.
+
+
+
+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 pass. 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' God. 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 noble 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 God 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 God 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 God 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 canal--all as
+soft as the moonlight, as exquisite as an odour, each sound tenderly
+truncated and dull. A great multitude 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 multitude 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. Passing 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 passed 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 God 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 God 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 God 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 mass to gladden the earth below with the faith of
+the lonely hills. The mighty creatures lay like grotesque animals of
+a far-off titanic 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 mass 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 mass 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 mass 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 grasses. 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
+grasshoppers chirped about him, and the gorgeous butterflies 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 hell, suspended between peaks and gulfs.
+The wind must roar awfully there in the winter; but the mountains stand
+away with their avalanches, and all the summer long keep the cold off
+the grassy fields.
+
+The same evening, he was already weary. The next morning it rained. It
+rained fiercely all day. He would leave the place on the morrow. In the
+evening it began to clear up. He walked out. The sun was setting. The
+snow-peaks were faintly tinged with rose, and the ragged masses of
+vapour that hung lazy and leaden-coloured about the sides of the abyss,
+were partially dyed a sulky orange red. Then all faded into gray. But
+as the sunlight vanished, a veil sank from the face of the moon, already
+half-way to the zenith, and she gathered courage and shone, till the
+mountain looked lovely as a ghost in the gleam of its snow and the
+glimmer of its glaciers. 'Ah!' thought Falconer, 'such a peace at last
+is all a man can look for--the repose of a spectral Elysium, a world
+where passion has died away, and only the dim ghost of its memory to
+disturb with a shadowy sorrow the helpless content of its undreaming
+years. The religion that can do but this much is not a very great or
+very divine thing. The human heart cannot invent a better it may be, but
+it can imagine grander results.'
+
+He did not yet know what the religion was of which he spoke. As well
+might a man born stone-deaf estimate the power of sweet sounds, or
+he who knows not a square from a circle pronounce upon the study of
+mathematics.
+
+The next morning rose brilliant--an ideal summer day. He would not go
+yet; he would spend one day more in the place. He opened his valise to
+get some lighter garments. His eye fell on a New Testament. Dr. Anderson
+had put it there. He had never opened it yet, and now he let it lie. Its
+time had not yet come. He went out.
+
+Walking up the edge of the valley, he came upon a little stream whose
+talk he had heard for some hundred yards. It flowed through a grassy
+hollow, with steeply sloping sides. Water is the same all the world
+over; but there was more than water here to bring his childhood back
+to Falconer. For at the spot where the path led him down to the burn, a
+little crag stood out from the bank,--a gray stone like many he knew on
+the stream that watered the valley of Rothieden: on the top of the stone
+grew a little heather; and beside it, bending towards the water, was a
+silver birch. He sat down on the foot of the rock, shut in by the high
+grassy banks from the gaze of the awful mountains. The sole unrest was
+the run of the water beside him, and it sounded so homely, that he
+began to jabber Scotch to it. He forgot that this stream was born in the
+clouds, far up where that peak rose into the air behind him; he did
+not know that a couple of hundred yards from where he sat, it tumbled
+headlong into the valley below: with his country's birch-tree beside
+him, and the rock crowned with its tuft of heather over his head, the
+quiet as of a Sabbath afternoon fell upon him--that quiet which is the
+one altogether lovely thing in the Scotch Sabbath--and once more the
+words arose in his mind, 'My peace I give unto you.'
+
+Now he fell a-thinking what this peace could be. And it came into his
+mind as he thought, that Jesus had spoken in another place about giving
+rest to those that came to him, while here he spoke about 'my peace.'
+Could this my mean a certain kind of peace that the Lord himself
+possessed? Perhaps it was in virtue of that peace, whatever it was, that
+he was the Prince of Peace. Whatever peace he had must be the highest
+and best peace--therefore the one peace for a man to seek, if indeed, as
+the words of the Lord seemed to imply, a man was capable of possessing
+it. He remembered the New Testament in his box, and, resolving to try
+whether he could not make something more out of it, went back to the inn
+quieter in heart than since he left his home. In the evening he returned
+to the brook, and fell to searching the story, seeking after the peace
+of Jesus.
+
+He found that the whole passage stood thus:--
+
+'Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world
+giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it
+be afraid.'
+
+He did not leave the place for six weeks. Every day he went to the burn,
+as he called it, with his New Testament; every day tried yet again to
+make out something more of what the Saviour meant. By the end of the
+month it had dawned upon him, he hardly knew how, that the peace of
+Jesus (although, of course, he could not know what it was like till he
+had it) must have been a peace that came from the doing of the will of
+his Father. From the account he gave of the discoveries he then made, I
+venture to represent them in the driest and most exact form that I can
+find they will admit of. When I use the word discoveries, I need hardly
+say that I use it with reference to Falconer and his previous knowledge.
+They were these:--that Jesus taught--
+
+First,--That a man's business is to do the will of God:
+
+Second,--That God takes upon himself the care of the man:
+
+Third,--Therefore, that a man must never be afraid of anything; and so,
+
+Fourth,--be left free to love God with all his heart, and his neighbour
+as himself.
+
+But one day, his thoughts having cleared themselves a little upon these
+points, a new set of questions arose with sudden inundation--comprised
+in these two:--
+
+'How can I tell for certain that there ever was such a man? How am I to
+be sure that such as he says is the mind of the maker of these glaciers
+and butterflies?'
+
+All this time he was in the wilderness as much as Moses at the back of
+Horeb, or St. Paul when he vanishes in Arabia: and he did nothing
+but read the four gospels and ponder over them. Therefore it is not
+surprising that he should have already become so familiar with the
+gospel story, that the moment these questions appeared, the following
+words should dart to the forefront of his consciousness to meet them:--
+
+'If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it
+be of God, or whether I speak of myself.'
+
+Here was a word of Jesus himself, announcing the one means of arriving
+at a conviction of the truth or falsehood of all that he said, namely,
+the doing of the will of God by the man who would arrive at such
+conviction.
+
+The next question naturally was: What is this will of God of which
+Jesus speaks? Here he found himself in difficulty. The theology of
+his grandmother rushed in upon him, threatening to overwhelm him with
+demands as to feeling and inward action from which his soul turned
+with sickness and fainting. That they were repulsive to him, that they
+appeared unreal, and contradictory to the nature around him, was no
+proof that they were not of God. But on the other hand, that they
+demanded what seemed to him unjust,--that these demands were founded on
+what seemed to him untruth attributed to God, on ways of thinking and
+feeling which are certainly degrading in a man,--these were reasons of
+the very highest nature for refusing to act upon them so long as, from
+whatever defects it might be in himself, they bore to him this aspect.
+He saw that while they appeared to be such, even though it might turn
+out that he mistook them, to acknowledge them would be to wrong God. But
+this conclusion left him in no better position for practice than before.
+
+When at length he did see what the will of God was, he wondered, so
+simple did it appear, that he had failed to discover it at once. Yet
+not less than a fortnight had he been brooding and pondering over the
+question, as he wandered up and down that burnside, or sat at the foot
+of the heather-crowned stone and the silver-barked birch, when the light
+began to dawn upon him. It was thus.
+
+In trying to understand the words of Jesus by searching back, as it
+were, for such thoughts and feelings in him as would account for the
+words he spoke, the perception awoke that at least he could not have
+meant by the will of God any such theological utterances as those which
+troubled him. Next it grew plain that what he came to do, was just to
+lead his life. That he should do the work, such as recorded, and much
+besides, that the Father gave him to do--this was the will of God
+concerning him. With this perception arose the conviction that unto
+every man whom God had sent into the world, he had given a work to do in
+that world. He had to lead the life God meant him to lead. The will of
+God was to be found and done in the world. In seeking a true relation to
+the world, would he find his relation to God?
+
+The time for action was come.
+
+He rose up from the stone of his meditation, took his staff in his hand,
+and went down the mountain, not knowing whither he went. And these were
+some of his thoughts as he went:
+
+'If it was the will of God who made me and her, my will shall not be set
+against his. I cannot be happy, but I will bow my head and let his waves
+and his billows go over me. If there is such a God, he knows what a pain
+I bear. His will be done. Jesus thought it well that his will should
+be done to the death. Even if there be no God, it will be grand to be a
+disciple of such a man, to do as he says, think as he thought--perhaps
+come to feel as he felt.'
+
+My reader may wonder that one so young should have been able to think so
+practically--to the one point of action. But he was in earnest, and what
+lay at the root of his character, at the root of all that he did, felt,
+and became, was childlike simplicity and purity of nature. If the sins
+of his father were mercifully visited upon him, so likewise were the
+grace and loveliness of his mother. And between the two, Falconer had
+fared well.
+
+As he descended the mountain, the one question was--his calling. With
+the faintest track to follow, with the clue of a spider's thread to
+guide him, he would have known that his business was to set out at once
+to find, and save his father. But never since the day when the hand
+of that father smote him, and Mary St. John found him bleeding on the
+floor, had he heard word or conjecture concerning him. If he were to set
+out to find him now, it would be to search the earth for one who might
+have vanished from it years ago. He might as well search the streets of
+a great city for a lost jewel. When the time came for him to find his
+father, if such an hour was written in the decrees of--I dare not say
+Fate, for Falconer hated the word--if such was the will of God, some
+sign would be given him--that is, some hint which he could follow with
+action. As he thought and thought it became gradually plainer that he
+must begin his obedience by getting ready for anything that God might
+require of him. Therefore he must go on learning till the call came.
+
+But he shivered at the thought of returning to Aberdeen. Might he not
+continue his studies in Germany? Would that not be as good--possibly,
+from the variety of the experience, better? But how was it to be
+decided? By submitting the matter to the friend who made either
+possible. Dr. Anderson had been to him as a father: he would be guided
+by his pleasure.
+
+He wrote, therefore, to Dr. Anderson, saying that he would return at
+once if he wished it, but that he would greatly prefer going to a German
+university for two years. The doctor replied that of course he would
+rather have him at home, but that he was confident Robert knew best what
+was best for himself; therefore he had only to settle where he thought
+proper, and the next summer he would come and see him, for he was not
+tied to Aberdeen any more than Robert.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. HOME AGAIN.
+
+Four years passed before Falconer returned to his native country, during
+which period Dr. Anderson had visited him twice, and shown himself
+well satisfied with his condition and pursuits. The doctor had likewise
+visited Rothieden, and had comforted the heart of the grandmother with
+regard to her Robert. From what he learned upon this visit, he had
+arrived at a true conjecture, I believe, as to the cause of the great
+change which had suddenly taken place in the youth. But he never asked
+Robert a question leading in the direction of the grief which he saw the
+healthy and earnest nature of the youth gradually assimilating into his
+life. He had too much respect for sorrow to approach it with curiosity.
+He had learned to put off his shoes when he drew nigh the burning bush
+of human pain.
+
+Robert had not settled at any of the universities, but had moved from
+one to the other as he saw fit, report guiding him to the men who spoke
+with authority. The time of doubt and anxious questioning was far
+from over, but the time was long gone by--if in his case it had ever
+been--when he could be like a wave of the sea, driven of the wind
+and tossed. He had ever one anchor of the soul, and he found that it
+held--the faith of Jesus (I say the faith of Jesus, not his own faith
+in Jesus), the truth of Jesus, the life of Jesus. However his intellect
+might be tossed on the waves of speculation and criticism, he found
+that the word the Lord had spoken remained steadfast; for in doing
+righteously, in loving mercy, in walking humbly, the conviction
+increased that Jesus knew the very secret of human life. Now and then
+some great vision gleamed across his soul of the working of all things
+towards a far-off goal of simple obedience to a law of life, which God
+knew, and which his son had justified through sorrow and pain. Again and
+again the words of the Master gave him a peep into a region where all
+was explicable, where all that was crooked might be made straight, where
+every mountain of wrong might be made low, and every valley of suffering
+exalted. Ever and again some one of the dark perplexities of humanity
+began to glimmer with light in its inmost depth. Nor was he without
+those moments of communion when the creature is lifted into the secret
+place of the Creator.
+
+Looking back to the time when it seemed that he cried and was not heard,
+he saw that God had been hearing, had been answering, all the time; had
+been making him capable of receiving the gift for which he prayed. He
+saw that intellectual difficulty encompassing the highest operations of
+harmonizing truth, can no more affect their reality than the dulness
+of chaos disprove the motions of the wind of God over the face of its
+waters. He saw that any true revelation must come out of the unknown in
+God through the unknown in man. He saw that its truths must rise in the
+man as powers of life, and that only as that life grows and unfolds can
+the ever-lagging intellect gain glimpses of partial outlines fading away
+into the infinite--that, indeed, only in material things and the laws
+that belong to them, are outlines possible--even there, only in the
+picture of them which the mind that analyzes them makes for itself, not
+in the things themselves.
+
+At the close of these four years, with his spirit calm and hopeful,
+truth his passion, and music, which again he had resumed and diligently
+cultivated, his pleasure, Falconer returned to Aberdeen. He was received
+by Dr. Anderson as if he had in truth been his own son. In the
+room stood a tall figure, with its back towards them, pocketing its
+handkerchief. The next moment the figure turned, and--could it be?--yes,
+it was Shargar. Doubt lingered only until he opened his mouth, and said
+'Eh, Robert!' with which exclamation he threw himself upon him, and
+after a very undignified fashion began crying heartily. Tall as he was,
+Robert's great black head towered above him, and his shoulders were like
+a rock against which Shargar's slight figure leaned. He looked down like
+a compassionate mastiff upon a distressed Italian grayhound. His eyes
+shimmered with feeling, but Robert's tears, if he ever shed any, were
+kept for very solemn occasions. He was more likely to weep for awful
+joy than for any sufferings either in himself or others. 'Shargar!'
+pronounced in a tone full of a thousand memories, was all the greeting
+he returned; but his great manly hand pressed Shargar's delicate
+long-fingered one with a grasp which must have satisfied his friend that
+everything was as it had been between them, and that their friendship
+from henceforth would take a new start. For with all that Robert had
+seen, thought, and learned, now that the bitterness of loss had gone by,
+the old times and the old friends were dearer. If there was any truth in
+the religion of God's will, in which he was a disciple, every moment
+of life's history which had brought soul in contact with soul, must be
+sacred as a voice from behind the veil. Therefore he could not now rest
+until he had gone to see his grandmother.
+
+'Will you come to Rothieden with me, Shargar? I beg your pardon--I
+oughtn't to keep up an old nickname,' said Robert, as they sat that
+evening with the doctor, over a tumbler of toddy.
+
+'If you call me anything else, I'll cut my throat, Robert, as I told
+you before. If any one else does,' he added, laughing, 'I'll cut his
+throat.'
+
+'Can he go with me, doctor?' asked Robert, turning to their host.
+
+'Certainly. He has not been to Rothieden since he took his degree. He's
+an A.M. now, and has distinguished himself besides. You'll see him in
+his uniform soon, I hope. Let's drink his health, Robert. Fill your
+glass.'
+
+The doctor filled his glass slowly and solemnly. He seldom drank
+even wine, but this was a rare occasion. He then rose, and with equal
+slowness, and a tremor in his voice which rendered it impossible to
+imagine the presence of anything but seriousness, said,
+
+'Robert, my son, let's drink the health of George Moray, Gentleman.
+Stand up.'
+
+Robert rose, and in his confusion Shargar rose too, and sat down again,
+blushing till his red hair looked yellow beside his cheeks. The men
+repeated the words, 'George Moray, Gentleman,' emptied their glasses,
+and resumed their seats. Shargar rose trembling, and tried in vain
+to speak. The reason in part was, that he sought to utter himself in
+English.
+
+'Hoots! Damn English!' he broke out at last. 'Gin I be a gentleman, Dr.
+Anderson and Robert Falconer, it's you twa 'at's made me ane, an' God
+bless ye, an' I'm yer hoomble servant to a' etairnity.'
+
+So saying, Shargar resumed his seat, filled his glass with trembling
+hand, emptied it to hide his feelings, but without success, rose once
+more, and retreated to the hall for a space.
+
+The next morning Robert and Shargar got on the coach and went to
+Rothieden. Robert turned his head aside as they came near the bridge
+and the old house of Bogbonnie. But, ashamed of his weakness, he turned
+again and looked at the house. There it stood, all the same,--a thing
+for the night winds to howl in, and follow each other in mad gambols
+through its long passages and rooms, so empty from the first that not
+even a ghost had any reason for going there--a place almost without a
+history--dreary emblem of so many empty souls that have hidden their
+talent in a napkin, and have nothing to return for it when the Master
+calls them. Having looked this one in the face, he felt stronger to meet
+those other places before which his heart quailed yet more. He knew that
+Miss St. John had left soon after Ericson's death: whether he was
+sorry or glad that he should not see her he could not tell. He thought
+Rothieden would look like Pompeii, a city buried and disinterred; but
+when the coach drove into the long straggling street, he found the
+old love revive, and although the blood rushed back to his heart when
+Captain Forsyth's house came in view, he did not turn away, but made his
+eyes, and through them his heart, familiar with its desolation. He got
+down at the corner, and leaving Shargar to go on to The Boar's Head and
+look after the luggage, walked into his grandmother's house and straight
+into her little parlour. She rose with her old stateliness when she saw
+a stranger enter the room, and stood waiting his address.
+
+'Weel, grannie,' said Robert, and took her in his arms.
+
+'The Lord's name be praised!' faltered she. 'He's ower guid to the likes
+o' me.'
+
+And she lifted up her voice and wept.
+
+She had been informed of his coming, but she had not expected him till
+the evening; he was much altered, and old age is slow.
+
+He had hardly placed her in her chair, when Betty came in. If she had
+shown him respect before, it was reverence now.
+
+'Eh, sir!' she said, 'I didna ken it was you, or I wadna hae come into
+the room ohn chappit at the door. I'll awa' back to my kitchie.'
+
+So saying, she turned to leave the room.
+
+'Hoots! Betty,' cried Robert, 'dinna be a gowk. Gie 's a grip o yer
+han'.'
+
+Betty stood staring and irresolute, overcome at sight of the manly bulk
+before her.
+
+'Gin ye dinna behave yersel', Betty, I'll jist awa' ower to Muckledrum,
+an' hae a caw (drive) throu the sessions-buik.'
+
+Betty laughed for the first time at the awful threat, and the ice once
+broken, things returned to somewhat of their old footing.
+
+I must not linger on these days. The next morning Robert paid a visit
+to Bodyfauld, and found that time had there flowed so gently that it had
+left but few wrinkles and fewer gray hairs. The fields, too, had little
+change to show; and the hill was all the same, save that its pines had
+grown. His chief mission was to John Hewson and his wife. When he left
+for the continent, he was not so utterly absorbed in his own griefs as
+to forget Jessie. He told her story to Dr. Anderson, and the good man
+had gone to see her the same day.
+
+In the evening, when he knew he should find them both at home, he
+walked into the cottage. They were seated by the fire, with the same pot
+hanging on the same crook for their supper. They rose, and asked him
+to sit down, but did not know him. When he told them who he was, they
+greeted him warmly, and John Hewson smiled something of the old smile,
+but only like it, for it had no 'rays proportionately delivered' from
+his mouth over his face.
+
+After a little indifferent chat, Robert said,
+
+'I came through Aberdeen yesterday, John.'
+
+At the very mention of Aberdeen, John's head sunk. He gave no answer,
+but sat looking in the fire. His wife rose and went to the other end of
+the room, busying herself quietly about the supper. Robert thought it
+best to plunge into the matter at once.
+
+'I saw Jessie last nicht,' he said.
+
+Still there was no reply. John's face had grown hard as a stone face,
+but Robert thought rather from the determination to govern his feelings
+than from resentment.
+
+'She's been doin' weel ever sin' syne,' he added.
+
+Still no word from either; and Robert fearing some outburst of
+indignation ere he had said his say, now made haste.
+
+'She's been a servant wi' Dr. Anderson for four year noo, an' he's sair
+pleased wi' her. She's a fine woman. But her bairnie's deid, an' that
+was a sair blow till her.'
+
+He heard a sob from the mother, but still John made no sign.
+
+'It was a bonnie bairnie as ever ye saw. It luikit in her face, she
+says, as gin it kent a' aboot it, and had only come to help her throu
+the warst o' 't; for it gaed hame 'maist as sune's ever she was
+richt able to thank God for sen'in' her sic an angel to lead her to
+repentance.'
+
+'John,' said his wife, coming behind his chair, and laying her hand on
+his shoulder, 'what for dinna ye speyk? Ye hear what Maister Faukner
+says.--Ye dinna think a thing's clean useless 'cause there may be a spot
+upo' 't?' she added, wiping her eyes with her apron.
+
+'A spot upo' 't?' cried John, starting to his feet. 'What ca' ye a
+spot?--Wuman, dinna drive me mad to hear ye lichtlie the glory o'
+virginity.'
+
+'That's a' verra weel, John,' interposed Robert quietly; 'but there was
+ane thocht as muckle o' 't as ye do, an' wad hae been ashamed to hear ye
+speak that gait aboot yer ain dauchter.'
+
+'I dinna unnerstan' ye,' returned Hewson, looking raised-like at him.
+
+'Dinna ye ken, man, that amo' them 'at kent the Lord best whan he cam
+frae haiven to luik efter his ain--to seek and to save, ye ken--amo'
+them 'at cam roon aboot him to hearken till 'im, was lasses 'at had gane
+the wrang gait a'thegither,--no like your bonnie Jessie 'at fell but
+ance. Man, ye're jist like Simon the Pharisee, 'at was sae scunnert at
+oor Lord 'cause he loot the wuman 'at was a sinner tak her wull o' 's
+feet--the feet 'at they war gaein' to tak their wull o' efter anither
+fashion afore lang. He wad hae shawn her the door--Simon wad--like you,
+John; but the Lord tuik her pairt. An' lat me tell you, John--an' I
+winna beg yer pardon for sayin' 't, for it's God's trowth--lat me tell
+you, 'at gin ye gang on that gait ye'll be sidin' wi' the Pharisee, an'
+no wi' oor Lord. Ye may lippen to yer wife, ay, an' to Jessie hersel',
+that kens better nor eyther o' ye, no to mak little o' virginity. Faith!
+they think mair o' 't than ye do, I'm thinkin', efter a'; only it's no a
+thing to say muckle aboot. An' it's no to stan' for a'thing, efter a'.'
+
+Silence followed. John sat down again, and buried his face in his hands.
+At length he murmured from between them,
+
+'The lassie's weel?'
+
+'Ay,' answered Robert; and silence followed again.
+
+'What wad ye hae me do?' asked John, lifting his head a little.
+
+'I wad hae ye sen' a kin' word till her. The lassie's hert's jist
+longin' efter ye. That's a'. And that's no ower muckle.'
+
+''Deed no,' assented the mother.
+
+John said nothing. But when his visitor rose he bade him a warm
+good-night.
+
+When Robert returned to Aberdeen he was the bearer of such a message
+as made poor Jessie glad at heart. This was his first experience of the
+sort.
+
+When he left the cottage, he did not return to the house, but threaded
+the little forest of pines, climbing the hill till he came out on its
+bare crown, where nothing grew but heather and blaeberries. There he
+threw himself down, and gazed into the heavens. The sun was below the
+horizon; all the dazzle was gone out of the gold, and the roses were
+fast fading; the downy blue of the sky was trembling into stars over
+his head; the brown dusk was gathering in the air; and a wind full of
+gentleness and peace came to him from the west. He let his thoughts go
+where they would, and they went up into the abyss over his head.
+
+'Lord, come to me,' he cried in his heart, 'for I cannot go to thee.
+If I were to go up and up through that awful space for ages and ages,
+I should never find thee. Yet there thou art. The tenderness of thy
+infinitude looks upon me from those heavens. Thou art in them and in me.
+Because thou thinkest, I think. I am thine--all thine. I abandon
+myself to thee. Fill me with thyself. When I am full of thee, my griefs
+themselves will grow golden in thy sunlight. Thou holdest them and
+their cause, and wilt find some nobler atonement between them than vile
+forgetfulness and the death of love. Lord, let me help those that are
+wretched because they do not know thee. Let me tell them that thou, the
+Life, must needs suffer for and with them, that they may be partakers
+of thy ineffable peace. My life is hid in thine: take me in thy hand as
+Gideon bore the pitcher to the battle. Let me be broken if need be, that
+thy light may shine upon the lies which men tell them in thy name, and
+which eat away their hearts.'
+
+Having persuaded Shargar to remain with Mrs. Falconer for a few days,
+and thus remove the feeling of offence she still cherished because of
+his 'munelicht flittin',' he returned to Dr. Anderson, who now unfolded
+his plans for him. These were, that he should attend the medical classes
+common to the two universities, and at the same time accompany him in
+his visits to the poor. He did not at all mean, he said, to determine
+Robert's life as that of a medical man, but from what he had learned
+of his feelings, he was confident that a knowledge of medicine would be
+invaluable to him. I think the good doctor must have foreseen the kind
+of life which Falconer would at length choose to lead, and with true
+and admirable wisdom, sought to prepare him for it. However this may be,
+Robert entertained the proposal gladly, went into the scheme with his
+whole heart, and began to widen that knowledge of and sympathy with the
+poor which were the foundation of all his influence over them.
+
+For a time, therefore, he gave a diligent and careful attendance upon
+lectures, read sufficiently, took his rounds with Dr. Anderson, and
+performed such duties as he delegated to his greater strength. Had the
+healing art been far less of an enjoyment to him than it was, he could
+yet hardly have failed of great progress therein; but seeing that it
+accorded with his best feelings, profoundest theories, and loftiest
+hopes, and that he received it as a work given him to do, it is not
+surprising that a certain faculty of cure, almost partaking of the
+instinctive, should have been rapidly developed in him, to the wonder
+and delight of his friend and master.
+
+In this labour he again spent about four years, during which time he
+gathered much knowledge of human nature, learning especially to judge it
+from no stand-point of his own, but in every individual case to take a
+new position whence the nature and history of the man should appear
+in true relation to the yet uncompleted result. He who cannot feel
+the humanity of his neighbour because he is different from himself in
+education, habits, opinions, morals, circumstances, objects, is unfit,
+if not unworthy, to aid him.
+
+Within this period Shargar had gone out to India, where he had
+distinguished himself particularly on a certain harassing march. Towards
+the close of the four years he had leave of absence, and was on his way
+home. About the same time Robert, in consequence of a fever brought
+on by over-fatigue, was in much need of a holiday; and Dr. Anderson
+proposed that he should meet Moray at Southampton.
+
+Shargar had no expectation of seeing him, and his delight, not greater
+on that account, broke out more wildly. No thinnest film had grown over
+his heart, though in all else he was considerably changed. The army
+had done everything that was wanted for his outward show of man. The
+drawling walk had vanished, and a firm step and soldierly stride had
+taken its place; his bearing was free, yet dignified; his high descent
+came out in the ease of his carriage and manners: there could be no
+doubt that at last Shargar was a gentleman. His hair had changed to a
+kind of red chestnut. His complexion was much darkened with the Indian
+sun. His eyes, too, were darker, and no longer rolled slowly from one
+object to another, but indicated by their quick glances a mind ready
+to observe and as ready to resolve. His whole appearance was more than
+prepossessing--it was even striking.
+
+Robert was greatly delighted with the improvement in him, and far more
+when he found that his mind's growth had at least kept pace with his
+body's change. It would be more correct to say that it had preceded and
+occasioned it; for however much the army may be able to do in that
+way, it had certainly, in Moray's case, only seconded the law of inward
+growth working outward show.
+
+The young men went up to London together, and great was the pleasure
+they had in each other's society, after so long a separation in which
+their hearts had remained unchanged while their natures had grown both
+worthy and capable of more honour and affection. They had both much to
+tell; for Robert was naturally open save in regard to his grief; and
+Shargar was proud of being able to communicate with Robert from a nearer
+level, in virtue of now knowing many things that Robert could not know.
+They went together to a hotel in St. Paul's Churchyard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. A MERE GLIMPSE.
+
+At the close of a fortnight, Falconer thought it time to return to
+his duties in Aberdeen. The day before the steamer sailed, they found
+themselves, about six o'clock, in Gracechurch Street. It was a fine
+summer evening. The street was less crowded than earlier in the
+afternoon, although there was a continuous stream of waggons, omnibuses,
+and cabs both ways. As they stood on the curbstone, a little way north
+of Lombard Street, waiting to cross--
+
+'You see, Shargar,' said Robert, 'Nature will have her way. Not all the
+hurry and confusion and roar can keep the shadows out. Look: wherever
+a space is for a moment vacant, there falls a shadow, as grotesque, as
+strange, as full of unutterable things as any shadow on a field of grass
+and daisies.'
+
+'I remember feeling the same kind of thing in India,' returned Shargar,
+'where nothing looked as if it belonged to the world I was born in, but
+my own shadow. In such a street as this, however, all the shadows look
+as if they belonged to another world, and had no business here.'
+
+'I quite feel that,' returned Falconer. 'They come like angels from the
+lovely west and the pure air, to show that London cannot hurt them, for
+it too is within the Kingdom of God--to teach the lovers of nature, like
+the old orthodox Jew, St. Peter, that they must not call anything common
+or unclean.'
+
+Shargar made no reply, and Robert glanced round at him. He was staring
+with wide eyes into, not at the crowd of vehicles that filled the
+street. His face was pale, and strangely like the Shargar of old days.
+
+'What's the matter with you?' Robert asked in some bewilderment.
+
+Receiving no answer, he followed Shargar's gaze, and saw a strange sight
+for London city.
+
+In the middle of the crowd of vehicles, with an omnibus before them, and
+a brewer's dray behind them, came a line of three donkey-carts, heaped
+high with bundles and articles of gipsy-gear. The foremost was conducted
+by a middle-aged woman of tall, commanding aspect, and expression both
+cunning and fierce. She walked by the donkey's head carrying a short
+stick, with which she struck him now and then, but which she oftener
+waved over his head like the truncheon of an excited marshal on the
+battle-field, accompanying its movements now with loud cries to the
+animal, now with loud response to the chaff of the omnibus conductor,
+the dray driver, and the tradesmen in carts about her. She was followed
+by a very handsome, olive-complexioned, wild-looking young woman, with
+her black hair done up in a red handkerchief, who conducted her donkey
+more quietly. Both seemed as much at home in the roar of Gracechurch
+Street as if they had been crossing a wild common. A loutish-looking
+young man brought up the rear with the third donkey. From the bundles on
+the foremost cart peeped a lovely, fair-haired, English-looking child.
+
+Robert took all this in in a moment. The same moment Shargar's spell was
+broken.
+
+'Lord, it is my mither!' he cried, and darted under a horse's neck into
+the middle of the ruck.
+
+He needled his way through till he reached the woman. She was swearing
+at a cabman whose wheel had caught the point of her donkey's shaft, and
+was hauling him round. Heedless of everything, Shargar threw his arms
+about her, crying,
+
+'Mither! mither!'
+
+'Nane o' yer blastit humbug!' she exclaimed, as, with a vigorous throw
+and a wriggle, she freed herself from his embrace and pushed him away.
+
+The moment she had him at arm's length, however, her hand closed upon
+his arm, and her other hand went up to her brow. From underneath it her
+eyes shot up and down him from head to foot, and he could feel her hand
+closing and relaxing and closing again, as if she were trying to force
+her long nails into his flesh. He stood motionless, waiting the result
+of her scrutiny, utterly unconscious that he caused a congestion in the
+veins of London, for every vehicle within sight of the pair had stopped.
+Falconer said a strange silence fell upon the street, as if all the
+things in it had been turned into shadows.
+
+A rough voice, which sounded as if all London must have heard it, broke
+the silence. It was the voice of the cabman who had been in altercation
+with the woman. Bursting into an insulting laugh, he used words with
+regard to her which it is better to leave unrecorded. The same instant
+Shargar freed himself from her grasp, and stood by the fore wheel of the
+cab.
+
+'Get down!' he said, in a voice that was not the less impressive that it
+was low and hoarse.
+
+The fellow saw what he meant, and whipped his horse. Shargar sprung on
+the box, and dragged him down all but headlong.
+
+'Now,' he said, 'beg my mother's pardon.'
+
+'Be damned if I do, &c., &c.,' said the cabman.
+
+'Then defend yourself,' said Shargar. 'Robert.'
+
+Falconer was watching it all, and was by his side in a moment.
+
+'Come on, you, &c., &c.,' cried the cabman, plucking up heart and
+putting himself in fighting shape. He looked one of those insolent
+fellows whom none see discomfited more gladly than the honest men of his
+own class. The same moment he lay between his horse's feet.
+
+Shargar turned to Robert, and saying only, 'There, Robert!' turned again
+towards the woman. The cabman rose bleeding, and, desiring no more of
+the same, climbed on his box, and went off, belabouring his horse, and
+pursued by a roar from the street, for the spectators were delighted at
+his punishment.
+
+'Now, mother,' said Shargar, panting with excitement.
+
+'What ca' they ye?' she asked, still doubtful, but as proud of being
+defended as if the coarse words of her assailant had had no truth in
+them. 'Ye canna be my lang-leggit Geordie.'
+
+'What for no?'
+
+'Ye're a gentleman, faith!'
+
+'An' what for no, again?' returned Shargar, beginning to smile.
+
+'Weel, it's weel speired. Yer father was ane ony gait--gin sae be 'at ye
+are as ye say.'
+
+Moray put his head close to hers, and whispered some words that nobody
+heard but herself.
+
+'It's ower lang syne to min' upo' that,' she said in reply, with a look
+of cunning consciousness ill settled upon her fine features. 'But ye can
+be naebody but my Geordie. Haith, man!' she went on, regarding him once
+more from head to foot, 'but ye're a credit to me, I maun alloo. Weel,
+gie me a sovereign, an' I s' never come near ye.'
+
+Poor Shargar in his despair turned half mechanically towards Robert. He
+felt that it was time to interfere.
+
+'You forget, mother,' said Shargar, turning again to her, and speaking
+English now, 'it was I that claimed you, and not you that claimed me.'
+
+She seemed to have no idea of what he meant.
+
+'Come up the road here, to oor public, an' tak a glaiss, wuman,' said
+Falconer. 'Dinna haud the fowk luikin' at ye.'
+
+The temptation of a glass of something strong, and the hope of getting
+money out of them, caused an instant acquiescence. She said a few words
+to the young woman, who proceeded at once to tie her donkey's head to
+the tail of the other cart.
+
+'Shaw the gait than,' said the elder, turning again to Falconer.
+
+Shargar and he led the way to St. Paul's Churchyard, and the woman
+followed faithfully. The waiter stared when they entered.
+
+'Bring a glass of whisky,' said Falconer, as he passed on to their
+private room. When the whisky arrived, she tossed it off, and looked as
+if she would like another glass.
+
+'Yer father 'ill hae ta'en ye up, I'm thinkin', laddie?' she said,
+turning to her son.
+
+'No,' answered Shargar, gloomily. 'There's the man that took me up.'
+
+'An' wha may ye be?' she asked, turning to Falconer.
+
+'Mr. Falconer,' said Shargar.
+
+'No a son o' Anerew Faukner?' she asked again, with evident interest.
+
+'The same,' answered Robert.
+
+'Well, Geordie,' she said, turning once more to her son, 'it's like
+mither, like father to the twa o' ye.'
+
+'Did you know my father?' asked Robert, eagerly.
+
+Instead of answering him she made another remark to her son.
+
+'He needna be ashamed o' your company, ony gait--queer kin' o' a mither
+'at I am.'
+
+'He never was ashamed of my company,' said Shargar, still gloomily.
+
+'Ay, I kent yer father weel eneuch,' she said, now answering
+Robert--'mair by token 'at I saw him last nicht. He was luikin' nae that
+ill.'
+
+Robert sprung from his seat, and caught her by the arm.
+
+'Ow! ye needna gang into sic a flurry. He'll no come near ye, I s'
+warran'.'
+
+'Tell me where he is,' said Robert. 'Where did you see him? I'll gie ye
+a' 'at I hae gin ye'll tak me till him.'
+
+'Hooly! hooly! Wha's to gang luikin' for a thrum in a hay-sow?' returned
+she, coolly. 'I only said 'at I saw him.'
+
+'But are ye sure it was him?' asked Falconer.
+
+'Ay, sure eneuch,' she answered.
+
+'What maks ye sae sure?'
+
+''Cause I never was vrang yet. Set a man ance atween my twa een, an'
+that 'll be twa 'at kens him whan 's ain mither 's forgotten 'im.'
+
+'Did you speak to him?'
+
+'Maybe ay, an' maybe no. I didna come here to be hecklet afore a jury.'
+
+'Tell me what he's like,' said Robert, agitated with eager hope.
+
+'Gin ye dinna ken what he's like, what for suld ye tak the trouble to
+speir? But 'deed ye'll ken what he's like whan ye fa' in wi' him,' she
+added, with a vindictive laugh--vindictive because he had given her only
+one glass of strong drink.
+
+With the laugh she rose, and made for the door. They rose at the same
+moment to detain her. Like one who knew at once to fight and flee, she
+turned and stunned them as with a blow.
+
+'She's a fine yoong thing, yon sister o' yours, Geordie. She'll be worth
+siller by the time she's had a while at the schuil.'
+
+The men looked at each other aghast. When they turned their eyes she
+had vanished. They rushed to the door, and, parting, searched in both
+directions. But they were soon satisfied that it was of no use. Probably
+she had found a back way into Paternoster Row, whence the outlets are
+numerous.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. THE DOCTOR'S DEATH.
+
+But now that Falconer had a ground, even thus shadowy, for hoping--I
+cannot say believing--that his father might be in London, he could not
+return to Aberdeen. Moray, who had no heart to hunt for his mother,
+left the next day by the steamer. Falconer took to wandering about
+the labyrinthine city, and in a couple of months knew more about the
+metropolis--the west end excepted--than most people who had lived their
+lives in it. The west end is no doubt a considerable exception to make,
+but Falconer sought only his father, and the west end was the place
+where he was least likely to find him. Day and night he wandered into
+all sorts of places: the worse they looked the more attractive he found
+them. It became almost a craze with him. He could not pass a dirty court
+or low-browed archway. He might be there. Or he might have been there.
+Or it was such a place as he would choose for shelter. He knew to what
+such a life as his must have tended.
+
+At first he was attracted only by tall elderly men. Such a man he would
+sometimes follow till his following made him turn and demand his
+object. If there was no suspicion of Scotch in his tone, Falconer easily
+apologized. If there was, he made such replies as might lead to some
+betrayal. He could not defend the course he was adopting: it had not the
+shadow of probability upon its side. Still the greatest successes the
+world has ever beheld had been at one time the greatest improbabilities!
+He could not choose but go on, for as yet he could think of no other
+way.
+
+Neither could a man like Falconer long confine his interest to this
+immediate object, especially after he had, in following it, found
+opportunity of being useful. While he still made it his main object
+to find his father, that object became a centre from which radiated a
+thousand influences upon those who were as sheep that had no shepherd.
+He fell back into his old ways at Aberdeen, only with a boundless sphere
+to work in, and with the hope of finding his father to hearten him. He
+haunted the streets at night, went into all places of entertainment,
+often to the disgust of senses and soul, and made his way into the
+lowest forms of life without introduction or protection.
+
+There was a certain stately air of the hills about him which was often
+mistaken for country inexperience, and men thought in consequence to
+make gain or game of him. But such found their mistake, and if not soon,
+then the more completely. Far from provoking or even meeting hostility,
+he soon satisfied those that persisted, that it was dangerous. In two
+years he became well known to the poor of a large district, especially
+on both sides of Shoreditch, for whose sake he made the exercise of his
+profession though not an object yet a ready accident.
+
+He lived in lodgings in John Street--the same in which I found him when
+I came to know him. He made few acquaintances, and they were chiefly the
+house-surgeons of hospitals--to which he paid frequent visits.
+
+He always carried a book in his pocket, but did not read much. On
+Sundays he generally went to some one of the many lonely heaths or
+commons of Surrey with his New Testament. When weary in London, he would
+go to the reading-room of the British Museum for an hour or two. He kept
+up a regular correspondence with Dr. Anderson.
+
+At length he received a letter from him, which occasioned his immediate
+departure for Aberdeen. Until now, his friend, who was entirely
+satisfied with his mode of life, and supplied him freely with money, had
+not even expressed a wish to recall him, though he had often spoken of
+visiting him in London. It now appeared that, unwilling to cause him
+any needless anxiety, he had abstained from mentioning the fact that
+his health had been declining. He had got suddenly worse, and Falconer
+hastened to obey the summons he had sent him in consequence.
+
+With a heavy heart he walked up to the hospitable door, recalling as he
+ascended the steps how he had stood there a helpless youth, in want of a
+few pounds to save his hopes, when this friend received him and bid
+him God-speed on the path he desired to follow. In a moment more he
+was shown into the study, and was passing through it to go to the
+cottage-room, when Johnston laid his hand on his arm.
+
+'The maister's no up yet, sir,' he said, with a very solemn look. 'He's
+been desperate efter seein' ye, and I maun gang an' lat him ken 'at
+ye're here at last, for fear it suld be ower muckle for him, seein' ye
+a' at ance. But eh, sir!' he added, the tears gathering in his eyes,
+'ye'll hardly ken 'im. He's that changed!'
+
+Johnston left the study by the door to the cottage--Falconer had never
+known the doctor sleep there--and returning a moment after, invited him
+to enter. In the bed in the recess--the room unchanged, with its deal
+table, and its sanded floor--lay the form of his friend. Falconer
+hastened to the bedside, kneeled down, and took his hand speechless.
+The doctor was silent too, but a smile overspread his countenance, and
+revealed his inward satisfaction. Robert's heart was full, and he could
+only gaze on the worn face. At length he was able to speak.
+
+'What for didna ye sen' for me?' he said. 'Ye never tellt me ye was
+ailin'.'
+
+'Because you were doing good, Robert, my boy; and I who had done so
+little had no right to interrupt what you were doing. I wonder if God
+will give me another chance. I would fain do better. I don't think I
+could sit singing psalms to all eternity,' he added with a smile.
+
+'Whatever good I may do afore my turn comes, I hae you to thank for 't.
+Eh, doctor, gin it hadna been for you!'
+
+Robert's feelings overcame him. He resumed, brokenly,
+
+'Ye gae me a man to believe in, whan my ain father had forsaken me, and
+my frien' was awa to God. Ye hae made me, doctor. Wi' meat an' drink an'
+learnin' an' siller, an' a'thing at ance, ye hae made me.'
+
+'Eh, Robert!' said the dying man, half rising on his elbow, 'to think
+what God maks us a' to ane anither! My father did ten times for me what
+I hae dune for you. As I lie here thinkin' I may see him afore a week's
+ower, I'm jist a bairn again.'
+
+As he spoke, the polish of his speech was gone, and the social
+refinement of his countenance with it. The face of his ancestors, the
+noble, sensitive, heart-full, but rugged, bucolic, and weather-beaten
+through centuries of windy ploughing, hail-stormed sheep-keeping,
+long-paced seed-sowing, and multiform labour, surely not less honourable
+in the sight of the working God than the fighting of the noble, came
+back in the face of the dying physician. From that hour to his death he
+spoke the rugged dialect of his fathers.
+
+A day or two after this, Robert again sitting by his bedside,
+
+'I dinna ken,' he said, 'whether it's richt--but I hae nae fear o'
+deith, an' yet I canna say I'm sure aboot onything. I hae seen mony a
+ane dee that cud hae no faith i' the Saviour; but I never saw that fear
+that some gude fowk wud hae ye believe maun come at the last. I wadna
+like to tak to ony papistry; but I never cud mak oot frae the Bible--and
+I read mair at it i' the jungle than maybe ye wad think--that it's a'
+ower wi' a body at their deith. I never heard them bring foret ony text
+but ane--the maist ridiculous hash 'at ever ye heard--to justifee 't.'
+
+'I ken the text ye mean--"As the tree falleth so it shall lie," or
+something like that--'at they say King Solomon wrote, though better
+scholars say his tree had fa'en mony a lang year afore that text saw the
+licht. I dinna believe sic a thocht was i' the man's heid when he wrote
+it. It is as ye say--ower contemptible to ca' an argument. I'll read it
+to ye ance mair.'
+
+Robert got his Bible, and read the following portion from that wonderful
+book, so little understood, because it is so full of wisdom--the Book of
+Ecclesiastes:--
+
+'Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.
+
+'Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for thou knowest not what
+evil shall be upon the earth.
+
+'If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth:
+and if the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, in the place
+where the tree falleth, there it shall be.
+
+'He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the
+clouds shall not reap.
+
+'As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do
+grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the
+works of God who maketh all.
+
+'In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine
+hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that,
+or whether they both shall be alike good.'
+
+'Ay, ay; that's it,' said Dr. Anderson. 'Weel, I maun say again that
+they're ill aff for an argument that taks that for ane upo' sic a
+momentous subjec'. I prefer to say, wi' the same auld man, that I know
+not the works of God who maketh all. But I wish I could say I believed
+onything for certain sure. But whan I think aboot it--wad ye believe 't?
+the faith o' my father's mair to me nor ony faith o' my ain. That soonds
+strange. But it's this: I'm positeeve that that godly great auld man
+kent mair aboot a' thae things--I cud see 't i' the face o' 'm--nor ony
+ither man 'at ever I kent. An' it's no by comparison only. I'm sure he
+did ken. There was something atween God and him. An' I think he wasna
+likely to be wrang; an' sae I tak courage to believe as muckle as I can,
+though maybe no sae muckle as I fain wad.'
+
+Robert, who from experience of himself, and the observations he had made
+by the bedsides of not a few dying men and women, knew well that nothing
+but the truth itself can carry its own conviction; that the words of our
+Lord are a body as it were in which the spirit of our Lord dwells, or
+rather the key to open the heart for the entrance of that spirit, turned
+now from all argumentation to the words of Jesus. He himself had said
+of them, 'They are spirit and they are life;' and what folly to buttress
+life and spirit with other powers than their own! From that day to the
+last, as often and as long as the dying man was able to listen to him,
+he read from the glad news just the words of the Lord. As he read thus,
+one fading afternoon, the doctor broke out with,
+
+'Eh, Robert, the patience o' him! He didna quench the smokin' flax.
+There's little fire aboot me, but surely I ken in my ain hert some o'
+the risin' smoke o' the sacrifice. Eh! sic words as they are! An' he was
+gaein' doon to the grave himsel', no half my age, as peacefu', though
+the road was sae rouch, as gin he had been gaein' hame till 's father.'
+
+'Sae he was,' returned Robert.
+
+'Ay; but here am I lyin' upo' my bed, slippin' easy awa. An' there was
+he--'
+
+The old man ceased. The sacred story was too sacred for speech. Robert
+sat with the New Testament open before him on the bed.
+
+'The mair the words o' Jesus come into me,' the doctor began again, 'the
+surer I am o' seein' my auld Brahmin frien', Robert. It's true I thought
+his religion not only began but ended inside him. It was a' a booin'
+doon afore and an aspirin' up into the bosom o' the infinite God. I
+dinna mean to say 'at he wasna honourable to them aboot him. And I never
+saw in him muckle o' that pride to the lave (rest) that belangs to the
+Brahmin. It was raither a stately kin'ness than that condescension which
+is the vice o' Christians. But he had naething to do wi' them. The first
+comman'ment was a' he kent. He loved God--nae a God like Jesus
+Christ, but the God he kent--and that was a' he could. The second
+comman'ment--that glorious recognition o' the divine in humanity makin'
+'t fit and needfu' to be loved, that claim o' God upon and for his ain
+bairns, that love o' the neebour as yer'sel--he didna ken. Still there
+was religion in him; and he who died for the sins o' the whole world
+has surely been revealed to him lang er' noo, and throu the knowledge o'
+him, he noo dwalls in that God efter whom he aspired.'
+
+Here was the outcome of many talks which Robert and the doctor had had
+together, as they laboured amongst the poor.
+
+'Did ye never try,' Robert asked, 'to lat him ken aboot the comin' o'
+God to his world in Jesus Christ?'
+
+'I couldna do muckle that way honestly, my ain faith was sae poor and
+sma'. But I tellt him what Christians believed. I tellt him aboot the
+character and history o' Christ. But it didna seem to tak muckle hauld
+o' him. It wasna interesstin' till him. Just ance whan I tellt him some
+things he had said aboot his relation to God--sic as, "I and my Father
+are one,"--and aboot the relation o' a' his disciples to God and
+himsel'--"I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in
+one," he said, wi' a smile, "The man was a good Brahmin."
+
+'It's little,' said Robert, 'the one great commandment can do withoot
+the other. It's little we can ken what God to love, or hoo to love him,
+withoot "thy neighbour as thyself." Ony ane o' them withoot the ither
+stan's like the ae factor o' a multiplication, or ae wing upo' a
+laverock (lark).'
+
+Towards the close of the week, he grew much feebler. Falconer scarcely
+left his room. He woke one midnight, and murmured as follows, with many
+pauses for breath and strength:
+
+'Robert, my time's near, I'm thinkin'; for, wakin' an' sleepin', I'm a
+bairn again. I can hardly believe whiles 'at my father hasna a grup o'
+my han'. A meenute ago I was traivellin' throu a terrible driftin' o'
+snaw--eh, hoo it whustled and sang! and the cauld o' 't was stingin';
+but my father had a grup o' me, an' I jist despised it, an' was
+stampin' 't doon wi' my wee bit feet, for I was like saven year auld or
+thereaboots. An' syne I thocht I heard my mither singin', and kent by
+that that the ither was a dream. I'm thinkin' a hantle 'ill luik dreamy
+afore lang. Eh! I wonner what the final waukin' 'ill be like.'
+
+After a pause he resumed,
+
+'Robert, my dear boy, ye're i' the richt gait. Haud on an' lat naething
+turn ye aside. Man, it's a great comfort to me to think that ye're
+my ain flesh and blude, an' nae that far aff. My father an' your
+great-gran'father upo' the gran'mither's side war ain brithers. I wonner
+hoo far doon it wad gang. Ye're the only ane upo' my father's side, you
+and yer father, gin he be alive, that I hae sib to me. My will's i' the
+bottom drawer upo' the left han' i' my writin' table i' the leebrary:--I
+hae left ye ilka plack 'at I possess. Only there's ae thing that I want
+ye to do. First o' a', ye maun gang on as yer doin' in London for
+ten year mair. Gin deein' men hae ony o' that foresicht that's been
+attreebuted to them in a' ages, it's borne in upo' me that ye wull see
+yer father again. At a' events, ye'll be helpin' some ill-faured sowls
+to a clean face and a bonny. But gin ye dinna fa' in wi' yer father
+within ten year, ye maun behaud a wee, an' jist pack up yer box, an'
+gang awa' ower the sea to Calcutta, an' du what I hae tellt ye to do
+i' that wull. I bind ye by nae promise, Robert, an' I winna hae nane.
+Things micht happen to put ye in a terrible difficulty wi' a promise.
+I'm only tellin' ye what I wad like. Especially gin ye hae fund yer
+father, ye maun gang by yer ain jeedgment aboot it, for there 'll be a
+hantle to do wi' him efter ye hae gotten a grup o' 'im. An' noo, I maun
+lie still, an' maybe sleep again, for I hae spoken ower muckle.'
+
+Hoping that he would sleep and wake yet again, Robert sat still. After
+an hour, he looked, and saw that, although hitherto much oppressed,
+he was now breathing like a child. There was no sign save of past
+suffering: his countenance was peaceful as if he had already entered
+into his rest. Robert withdrew, and again seated himself. And the great
+universe became to him as a bird brooding over the breaking shell of the
+dying man.
+
+On either hand we behold a birth, of which, as of the moon, we see but
+half. We are outside the one, waiting for a life from the unknown; we
+are inside the other, watching the departure of a spirit from the womb
+of the world into the unknown. To the region whither he goes, the man
+enters newly born. We forget that it is a birth, and call it a death.
+The body he leaves behind is but the placenta by which he drew his
+nourishment from his mother Earth. And as the child-bed is watched on
+earth with anxious expectancy, so the couch of the dying, as we call
+them, may be surrounded by the birth-watchers of the other world,
+waiting like anxious servants to open the door to which this world is
+but the wind-blown porch.
+
+Extremes meet. As a man draws nigh to his second birth, his heart looks
+back to his childhood. When Dr. Anderson knew that he was dying, he
+retired into the simulacrum of his father's benn end.
+
+As Falconer sat thinking, the doctor spoke. They were low, faint,
+murmurous sounds, for the lips were nearly at rest. Wanted no more for
+utterance, they were going back to the holy dust, which is God's yet.
+
+'Father, father!' he cried quickly, in the tone and speech of a Scotch
+laddie, 'I'm gaein' doon. Haud a grup o' my han'.'
+
+When Robert hurried to the bedside, he found that the last breath had
+gone in the words. The thin right hand lay partly closed, as if it had
+been grasping a larger hand. On the face lay confidence just ruffled
+with apprehension: the latter melted away, and nothing remained but
+that awful and beautiful peace which is the farewell of the soul to its
+servant.
+
+Robert knelt and thanked God for the noble man.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. A TALK WITH GRANNIE.
+
+Dr. Anderson's body was, according to the fine custom of many of the
+people of Aberdeen, borne to the grave by twelve stalwart men in black,
+with broad round bonnets on their heads, the one-half relieving the
+other--a privilege of the company of shore-porters. Their exequies are
+thus freed from the artificial, grotesque, and pagan horror given by
+obscene mutes, frightful hearse, horses, and feathers. As soon as,
+in the beautiful phrase of the Old Testament, John Anderson was thus
+gathered to his fathers, Robert went to pay a visit to his grandmother.
+
+Dressed to a point in the same costume in which he had known her from
+childhood, he found her little altered in appearance. She was one of
+those who instead of stooping with age, settle downwards: she was still
+as erect as ever, though shorter. Her step was feebler, and when she
+prayed, her voice quavered more. On her face sat the same settled,
+almost hard repose, as ever; but her behaviour was still more gentle
+than when he had seen her last. Notwithstanding, however, that time had
+wrought so little change in her appearance, Robert felt that somehow the
+mist of a separation between her world and his was gathering; that
+she was, as it were, fading from his sight and presence, like the moon
+towards 'her interlunar cave.' Her face was gradually turning from him
+towards the land of light.
+
+'I hae buried my best frien' but yersel', grannie,' he said, as he took
+a chair close by her side, where he used to sit when he read the Bible
+and Boston to her.
+
+'I trust he's happy. He was a douce and a weel-behaved man; and ye hae
+rizzon to respec' his memory. Did he dee the deith o' the richteous,
+think ye, laddie?'
+
+'I do think that, grannie. He loved God and his Saviour.'
+
+'The Lord be praised!' said Mrs. Falconer. 'I had guid houps o' 'im in
+'s latter days. And fowk says he's made a rich man o' ye, Robert?'
+
+'He's left me ilka thing, excep' something till 's servan's--wha hae
+weel deserved it.'
+
+'Eh, Robert! but it's a terrible snare. Siller 's an awfu' thing. My
+puir Anerew never begud to gang the ill gait, till he began to hae ower
+muckle siller. But it badena lang wi' 'im.'
+
+'But it's no an ill thing itsel', grannie; for God made siller as weel
+'s ither things.'
+
+'He thinksna muckle o' 't, though, or he wad gie mair o' 't to some
+fowk. But as ye say, it's his, and gin ye hae grace to use 't aricht, it
+may be made a great blessin' to yersel' and ither fowk. But eh, laddie!
+tak guid tent 'at ye ride upo' the tap o' 't, an' no lat it rise like a
+muckle jaw (billow) ower yer heid; for it's an awfu' thing to be droont
+in riches.'
+
+'Them 'at prays no to be led into temptation hae a chance--haena they,
+grannie?'
+
+'That hae they, Robert. And to be plain wi' ye, I haena that muckle fear
+o' ye; for I hae heard the kin' o' life 'at ye hae been leadin'. God's
+hearkent to my prayers for you; and gin ye gang on as ye hae begun, my
+prayers, like them o' David the son o' Jesse, are endit. Gang on, my
+dear lad, gang on to pluck brands frae the burnin'. Haud oot a helpin'
+han' to ilka son and dauchter o' Adam 'at will tak a grip o' 't. Be a
+burnin' an' a shinin' licht, that men may praise, no you, for ye're
+but clay i' the han's o' the potter, but yer Father in heaven. Tak the
+drunkard frae his whusky, the deboshed frae his debosh, the sweirer frae
+his aiths, the leear frae his lees; and giena ony o' them ower muckle o'
+yer siller at ance, for fear 'at they grow fat an' kick an' defy God and
+you. That's my advice to ye, Robert.'
+
+'And I houp I'll be able to haud gey and near till 't, grannie, for it's
+o' the best. But wha tellt ye what I was aboot in Lonnon?'
+
+'Himsel'.'
+
+'Dr. Anderson?'
+
+'Ay, jist himsel'. I hae had letter upo' letter frae 'im aboot you and
+a' 'at ye was aboot. He keepit me acquant wi' 't a'.'
+
+This fresh proof of his friend's affection touched Robert deeply. He had
+himself written often to his grandmother, but he had never entered into
+any detail of his doings, although the thought of her was ever at hand
+beside the thought of his father.
+
+'Do ye ken, grannie, what's at the hert o' my houps i' the meesery an'
+degradation that I see frae mornin' to nicht, and aftener yet frae nicht
+to mornin' i' the back closes and wynds o' the great city?'
+
+'I trust it's the glory o' God, laddie.'
+
+'I houp that's no a'thegither wantin', grannie. For I love God wi' a' my
+hert. But I doobt it's aftener the savin' o' my earthly father nor the
+glory o' my heavenly ane that I'm thinkin' o'.'
+
+Mrs. Falconer heaved a deep sigh.
+
+'God grant ye success, Robert,' she said. 'But that canna be richt.'
+
+'What canna be richt?'
+
+'No to put the glory o' God first and foremost.'
+
+'Weel, grannie; but a body canna rise to the heicht o' grace a' at ance,
+nor yet in ten, or twenty year. Maybe gin I do richt, I may be able to
+come to that or a' be dune. An' efter a', I'm sure I love God mair nor
+my father. But I canna help thinkin' this, that gin God heardna ae sang
+o' glory frae this ill-doin' earth o' his, he wadna be nane the waur;
+but--'
+
+'Hoo ken ye that?' interrupted his grandmother.
+
+'Because he wad be as gude and great and grand as ever.'
+
+'Ow ay.'
+
+'But what wad come o' my father wantin' his salvation? He can waur want
+that, remainin' the slave o' iniquity, than God can want his glory.
+Forby, ye ken there's nae glory to God like the repentin' o' a sinner,
+justifeein' God, an' sayin' till him--"Father, ye're a' richt, an' I'm
+a' wrang." What greater glory can God hae nor that?'
+
+'It's a' true 'at ye say. But still gin God cares for that same glory,
+ye oucht to think o' that first, afore even the salvation o' yer
+father.'
+
+'Maybe ye're richt, grannie. An' gin it be as ye say--he's promised
+to lead us into a' trowth, an' he'll lead me into that trowth. But I'm
+thinkin' it's mair for oor sakes than his ain 'at he cares aboot his
+glory. I dinna believe 'at he thinks aboot his glory excep' for the sake
+o' the trowth an' men's herts deein' for want o' 't.'
+
+Mrs. Falconer thought for a moment.
+
+'It may be 'at ye're richt, laddie; but ye hae a way o' sayin' things
+'at 's some fearsome.'
+
+'God's nae like a prood man to tak offence, grannie. There's naething
+pleases him like the trowth, an' there's naething displeases him like
+leein', particularly whan it's by way o' uphaudin' him. He wants nae
+sic uphaudin'. Noo, ye say things aboot him whiles 'at soun's to me
+fearsome.'
+
+'What kin' o' things are they, laddie?' asked the old lady, with offence
+glooming in the background.
+
+'Sic like as whan ye speyk aboot him as gin he was a puir prood
+bailey-like body, fu' o' his ain importance, an' ready to be doon upo'
+onybody 'at didna ca' him by the name o' 's office--ay think-thinkin'
+aboot 's ain glory; in place o' the quaiet, michty, gran',
+self-forgettin', a'-creatin', a'-uphaudin', eternal bein', wha took the
+form o' man in Christ Jesus, jist that he micht hae 't in 's pooer to
+beir and be humblet for oor sakes. Eh, grannie! think o' the face o'
+that man o' sorrows, that never said a hard word till a sinfu' wuman, or
+a despised publican: was he thinkin' aboot 's ain glory, think ye? An'
+we hae no richt to say we ken God save in the face o' Christ Jesus.
+Whatever 's no like Christ is no like God.'
+
+'But, laddie, he cam to saitisfee God's justice by sufferin' the
+punishment due to oor sins; to turn aside his wrath an' curse; to
+reconcile him to us. Sae he cudna be a'thegither like God.'
+
+'He did naething o' the kin', grannie. It's a' a lee that. He cam to
+saitisfee God's justice by giein' him back his bairns; by garrin' them
+see that God was just; by sendin' them greetin' hame to fa' at his feet,
+an' grip his knees an' say, "Father, ye're i' the richt." He cam to lift
+the weicht o' the sins that God had curst aff o' the shoothers o' them
+'at did them, by makin' them turn agen them, an' be for God an' no
+for sin. And there isna a word o' reconceelin' God till 's in a' the
+Testament, for there was no need o' that: it was us that he needed to be
+reconcilet to him. An' sae he bore oor sins and carried oor sorrows; for
+those sins comin' oot in the multitudes--ay and in his ain disciples
+as weel, caused him no en' o' grief o' mind an' pain o' body, as a'body
+kens. It wasna his ain sins, for he had nane, but oors, that caused him
+sufferin'; and he took them awa'--they're vainishin' even noo frae the
+earth, though it doesna luik like it in Rag-fair or Petticoat-lane.
+An' for oor sorrows--they jist garred him greit. His richteousness
+jist annihilates oor guilt, for it's a great gulf that swallows up and
+destroys 't. And sae he gae his life a ransom for us: and he is the life
+o' the world. He took oor sins upo' him, for he cam into the middle o'
+them an' took them up--by no sleicht o' han', by no quibblin' o' the
+lawyers, aboot imputin' his richteousness to us, and sic like, which is
+no to be found i' the Bible at a', though I dinna say that there's no
+possible meanin' i' the phrase, but he took them and took them awa'; and
+here am I, grannie, growin' oot o' my sins in consequennce, and there
+are ye, grannie, growin' oot o' yours in consequennce, an' haein'
+nearhan' dune wi' them a'thegither er this time.'
+
+'I wis that may be true, laddie. But I carena hoo ye put it,' returned
+his grandmother, bewildered no doubt with this outburst, 'sae be that ye
+put him first an' last an' i' the mids' o' a' thing, an' say wi' a' yer
+hert, "His will be dune!"'
+
+'Wi' a' my hert, "His will be dune," grannie,' responded Robert.
+
+'Amen, amen. And noo, laddie, duv ye think there's ony likliheid that
+yer father 's still i' the body? I dream aboot him whiles sae lifelike
+that I canna believe him deid. But that's a' freits (superstitions).'
+
+'Weel, grannie, I haena the least assurance. But I hae the mair houp.
+Wad ye ken him gin ye saw him?'
+
+'Ken him!' she cried; 'I wad ken him gin he had been no to say four,
+but forty days i' the sepulchre! My ain Anerew! Hoo cud ye speir sic a
+queston, laddie?'
+
+'He maun be sair changed, grannie. He maun be turnin' auld by this
+time.'
+
+'Auld! Sic like 's yersel, laddie.--Hoots, hoots! ye're richt. I am
+forgettin'. But nanetheless wad I ken him.'
+
+'I wis I kent what he was like. I saw him ance--hardly twise, but a'
+that I min' upo' wad stan' me in ill stead amo' the streets o' Lonnon.'
+
+'I doobt that,' returned Mrs. Falconer--a form of expression rather
+oddly indicating sympathetic and somewhat regretful agreement with what
+has been said. 'But,' she went on, 'I can lat ye see a pictur' o' 'im,
+though I doobt it winna shaw sae muckle to you as to me. He had it
+paintit to gie to yer mother upo' their weddin' day. Och hone! She did
+the like for him; but what cam o' that ane, I dinna ken.'
+
+Mrs. Falconer went into the little closet to the old bureau, and
+bringing out the miniature, gave it to Robert. It was the portrait of a
+young man in antiquated blue coat and white waistcoat, looking innocent,
+and, it must be confessed, dull and uninteresting. It had been painted
+by a travelling artist, and probably his skill did not reach to
+expression. It brought to Robert's mind no faintest shadow of
+recollection. It did not correspond in the smallest degree to what
+seemed his vague memory, perhaps half imagination, of the tall worn man
+whom he had seen that Sunday. He could not have a hope that this would
+give him the slightest aid in finding him of whom it had once been a
+shadowy resemblance at least.
+
+'Is 't like him, grannie?' he asked.
+
+As if to satisfy herself once more ere she replied, she took the
+miniature, and gazed at it for some time. Then with a deep hopeless
+sigh, she answered,
+
+'Ay, it's like him; but it's no himsel'. Eh, the bonny broo, an' the
+smilin' een o' him!--smilin' upon a'body, an' upo' her maist o' a', till
+he took to the drink, and waur gin waur can be. It was a' siller an'
+company--company 'at cudna be merry ohn drunken. Verity their lauchter
+was like the cracklin' o' thorns aneath a pot. Het watter and whusky
+was aye the cry efter their denner an' efter their supper, till my puir
+Anerew tuik till the bare whusky i' the mornin' to fill the ebb o' the
+toddy. He wad never hae dune as he did but for the whusky. It jist drave
+oot a' gude and loot in a' ill.'
+
+'Wull ye lat me tak this wi' me, grannie?' said Robert; for though
+the portrait was useless for identification, it might serve a further
+purpose.
+
+'Ow, ay, tak it. I dinna want it. I can see him weel wantin' that. But I
+hae nae houp left 'at ye'll ever fa' in wi' him.'
+
+'God's aye doin' unlikly things, grannie,' said Robert, solemnly.
+
+'He's dune a' 'at he can for him, I doobt, already.'
+
+'Duv ye think 'at God cudna save a man gin he liket, than, grannie?'
+
+'God can do a'thing. There's nae doobt but by the gift o' his speerit he
+cud save a'body.'
+
+'An' ye think he's no mercifu' eneuch to do 't?'
+
+'It winna do to meddle wi' fowk's free wull. To gar fowk be gude wad be
+nae gudeness.'
+
+'But gin God could actually create the free wull, dinna ye think he cud
+help it to gang richt, withoot ony garrin'? We ken sae little aboot it,
+grannie! Hoo does his speerit help onybody? Does he gar them 'at accep's
+the offer o' salvation?'
+
+'Na, I canna think that. But he shaws them the trowth in sic a way that
+they jist canna bide themsel's, but maun turn to him for verra peace an'
+rist.'
+
+'Weel, that's something as I think. An' until I'm sure that a man has
+had the trowth shawn till him in sic a way 's that, I canna alloo mysel'
+to think that hooever he may hae sinned, he has finally rejeckit the
+trowth. Gin I kent that a man had seen the trowth as I hae seen 't
+whiles, and had deleeberately turned his back upo' 't and said, "I'll
+nane o' 't," than I doobt I wad be maist compelled to alloo that there
+was nae mair salvation for him, but a certain and fearfu' luikin' for
+o' judgment and fiery indignation. But I dinna believe that ever man did
+sae. But even than, I dinna ken.'
+
+'I did a' for him that I kent hoo to do,' said Mrs. Falconer,
+reflectingly. 'Nicht an' mornin' an' aften midday prayin' for an' wi'
+him.'
+
+'Maybe ye scunnert him at it, grannie.'
+
+She gave a stifled cry of despair.
+
+'Dinna say that, laddie, or ye'll drive me oot o' my min'. God forgie
+me, gin that be true. I deserve hell mair nor my Anerew.'
+
+'But, ye see, grannie, supposin' it war sae, that wadna be laid to your
+accoont, seein' ye did the best ye kent. Nor wad it be forgotten to him.
+It wad mak a hantle difference to his sin; it wad be a great excuse
+for him. An' jist think, gin it be fair for ae human being to influence
+anither a' 'at they can, and that's nae interferin' wi' their free
+wull--it's impossible to measure what God cud do wi' his speerit winnin'
+at them frae a' sides, and able to put sic thouchts an' sic pictures
+into them as we canna think. It wad a' be true that he tellt them, and
+the trowth can never be a meddlin' wi' the free wull.'
+
+Mrs. Falconer made no reply, but evidently went on thinking.
+
+She was, though not a great reader, yet a good reader. Any book that was
+devout and thoughtful she read gladly. Through some one or other of this
+sort she must have been instructed concerning free will, for I do
+not think such notions could have formed any portion of the religious
+teaching she had heard. Men in that part of Scotland then believed that
+the free will of man was only exercised in rejecting--never in accepting
+the truth; and that men were saved by the gift of the Spirit, given
+to some and not to others, according to the free will of God, in the
+exercise of which no reason appreciable by men, or having anything to do
+with their notions of love or justice, had any share. In the recognition
+of will and choice in the acceptance of the mercy of God, Mrs. Falconer
+was then in advance of her time. And it is no wonder if her notions did
+not all hang logically together.
+
+'At ony rate, grannie,' resumed her grandson, 'I haena dune a' for him
+'at I can yet; and I'm no gaein' to believe onything that wad mak me
+remiss in my endeavour. Houp for mysel', for my father, for a'body, is
+what's savin' me, an' garrin' me work. An' gin ye tell me that I'm no
+workin' wi' God, that God's no the best an' the greatest worker aboon
+a', ye tak the verra hert oot o' my breist, and I dinna believe in God
+nae mair, an' my han's drap doon by my sides, an' my legs winna gang.
+No,' said Robert, rising, 'God 'ill gie me my father sometime, grannie;
+for what man can do wantin' a father? Human bein' canna win at the hert
+o' things, canna ken a' the oots an' ins, a' the sides o' love, excep'
+he has a father amo' the lave to love; an' I hae had nane, grannie. An'
+that God kens.'
+
+She made him no answer. She dared not say that he expected too much from
+God. Is it likely that Jesus will say so of any man or woman when he
+looks for faith in the earth?
+
+Robert went out to see some of his old friends, and when he returned it
+was time for supper and worship. These were the same as of old: a plate
+of porridge, and a wooden bowl of milk for the former; a chapter and a
+hymn, both read, and a prayer from grannie, and then from Robert for the
+latter. And so they went to bed.
+
+But Robert could not sleep. He rose and dressed himself, went up to the
+empty garret, looked at the stars through the skylight, knelt and
+prayed for his father and for all men to the Father of all, then softly
+descended the stairs, and went out into the street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. SHARGAR'S MOTHER.
+
+It was a warm still night in July--moonless but not dark. There is no
+night there in the summer--only a long ethereal twilight. He walked
+through the sleeping town so full of memories, all quiet in his mind
+now--quiet as the air that ever broods over the house where a friend has
+dwelt. He left the town behind, and walked--through the odours of grass
+and of clover and of the yellow flowers on the old earthwalls that
+divided the fields--sweet scents to which the darkness is friendly, and
+which, mingling with the smell of the earth itself, reach the founts of
+memory sooner than even words or tones--down to the brink of the river
+that flowed scarcely murmuring through the night, itself dark and brown
+as the night from its far-off birthplace in the peaty hills. He
+crossed the footbridge and turned into the bleachfield. Its houses were
+desolate, for that trade too had died away. The machinery stood rotting
+and rusting. The wheel gave no answering motion to the flow of the water
+that glided away beneath it. The thundering beatles were still. The huge
+legs of the wauk-mill took no more seven-leagued strides nowhither. The
+rubbing-boards with their thickly-fluted surfaces no longer frothed the
+soap from every side, tormenting the web of linen into a brightness to
+gladden the heart of the housewife whose hands had spun the yarn.
+The terrible boiler that used to send up from its depths bubbling and
+boiling spouts and peaks and ridges, lay empty and cold. The little
+house behind, where its awful furnace used to glow, and which the
+pungent chlorine used to fill with its fumes, stood open to the wind
+and the rain: he could see the slow river through its unglazed window
+beyond. The water still went slipping and sliding through the deserted
+places, a power whose use had departed. The canal, the delight of his
+childhood, was nearly choked with weeds; it went flowing over long
+grasses that drooped into it from its edges, giving a faint gurgle once
+and again in its flow, as if it feared to speak in the presence of the
+stars, and escaped silently into the river far below. The grass was no
+longer mown like a lawn, but was long and deep and thick. He climbed to
+the place where he had once lain and listened to the sounds of the belt
+of fir-trees behind him, hearing the voice of Nature that whispered
+God in his ears, and there he threw himself down once more. All the old
+things, the old ways, the old glories of childhood--were they gone? No.
+Over them all, in them all, was God still. There is no past with him.
+An eternal present, He filled his soul and all that his soul had ever
+filled. His history was taken up into God: it had not vanished: his life
+was hid with Christ in God. To the God of the human heart nothing that
+has ever been a joy, a grief, a passing interest, can ever cease to be
+what it has been; there is no fading at the breath of time, no passing
+away of fashion, no dimming of old memories in the heart of him whose
+being creates time. Falconer's heart rose up to him as to his own deeper
+life, his indwelling deepest spirit--above and beyond him as the heavens
+are above and beyond the earth, and yet nearer and homelier than his own
+most familiar thought. 'As the light fills the earth,' thought he, 'so
+God fills what we call life. My sorrows, O God, my hopes, my joys, the
+upliftings of my life are with thee, my root, my life. Thy comfortings,
+my perfect God, are strength indeed!'
+
+He rose and looked around him. While he lay, the waning, fading moon had
+risen, weak and bleared and dull. She brightened and brightened until at
+last she lighted up the night with a wan, forgetful gleam. 'So should I
+feel,' he thought, 'about the past on which I am now gazing, were it not
+that I believe in the God who forgets nothing. That which has been, is.'
+His eye fell on something bright in the field beyond. He would see what
+it was, and crossed the earthen dyke. It shone like a little moon in the
+grass. By humouring the reflection he reached it. It was only a cutting
+of white iron, left by some tinker. He walked on over the field,
+thinking of Shargar's mother. If he could but find her! He walked on and
+on. He had no inclination to go home. The solitariness of the night, the
+uncanniness of the moon, prevents most people from wandering far: Robert
+had learned long ago to love the night, and to feel at home with every
+aspect of God's world. How this peace contrasted with the nights in
+London streets! this grass with the dark flow of the Thames! these hills
+and those clouds half melted into moonlight with the lanes blazing with
+gas! He thought of the child who, taken from London for the first time,
+sent home the message: 'Tell mother that it's dark in the country at
+night.' Then his thoughts turned again to Shargar's mother! Was it
+not possible, being a wanderer far and wide, that she might be now in
+Rothieden? Such people have a love for their old haunts, stronger than
+that of orderly members of society for their old homes. He turned back,
+and did not know where he was. But the lines of the hill-tops directed
+him. He hastened to the town, and went straight through the sleeping
+streets to the back wynd where he had found Shargar sitting on the
+doorstep. Could he believe his eyes? A feeble light was burning in the
+shed. Some other poverty-stricken bird of the night, however, might
+be there, and not she who could perhaps guide him to the goal of his
+earthly life. He drew near, and peeped in at the broken window. A heap
+of something lay in a corner, watched only by a long-snuffed candle.
+
+The heap moved, and a voice called out querulously,
+
+'Is that you, Shargar, ye shochlin deevil?'
+
+Falconer's heart leaped. He hesitated no longer, but lifted the latch
+and entered. He took up the candle, snuffed it as he best could, and
+approached the woman. When the light fell on her face she sat up,
+staring wildly with eyes that shunned and sought it.
+
+'Wha are ye that winna lat me dee in peace and quaietness?'
+
+'I'm Robert Falconer.'
+
+'Come to speir efter yer ne'er-do-weel o' a father, I reckon,' she said.
+
+'Yes,' he answered.
+
+'Wha's that ahin' ye?'
+
+'Naebody's ahin' me,' answered Robert.
+
+'Dinna lee. Wha's that ahin' the door?'
+
+'Naebody. I never tell lees.'
+
+'Whaur's Shargar? What for doesna he come till 's mither?'
+
+'He's hynd awa' ower the seas--a captain o' sodgers.'
+
+'It's a lee. He's an ill-faured scoonrel no to come till 's mither an'
+bid her gude-bye, an' her gaein' to hell.'
+
+'Gin ye speir at Christ, he'll tak ye oot o' the verra mou' o' hell,
+wuman.'
+
+'Christ! wha's that? Ow, ay! It's him 'at they preach aboot i' the
+kirks. Na, na. There's nae gude o' that. There's nae time to repent noo.
+I doobt sic repentance as mine wadna gang for muckle wi' the likes o'
+him.'
+
+'The likes o' him 's no to be gotten. He cam to save the likes o' you
+an' me.'
+
+'The likes o' you an' me! said ye, laddie? There's no like atween you
+and me. He'll hae naething to say to me, but gang to hell wi' ye for a
+bitch.'
+
+'He never said sic a word in 's life. He wad say, "Poor thing! she was
+ill-used. Ye maunna sin ony mair. Come, and I'll help ye." He wad say
+something like that. He'll save a body whan she wadna think it.'
+
+'An' I hae gien my bonnie bairn to the deevil wi' my ain han's! She'll
+come to hell efter me to girn at me, an' set them on me wi' their reid
+het taings, and curse me. Och hone! och hone!'
+
+'Hearken to me,' said Falconer, with as much authority as he could
+assume. But she rolled herself over again in the corner, and lay
+groaning.
+
+'Tell me whaur she is,' said Falconer, 'and I'll tak her oot o' their
+grup, whaever they be.'
+
+She sat up again, and stared at him for a few moments without speaking.
+
+'I left her wi' a wuman waur nor mysel',' she said at length. 'God
+forgie me.'
+
+'He will forgie ye, gin ye tell me whaur she is.'
+
+'Do ye think he will? Eh, Maister Faukner! The wuman bides in a coort
+off o' Clare Market. I dinna min' upo' the name o' 't, though I cud
+gang till 't wi' my een steekit. Her name's Widow Walker--an auld
+rowdie--damn her sowl!'
+
+'Na, na, ye maunna say that gin ye want to be forgien yersel'. I'll fin'
+her oot. An' I'm thinkin' it winna be lang or I hae a grup o' her. I'm
+gaein' back to Lonnon in twa days or three.'
+
+'Dinna gang till I'm deid. Bide an' haud the deevil aff o' me. He has a
+grup o' my hert noo, rivin' at it wi' his lang nails--as lang 's birds'
+nebs.'
+
+'I'll bide wi' ye till we see what can be dune for ye. What's the
+maitter wi' ye? I'm a doctor noo.'
+
+There was not a chair or box or stool on which to sit down. He therefore
+kneeled beside her. He felt her pulse, questioned her, and learned that
+she had long been suffering from an internal complaint, which had within
+the last week grown rapidly worse. He saw that there was no hope of her
+recovery, but while she lived he gave himself to her service as to that
+of a living soul capable of justice and love. The night was more than
+warm, but she had fits of shivering. He wrapped his coat round her,
+and wiped from the poor degraded face the damps of suffering. The
+woman-heart was alive still, for she took the hand that ministered to
+her and kissed it with a moan. When the morning came she fell asleep.
+He crept out and went to his grandmother's, where he roused Betty, and
+asked her to get him some peat and coals. Finding his grandmother awake,
+he told her all, and taking the coals and the peat, carried them to
+the hut, where he managed, with some difficulty, to light a fire on the
+hearth; after which he sat on the doorstep till Betty appeared with two
+men carrying a mattress and some bedding. The noise they made awoke her.
+
+'Dinna tak me,' she cried. 'I winna do 't again, an' I'm deein', I tell
+ye I'm deein', and that'll clear a' scores--o' this side ony gait,' she
+added.
+
+They lifted her upon the mattress, and made her more comfortable than
+perhaps she had ever been in her life. But it was only her illness that
+made her capable of prizing such comfort. In health, the heather on a
+hill-side was far more to her taste than bed and blankets. She had
+a wild, roving, savage nature, and the wind was dearer to her than
+house-walls. She had come of ancestors--and it was a poor little atom of
+truth that a soul bred like this woman could have been born capable of
+entertaining. But she too was eternal--and surely not to be fixed for
+ever in a bewilderment of sin and ignorance--a wild-eyed soul staring
+about in hell-fire for want of something it could not understand and had
+never beheld--by the changeless mandate of the God of love! She was in
+less pain than during the night, and lay quietly gazing at the fire.
+Things awful to another would no doubt cross her memory without any
+accompanying sense of dismay; tender things would return without moving
+her heart; but Falconer had a hold of her now. Nothing could be done for
+her body except to render its death as easy as might be; but something
+might be done for herself. He made no attempt to produce this or that
+condition of mind in the poor creature. He never made such attempts.
+'How can I tell the next lesson a soul is capable of learning?' he would
+say. 'The Spirit of God is the teacher. My part is to tell the good
+news. Let that work as it ought, as it can, as it will.' He knew that
+pain is with some the only harbinger that can prepare the way for the
+entrance of kindness: it is not understood till then. In the lulls of
+her pain he told her about the man Christ Jesus--what he did for the
+poor creatures who came to him--how kindly he spoke to them--how he
+cured them. He told her how gentle he was with the sinning women, how he
+forgave them and told them to do so no more. He left the story without
+comment to work that faith which alone can redeem from selfishness and
+bring into contact with all that is living and productive of life,
+for to believe in him is to lay hold of eternal life: he is the
+Life--therefore the life of men. She gave him but little encouragement:
+he did not need it, for he believed in the Life. But her outcries were
+no longer accompanied with that fierce and dreadful language in which
+she sought relief at first. He said to himself, 'What matter if I see no
+sign? I am doing my part. Who can tell, when the soul is free from the
+distress of the body, when sights and sounds have vanished from her,
+and she is silent in the eternal, with the terrible past behind her, and
+clear to her consciousness, how the words I have spoken to her may yet
+live and grow in her; how the kindness God has given me to show her may
+help her to believe in the root of all kindness, in the everlasting love
+of her Father in heaven? That she can feel at all is as sure a sign of
+life as the adoration of an ecstatic saint.'
+
+He had no difficulty now in getting from her what information she could
+give him about his father. It seemed to him of the greatest import,
+though it amounted only to this, that when he was in London, he used to
+lodge at the house of an old Scotchwoman of the name of Macallister,
+who lived in Paradise Gardens, somewhere between Bethnal Green and
+Spitalfields. Whether he had been in London lately, she did not
+know; but if anybody could tell him where he was, it would be Mrs.
+Macallister.
+
+His heart filled with gratitude and hope and the surging desire for the
+renewal of his London labours. But he could not leave the dying woman
+till she was beyond the reach of his comfort: he was her keeper now. And
+'he that believeth shall not make haste.' Labour without perturbation,
+readiness without hurry, no haste, and no hesitation, was the divine law
+of his activity.
+
+Shargar's mother breathed her last holding his hand. They were alone. He
+kneeled by the bed, and prayed to God, saying,
+
+'Father, this woman is in thy hands. Take thou care of her, as thou hast
+taken care of her hitherto. Let the light go up in her soul, that she
+may love and trust thee, O light, O gladness. I thank thee that thou
+hast blessed me with this ministration. Now lead me to my father. Thine
+is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.'
+
+He rose and went to his grandmother and told her all. She put her arms
+round his neck, and kissed him, and said,
+
+'God bless ye, my bonny lad. And he will bless ye. He will; he will. Noo
+gang yer wa's, and do the wark he gies ye to do. Only min', it's no you;
+it's him.'
+
+The next morning, the sweet winds of his childhood wooing him to remain
+yet a day among their fields, he sat on the top of the Aberdeen coach,
+on his way back to the horrors of court and alley in the terrible
+London.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. THE SILK-WEAVER.
+
+When he arrived he made it his first business to find 'Widow Walker.'
+She was evidently one of the worst of her class; and could it have been
+accomplished without scandal, and without interfering with the quietness
+upon which he believed that the true effect of his labours in a large
+measure depended, he would not have scrupled simply to carry off the
+child. With much difficulty, for the woman was suspicious, he contrived
+to see her, and was at once reminded of the child he had seen in the
+cart on the occasion of Shargar's recognition of his mother. He fancied
+he saw in her some resemblance to his friend Shargar. The affair ended
+in his paying the woman a hundred and fifty pounds to give up the girl.
+Within six months she had drunk herself to death. He took little Nancy
+Kennedy home with him, and gave her in charge to his housekeeper. She
+cried a good deal at first, and wanted to go back to Mother Walker, but
+he had no great trouble with her after a time. She began to take a share
+in the house-work, and at length to wait upon him. Then Falconer began
+to see that he must cultivate relations with other people in order
+to enlarge his means of helping the poor. He nowise abandoned his
+conviction that whatever good he sought to do or lent himself to aid
+must be effected entirely by individual influence. He had little faith
+in societies, regarding them chiefly as a wretched substitute, just
+better than nothing, for that help which the neighbour is to give to
+his neighbour. Finding how the unbelief of the best of the poor is
+occasioned by hopelessness in privation, and the sufferings of those
+dear to them, he was confident that only the personal communion of
+friendship could make it possible for them to believe in God. Christians
+must be in the world as He was in the world; and in proportion as the
+truth radiated from them, the world would be able to believe in Him.
+Money he saw to be worse than useless, except as a gracious outcome of
+human feelings and brotherly love. He always insisted that the Saviour
+healed only those on whom his humanity had laid hold; that he demanded
+faith of them in order to make them regard him, that so his personal
+being might enter into their hearts. Healing without faith in its source
+would have done them harm instead of good--would have been to them a
+windfall, not a Godsend; at best the gift of magic, even sometimes the
+power of Satan casting out Satan. But he must not therefore act as if
+he were the only one who could render this individual aid, or as if
+men influencing the poor individually could not aid each other in their
+individual labours. He soon found, I say, that there were things he
+could not do without help, and Nancy was his first perplexity. From this
+he was delivered in a wonderful way.
+
+One afternoon he was prowling about Spitalfields, where he had made many
+acquaintances amongst the silk-weavers and their families. Hearing a
+loud voice as he passed down a stair from the visit he had been paying
+further up the house, he went into the room whence the sound came,
+for he knew a little of the occupant. He was one De Fleuri, or as
+the neighbours called him, Diffleery, in whose countenance, after
+generations of want and debasement, the delicate lines and noble cast of
+his ancient race were yet emergent. This man had lost his wife and
+three children, his whole family except a daughter now sick, by a
+slow-consuming hunger; and he did not believe there was a God that ruled
+in the earth. But he supported his unbelief by no other argument than
+a hopeless bitter glance at his empty loom. At this moment he sat
+silent--a rock against which the noisy waves of a combative Bible-reader
+were breaking in rude foam. His silence and apparent impassiveness
+angered the irreverent little worthy. To Falconer's humour he looked a
+vulgar bull-terrier barking at a noble, sad-faced staghound. His foolish
+arguments against infidelity, drawn from Paley's Natural Theology, and
+tracts about the inspiration of the Bible, touched the sore-hearted
+unbelief of the man no nearer than the clangour of negro kettles affects
+the eclipse of the sun. Falconer stood watching his opportunity. Nor
+was the eager disputant long in affording him one. Socratic fashion,
+Falconer asked him a question, and was answered; followed it with
+another, which, after a little hesitation, was likewise answered;
+then asked a third, the ready answer to which involved such a flagrant
+contradiction of the first, that the poor sorrowful weaver burst into
+a laugh of delight at the discomfiture of his tormentor. After some
+stammering, and a confused attempt to recover the line of argument, the
+would-be partizan of Deity roared out, 'The fool hath said in his heart
+there is no God;' and with this triumphant discharge of his swivel,
+turned and ran down the stairs precipitately.
+
+Both laughed while the sound of his footsteps lasted. Then Falconer
+said,
+
+'My. De Fleuri, I believe in God with all my heart, and soul, and
+strength, and mind; though not in that poor creature's arguments. I
+don't know that your unbelief is not better than his faith.'
+
+'I am greatly obliged to you, Mr. Falconer. I haven't laughed so for
+years. What right has he to come pestering me?'
+
+'None whatever. But you must forgive him, because he is well-meaning,
+and because his conceit has made a fool of him. They're not all like
+him. But how is your daughter?'
+
+'Very poorly, sir. She's going after the rest. A Spitalfields weaver
+ought to be like the cats: they don't mind how many of their kittens are
+drowned.'
+
+'I beg your pardon. They don't like it. Only they forget it sooner than
+we do.'
+
+'Why do you say we, sir? You don't know anything of that sort.'
+
+'The heart knows its own bitterness, De Fleuri--and finds it enough, I
+dare say.'
+
+The weaver was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, there was a
+touch of tenderness in his respect.
+
+'Will you go and see my poor Katey, sir?'
+
+'Would she like to see me?'
+
+'It does her good to see you. I never let that fellow go near her. He
+may worry me as he pleases; but she shall die in peace. That is all I
+can do for her.'
+
+'Do you still persist in refusing help--for your daughter--I don't mean
+for yourself?'
+
+Not believing in God, De Fleuri would not be obliged to his fellow.
+Falconer had never met with a similar instance.
+
+'I do. I won't kill her, and I won't kill myself: I am not bound to
+accept charity. It's all right. I only want to leave the whole affair
+behind; and I sincerely hope there's nothing to come after. If I were
+God, I should be ashamed of such a mess of a world.'
+
+'Well, no doubt you would have made something more to your mind--and
+better, too, if all you see were all there is to be seen. But I didn't
+send that bore away to bore you myself. I'm going to see Katey.'
+
+'Very well, sir. I won't go up with you, for I won't interfere with what
+you think proper to say to her.'
+
+'That's rather like faith somewhere!' thought Falconer. 'Could that man
+fail to believe in Jesus Christ if he only saw him--anything like as he
+is?'
+
+Katey lay in a room overhead; for though he lacked food, this man
+contrived to pay for a separate room for his daughter, whom he treated
+with far more respect than many gentlemen treat their wives. Falconer
+found her lying on a wretched bed. Still it was a bed; and many in the
+same house had no bed to lie on. He had just come from a room overhead
+where lived a widow with four children. All of them lay on a floor
+whence issued at night, by many holes, awful rats. The children could
+not sleep for horror. They did not mind the little ones, they said, but
+when the big ones came, they were awake all night.
+
+'Well, Katey, how are you?'
+
+'No better, thank God.'
+
+She spoke as her father had taught her. Her face was worn and thin, but
+hardly death-like. Only extremes met in it--the hopelessness had turned
+through quietude into comfort. Her hopelessness affected him more than
+her father's. But there was nothing he could do for her.
+
+There came a tap at the door.
+
+'Come in,' said Falconer, involuntarily.
+
+A lady in the dress of a Sister of Mercy entered with a large basket on
+her arm. She started, and hesitated for a moment when she saw him. He
+rose, thinking it better to go. She advanced to the bedside. He turned
+at the door, and said,
+
+'I won't say good-bye yet, Katey, for I'm going to have a chat with your
+father, and if you will let me, I will look in again.'
+
+As he turned he saw the lady kiss her on the forehead. At the sound
+of his voice she started again, left the bedside and came towards him.
+Whether he knew her by her face or her voice first, he could not tell.
+
+'Robert,' she said, holding out her hand.
+
+It was Mary St. John. Their hands met, joined fast, and lingered, as
+they gazed each in the other's face. It was nearly fourteen years since
+they had parted. The freshness of youth was gone from her cheek, and the
+signs of middle age were present on her forehead. But she was statelier,
+nobler, and gentler than ever. Falconer looked at her calmly, with
+only a still swelling at the heart, as if they met on the threshold of
+heaven. All the selfishness of passion was gone, and the old earlier
+adoration, elevated and glorified, had returned. He was a boy once more
+in the presence of a woman-angel. She did not shrink from his gaze, she
+did not withdraw her hand from his clasp.
+
+'I am so glad, Robert!' was all she said.
+
+'So am I,' he answered quietly. 'We may meet sometimes then?'
+
+'Yes. Perhaps we can help each other.'
+
+'You can help me,' said Falconer. 'I have a girl I don't know what to do
+with.'
+
+'Send her to me. I will take care of her.'
+
+'I will bring her. But I must come and see you first.'
+
+'That will tell you where I live,' she said, giving him a card.
+Good-bye.'
+
+'Till to-morrow,' said Falconer.
+
+'She's not like that Bible fellow,' said De Fleuri, as he entered his
+room again. 'She don't walk into your house as if it was her own.'
+
+He was leaning against his idle loom, which, like a dead thing, filled
+the place with the mournfulness of death. Falconer took a broken chair,
+the only one, and sat down.
+
+'I am going to take a liberty with you, Mr. De Fleuri,' he said.
+
+'As you please, Mr. Falconer.'
+
+'I want to tell you the only fault I have to you.'
+
+'Yes?'
+
+'You don't do anything for the people in the house. Whether you believe
+in God or not, you ought to do what you can for your neighbour.'
+
+He held that to help a neighbour is the strongest antidote to unbelief,
+and an open door out of the bad air of one's own troubles, as well.
+
+De Fleuri laughed bitterly, and rubbed his hand up and down his empty
+pocket. It was a pitiable action. Falconer understood it.
+
+'There are better things than money: sympathy, for instance. You could
+talk to them a little.'
+
+'I have no sympathy, sir.'
+
+'You would find you had, if you would let it out.'
+
+'I should only make them more miserable. If I believed as you do, now,
+there might be some use.'
+
+'There's that widow with her four children in the garret. The poor
+little things are tormented by the rats: couldn't you nail bits of wood
+over their holes?'
+
+De Fleuri laughed again.
+
+'Where am I to get the bits of wood, except I pull down some of those
+laths. And they wouldn't keep them out a night.'
+
+'Couldn't you ask some carpenter?'
+
+'I won't ask a favour.'
+
+'I shouldn't mind asking, now.'
+
+'That's because you don't know the bitterness of needing.'
+
+'Fortunately, however, there's no occasion for it. You have no right to
+refuse for another what you wouldn't accept for yourself. Of course I
+could send in a man to do it; but if you would do it, that would do her
+heart good. And that's what most wants doing good to--isn't it, now?'
+
+'I believe you're right there, sir. If it wasn't for the misery of it, I
+shouldn't mind the hunger.'
+
+'I should like to tell you how I came to go poking my nose into other
+people's affairs. Would you like to hear my story now?'
+
+'If you please, sir.'
+
+A little pallid curiosity seemed to rouse itself in the heart of the
+hopeless man. So Falconer began at once to tell him how he had been
+brought up, describing the country and their ways of life, not excluding
+his adventures with Shargar, until he saw that the man was thoroughly
+interested. Then all at once, pulling out his watch, he said,
+
+'But it's time I had my tea, and I haven't half done yet. I am not fond
+of being hungry, like you, Mr. De Fleuri.'
+
+The poor fellow could only manage a very dubious smile.
+
+'I'll tell you what,' said Falconer, as if the thought had only just
+struck him--'come home with me, and I'll give you the rest of it at my
+own place.'
+
+'You must excuse me, sir.'
+
+'Bless my soul, the man's as proud as Lucifer! He won't accept a
+neighbour's invitation to a cup of tea--for fear it should put him under
+obligations, I suppose.'
+
+'It's very kind of you, sir, to put it in that way; but I don't choose
+to be taken in. You know very well it's not as one equal asks another
+you ask me. It's charity.'
+
+'Do I not behave to you as an equal?'
+
+'But you know that don't make us equals.'
+
+'But isn't there something better than being equals? Supposing, as you
+will have it, that we're not equals, can't we be friends?'
+
+'I hope so, sir.'
+
+'Do you think now, Mr. De Fleuri, if you weren't something more to me
+than a mere equal, I would go telling you my own history? But I forgot:
+I have told you hardly anything yet. I have to tell you how much nearer
+I am to your level than you think. I had the design too of getting you
+to help me in the main object of my life. Come, don't be a fool. I want
+you.'
+
+'I can't leave Katey,' said the weaver, hesitatingly.
+
+'Miss St. John is there still. I will ask her to stop till you come
+back.'
+
+Without waiting for an answer, he ran up the stairs, and had speedily
+arranged with Miss St. John. Then taking his consent for granted, he
+hurried De Fleuri away with him, and knowing how unfit a man of his
+trade was for walking, irrespective of feebleness from want, he called
+the first cab, and took him home. Here, over their tea, which he judged
+the safest meal for a stomach unaccustomed to food, he told him about
+his grandmother, and about Dr. Anderson, and how he came to give himself
+to the work he was at, partly for its own sake, partly in the hope of
+finding his father. He told him his only clue to finding him; and that
+he had called on Mrs. Macallister twice every week for two years, but
+had heard nothing of him. De Fleuri listened with what rose to great
+interest before the story was finished. And one of its ends at least was
+gained: the weaver was at home with him. The poor fellow felt that such
+close relation to an outcast, did indeed bring Falconer nearer to his
+own level.
+
+'Do you want it kept a secret, sir?' he asked.
+
+'I don't want it made a matter of gossip. But I do not mind how many
+respectable people like yourself know of it.'
+
+He said this with a vague hope of assistance.
+
+Before they parted, the unaccustomed tears had visited the eyes of
+De Fleuri, and he had consented not only to repair Mrs. Chisholm's
+garret-floor, but to take in hand the expenditure of a certain sum
+weekly, as he should judge expedient, for the people who lived in that
+and the neighbouring houses--in no case, however, except of sickness,
+or actual want of bread from want of work. Thus did Falconer appoint a
+sorrow-made infidel to be the almoner of his christian charity, knowing
+well that the nature of the Son of Man was in him, and that to get him
+to do as the Son of Man did, in ever so small a degree, was the readiest
+means of bringing his higher nature to the birth. Nor did he ever repent
+the choice he had made.
+
+When he waited upon Miss St. John the next day, he found her in the
+ordinary dress of a lady. She received him with perfect confidence and
+kindness, but there was no reference made to the past. She told him that
+she had belonged to a sisterhood, but had left it a few days before,
+believing she could do better without its restrictions.
+
+'It was an act of cowardice,' she said,--'wearing the dress yesterday.
+I had got used to it, and did not feel safe without it; but I shall not
+wear it any more.'
+
+'I think you are right,' said Falconer. 'The nearer any friendly act is
+associated with the individual heart, without intervention of class or
+creed, the more the humanity, which is the divinity of it, will appear.'
+
+He then told her about Nancy.
+
+'I will keep her about myself for a while,' said Miss St. John, 'till
+I see what can be done with her. I know a good many people who without
+being prepared, or perhaps able to take any trouble, are yet ready to do
+a kindness when it is put in their way.'
+
+'I feel more and more that I ought to make some friends,' said Falconer;
+'for I find my means of help reach but a little way. What had I better
+do? I suppose I could get some introductions.--I hardly know how.'
+
+'That will easily be managed. I will take that in hand. If you will
+accept invitations, you will soon know a good many people--of all
+sorts,' she added with a smile.
+
+About this time Falconer, having often felt the pressure of his
+ignorance of legal affairs, and reflected whether it would not add to
+his efficiency to rescue himself from it, began such a course of study
+as would fit him for the profession of the law. Gifted with splendid
+health, and if with a slow strength of grasping, yet with a great power
+of holding, he set himself to work, and regularly read for the bar.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. MY OWN ACQUAINTANCE.
+
+It was after this that my own acquaintance with Falconer commenced. I
+had just come out of one of the theatres in the neighbourhood of the
+Strand, unable to endure any longer the dreary combination of false
+magnanimity and real meanness, imported from Paris in the shape of
+a melodrama, for the delectation of the London public. I had turned
+northwards, and was walking up one of the streets near Covent Garden,
+when my attention was attracted to a woman who came out of a gin-shop,
+carrying a baby. She went to the kennel, and bent her head over, ill
+with the poisonous stuff she had been drinking. And while the woman
+stood in this degrading posture, the poor, white, wasted baby was
+looking over her shoulder with the smile of a seraph, perfectly
+unconscious of the hell around her.
+
+'Children will see things as God sees them,' murmured a voice beside me.
+
+I turned and saw a tall man with whose form I had already become a
+little familiar, although I knew nothing of him, standing almost at my
+elbow, with his eyes fixed on the woman and the child, and a strange
+smile of tenderness about his mouth, as if he were blessing the little
+creature in his heart.
+
+He too saw the wonder of the show, typical of so much in the world,
+indeed of the world itself--the seemingly vile upholding and ministering
+to the life of the pure, the gracious, the fearless. Aware from his
+tone more than from his pronunciation that he was a fellow-countryman, I
+ventured to speak to him, and in a home-dialect.
+
+'It's a wonnerfu' sicht. It's the cake o' Ezekiel ower again.'
+
+He looked at me sharply, thought a moment, and said,
+
+'You were going my way when you stopped. I will walk with you, if you
+will.'
+
+'But what's to be done about it?' I said.
+
+'About what?' he returned.
+
+'About the child there,' I answered.
+
+'Oh! she is its mother,' he replied, walking on.
+
+'What difference does that make?' I said.
+
+'All the difference in the world. If God has given her that child, what
+right have you or I to interfere?'
+
+'But I verily believe from the look of the child she gives it gin.'
+
+'God saves the world by the new blood, the children. To take her child
+from her, would be to do what you could to damn her.'
+
+'It doesn't look much like salvation there.'
+
+'You mustn't interfere with God's thousand years any more than his one
+day.'
+
+'Are you sure she is the mother?' I asked.
+
+'Yes. I would not have left the child with her otherwise.'
+
+'What would you have done with it? Got it into some orphan asylum?--or
+the Foundling perhaps?'
+
+'Never,' he answered. 'All those societies are wretched inventions for
+escape from the right way. There ought not to be an orphan asylum in the
+kingdom.'
+
+'What! Would you put them all down then?'
+
+'God forbid. But I would, if I could, make them all useless.'
+
+'How could you do that?'
+
+'I would merely enlighten the hearts of childless people as to their
+privileges.'
+
+'Which are?'
+
+'To be fathers and mothers to the fatherless and motherless.'
+
+'I have often wondered why more of them did not adopt children. Why
+don't they?'
+
+'For various reasons which a real love to child nature would blow to the
+winds--all comprised in this, that such a child would not be their own
+child. As if ever a child could be their own! That a child is God's
+is of rather more consequence than whether it is born of this or that
+couple. Their hearts would surely be glad when they went into heaven to
+have the angels of the little ones that always behold the face of their
+Father coming round them, though they were not exactly their father and
+mother.'
+
+'I don't know what the passage you refer to means.'
+
+'Neither do I. But it must mean something, if He said it. Are you a
+clergyman?'
+
+'No. I am only a poor teacher of mathematics and poetry, shown up the
+back stairs into the nurseries of great houses.'
+
+'A grand chance, if I may use the word.'
+
+'I do try to wake a little enthusiasm in the sons and daughters--without
+much success, I fear.'
+
+'Will you come and see me?' he said.
+
+'With much pleasure. But, as I have given you an answer, you owe me
+one.'
+
+'I do.'
+
+'Have you adopted a child?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'Then you have some of your own?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'Then, excuse me, but why the warmth of your remarks on those who--'
+
+'I think I shall be able to satisfy you on that point, if we draw
+to each other. Meantime I must leave you. Could you come to-morrow
+evening?'
+
+'With pleasure.'
+
+We arranged the hour and parted. I saw him walk into a low public-house,
+and went home.
+
+At the time appointed, I rang the bell, and was led by an elderly woman
+up the stair, and shown into a large room on the first-floor--poorly
+furnished, and with many signs of bachelor-carelessness. Mr. Falconer
+rose from an old hair-covered sofa to meet me as I entered. I will first
+tell my reader something of his personal appearance.
+
+He was considerably above six feet in height, square-shouldered,
+remarkably long in the arms, and his hands were uncommonly large and
+powerful. His head was large, and covered with dark wavy hair, lightly
+streaked with gray. His broad forehead projected over deep-sunk eyes,
+that shone like black fire. His features, especially his Roman nose,
+were large, and finely, though not delicately, modelled. His nostrils
+were remarkably large and flexile, with a tendency to slight motion: I
+found on further acquaintance that when he was excited, they expanded in
+a wild equine manner. The expression of his mouth was of tender power,
+crossed with humour. He kept his lips a little compressed, which gave a
+certain sternness to his countenance: but when this sternness dissolved
+in a smile, it was something enchanting. He was plainly, rather shabbily
+clothed. No one could have guessed at his profession or social position.
+He came forward and received me cordially. After a little indifferent
+talk, he asked me if I had any other engagement for the evening.
+
+'I never have any engagements,' I answered--'at least, of a social kind.
+I am burd alane. I know next to nobody.'
+
+'Then perhaps you would not mind going out with me for a stroll?'
+
+'I shall be most happy,' I answered.
+
+There was something about the man I found exceedingly attractive; I had
+very few friends; and there was besides something odd, almost romantic,
+in this beginning of an intercourse: I would see what would come of it.
+
+'Then we'll have some supper first,' said Mr. Falconer, and rang the
+bell.
+
+While we ate our chops--
+
+'I dare say you think it strange,' my host said, 'that without the least
+claim on your acquaintance, I should have asked you to come and see me,
+Mr.--'
+
+He stopped, smiling.
+
+'My name is Gordon--Archie Gordon,' I said.
+
+'Well, then, Mr. Gordon, I confess I have a design upon you. But you
+will remember that you addressed me first.'
+
+'You spoke first,' I said.
+
+'Did I?'
+
+'I did not say you spoke to me, but you spoke.--I should not have
+ventured to make the remark I did make, if I had not heard your voice
+first. What design have you on me?'
+
+'That will appear in due course. Now take a glass of wine, and we'll set
+out.'
+
+We soon found ourselves in Holborn, and my companion led the way towards
+the City. The evening was sultry and close.
+
+'Nothing excites me more,' said Mr. Falconer, 'than a walk in the
+twilight through a crowded street. Do you find it affect you so?'
+
+'I cannot speak as strongly as you do,' I replied. 'But I perfectly
+understand what you mean. Why is it, do you think?'
+
+'Partly, I fancy, because it is like the primordial chaos, a
+concentrated tumult of undetermined possibilities. The germs of infinite
+adventure and result are floating around you like a snow-storm. You do
+not know what may arise in a moment and colour all your future. Out
+of this mass may suddenly start something marvellous, or, it may be,
+something you have been looking for for years.'
+
+The same moment, a fierce flash of lightning, like a blue sword-blade
+a thousand times shattered, quivered and palpitated about us, leaving a
+thick darkness on the sense. I heard my companion give a suppressed cry,
+and saw him run up against a heavy drayman who was on the edge of the
+path, guiding his horses with his long whip. He begged the man's pardon,
+put his hand to his head, and murmured, 'I shall know him now.' I was
+afraid for a moment that the lightning had struck him, but he assured
+me there was nothing amiss. He looked a little excited and confused,
+however.
+
+I should have forgotten the incident, had he not told me
+afterwards--when I had come to know him intimately--that in the moment
+of that lightning flash, he had had a strange experience: he had seen
+the form of his father, as he had seen him that Sunday afternoon, in the
+midst of the surrounding light. He was as certain of the truth of the
+presentation as if a gradual revival of memory had brought with it the
+clear conviction of its own accuracy. His explanation of the phenomenon
+was, that, in some cases, all that prevents a vivid conception from
+assuming objectivity, is the self-assertion of external objects. The
+gradual approach of darkness cannot surprise and isolate the phantasm;
+but the suddenness of the lightning could and did, obliterating
+everything without, and leaving that over which it had no power standing
+alone, and therefore visible.
+
+'But,' I ventured to ask, 'whence the minuteness of detail, surpassing,
+you say, all that your memory could supply?'
+
+'That I think was a quickening of the memory by the realism of the
+presentation. Excited by the vision, it caught at its own past, as it
+were, and suddenly recalled that which it had forgotten. In the rapidity
+of all pure mental action, this at once took its part in the apparent
+objectivity.'
+
+To return to the narrative of my first evening in Falconer's company.
+
+It was strange how insensible the street population was to the grandeur
+of the storm. While the thunder was billowing and bellowing over and
+around us--
+
+'A hundred pins for one ha'penny,' bawled a man from the gutter, with
+the importance of a Cagliostro.
+
+'Evening Star! Telegrauwff!' roared an ear-splitting urchin in my very
+face. I gave him a shove off the pavement.
+
+'Ah! don't do that,' said Falconer. 'It only widens the crack between
+him and his fellows--not much, but a little.'
+
+'You are right,' I said. 'I won't do it again.'
+
+The same moment we heard a tumult in a neighbouring street. A crowd
+was execrating a policeman, who had taken a woman into custody, and was
+treating her with unnecessary rudeness. Falconer looked on for a few
+moments.
+
+'Come, policeman!' he said at length, in a tone of expostulation.
+'You're rather rough, are you not? She's a woman, you know.'
+
+'Hold your blasted humbug,' answered the man, an exceptional specimen of
+the force at that time at all events, and shook the tattered wretch, as
+if he would shake her out of her rags.
+
+Falconer gently parted the crowd, and stood beside the two.
+
+'I will help you,' he said, 'to take her to the station, if you like,
+but you must not treat her that way.'
+
+'I don't want your help,' said the policeman; 'I know you, and all the
+damned lot of you.'
+
+'Then I shall be compelled to give you a lesson,' said Falconer.
+
+The man's only answer was a shake that made the woman cry out.
+
+'I shall get into trouble if you get off,' said Falconer to her. 'Will
+you promise me, on your word, to go with me to the station, if I rid you
+of the fellow?'
+
+'I will, I will,' said the woman.
+
+'Then, look out,' said Falconer to the policeman; 'for I'm going to give
+you that lesson.'
+
+The officer let the woman go, took his baton, and made a blow at
+Falconer. In another moment--I could hardly see how--he lay in the
+street.
+
+'Now, my poor woman, come along,' said Falconer.
+
+She obeyed, crying gently. Two other policemen came up.
+
+'Do you want to give that woman in charge, Mr. Falconer?' asked one of
+them.
+
+'I give that man in charge,' cried his late antagonist, who had just
+scrambled to his feet. 'Assaulting the police in discharge of their
+duty.'
+
+'Very well,' said the other. 'But you're in the wrong box, and that
+you'll find. You had better come along to the station, sir.'
+
+'Keep that fellow from getting hold of the woman--you two, and we'll go
+together,' said Falconer.
+
+Bewildered with the rapid sequence of events, I was following in the
+crowd. Falconer looked about till he saw me, and gave me a nod which
+meant come along. Before we reached Bow Street, however, the offending
+policeman, who had been walking a little behind in conversation with
+one of the others, advanced to Falconer, touched his hat, and said
+something, to which Falconer replied.
+
+'Remember, I have my eye upon you,' was all I heard, however, as he left
+the crowd and rejoined me. We turned and walked eastward again.
+
+The storm kept on intermittently, but the streets were rather more
+crowded than usual notwithstanding.
+
+'Look at that man in the woollen jacket,' said Falconer. 'What a
+beautiful outline of face! There must be something noble in that man.'
+
+'I did not see him,' I answered, 'I was taken up with a woman's face,
+like that of a beautiful corpse. It's eyes were bright. There was gin in
+its brain.'
+
+The streets swarmed with human faces gleaming past. It was a night of
+ghosts.
+
+There stood a man who had lost one arm, earnestly pumping bilge-music
+out of an accordion with the other, holding it to his body with the
+stump. There was a woman, pale with hunger and gin, three match-boxes
+in one extended hand, and the other holding a baby to her breast. As
+we looked, the poor baby let go its hold, turned its little head, and
+smiled a wan, shrivelled, old-fashioned smile in our faces.
+
+Another happy baby, you see, Mr. Gordon,' said Falconer. 'A child, fresh
+from God, finds its heaven where no one else would. The devil could
+drive woman out of Paradise; but the devil himself cannot drive the
+Paradise out of a woman.'
+
+'What can be done for them?' I said, and at the moment, my eye fell upon
+a row of little children, from two to five years of age, seated upon the
+curb-stone.
+
+They were chattering fast, and apparently carrying on some game, as
+happy as if they had been in the fields.
+
+'Wouldn't you like to take all those little grubby things, and put them
+in a great tub and wash them clean?' I said.
+
+'They'd fight like spiders,' rejoined Falconer.
+
+'They're not fighting now.'
+
+'Then don't make them. It would be all useless. The probability is that
+you would only change the forms of the various evils, and possibly
+for worse. You would buy all that man's glue-lizards, and that man's
+three-foot rules, and that man's dog-collars and chains, at three times
+their value, that they might get more drink than usual, and do nothing
+at all for their living to-morrow.--What a happy London you would make
+if you were Sultan Haroun!' he added, laughing. 'You would put an end to
+poverty altogether, would you not?'
+
+I did not reply at once.
+
+'But I beg your pardon,' he resumed; 'I am very rude.'
+
+'Not at all,' I returned. 'I was only thinking how to answer you. They
+would be no worse after all than those who inherit property and lead
+idle lives.'
+
+'True; but they would be no better. Would you be content that your
+quondam poor should be no better off than the rich? What would be gained
+thereby? Is there no truth in the words "Blessed are the poor"? A deeper
+truth than most Christians dare to see.--Did you ever observe that there
+is not one word about the vices of the poor in the Bible--from beginning
+to end?'
+
+'But they have their vices.'
+
+'Indubitably. I am only stating a fact. The Bible is full enough of the
+vices of the rich. I make no comment.'
+
+'But don't you care for their sufferings?'
+
+'They are of secondary importance quite. But if you had been as much
+amongst them as I, perhaps you would be of my opinion, that the poor are
+not, cannot possibly feel so wretched as they seem to us. They live in a
+climate, as it were, which is their own, by natural law comply with it,
+and find it not altogether unfriendly. The Laplander will prefer his
+wastes to the rich fields of England, not merely from ignorance, but for
+the sake of certain blessings amongst which he has been born and brought
+up. The blessedness of life depends far more on its interest than upon
+its comfort. The need of exertion and the doubt of success, renders life
+much more interesting to the poor than it is to those who, unblessed
+with anxiety for the bread that perisheth, waste their poor hearts about
+rank and reputation.'
+
+'I thought such anxiety was represented as an evil in the New
+Testament.'
+
+'Yes. But it is a still greater evil to lose it in any other way than by
+faith in God. You would remove the anxiety by destroying its cause: God
+would remove it by lifting them above it, by teaching them to trust in
+him, and thus making them partakers of the divine nature. Poverty is a
+blessing when it makes a man look up.'
+
+'But you cannot say it does so always.'
+
+'I cannot determine when, where, and how much; but I am sure it does.
+And I am confident that to free those hearts from it by any deed of
+yours would be to do them the greatest injury you could. Probably their
+want of foresight would prove the natural remedy, speedily reducing them
+to their former condition--not however without serious loss.'
+
+'But will not this theory prove at last an anaesthetic rather than an
+anodyne? I mean that, although you may adopt it at first for refuge from
+the misery the sight of their condition occasions you, there is surely a
+danger of its rendering you at last indifferent to it.'
+
+'Am I indifferent? But you do not know me yet. Pardon my egotism. There
+may be such danger. Every truth has its own danger or shadow. Assuredly
+I would have no less labour spent upon them. But there can be no true
+labour done, save in as far as we are fellow-labourers with God. We must
+work with him, not against him. Every one who works without believing
+that God is doing the best, the absolute good for them, is, must be,
+more or less, thwarting God. He would take the poor out of God's hands.
+For others, as for ourselves, we must trust him. If we could thoroughly
+understand anything, that would be enough to prove it undivine; and that
+which is but one step beyond our understanding must be in some of its
+relations as mysterious as if it were a hundred. But through all this
+darkness about the poor, at least I can see wonderful veins and fields
+of light, and with the help of this partial vision, I trust for the
+rest. The only and the greatest thing man is capable of is Trust in
+God.'
+
+'What then is a man to do for the poor? How is he to work with God?' I
+asked.
+
+'He must be a man amongst them--a man breathing the air of a higher
+life, and therefore in all natural ways fulfilling his endless human
+relations to them. Whatever you do for them, let your own being, that
+is you in relation to them, be the background, that so you may be a
+link between them and God, or rather I should say, between them and the
+knowledge of God.'
+
+While Falconer spoke, his face grew grander and grander, till at last
+it absolutely shone. I felt that I walked with a man whose faith was his
+genius.
+
+'Of one thing I am pretty sure,' he resumed, 'that the same recipe
+Goethe gave for the enjoyment of life, applies equally to all work: "Do
+the thing that lies next you." That is all our business. Hurried results
+are worse than none. We must force nothing, but be partakers of the
+divine patience. How long it took to make the cradle! and we fret that
+the baby Humanity is not reading Euclid and Plato, even that it is not
+understanding the Gospel of St. John! If there is one thing evident in
+the world's history, it is that God hasteneth not. All haste implies
+weakness. Time is as cheap as space and matter. What they call the
+church militant is only at drill yet, and a good many of the officers
+too not out of the awkward squad. I am sure I, for a private, am not.
+In the drill a man has to conquer himself, and move with the rest by
+individual attention to his own duty: to what mighty battlefields the
+recruit may yet be led, he does not know. Meantime he has nearly enough
+to do with his goose-step, while there is plenty of single combat,
+skirmish, and light cavalry work generally, to get him ready for
+whatever is to follow. I beg your pardon: I am preaching.'
+
+'Eloquently,' I answered.
+
+Of some of the places into which Falconer led me that night I will
+attempt no description--places blazing with lights and mirrors, crowded
+with dancers, billowing with music, close and hot, and full of the
+saddest of all sights, the uninteresting faces of commonplace women.
+
+'There is a passion,' I said, as we came out of one of these dreadful
+places, 'that lingers about the heart like the odour of violets, like a
+glimmering twilight on the borders of moonrise; and there is a passion
+that wraps itself in the vapours of patchouli and coffins, and streams
+from the eyes like gaslight from a tavern. And yet the line is ill to
+draw between them. It is very dreadful. These are women.'
+
+'They are in God's hands,' answered Falconer. 'He hasn't done with them
+yet. Shall it take less time to make a woman than to make a world? Is
+not the woman the greater? She may have her ages of chaos, her centuries
+of crawling slime, yet rise a woman at last.'
+
+'How much alike all those women were!'
+
+'A family likeness, alas! which always strikes you first.'
+
+'Some of them looked quite modest.'
+
+'There are great differences. I do not know anything more touching than
+to see how a woman will sometimes wrap around her the last remnants of a
+soiled and ragged modesty. It has moved me almost to tears to see such
+a one hanging her head in shame during the singing of a detestable song.
+That poor thing's shame was precious in the eyes of the Master, surely.'
+
+'Could nothing be done for her?'
+
+'I contrived to let her know where she would find a friend if she wanted
+to be good: that is all you can do in such cases. If the horrors of
+their life do not drive them out at such an open door, you can do
+nothing else, I fear--for the time.'
+
+'Where are you going now, may I ask?'
+
+'Into the city--on business,' he added with a smile.
+
+'There will be nobody there so late.'
+
+'Nobody! One would think you were the beadle of a city church, Mr.
+Gordon.'
+
+We came into a very narrow, dirty street. I do not know where it is. A
+slatternly woman advanced from an open door, and said,
+
+'Mr. Falconer.'
+
+He looked at her for a moment.
+
+'Why, Sarah, have you come to this already?' he said.
+
+'Never mind me, sir. It's no more than you told me to expect. You knowed
+him better than I did. Leastways I'm an honest woman.'
+
+'Stick to that, Sarah; and be good-tempered.'
+
+'I'll have a try anyhow, sir. But there's a poor cretur a dyin'
+up-stairs; and I'm afeard it'll go hard with her, for she throwed a
+Bible out o' window this very morning, sir.'
+
+'Would she like to see me? I'm afraid not.'
+
+'She's got Lilywhite, what's a sort of a reader, readin' that same Bible
+to her now.'
+
+'There can be no great harm in just looking in,' he said, turning to me.
+
+'I shall be happy to follow you--anywhere,' I returned.
+
+'She's awful ill, sir; cholerer or summat,' said Sarah, as she led the
+way up the creaking stair.
+
+We half entered the room softly. Two or three women sat by the chimney,
+and another by a low bed, covered with a torn patchwork counterpane,
+spelling out a chapter in the Bible. We paused for a moment to hear what
+she was reading. Had the book been opened by chance, or by design? It
+was the story of David and Bathsheba. Moans came from the bed, but the
+candle in a bottle, by which the woman was reading, was so placed that
+we could not see the sufferer.
+
+We stood still and did not interrupt the reading.
+
+'Ha! ha! ha!' laughed a coarse voice from the side of the chimney: 'the
+saint, you see, was no better than some of the rest of us!'
+
+'I think he was a good deal worse just then,' said Falconer, stepping
+forward.
+
+'Gracious! there's Mr. Falconer,' said another woman, rising, and
+speaking in a flattering tone.
+
+'Then,' remarked the former speaker, 'there's a chance for old Moll and
+me yet. King David was a saint, wasn't he? Ha! ha!'
+
+'Yes, and you might be one too, if you were as sorry for your faults as
+he was for his.'
+
+'Sorry, indeed! I'll be damned if I be sorry. What have I to be sorry
+for? Where's the harm in turning an honest penny? I ha' took no man's
+wife, nor murdered himself neither. There's yer saints! He was a rum
+'un. Ha! ha!'
+
+Falconer approached her, bent down and whispered something no one could
+hear but herself. She gave a smothered cry, and was silent.
+
+'Give me the book,' he said, turning towards the bed. 'I'll read you
+something better than that. I'll read about some one that never did
+anything wrong.'
+
+'I don't believe there never was no sich a man,' said the previous
+reader, as she handed him the book, grudgingly.
+
+'Not Jesus Christ himself?' said Falconer.
+
+'Oh! I didn't know as you meant him.'
+
+'Of course I meant him. There never was another.'
+
+'I have heard tell--p'raps it was yourself, sir--as how he didn't come
+down upon us over hard after all, bless him!'
+
+Falconer sat down on the side of the bed, and read the story of Simon
+the Pharisee and the woman that was a sinner. When he ceased, the
+silence that followed was broken by a sob from somewhere in the room.
+The sick woman stopped her moaning, and said,
+
+'Turn down the leaf there, please, sir. Lilywhite will read it to me
+when you're gone.'
+
+The some one sobbed again. It was a young slender girl, with a face
+disfigured by the small-pox, and, save for the tearful look it wore,
+poor and expressionless. Falconer said something gentle to her.
+
+'Will he ever come again?' she sobbed.
+
+'Who?' asked Falconer.
+
+'Him--Jesus Christ. I've heard tell, I think, that he was to come again
+some day.'
+
+'Why do you ask?'
+
+'Because--' she said, with a fresh burst of tears, which rendered the
+words that followed unintelligible. But she recovered herself in a few
+moments, and, as if finishing her sentence, put her hand up to her poor,
+thin, colourless hair, and said,
+
+'My hair ain't long enough to wipe his feet.'
+
+'Do you know what he would say to you, my girl?' Falconer asked.
+
+'No. What would he say to me? He would speak to me, would he?'
+
+'He would say: Thy sins are forgiven thee.'
+
+'Would he, though? Would he?' she cried, starting up. 'Take me to
+him--take me to him. Oh! I forgot. He's dead. But he will come again,
+won't he? He was crucified four times, you know, and he must ha' come
+four times for that. Would they crucify him again, sir?'
+
+'No, they wouldn't crucify him now--in England at least. They would only
+laugh at him, shake their heads at what he told them, as much as to say
+it wasn't true, and sneer and mock at him in some of the newspapers.'
+
+'Oh dear! I've been very wicked.'
+
+'But you won't be so any more.'
+
+'No, no, no. I won't, I won't, I won't.'
+
+She talked hurriedly, almost wildly. The coarse old woman tapped her
+forehead with her finger. Falconer took the girl's hand.
+
+'What is your name?' he said.
+
+'Nell.'
+
+'What more?'
+
+'Nothing more.'
+
+'Well, Nelly,' said Falconer.
+
+'How kind of you to call me Nelly!' interrupted the poor girl. 'They
+always calls me Nell, just.'
+
+'Nelly,' repeated Falconer, 'I will send a lady here to-morrow to take
+you away with her, if you like, and tell you how you must do to find
+Jesus.--People always find him that want to find him.'
+
+The elderly woman with the rough voice, who had not spoken since he
+whispered to her, now interposed with a kind of cowed fierceness.
+
+'Don't go putting humbug into my child's head now, Mr. Falconer--'ticing
+her away from her home. Everybody knows my Nell's been an idiot since
+ever she was born. Poor child!'
+
+'I ain't your child,' cried the girl, passionately. 'I ain't nobody's
+child.'
+
+'You are God's child,' said Falconer, who stood looking on with his eyes
+shining, but otherwise in a state of absolute composure.
+
+'Am I? Am I? You won't forget to send for me, sir?'
+
+'That I won't,' he answered.
+
+She turned instantly towards the woman, and snapped her fingers in her
+face.
+
+'I don't care that for you,' she cried. 'You dare to touch me now, and
+I'll bite you.'
+
+'Come, come, Nelly, you mustn't be rude,' said Falconer.
+
+'No, sir, I won't no more, leastways to nobody but she. It's she makes
+me do all the wicked things, it is.'
+
+She snapped her fingers in her face again, and then burst out crying.
+
+'She will leave you alone now, I think,' said Falconer. 'She knows it
+will be quite as well for her not to cross me.'
+
+This he said very significantly, as he turned to the door, where he
+bade them a general good-night. When we reached the street, I was too
+bewildered to offer any remark. Falconer was the first to speak.
+
+'It always comes back upon me, as if I had never known it before, that
+women like some of those were of the first to understand our Lord.'
+
+'Some of them wouldn't have understood him any more than the Pharisee,
+though.'
+
+'I'm not so sure of that. Of course there are great differences. There
+are good and bad amongst them as in every class. But one thing is clear
+to me, that no indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so
+much as respectable selfishness.'
+
+'I am afraid you will not get society to agree with you,' I said,
+foolishly.
+
+'I have no wish that society should agree with me; for if it did, it
+would be sure to do so upon the worst of principles. It is better that
+society should be cruel, than that it should call the horrible thing a
+trifle: it would know nothing between.'
+
+Through the city--though it was only when we crossed one of the main
+thoroughfares that I knew where we were--we came into the region of
+Bethnal Green. From house to house till it grew very late, Falconer
+went, and I went with him. I will not linger on this part of our
+wanderings. Where I saw only dreadful darkness, Falconer always would
+see some glimmer of light. All the people into whose houses we went
+knew him. They were all in the depths of poverty. Many of them were
+respectable. With some of them he had long talks in private, while I
+waited near. At length he said,
+
+'I think we had better be going home, Mr. Gordon. You must be tired.'
+
+'I am, rather,' I answered. 'But it doesn't matter, for I have nothing
+to do to-morrow.'
+
+'We shall get a cab, I dare say, before we go far.'
+
+'Not for me. I am not so tired, but that I would rather walk,' I said.
+
+'Very well,' he returned. 'Where do you live?'
+
+I told him.
+
+'I will take you the nearest way.'
+
+'You know London marvellously.'
+
+'Pretty well now,' he answered.
+
+We were somewhere near Leather Lane about one o'clock. Suddenly we came
+upon two tiny children standing on the pavement, one on each side of
+the door of a public-house. They could not have been more than two and
+three. They were sobbing a little--not much. The tiny creatures stood
+there awfully awake in sleeping London, while even their own playmates
+were far off in the fairyland of dreams.
+
+'This is the kind of thing,' I said, 'that makes me doubt whether there
+be a God in heaven.'
+
+'That is only because he is down here,' answered Falconer, 'taking such
+good care of us all that you can't see him. There is not a gin-palace,
+or yet lower hell in London, in which a man or woman can be out of God.
+The whole being love, there is nothing for you to set it against and
+judge it by. So you are driven to fancies.'
+
+The house was closed, but there was light above the door. We went up
+to the children, and spoke to them, but all we could make out was
+that mammie was in there. One of them could not speak at all. Falconer
+knocked at the door. A good-natured-looking Irishwoman opened it a
+little way and peeped out.
+
+'Here are two children crying at your door, ma'am,' said Falconer.
+
+'Och, the darlin's! they want their mother.'
+
+'Do you know her, then?'
+
+'True for you, and I do. She's a mighty dacent woman in her way when the
+drink's out uv her, and very kind to the childher; but oncet she smells
+the dhrop o' gin, her head's gone intirely. The purty craytures have
+waked up, an' she not come home, and they've run out to look after her.'
+
+Falconer stood a moment as if thinking what would be best. The shriek of
+a woman rang through the night.
+
+'There she is!' said the Irishwoman. 'For God's sake don't let her get
+a hould o' the darlints. She's ravin' mad. I seen her try to kill them
+oncet.'
+
+The shrieks came nearer and nearer, and after a few moments the woman
+appeared in the moonlight, tossing her arms over her head, and screaming
+with a despair for which she yet sought a defiant expression. Her head
+was uncovered, and her hair flying in tangles; her sleeves were torn,
+and her gaunt arms looked awful in the moonlight. She stood in the
+middle of the street, crying again and again, with shrill laughter
+between, 'Nobody cares for me, and I care for nobody! Ha! ha! ha!'
+
+'Mammie! mammie!' cried the elder of the children, and ran towards her.
+
+The woman heard, and rushed like a fury towards the child. Falconer too
+ran, and caught up the child. The woman gave a howl and rushed towards
+the other. I caught up that one. With a last shriek, she dashed her head
+against the wall of the public-house, dropped on the pavement, and lay
+still.
+
+Falconer set the child down, lifted the wasted form in his arms, and
+carried it into the house. The face was blue as that of a strangled
+corpse. She was dead.
+
+'Was she a married woman?' Falconer asked.
+
+'It's myself can't tell you sir,' the Irishwoman answered. 'I never saw
+any boy with her.'
+
+'Do you know where she lived?'
+
+'No, sir. Somewhere not far off, though. The children will know.'
+
+But they stood staring at their mother, and we could get nothing out of
+them. They would not move from the corpse.
+
+'I think we may appropriate this treasure-trove,' said Falconer, turning
+at last to me; and as he spoke, he took the eldest in his arms. Then,
+turning to the woman, he gave her a card, saying, 'If any inquiry is
+made about them, there is my address.--Will you take the other, Mr.
+Gordon?'
+
+I obeyed. The children cried no more. After traversing a few streets, we
+found a cab, and drove to a house in Queen Square, Bloomsbury.
+
+Falconer got out at the door of a large house, and rung the bell; then
+got the children out, and dismissed the cab. There we stood in the
+middle of the night, in a silent, empty square, each with a child in
+his arms. In a few minutes we heard the bolts being withdrawn. The door
+opened, and a tall graceful form wrapped in a dressing-gown, appeared.
+
+'I have brought you two babies, Miss St. John,' said Falconer. 'Can you
+take them?'
+
+'To be sure I can,' she answered, and turned to lead the way. 'Bring
+them in.'
+
+We followed her into a little back room. She put down her candle, and
+went straight to the cupboard, whence she brought a sponge-cake, from
+which she cut a large piece for each of the children.
+
+'What a mercy they are, Robert,--those little gates in the face! Red
+Lane leads direct to the heart,' she said, smiling, as if she rejoiced
+in the idea of taming the little wild angelets. 'Don't you stop. You are
+tired enough, I am sure. I will wake my maid, and we'll get them washed
+and put to bed at once.'
+
+She was closing the door, when Falconer turned.
+
+'Oh! Miss St. John,' he said, 'I was forgetting. Could you go down to
+No. 13 in Soap Lane--you know it, don't you?'
+
+'Yes. Quite well.'
+
+'Ask for a girl called Nell--a plain, pock-marked young girl--and take
+her away with you.'
+
+'When shall I go?'
+
+'To-morrow morning. But I shall be in. Don't go till you see me.
+Good-night.'
+
+We took our leave without more ado.
+
+'What a lady-like woman to be the matron of an asylum!' I said.
+
+Falconer gave a little laugh.
+
+'That is no asylum. It is a private house.'
+
+'And the lady?'
+
+'Is a lady of private means,' he answered, 'who prefers Bloomsbury to
+Belgravia, because it is easier to do noble work in it. Her heaven is on
+the confines of hell.'
+
+'What will she do with those children?'
+
+'Kiss them and wash them and put them to bed.'
+
+'And after that?'
+
+'Give them bread and milk in the morning.'
+
+'And after that?'
+
+'Oh! there's time enough. We'll see. There's only one thing she won't
+do.'
+
+'What is that?'
+
+'Turn them out again.'
+
+A pause followed, I cogitating.
+
+'Are you a society, then?' I asked at length.
+
+'No. At least we don't use the word. And certainly no other society
+would acknowledge us.'
+
+'What are you, then?'
+
+'Why should we be anything, so long as we do our work?'
+
+'Don't you think there is some affectation in refusing a name?'
+
+'Yes, if the name belongs to you? Not otherwise.'
+
+'Do you lay claim to no epithet of any sort?'
+
+'We are a church, if you like. There!'
+
+'Who is your clergyman?'
+
+'Nobody.'
+
+'Where do you meet?'
+
+'Nowhere.'
+
+'What are your rules, then?'
+
+'We have none.'
+
+'What makes you a church?'
+
+'Divine Service.'
+
+'What do you mean by that?'
+
+'The sort of thing you have seen to-night.'
+
+'What is your creed?'
+
+'Christ Jesus.'
+
+'But what do you believe about him?'
+
+'What we can. We count any belief in him--the smallest--better than any
+belief about him--the greatest--or about anything else besides. But we
+exclude no one.'
+
+'How do you manage without?'
+
+'By admitting no one.'
+
+'I cannot understand you.'
+
+'Well, then: we are an undefined company of people, who have grown
+into human relations with each other naturally, through one attractive
+force--love for human beings, regarding them as human beings only in
+virtue of the divine in them.'
+
+'But you must have some rules,' I insisted.
+
+'None whatever. They would cause us only trouble. We have nothing
+to take us from our work. Those that are most in earnest, draw most
+together; those that are on the outskirts have only to do nothing, and
+they are free of us. But we do sometimes ask people to help us--not with
+money.'
+
+'But who are the we?'
+
+'Why you, if you will do anything, and I and Miss St. John and twenty
+others--and a great many more I don't know, for every one is a centre to
+others. It is our work that binds us together.'
+
+'Then when that stops you drop to pieces.'
+
+'Yes, thank God. We shall then die. There will be no corporate
+body--which means a bodied body, or an unsouled body, left behind to
+simulate life, and corrupt, and work no end of disease. We go to ashes
+at once, and leave no corpse for a ghoul to inhabit and make a vampire
+of. When our spirit is dead, our body is vanished.'
+
+'Then you won't last long.'
+
+'Then we oughtn't to last long.'
+
+'But the work of the world could not go on so.'
+
+'We are not the life of the world. God is. And when we fail, he can and
+will send out more and better labourers into his harvest-field. It is a
+divine accident by which we are thus associated.'
+
+'But surely the church must be otherwise constituted.'
+
+'My dear sir, you forget: I said we were a church, not the church.'
+
+'Do you belong to the Church of England?'
+
+'Yes, some of us. Why should we not? In as much as she has faithfully
+preserved the holy records and traditions, our obligations to her are
+infinite. And to leave her would be to quarrel, and start a thousand
+vermiculate questions, as Lord Bacon calls them, for which life is too
+serious in my eyes. I have no time for that.'
+
+'Then you count the Church of England the Church?'
+
+'Of England, yes; of the universe, no: that is constituted just like
+ours, with the living working Lord for the heart of it.'
+
+'Will you take me for a member?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'Will you not, if--?'
+
+'You may make yourself one if you will. I will not speak a word to
+gain you. I have shown you work. Do something, and you are of Christ's
+Church.'
+
+We were almost at the door of my lodging, and I was getting very weary
+in body, and indeed in mind, though I hope not in heart. Before we
+separated, I ventured to say,
+
+'Will you tell me why you invited me to come and see you? Forgive my
+presumption, but you seemed to seek acquaintance with me, although you
+did make me address you first.'
+
+He laughed gently, and answered in the words of the ancient mariner:--
+
+     'The moment that his face I see,
+     I know the man that must hear me:
+     To him my tale I teach.'
+
+Without another word, he shook hands with me, and left me. Weary as I
+was, I stood in the street until I could hear his footsteps no longer.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. THE BROTHERS.
+
+One day, as Falconer sat at a late breakfast, Shargar burst into his
+room. Falconer had not even known that he was coming home, for he had
+outstripped the letter he had sent. He had his arm in a sling, which
+accounted for his leave.
+
+'Shargar!' cried Falconer, starting up in delight.
+
+'Major Shargar, if you please. Give me all my honours, Robert,' said
+Moray, presenting his left hand.
+
+'I congratulate you, my boy. Well, this is delightful! But you are
+wounded.'
+
+'Bullet--broken--that's all. It's nearly right again. I'll tell you
+about it by and by. I am too full of something else to talk about
+trifles of that sort. I want you to help me.'
+
+He then rushed into the announcement that he had fallen desperately in
+love with a lady who had come on board with her maid at Malta, where she
+had been spending the winter. She was not very young, about his own
+age, but very beautiful, and of enchanting address. How she could have
+remained so long unmarried he could not think. It could not be but that
+she had had many offers. She was an heiress, too, but that Shargar felt
+to be a disadvantage for him. All the progress he could yet boast of was
+that his attentions had not been, so far as he could judge, disagreeable
+to her. Robert thought even less of the latter fact than Shargar
+himself, for he did not believe there were many women to whom Shargar's
+attentions would be disagreeable: they must always be simple and manly.
+What was more to the point, she had given him her address in London, and
+he was going to call upon her the next day. She was on a visit to Lady
+Janet Gordon, an elderly spinster, who lived in Park-street.
+
+'Are you quite sure she's not an adventuress, Shargar?'
+
+'It's o' no mainner o' use to tell ye what I'm sure or no sure o',
+Robert, in sic a case. But I'll manage, somehoo, 'at ye sall see her
+yersel', an' syne I'll speir back yer ain queston at ye.'
+
+'Weel, hae ye tauld her a' aboot yersel'?'
+
+'No!' answered Shargar, growing suddenly pale. 'I never thocht aboot
+that. But I had no richt, for a' that passed, to intrude mysel' upo' her
+to that extent.'
+
+'Weel, I reckon ye're richt. Yer wounds an' yer medals ought to weigh
+weel against a' that. There's this comfort in 't, that gin she bena
+richt weel worthy o' ye, auld frien', she winna tak ye.'
+
+Shargar did not seem to see the comfort of it. He was depressed for the
+remainder of the day. In the morning he was in wild spirits again. Just
+before he started, however, he said, with an expression of tremulous
+anxiety,
+
+'Oucht I to tell her a' at ance--already--aboot--aboot my mither?'
+
+'I dinna say that. Maybe it wad be equally fair to her and to yersel'
+to lat her ken ye a bit better afore ye do that.--We'll think that
+ower.--Whan ye gang doon the stair, ye'll see a bit brougham at the door
+waitin' for ye. Gie the coachman ony orders ye like. He's your servant
+as lang 's ye're in London. Commit yer way to the Lord, my boy.'
+
+Though Shargar did not say much, he felt strengthened by Robert's truth
+to meet his fate with something of composure. But it was not to be
+decided that day. Therein lay some comfort.
+
+He returned in high spirits still. He had been graciously received both
+by Miss Hamilton and her hostess--a kind-hearted old lady, who spoke
+Scotch with the pure tone of a gentlewoman, he said--a treat not to
+be had once in a twelvemonth. She had asked him to go to dinner in the
+evening, and to bring his friend with him. Robert, however, begged him
+to make his excuse, as he had an engagement in--a very different sort of
+place.
+
+When Shargar returned, Robert had not come in. He was too excited to
+go to bed, and waited for him. It was two o'clock before he came home.
+Shargar told him there was to be a large party at Lady Patterdale's
+the next evening but one, and Lady Janet had promised to procure him an
+invitation.
+
+The next morning Robert went to see Mary St. John, and asked if she
+knew anything of Lady Patterdale, and whether she could get him an
+invitation. Miss St. John did not know her, but she thought she could
+manage it for him. He told her all about Shargar, for whose sake he
+wished to see Miss Hamilton before consenting to be introduced to her.
+Miss St. John set out at once, and Falconer received a card the next
+day. When the evening came, he allowed Shargar to set out alone in his
+brougham, and followed an hour later in a hansom.
+
+When he reached the house, the rooms were tolerably filled, and as
+several parties had arrived just before him, he managed to enter without
+being announced. After a little while he caught sight of Shargar.
+He stood alone, almost in a corner, with a strange, rather raised
+expression in his eyes. Falconer could not see the object to which they
+were directed. Certainly, their look was not that of love. He made his
+way up to him and laid his hand on his arm. Shargar betrayed no little
+astonishment when he saw him.
+
+'You here, Robert!' he said.
+
+'Yes, I'm here. Have you seen her yet? Is she here?'
+
+'Wha do ye think 's speakin' till her this verra minute? Look there!'
+Shargar said in a low voice, suppressed yet more to hide his excitement.
+
+Following his directions, Robert saw, amidst a little group of gentlemen
+surrounding a seated lady, of whose face he could not get a peep,
+a handsome elderly man, who looked more fashionable than his years
+justified, and whose countenance had an expression which he felt
+repulsive. He thought he had seen him before, but Shargar gave him no
+time to come to a conclusion of himself.
+
+'It's my brither Sandy, as sure 's deith!' he said; 'and he's been
+hingin' aboot her ever sin' she cam in. But I dinna think she likes him
+a'thegither by the leuk o' her.'
+
+'What for dinna ye gang up till her yersel', man? I wadna stan' that gin
+'twas me.'
+
+'I'm feared 'at he ken me. He's terrible gleg. A' the Morays are gleg,
+and yon marquis has an ee like a hawk.'
+
+'What does 't maitter? Ye hae dune naething to be ashamed o' like him.'
+
+'Ay; but it's this. I wadna hae her hear the trowth aboot me frae that
+boar's mou' o' his first. I wad hae her hear 't frae my ain, an' syne
+she canna think I meant to tak her in.'
+
+At this moment there was a movement in the group. Shargar, receiving no
+reply, looked round at Robert. It was now Shargar's turn to be surprised
+at his expression.
+
+'Are ye seein' a vraith, Robert?' he said. 'What gars ye leuk like that,
+man?'
+
+'Oh!' answered Robert, recovering himself, 'I thought I saw some one I
+knew. But I'm not sure. I'll tell you afterwards. We've been talking too
+earnestly. People are beginning to look at us.'
+
+So saying, he moved away towards the group of which the marquis still
+formed one. As he drew near he saw a piano behind Miss Hamilton. A
+sudden impulse seized him, and he yielded to it. He made his way to the
+piano, and seating himself, began to play very softly--so softly that
+the sounds could scarcely be heard beyond the immediate neighbourhood of
+the instrument. There was no change on the storm of talk that filled
+the room. But in a few minutes a face white as a shroud was turned round
+upon him from the group in front, like the moon dawning out of a cloud.
+He stopped at once, saying to himself, 'I was right;' and rising,
+mingled again with the crowd. A few minutes after, he saw Shargar
+leading Miss Hamilton out of the room, and Lady Janet following. He did
+not intend to wait his return, but got near the door, that he might slip
+out when he should re-enter. But Shargar did not return. For, the moment
+she reached the fresh air, Miss Hamilton was so much better that Lady
+Janet, whose heart was as young towards young people as if she had never
+had the unfortunate love affair tradition assigned her, asked him to see
+them home, and he followed them into her carriage. Falconer left a few
+minutes after, anxious for quiet that he might make up his mind as to
+what he ought to do. Before he had walked home, he had resolved on the
+next step. But not wishing to see Shargar yet, and at the same time
+wanting to have a night's rest, he went home only to change his clothes,
+and betook himself to a hotel in Covent Garden.
+
+He was at Lady Janet's door by ten o'clock the next morning, and sent in
+his card to Miss Hamilton. He was shown into the drawing-room, where she
+came to him.
+
+'May I presume on old acquaintance?' he asked, holding out his hand.
+
+She looked in his face quietly, took his hand, pressed it warmly, and
+said,
+
+'No one has so good a right, Mr. Falconer. Do sit down.'
+
+He placed a chair for her, and obeyed.
+
+After a moment's silence on both sides:
+
+'Are you aware, Miss--?' he said and hesitated.
+
+'Miss Hamilton,' she said with a smile. 'I was Miss Lindsay when you
+knew me so many years ago. I will explain presently.'
+
+Then with an air of expectation she awaited the finish of his sentence.
+
+'Are you aware, Miss Hamilton, that I am Major Moray's oldest friend?'
+
+'I am quite aware of it, and delighted to know it. He told me so last
+night.'
+
+Somewhat dismayed at this answer, Falconer resumed,
+
+'Did Major Moray likewise communicate with you concerning his own
+history?'
+
+'He did. He told me all.'
+
+Falconer was again silent for some moments.
+
+'Shall I be presuming too far if I venture to conclude that my friend
+will not continue his visits?'
+
+'On the contrary,' she answered, with the same delicate blush that in
+old times used to overspread the lovely whiteness of her face, 'I expect
+him within half-an-hour.'
+
+'Then there is no time to be lost,' thought Falconer.
+
+'Without presuming to express any opinion of my own,' he said quietly,
+'a social code far less severe than that which prevails in England,
+would take for granted that an impassable barrier existed between Major
+Moray and Miss Hamilton.'
+
+'Do not suppose, Mr. Falconer, that I could not meet Major Moray's
+honesty with equal openness on my side.'
+
+Falconer, for the first time almost in his life, was incapable of speech
+from bewilderment. But Miss Hamilton did not in the least enjoy his
+perplexity, and made haste to rescue both him and herself. With a blush
+that was now deep as any rose, she resumed,
+
+'But I owe you equal frankness, Mr. Falconer. There is no barrier
+between Major Moray and myself but the foolish--no, wicked--indiscretion
+of an otherwise innocent and ignorant girl. Listen, Mr. Falconer: under
+the necessity of the circumstances you will not misjudge me if I compel
+myself to speak calmly. This, I trust, will be my final penance. I
+thought Lord Rothie was going to marry me. To do him justice, he never
+said so. Make what excuse for my folly you can. I was lost in a mist
+of vain imaginations. I had had no mother to teach me anything, Mr.
+Falconer, and my father never suspected the necessity of teaching me
+anything. I was very ill on the passage to Antwerp, and when I began to
+recover a little, I found myself beginning to doubt both my own conduct
+and his lordship's intentions. Possibly the fact that he was not quite
+so kind to me in my illness as I had expected, and that I felt hurt in
+consequence, aided the doubt. Then the thought of my father returning
+and finding that I had left him, came and burned in my heart like fire.
+But what was I to do? I had never been out of Aberdeen before. I did not
+know even a word of French. I was altogether in Lord Rothie's power. I
+thought I loved him, but it was not much of love that sea-sickness could
+get the better of. With a heart full of despair I went on shore. The
+captain slipped a note into my hand. I put it in my pocket, but pulled
+it out with my handkerchief in the street. Lord Rothie picked it up. I
+begged him to give it me, but he read it, and then tore it in pieces. I
+entered the hotel, as wretched as girl could well be. I began to dislike
+him. But during dinner he was so kind and attentive that I tried to
+persuade myself that my fears were fanciful. After dinner he took me
+out. On the stairs we met a lady whose speech was Scotch. Her maid
+called her Lady Janet. She looked kindly at me as I passed. I thought
+she could read my face. I remembered afterwards that Lord Rothie turned
+his head away when we met her. We went into the cathedral. We were
+standing under that curious dome, and I was looking up at its strange
+lights, when down came a rain of bell-notes on the roof over my head.
+Before the first tune was over, I seemed to expect the second, and then
+the third, without thinking how I could know what was coming; but when
+they ended with the ballad of the Witch Lady, and I lifted up my head
+and saw that I was not by my father's fireside, but in Antwerp Cathedral
+with Lord Rothie, despair filled me with a half-insane resolution.
+Happily Lord Rothie was at some little distance talking to a priest
+about one of Rubens's pictures. I slipped unseen behind the nearest
+pillar, and then flew from the church. How I got to the hotel I do not
+know, but I did reach it. 'Lady Janet,' was all I could say. The waiter
+knew the name, and led me to her room. I threw myself on my knees, and
+begged her to save me. She assured me no one should touch me. I gasped
+'Lord Rothie,' and fainted. When I came to myself--but I need not tell
+you all the particulars. Lady Janet did take care of me. Till last
+night I never saw Lord Rothie again. I did not acknowledge him, but he
+persisted in talking to me, behave as I would, and I saw well enough
+that he knew me.'
+
+Falconer took her hand and kissed it.
+
+'Thank God,' he said. 'That spire was indeed the haunt of angels as I
+fancied while I played upon those bells.'
+
+'I knew it was you--that is, I was sure of it when I came to think about
+it; but at the time I took it for a direct message from heaven, which
+nobody heard but myself.'
+
+'It was such none the less that I was sent to deliver it,' said
+Falconer. 'I little thought during my imprisonment because of it, that
+the end of my journey was already accomplished.'
+
+Mysie put her hand in his.
+
+'You have saved me, Mr. Falconer.'
+
+'For Ericson's sake, who was dying and could not,' returned Falconer.
+
+'Ah!' said Mysie, her large eyes opening with wonder. It was evident she
+had had no suspicion of his attachment to her.
+
+'But,' said Falconer, 'there was another in it, without whom I could
+have done nothing.'
+
+'Who was that?'
+
+'George Moray.'
+
+'Did he know me then?'
+
+'No. Fortunately not. You would not have looked at him then. It was
+all done for love of me. He is the truest fellow in the world, and
+altogether worthy of you, Miss Hamilton. I will tell you the whole story
+some day, lest he should not do himself justice.'
+
+'Ah, that reminds me. Hamilton sounds strange in your voice. You
+suspected me of having changed my name to hide my history?'
+
+It was so, and Falconer's silence acknowledged the fact.
+
+'Lady Janet brought me home, and told my father all. When he died a few
+years after, she took me to live with her, and never rested till she
+had brought me acquainted with Sir John Hamilton, in favour of whom my
+father had renounced his claim to some disputed estates. Sir John had
+lost his only son, and he had no daughter. He was a kind-hearted old
+man, rather like my own father. He took to me, as they say, and made me
+change my name to his, leaving me the property that might have been my
+father's, on condition that whoever I married should take the same name.
+I don't think your friend will mind making the exchange,' said Mysie in
+conclusion, as the door opened and Shargar came in.
+
+'Robert, ye're a' gait (everywhere)!' he exclaimed as he entered. Then,
+stopping to ask no questions, 'Ye see I'm to hae a name o' my ain efter
+a',' he said, with a face which looked even handsome in the light of his
+gladness.
+
+Robert shook hands with him, and wished him joy heartily.
+
+'Wha wad hae thocht it, Shargar,' he added, 'that day 'at ye pat bonnets
+for hose upo' Black Geordie's huves?'
+
+The butler announced the Marquis of Boarshead. Mysie's eyes flashed. She
+rose from her seat, and advanced to meet the marquis, who entered behind
+the servant. He bowed and held out his hand. Mysie retreated one step,
+and stood.
+
+'Your lordship has no right to force yourself upon me. You must have
+seen that I had no wish to renew the acquaintance I was unhappy enough
+to form--now, thank God, many years ago.'
+
+'Forgive me, Miss Hamilton. One word in private,' said the marquis.
+
+'Not a word,' returned Mysie.
+
+'Before these gentlemen, then, whom I have not the honour of knowing, I
+offer you my hand.'
+
+'To accept that offer would be to wrong myself even more than your
+lordship has done.'
+
+She went back to where Moray was standing, and stood beside him. The
+evil spirit in the marquis looked out at its windows.
+
+'You are aware, madam,' he said, 'that your reputation is in the hand I
+offer you?'
+
+'The worse for it, my lord,' returned Mysie, with a scornful smile. 'But
+your lordship's brother will protect it.'
+
+'My brother!' said the marquis. 'What do you mean? I have no brother!'
+
+'Ye hae mair brithers than ye ken o', Lord Sandy, and I'm ane o' them,'
+said Shargar.
+
+'You are either a liar or a bastard, then,' said the marquis, who
+had not been brought up in a school of which either self-restraint or
+respect for women were prominent characteristics.
+
+Falconer forgot himself for a moment, and made a stride forward.
+
+'Dinna hit him, Robert,' cried Shargar. 'He ance gae me a shillin', an'
+it helpit, as ye ken, to haud me alive to face him this day.--No liar,
+my lord, but a bastard, thank heaven.' Then, with a laugh, he instantly
+added, 'Gin I had been ain brither to you, my lord, God only knows what
+a rascal I micht hae been.'
+
+'By God, you shall answer for your damned insolence,' said the marquis,
+and, lifting his riding-whip from the table where he had laid it, he
+approached his brother.
+
+Mysie rang the bell.
+
+'Haud yer han', Sandy,' cried Shargar. 'I hae faced mair fearsome foes
+than you. But I hae some faimily-feelin', though ye hae nane: I wadna
+willin'ly strike my brither.'
+
+As he spoke, he retreated a little. The marquis came on with raised
+whip. But Falconer stepped between, laid one of his great hands on the
+marquis's chest, and flung him to the other end of the room, where he
+fell over an ottoman. The same moment the servant entered.
+
+'Ask your mistress to oblige me by coming to the drawing-room,' said
+Mysie.
+
+The marquis had risen, but had not recovered his presence of mind when
+Lady Janet entered. She looked inquiringly from one to the other.
+
+'Please, Lady Janet, will you ask the Marquis of Boarshead to leave the
+house,' said Mysie.
+
+'With all my hert,' answered Lady Janet; 'and the mair that he's a kin'
+o' a cousin o' my ain. Gang yer wa's, Sandy. Ye're no fit company for
+decent fowk; an' that ye wad ken yersel', gin ye had ony idea left o'
+what decency means.'
+
+Without heeding her, the marquis went up to Falconer.
+
+'Your card, sir.'
+
+Lady Janet followed him.
+
+''Deed ye s' get nae cairds here,' she said, pushing him aside.
+
+'So you allow your friends to insult me in your own house as they
+please, cousin Janet?' said the marquis, who probably felt her
+opposition the most formidable of all.
+
+''Deed they canna say waur o' ye nor I think. Gang awa', an' repent.
+Consider yer gray hairs, man.'
+
+This was the severest blow he had yet received. He left the room,
+'swearing at large.'
+
+Falconer followed him; but what came of it nobody ever heard.
+
+Major and Miss Hamilton were married within three months, and went out
+to India together, taking Nancy Kennedy with them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. A NEOPHYTE.
+
+Before many months had passed, without the slightest approach to any
+formal recognition, I found myself one of the church of labour of which
+Falconer was clearly the bishop. As he is the subject, or rather object
+of my book, I will now record a fact which may serve to set forth his
+views more clearly. I gained a knowledge of some of the circumstances,
+not merely from the friendly confidences of Miss St. John and Falconer,
+but from being a kind of a Scotch cousin of Lady Janet Gordon, whom
+I had taken an opportunity of acquainting with the relation. She was
+old-fashioned enough to acknowledge it even with some eagerness. The
+ancient clan-feeling is good in this, that it opens a channel whose very
+existence is a justification for the flow of simply human feelings along
+all possible levels of social position. And I would there were more of
+it. Only something better is coming instead of it--a recognition of the
+infinite brotherhood in Christ. All other relations, all attempts
+by churches, by associations, by secret societies--of Freemasons and
+others, are good merely as they tend to destroy themselves in the wider
+truth; as they teach men to be dissatisfied with their limitations. But
+I wander; for I mentioned Lady Janet now, merely to account for some of
+the information I possess concerning Lady Georgina Betterton.
+
+I met her once at my so-called cousin's, whom she patronized as a dear
+old thing. To my mind, she was worth twenty of her, though she was
+wrinkled and Scottishly sententious. 'A sweet old bat,' was another
+epithet of Lady Georgina's. But she came to see her, notwithstanding,
+and did not refuse to share in her nice little dinners, and least of
+all, when Falconer was of the party, who had been so much taken with
+Lady Janet's behaviour to the Marquis of Boarshead, just recorded, that
+he positively cultivated her acquaintance thereafter.
+
+Lady Georgina was of an old family--an aged family, indeed; so old, in
+fact, that some envious people professed to think it decrepit with age.
+This, however, may well be questioned if any argument bearing on the
+point may be drawn from the person of Lady Georgina. She was at least as
+tall as Mary St. John, and very handsome--only with somewhat masculine
+features and expression. She had very sloping shoulders and a long
+neck, which took its finest curves when she was talking to inferiors:
+condescension was her forte. Of the admiration of the men, she had had
+more than enough, although either they were afraid to go farther, or she
+was hard to please.
+
+She had never contemplated anything admirable long enough to comprehend
+it; she had never looked up to man or woman with anything like
+reverence; she saw too quickly and too keenly into the foibles of all
+who came near her to care to look farther for their virtues. If she had
+ever been humbled, and thence taught to look up, she might by this time
+have been a grand woman, worthy of a great man's worship. She patronized
+Miss St. John, considerably to her amusement, and nothing to her
+indignation. Of course she could not understand her. She had a vague
+notion of how she spent her time; and believing a certain amount of
+fanaticism essential to religion, wondered how so sensible and ladylike
+a person as Miss St. John could go in for it.
+
+Meeting Falconer at Lady Janet's, she was taken with him. Possibly she
+recognized in him a strength that would have made him her master, if he
+had cared for such a distinction; but nothing she could say attracted
+more than a passing attention on his part. Falconer was out of her
+sphere, and her influences were powerless to reach him.
+
+At length she began to have a glimmering of the relation of labour
+between Miss St. John and him, and applied to the former for some
+enlightenment. But Miss St. John was far from explicit, for she had no
+desire for such assistance as Lady Georgina's. What motives next led her
+to seek the interview I am now about to record, I cannot satisfactorily
+explain, but I will hazard a conjecture or two, although I doubt if she
+understood them thoroughly herself.
+
+She was, if not blasee, at least ennuyee, and began to miss excitement,
+and feel blindly about her for something to make life interesting. She
+was gifted with far more capacity than had ever been exercised, and was
+of a large enough nature to have grown sooner weary of trifles than most
+women of her class. She might have been an artist, but she drew like a
+young lady; she might have been a prophetess, and Byron was her greatest
+poet. It is no wonder that she wanted something she had not got.
+
+Since she had been foiled in her attempt on Miss St. John, which she
+attributed to jealousy, she had, in quite another circle, heard strange,
+wonderful, even romantic stories about Falconer and his doings among the
+poor. A new world seemed to open before her longing gaze--a world, or a
+calenture, a mirage? for would she cross the 'wandering fields of barren
+foam,' to reach the green grass that did wave on the far shore? the
+dewless desert to reach the fair water that did lie leagues beyond its
+pictured sweetness? But I think, mingled with whatever motives she may
+have had, there must have been some desire to be a nobler, that is a
+more useful woman than she had been.
+
+She had not any superabundance of feminine delicacy, though she had
+plenty of good-breeding, and she trusted to her position in society to
+cover the eccentricity of her present undertaking.
+
+One morning after breakfast she called upon Falconer; and accustomed
+to visits from all sorts of people, Mrs. Ashton showed her into his
+sitting-room without even asking her name. She found him at his piano,
+apologized, in her fashionable drawl, for interrupting his music, and
+accepted his offer of a chair without a shade of embarrassment. Falconer
+seated himself and sat waiting.
+
+'I fear the step I have taken will appear strange to you, Mr. Falconer.
+Indeed it appears strange to myself. I am afraid it may appear stranger
+still.'
+
+'It is easy for me to leave all judgment in the matter to yourself,
+Miss--I beg your pardon; I know we have met; but for the moment I cannot
+recall your name.'
+
+'Lady Georgina Betterton,' drawled the visitor carelessly, hiding
+whatever annoyance she may have felt.
+
+Falconer bowed. Lady Georgina resumed.
+
+'Of course it only affects myself; and I am willing to take the risk,
+notwithstanding the natural desire to stand well in the opinion of any
+one with whom even my boldness could venture such a step.'
+
+A smile, intended to be playful, covered the retreat of the sentence.
+Falconer bowed again. Lady Georgina had yet again to resume.
+
+'From the little I have seen, and the much I have heard of you--excuse
+me, Mr. Falconer--I cannot help thinking that you know more of the
+secret of life than other people--if indeed it has any secret.'
+
+'Life certainly is no burden to me,' returned Falconer. 'If that implies
+the possession of any secret which is not common property, I fear it
+also involves a natural doubt whether such secret be communicable.'
+
+'Of course I mean only some secret everybody ought to know.'
+
+'I do not misunderstand you.'
+
+'I want to live. You know the world, Mr. Falconer. I need not tell
+you what kind of life a girl like myself leads. I am not old, but the
+gilding is worn off. Life looks bare, ugly, uninteresting. I ask you to
+tell me whether there is any reality in it or not; whether its past glow
+was only gilt; whether the best that can be done is to get through with
+it as fast as possible?'
+
+'Surely your ladyship must know some persons whose very countenances
+prove that they have found a reality at the heart of life.'
+
+'Yes. But none whose judgment I could trust. I cannot tell how soon they
+may find reason to change their minds on the subject. Their satisfaction
+may only be that they have not tried to rub the varnish off the gilding
+so much as I, and therefore the gilding itself still shines a little in
+their eyes.'
+
+'If it be only gilding, it is better it should be rubbed off.'
+
+'But I am unwilling to think it is. I am not willing to sign a bond of
+farewell to hope. Life seemed good once. It is bad enough that it seems
+such no longer, without consenting that it must and shall be so. Allow
+me to add, for my own sake, that I speak from the bitterness of no
+chagrin. I have had all I ever cared--or condescended to wish for. I
+never had anything worth the name of a disappointment in my life.'
+
+'I cannot congratulate you upon that,' said Falconer, seriously. 'But
+if there be a truth or a heart in life, assurance of the fact can only
+spring from harmony with that truth. It is not to be known save by
+absolute contact with it; and the sole guide in the direction of it must
+be duty: I can imagine no other possible conductor. We must do before we
+can know.'
+
+'Yes, yes,' replied Lady Georgina, hastily, in a tone that implied, 'Of
+course, of course: we know all about that.' But aware at once, with the
+fine instinct belonging to her mental organization, that she was
+thus shutting the door against all further communication, she added
+instantly: 'But what is one's duty? There is the question.'
+
+'The thing that lies next you, of course. You are, and must remain, the
+sole judge of that. Another cannot help you.'
+
+'But that is just what I do not know.'
+
+I interrupt Lady Georgina to remark--for I too have been a pupil of
+Falconer--that I believe she must have suspected what her duty was, and
+would not look firmly at her own suspicion. She added:
+
+'I want direction.'
+
+But the same moment she proceeded to indicate the direction in which she
+wanted to be directed; for she went on:
+
+'You know that now-a-days there are so many modes in which to employ
+one's time and money that one does not know which to choose. The lower
+strata of society, you know, Mr. Falconer--so many channels! I want the
+advice of a man of experience, as to the best investment, if I may use
+the expression: I do not mean of money only, but of time as well.'
+
+'I am not fitted to give advice in such a matter.'
+
+'Mr. Falconer!'
+
+'I assure you I am not. I subscribe to no society myself--not one.'
+
+'Excuse me, but I can hardly believe the rumours I hear of you--people
+will talk, you know--are all inventions. They say you are for ever
+burrowing amongst the poor. Excuse the phrase.'
+
+'I excuse or accept it, whichever you please. Whatever I do, I am my own
+steward.'
+
+'Then you are just the person to help me! I have a fortune, not very
+limited, at my own disposal: a gentleman who is his own steward, would
+find his labours merely facilitated by administering for another as
+well--such labours, I mean.'
+
+'I must beg to be excused, Lady Georgina. I am accountable only for my
+own, and of that I have quite as much as I can properly manage. It
+is far more difficult to use money for others than to spend it for
+yourself.'
+
+'Ah!' said Lady Georgina, thoughtfully, and cast an involuntary glance
+round the untidy room, with its horse-hair furniture, its ragged array
+of books on the wall, its side-table littered with pamphlets he never
+read, with papers he never printed, with pipes he smoked by chance
+turns. He saw the glance and understood it.
+
+'I am accustomed,' he said, 'to be in such sad places for human beings
+to live in, that I sometimes think even this dingy old room an absolute
+palace of comfort.--But,' he added, checking himself, as it were, 'I
+do not see in the least how your proposal would facilitate an answer to
+your question.'
+
+'You seem hardly inclined to do me justice,' said Lady Georgina, with,
+for the first time, a perceptible, though slight shadow crossing the
+disc of her resolution. 'I only meant it,' she went on, 'as a step
+towards a further proposal, which I think you will allow looks at least
+in the direction you have been indicating.'
+
+She paused.
+
+'May I beg of you to state the proposal?' said Falconer.
+
+But Lady Georgina was apparently in some little difficulty as to the
+proper form in which to express her object. At last it appeared in the
+cloak of a question.
+
+'Do you require no assistance in your efforts for the elevation of the
+lower classes?' she asked.
+
+'I don't make any such efforts,' said Falconer.
+
+Some of my lady-readers will probably be remarking to themselves, 'How
+disagreeable of him! I can't endure the man.' If they knew how Falconer
+had to beware of the forwardness and annoyance of well-meaning women,
+they would not dislike him so much. But Falconer could be indifferent to
+much dislike, and therein I know some men that envy him.
+
+When he saw, however, that Lady Georgina was trying to swallow a lump in
+her throat, he hastened to add,
+
+'I have only relations with individuals--none with classes.'
+
+Lady Georgina gathered her failing courage. 'Then there is the more hope
+for me,' she said. 'Surely there are things a woman might be useful
+in that a man cannot do so well--especially if she would do as she was
+told, Mr. Falconer?'
+
+He looked at her, inquiring of her whole person what numen abode in the
+fane. She misunderstood the look.
+
+'I could dress very differently, you know. I will be a sister of
+charity, if you like.'
+
+'And wear a uniform?--as if the god of another world wanted to make
+proselytes or traitors in this! No, Lady Georgina, it was not of a dress
+so easily altered that I was thinking; it was of the habit, the dress of
+mind, of thought, of feeling. When you laid aside your beautiful dress,
+could you avoid putting on the garment of condescension, the most
+unchristian virtue attributed to Deity or saint? Could you--I must be
+plain with you, Lady Georgina, for this has nothing to do with the forms
+of so-called society--could your temper endure the mortifications of
+low opposition and misrepresentation of motive and end--which, avoid
+intrusion as you might, would yet force themselves on your perception?
+Could you be rudely, impudently thwarted by the very persons for whom
+you were spending your strength and means, and show no resentment? Could
+you make allowances for them as for your own brothers and sisters, your
+own children?'
+
+Lady Georgina was silent.
+
+'I shall seem to glorify myself, but at that risk I must put the reality
+before you.--Could you endure the ugliness both moral and physical which
+you must meet at every turn? Could you look upon loathsomeness, not
+merely without turning away in disgust, and thus wounding the very heart
+you would heal, but without losing your belief in the Fatherhood of God,
+by losing your faith in the actual blood-relationship to yourself of
+these wretched beings? Could you believe in the immortal essence
+hidden under all this garbage--God at the root of it all? How would the
+delicate senses you probably inherit receive the intrusions from which
+they could not protect themselves? Would you be in no danger of finding
+personal refuge in the horrid fancy, that these are but the slimy
+borders of humanity where it slides into, and is one with bestiality? I
+could show you one fearful baboon-like woman, whose very face makes
+my nerves shudder: could you believe that woman might one day become a
+lady, beautiful as yourself, and therefore minister to her? Would you
+not be tempted, for the sake of your own comfort, if not for the pride
+of your own humanity, to believe that, like untimely blossoms, these
+must fall from off the boughs of the tree of life, and come to nothing
+at all--a theory that may do for the preacher, but will not do for the
+worker: him it would paralyze?--or, still worse, infinitely worse, that
+they were doomed, from their birth, to endless ages of a damnation,
+filthy as that in which you now found them, and must probably leave
+them? If you could come to this, you had better withhold your hand; for
+no desire for the betterment of the masses, as they are stupidly called,
+can make up for a lack of faith in the individual. If you cannot hope
+for them in your heart, your hands cannot reach them to do them good.
+They will only hurt them.'
+
+Lady Georgina was still silent. Falconer's eloquence had perhaps made
+her ashamed.
+
+'I want you to sit down and count the cost, before you do any mischief
+by beginning what you are unfit for. Last week I was compelled more than
+once to leave the house where my duty led me, and to sit down upon a
+stone in the street, so ill that I was in danger of being led away as
+intoxicated, only the policeman happened to know me. Twice I went back
+to the room I had left, crowded with human animals, and one of them
+at least dying. It was all I could do, and I have tolerable nerve and
+tolerable experience.'
+
+A mist was gathering over Lady Georgina's eyes. She confessed it
+afterwards to Miss St. John. And through the mist he looked larger than
+human.
+
+'And then the time you must spend before you can lay hold upon them
+at all, that is with the personal relation which alone is of any real
+influence! Our Saviour himself had to be thirty years in the world
+before he had footing enough in it to justify him in beginning to teach
+publicly: he had been laying the needful foundations all the time. Not
+under any circumstances could I consent to make use of you before you
+had brought yourself into genuine relations with some of them first.'
+
+'Do you count societies, then, of no use whatever?' Lady Georgina asked,
+more to break the awkwardness of her prolonged silence than for any
+other reason.
+
+'In as far as any of the persons they employ fulfil the conditions of
+which I have spoken, they are useful--that is, just in as far as they
+come into genuine human relations with those whom they would help. In as
+far as their servants are incapable of this, the societies are hurtful.
+The chief good which societies might effect would be the procuring of
+simple justice for the poor. That is what they need at the hands of
+the nation, and what they do not receive. But though few can have the
+knowledge of the poor I have, many could do something, if they would
+only set about it simply, and not be too anxious to convert them; if
+they would only be their friends after a common-sense fashion. I know,
+say, a hundred wretched men and women far better than a man in general
+knows him with whom he claims an ordinary intimacy. I know many more by
+sight whose names in the natural course of events I shall probably know
+soon. I know many of their relations to each other, and they talk about
+each other to me as if I were one of themselves, which I hope in God I
+am. I have been amongst them a good many years now, and shall probably
+spend my life amongst them. When I went first, I was repeatedly robbed;
+now I should hardly fear to carry another man's property. Two years ago
+I had my purse taken, but next morning it was returned, I do not know by
+whom: in fact it was put into my pocket again--every coin, as far as I
+could judge, as it left me. I seldom pretend to teach them--only now and
+then drop a word of advice. But possibly, before I die, I may speak to
+them in public. At present I avoid all attempt at organization of any
+sort, and as far as I see, am likely of all things to avoid it. What I
+want is first to be their friend, and then to be at length recognized
+as such. It is only in rare cases that I seek the acquaintance of any of
+them: I let it come naturally. I bide my time. Almost never do I offer
+assistance. I wait till they ask it, and then often refuse the sort they
+want. The worst thing you can do for them is to attempt to save them
+from the natural consequences of wrong: you may sometimes help them out
+of them. But it is right to do many things for them when you know them,
+which it would not be right to do for them until you know them. I am
+amongst them; they know me; their children know me; and something is
+always occurring that makes this or that one come to me. Once I have a
+footing, I seldom lose it. So you see, in this my labour I am content to
+do the thing that lies next me. I wait events. You have had no training,
+no blundering to fit you for such work. There are many other modes of
+being useful; but none in which I could undertake to direct you. I am
+not in the habit of talking so much about my ways--but that is of no
+consequence. I think I am right in doing so in this instance.'
+
+'I cannot misunderstand you,' faltered Lady Georgina.
+
+Falconer was silent. Without looking up from the floor on which her eyes
+had rested all the time he spoke, Lady Georgina said at last,
+
+'Then what is my next duty? What is the thing that lies nearest to me?'
+
+'That, I repeat, belongs to your every-day history. No one can answer
+that question but yourself. Your next duty is just to determine what
+your next duty is.--Is there nothing you neglect? Is there nothing you
+know you ought not to do?--You would know your duty, if you thought in
+earnest about it, and were not ambitious of great things.'
+
+'Ah then,' responded Lady Georgina, with an abandoning sigh, 'I suppose
+it is something very commonplace, which will make life more dreary than
+ever. That cannot help me.'
+
+'It will, if it be as dreary as reading the newspapers to an old deaf
+aunt. It will soon lead you to something more. Your duty will begin to
+comfort you at once, but will at length open the unknown fountain of
+life in your heart.'
+
+Lady Georgina lifted up her head in despair, looked at Falconer through
+eyes full of tears, and said vehemently,
+
+'Mr. Falconer, you can have no conception how wretched a life like mine
+is. And the futility of everything is embittered by the consciousness
+that it is from no superiority to such things that I do not care for
+them.'
+
+'It is from superiority to such things that you do not care for them.
+You were not made for such things. They cannot fill your heart. It has
+whole regions with which they have no relation.'
+
+'The very thought of music makes me feel ill. I used to be passionately
+fond of it.'
+
+'I presume you got so far in it that you asked, "Is there nothing more?"
+Concluding there was nothing more, and yet needing more, you turned from
+it with disappointment?'
+
+'It is the same,' she went on hurriedly, 'with painting, modelling,
+reading--whatever I have tried. I am sick of them all. They do nothing
+for me.'
+
+'How can you enjoy music, Lady Georgina, if you are not in harmony with
+the heart and source of music?'
+
+'How do you mean?'
+
+'Until the human heart knows the divine heart, it must sigh and complain
+like a petulant child, who flings his toys from him because his mother
+is not at home. When his mother comes back to him he finds his toys are
+good still. When we find Him in our own hearts, we shall find him in
+everything, and music will be deep enough then, Lady Georgina. It is
+this that the Brahmin and the Platonist seek; it is this that the mystic
+and the anchorite sigh for; towards this the teaching of the greatest of
+men would lead us: Lord Bacon himself says, "Nothing can fill, much less
+extend the soul of man, but God, and the contemplation of God." It is
+Life you want. If you will look in your New Testament, and find out
+all that our Lord says about Life, you will find the only cure for your
+malady. I know what such talk looks like; but depend upon it, what I am
+talking about is something very different from what you fancy it. Anyhow
+to this you must come, one day or other.'
+
+'But how am I to gain this indescribable good, which so many seek, and
+so few find?'
+
+'Those are not my words,' said Falconer emphatically. 'I should have
+said--"which so few yet seek; but so many shall at length find."'
+
+'Do not quarrel with my foolish words, but tell me how I am to find
+it; for I suppose there must be something in what so many good people
+assert.'
+
+'You thought I could give you help?'
+
+'Yes. That is why I came to you.'
+
+'Just so. I cannot give you help. Go and ask it of one who can.'
+
+'Speak more plainly.'
+
+'Well then: if there be a God, he must hear you if you call to him.
+If there be a father, he will listen to his child. He will teach you
+everything.'
+
+'But I don't know what I want.'
+
+'He does: ask him to tell you what you want. It all comes back to the
+old story: "If ye then being evil, know how to give good gifts to your
+children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the holy Spirit
+to them that ask him!" But I wish you would read your New Testament--the
+Gospels I mean: you are not in the least fit to understand the Epistles
+yet. Read the story of our Saviour as if you had never read it before.
+He at least was a man who seemed to have that secret of life after the
+knowledge of which your heart is longing.'
+
+Lady Georgina rose. Her eyes were again full of tears. Falconer too was
+moved. She held out her hand to him, and without another word left the
+room. She never came there again.
+
+Her manner towards Falconer was thereafter much altered. People said
+she was in love with him: if she was, it did her no harm. Her whole
+character certainly was changed. She sought the friendship of Miss St.
+John, who came at length to like her so much, that she took her with
+her in some of her walks among the poor. By degrees she began to do
+something herself after a quiet modest fashion. But within a few years,
+probably while so engaged, she caught a fever from which she did not
+recover. It was not till after her death that Falconer told any one of
+the interview he had had with her. And by that time I had the honour of
+being very intimate with him. When she knew that she was dying, she sent
+for him. Mary St. John was with her. She left them together. When he
+came out, he was weeping.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. THE SUICIDE.
+
+Falconer lived on and laboured on in London. Wherever he found a man
+fitted for the work, he placed him in such office as De Fleuri already
+occupied. At the same time he went more into society, and gained the
+friendship of many influential people. Besides the use he made of this
+to carry out plans for individual rescue, it enabled him to bestir
+himself for the first and chief good which he believed it was in
+the power of the government to effect for the class amongst which he
+laboured. As I have shown, he did not believe in any positive good
+being effected save through individual contact--through faith, in a
+word--faith in the human helper--which might become a stepping-stone
+through the chaotic misery towards faith in the Lord and in his Father.
+All that association could do, as such, was only, in his judgment, to
+remove obstructions from the way of individual growth and education--to
+put better conditions within reach--first of all, to provide that the
+people should be able, if they would, to live decently. He had no notion
+of domestic inspection, or of offering prizes for cleanliness and order.
+He knew that misery and wretchedness are the right and best condition
+of those who live so that misery and wretchedness are the natural
+consequences of their life. But there ought always to be the possibility
+of emerging from these; and as things were, over the whole country, for
+many who would if they could, it was impossible to breathe fresh air, to
+be clean, to live like human beings. And he saw this difficulty ever
+on the increase, through the rapacity of the holders of small
+house-property, and the utter wickedness of railway companies, who
+pulled down every house that stood in their way, and did nothing to
+provide room for those who were thus ejected--most probably from a
+wretched place, but only, to be driven into a more wretched still. To
+provide suitable dwellings for the poor he considered the most pressing
+of all necessary reforms. His own fortune was not sufficient for doing
+much in this way, but he set about doing what he could by purchasing
+houses in which the poor lived, and putting them into the hands of
+persons whom he could trust, and who were immediately responsible to him
+for their proceedings: they had to make them fit for human abodes,
+and let them to those who desired better accommodation, giving the
+preference to those already tenants, so long as they paid their
+reasonable rent, which he considered far more necessary for them to do
+than for him to have done.
+
+One day he met by appointment the owner of a small block, of which
+he contemplated the purchase. They were in a dreadfully dilapidated
+condition, a shame that belonged more to the owner than the inhabitants.
+The man wanted to sell the houses, or at least was willing to sell them,
+but put an exorbitant price upon them. Falconer expostulated.
+
+'I know the whole of the rent these houses could bring you in,' he said,
+'without making any deduction for vacancies and defalcations: what you
+ask is twice as much as they would fetch if the full rent were certain.'
+
+The poor wretch looked up at him with the leer of a ghoul. He was
+dressed like a broken-down clergyman, in rusty black, with a neck-cloth
+of whitey-brown.
+
+'I admit it,' he said in good English, and a rather educated tone. 'Your
+arguments are indisputable. I confess besides that so far short does
+the yield come of the amount on paper, that it would pay me to give them
+away. But it's the funerals, sir, that make it worth my while. I'm an
+undertaker, as you may judge from my costume. I count back-rent in
+the burying. People may cheat their landlord, but they can't cheat the
+undertaker. They must be buried. That's the one indispensable--ain't it,
+sir?'
+
+Falconer had let him run on that he might have the measure of him. Now
+he was prepared with his reply.
+
+'You've told me your profession,' he said: 'I'll tell you mine. I am a
+lawyer. If you don't let me have those houses for five hundred, which is
+the full market value, I'll prosecute you. It'll take a good penny from
+the profits of your coffins to put those houses in a state to satisfy
+the inspector.'
+
+The wretched creature was struck dumb. Falconer resumed.
+
+'You're the sort of man that ought to be kept to your pound of filthy
+flesh. I know what I say; and I'll do it. The law costs me nothing. You
+won't find it so.'
+
+The undertaker sold the houses, and no longer in that quarter killed the
+people he wanted to bury.
+
+I give this as a specimen of the kind of thing Falconer did. But he took
+none of the business part in his own hands, on the same principle on
+which Paul the Apostle said it was unmeet for him to leave the preaching
+of the word in order to serve tables--not that the thing was beneath
+him, but that it was not his work so long as he could be doing more
+important service still.
+
+De Fleuri was one of his chief supports. The whole nature of the man
+mellowed under the sun of Falconer, and over the work that Falconer
+gave him to do. His daughter recovered, and devoted herself to the same
+labour that had rescued her. Miss St. John was her superior. By degrees,
+without any laws or regulations, a little company was gathered, not of
+ladies and gentlemen, but of men and women, who aided each other, and
+without once meeting as a whole, laboured not the less as one body in
+the work of the Lord, bound in one by bonds that had nothing to do with
+cobweb committee meetings or public dinners, chairmen or wine-flushed
+subscriptions. They worked like the leaven of which the Lord spoke.
+
+But De Fleuri, like almost every one in the community I believe, had his
+own private schemes subserving the general good. He knew the best men of
+his own class and his own trade, and with them his superior intellectual
+gifts gave him influence. To them he told the story of Falconer's
+behaviour to him, of Falconer's own need, and of his hungry-hearted
+search. An enthusiasm of help seized upon the men. To aid your superior
+is such a rousing gladness!--Was anything of this in St. Paul's mind
+when he spoke of our being fellow-workers with God? I only put the
+question.--Each one of these had his own trustworthy acquaintances, or
+neighbours, rather--for like finds out like all the world through, as
+well as over--and to them he told the story of Falconer and his father,
+so that in all that region of London it became known that the man who
+loved the poor was himself needy, and looked to the poor for their help.
+Without them he could not be made perfect.
+
+Some of my readers may be inclined to say that it was dishonourable in
+Falconer to have occasioned the publishing of his father's disgrace.
+Such may recall to their minds that concealment is no law of the
+universe; that, on the contrary, the Lord of the Universe said once:
+'There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed.' Was the disgrace
+of Andrew Falconer greater because a thousand men knew it, instead of
+forty, who could not help knowing it? Hope lies in light and knowledge.
+Andrew would be none the worse that honest men knew of his vice: they
+would be the first to honour him if he should overcome it. If he would
+not--the disgrace was just, and would fall upon his son only in sorrow,
+not in dishonour. The grace of God--the making of humanity by his
+beautiful hand--no, heart--is such, that disgrace clings to no man after
+repentance, any more than the feet defiled with the mud of the world
+come yet defiled from the bath. Even the things that proceed out of the
+man, and do terribly defile him, can be cast off like the pollution of
+the leper by a grace that goes deeper than they; and the man who
+says, 'I have sinned: I will sin no more,' is even by the voice of his
+brothers crowned as a conqueror, and by their hearts loved as one who
+has suffered and overcome. Blessing on the God-born human heart! Let the
+hounds of God, not of Satan, loose upon sin;--God only can rule the dogs
+of the devil;--let them hunt it to the earth; let them drag forth the
+demoniac to the feet of the Man who loved the people while he let the
+devil take their swine; and do not talk about disgrace from a thing
+being known when the disgrace is that the thing should exist.
+
+One night I was returning home from some poor attempts of my own. I had
+now been a pupil of Falconer for a considerable time, but having my own
+livelihood to make, I could not do so much as I would.
+
+It was late, nearly twelve o'clock, as I passed through the region of
+Seven Dials. Here and there stood three or four brutal-looking men, and
+now and then a squalid woman with a starveling baby in her arms, in
+the light of the gin-shops. The babies were the saddest to
+see--nursery-plants already in training for the places these men and
+women now held, then to fill a pauper's grave, or perhaps a perpetual
+cell--say rather, for the awful spaces of silence, where the railway
+director can no longer be guilty of a worse sin than house-breaking,
+and his miserable brother will have no need of the shelter of which
+he deprived him. Now and then a flaunting woman wavered past--a
+night-shade, as our old dramatists would have called her. I could hardly
+keep down an evil disgust that would have conquered my pity, when a
+scanty white dress would stop beneath a lamp, and the gay dirty bonnet,
+turning round, reveal a painted face, from which shone little more than
+an animal intelligence, not brightened by the gin she had been drinking.
+Vague noises of strife and of drunken wrath flitted around me as I
+passed an alley, or an opening door let out its evil secret. Once I
+thought I heard the dull thud of a blow on the head. The noisome vapours
+were fit for any of Swedenborg's hells. There were few sounds, but the
+very quiet seemed infernal. The night was hot and sultry. A skinned cat,
+possibly still alive, fell on the street before me. Under one of the
+gas-lamps lay something long: it was a tress of dark hair, torn perhaps
+from some woman's head: she had beautiful hair at least. Once I heard
+the cry of murder, but where, in that chaos of humanity, right or left,
+before or behind me, I could not even guess. Home to such regions,
+from gorgeous stage-scenery and dresses, from splendid, mirror-beladen
+casinos, from singing-halls, and places of private and prolonged
+revelry, trail the daughters of men at all hours from midnight till
+morning. Next day they drink hell-fire that they may forget. Sleep
+brings an hour or two of oblivion, hardly of peace; but they must wake,
+worn and miserable, and the waking brings no hope: their only known help
+lies in the gin-shop. What can be done with them? But the secrets God
+keeps must be as good as those he tells.
+
+But no sights of the night ever affected me so much as walking through
+this same St. Giles's on a summer Sunday morning, when church-goers
+were in church. Oh! the faces that creep out into the sunshine then,
+and haunt their doors! Some of them but skins drawn over skulls, living
+Death's-heads, grotesque in their hideousness.
+
+I was not very far from Falconer's abode. My mind was oppressed with sad
+thoughts and a sense of helplessness. I began to wonder what Falconer
+might at that moment be about. I had not seen him for a long time--a
+whole fortnight. He might be at home: I would go and see, and if there
+were light in his windows I would ring his bell.
+
+I went. There was light in his windows. He opened the door himself, and
+welcomed me. I went up with him, and we began to talk. I told him of my
+sad thoughts, and my feelings of helplessness.
+
+'He that believeth shall not make haste,' he said. 'There is plenty of
+time. You must not imagine that the result depends on you, or that a
+single human soul can be lost because you may fail. The question, as
+far as you are concerned, is, whether you are to be honoured in having a
+hand in the work that God is doing, and will do, whether you help him
+or not. Some will be honoured: shall it be me? And this honour gained
+excludes no one: there is work, as there is bread in his house, enough
+and to spare. It shows no faith in God to make frantic efforts or
+frantic lamentations. Besides, we ought to teach ourselves to see, as
+much as we may, the good that is in the condition of the poor.'
+
+'Teach me to see that, then,' I said. 'Show me something.'
+
+'The best thing is their kindness to each other. There is an absolute
+divinity in their self-denial for those who are poorer than themselves.
+I know one man and woman, married people, who pawned their very
+furniture and wearing apparel to procure cod-liver oil for a girl dying
+in consumption. She was not even a relative, only an acquaintance of
+former years. They had found her destitute and taken her to their own
+poor home. There are fathers and mothers who will work hard all the
+morning, and when dinner-time comes "don't want any," that there may be
+enough for their children--or half enough, more likely. Children will
+take the bread out of their own mouths to put in that of their sick
+brother, or to stick in the fist of baby crying for a crust--giving only
+a queer little helpless grin, half of hungry sympathy, half of pleasure,
+as they see it disappear. The marvel to me is that the children turn
+out so well as they do; but that applies to the children in all ranks
+of life. Have you ever watched a group of poor children, half-a-dozen of
+them with babies in their arms?'
+
+'I have, a little, and have seen such a strange mixture of carelessness
+and devotion.'
+
+'Yes. I was once stopped in the street by a child of ten, with face
+absolutely swollen with weeping, asking me to go and see baby who was
+very ill. She had dropped him four times that morning, but had no idea
+that could have done him any harm. The carelessness is ignorance.
+Their form of it is not half so shocking as that of the mother who will
+tremble at the slightest sign of suffering in her child, but will hear
+him lie against his brother without the smallest discomfort. Ah! we
+shall all find, I fear, some day, that we have differed from each other,
+where we have done best, only in mode--perhaps not even in degree. A
+grinding tradesman takes advantage of the over supply of labour to
+get his work done at starvation prices: I owe him love, and have never
+thought of paying my debt except in boundless indignation.'
+
+'I wish I had your faith and courage, Mr. Falconer,' I said.
+
+'You are in a fair way of having far more,' he returned. 'You are not so
+old as I am, by a long way. But I fear you are getting out of spirits.
+Is to-morrow a hard day with you?'
+
+'I have next to nothing to do to-morrow.'
+
+'Then will you come to me in the evening? We will go out together.'
+
+Of course I was only too glad to accept the proposal. But our talk did
+not end here. The morning began to shine before I rose to leave him; and
+before I reached my abode it was broad daylight. But what a different
+heart I carried within me! And what a different London it was outside of
+me! The scent of the hayfields came on the hardly-moving air. It was a
+strange morning--a new day of unknown history--in whose young light the
+very streets were transformed, looking clear and clean, and wondrously
+transparent in perspective, with unknown shadows lying in unexpected
+nooks, with projection and recess, line and bend, as I had never seen
+them before. The light was coming as if for the first time since the
+city sprang into being--as if a thousand years had rolled over it in
+darkness and lamplight, and now, now, after the prayers and longings of
+ages, the sun of God was ascending the awful east, and the spirit-voice
+had gone forth: 'Arise, shine, for thy light is come.'
+
+It was a well-behaved, proper London through which I walked home. Here
+and there, it is true, a debauched-looking man, with pale face, and
+red sleepy eyes, or a weary, withered girl, like a half-moon in the
+daylight, straggled somewhither. But they looked strange to the London
+of the morning. They were not of it. Alas for those who creep to their
+dens, like the wild beasts when the sun arises, because the light has
+shaken them out of the world. All the horrid phantasms of the Valley of
+the Shadow of Death that had risen from the pit with the vaporous night
+had sunk to escape the arrows of the sun, once more into its bottomless
+depth. If any horrid deed was doing now, how much more horrid in the
+awful still light of this first hour of a summer morn! How many evil
+passions now lay sunk under the holy waves of sleep! How many heartaches
+were gnawing only in dreams, to wake with the brain, and gnaw in earnest
+again! And over all brooded the love of the Lord Christ, who is Lord
+over all blessed for ever, and shall yet cast death and hell into the
+lake of fire--the holy purifying Fate.
+
+I got through my sole engagement--a very dreary one, for surely never
+were there stupider young people in the whole region of rank than those
+to whom duty and necessity sent me on the Wednesday mornings of that
+London season--even with some enjoyment. For the lessons Falconer had
+been giving me clung to me and grew on me until I said thus to myself:
+'Am I to believe only for the poor, and not for the rich? Am I not to
+bear with conceit even, hard as it is to teach? for is not this conceit
+itself the measure as the consequence of incapacity and ignorance? They
+cannot help being born stupid, any more than some of those children in
+St. Giles's can help being born preternaturally, unhealthily clever.
+I am going with my friend this evening: that hope is enough to make
+me strong for one day at least.' So I set myself to my task, and that
+morning wiled the first gleam of intelligent delight out of the eyes
+of one poor little washed-out ladyship. I could have kissed her from
+positive thankfulness.
+
+The day did wear over. The evening did come. I was with my friend--for
+friend I could call him none the less and all the more that I worshipped
+him.
+
+'I have business in Westminster,' he said, 'and then on the other side
+of the water.'
+
+'I am more and more astonished at your knowledge of London, Mr.
+Falconer,' I said. 'You must have a great faculty for places.'
+
+'I think rather the contrary,' he answered. 'But there is no end to
+the growth of a faculty, if one only uses it--especially when his whole
+nature is interested in its efficiency, and makes demands upon it.
+The will applies to the intellect; the intellect communicates its
+necessities to the brain; the brain bestirs itself, and grows more
+active; the eyes lend their aid; the memory tries not to be behind; and
+at length you have a man gifted in localities.'
+
+'How is it that people generally can live in such quiet ignorance of the
+regions that surround them, and the kind of humanity so near them?' I
+said after a pause.
+
+'It does seem strange. It is as if a man should not know who were in his
+own house. Would-be civilization has for the very centre of its citadel,
+for the citizens of its innermost city, for the heart around which
+the gay and fashionable, the learned, the artistic, the virtuous, the
+religious are gathered, a people some of whom are barbarous, some cruel,
+many miserable, many unhappy, save for brief moments not of hope, but
+of defiance, distilled in the alembic of the brain from gin: what better
+life could steam up from such a Phlegethon! Look there: "Cream of the
+Valley!" As if the mocking serpent must with sweet words of Paradise
+deepen the horrors of the hellish compound, to which so many of our
+brothers and sisters made in the image of God, fly as to their only
+Saviour from the misery of feeling alive.'
+
+'How is it that the civilized people of London do not make a
+simultaneous inroad upon the haunts of the demons and drive them out?'
+
+'It is a mercy they do not. They would only do infinite mischief. The
+best notion civilization seems to have is--not to drive out the demons,
+but to drive out the possessed; to take from them the poor refuges they
+have, and crowd them into deeper and more fetid hells--to make room for
+what?--more and more temples in which Mammon may be worshipped. The
+good people on the other hand invade them with foolish tracts, that lie
+against God; or give their money to build churches, where there is
+as yet no people that will go to them. Why, the other day, a young
+clergyman bored me, and would have been boring me till now, I think, if
+I would have let him, to part with a block of my houses, where I know
+every man, woman, and child, and keep them in comparative comfort and
+cleanliness and decency, to say no more, that he might pull them down
+and build a church upon the site--not quite five minutes' walk from the
+church where he now officiates.'
+
+It was a blowing, moon-lit night. The gaslights flickered and wavered in
+the gusts of wind. It was cold, very cold for the season. Even Falconer
+buttoned his coat over his chest. He got a few paces in advance of me
+sometimes, when I saw him towering black and tall and somewhat gaunt,
+like a walking shadow. The wind increased in violence. It was a
+north-easter, laden with dust, and a sense of frozen Siberian steppes.
+We had to stoop and head it at the corners of streets. Not many people
+were out, and those who were, seemed to be hurrying home. A few little
+provision-shops, and a few inferior butchers' stalls were still open.
+Their great jets of gas, which looked as if they must poison the meat,
+were flaming fierce and horizontal, roaring like fiery flags, and anon
+dying into a blue hiss. Discordant singing, more like the howling of
+wild beasts, came from the corner houses, which blazed like the gates
+of hell. Their doors were ever on the swing, and the hot odours of death
+rushed out, and the cold blast of life rushed in. We paused a little
+before one of them--over the door, upon the sign, was in very deed the
+name Death. There were ragged women within who took their half-dead
+babies from their bare, cold, cheerless bosoms, and gave them of the
+poison of which they themselves drank renewed despair in the name of
+comfort. They say that most of the gin consumed in London is drunk by
+women. And the little clay-coloured baby-faces made a grimace or two,
+and sank to sleep on the thin tawny breasts of the mothers, who having
+gathered courage from the essence of despair, faced the scowling night
+once more, and with bare necks and hopeless hearts went--whither? Where
+do they all go when the gin-hells close their yawning jaws? Where do
+they lie down at night? They vanish like unlawfully risen corpses in
+the graves of cellars and garrets, in the charnel-vaults of
+pestiferously-crowded lodging-houses, in the prisons of police-stations,
+under dry arches, within hoardings; or they make vain attempts to rest
+the night out upon door-steps or curbstones. All their life long man
+denies them the one right in the soil which yet is so much theirs, that
+once that life is over, he can no longer deny it--the right of room
+to lie down. Space itself is not allowed to be theirs by any right of
+existence: the voice of the night-guardian commanding them to move on,
+is as the howling of a death-hound hunting them out of the air into
+their graves.
+
+In St. James's we came upon a group around the gates of a great house.
+Visitors were coming and going, and it was a show to be had for nothing
+by those who had nothing to pay. Oh! the children with clothes too
+ragged to hold pockets for their chilled hands, that stared at the
+childless duchess descending from her lordly carriage! Oh! the wan
+faces, once lovely as theirs, it may be, that gazed meagre and pinched
+and hungry on the young maidens in rose-colour and blue, tripping
+lightly through the avenue of their eager eyes--not yet too envious of
+unattainable felicity to gaze with admiring sympathy on those who seemed
+to them the angels, the goddesses of their kind. 'O God!' I thought, but
+dared not speak, 'and thou couldst make all these girls so lovely! Thou
+couldst give them all the gracious garments of rose and blue and white
+if thou wouldst! Why should these not be like those? They are hungry
+even, and wan and torn. These too are thy children. There is wealth
+enough in thy mines and in thy green fields, room enough in thy starry
+spaces, O God!' But a voice--the echo of Falconer's teaching, awoke in
+my heart--'Because I would have these more blessed than those, and those
+more blessed with them, for they are all my children.'
+
+By the Mall we came into Whitehall, and so to Westminster Bridge.
+Falconer had changed his mind, and would cross at once. The present
+bridge was not then finished, and the old bridge alongside of it was
+still in use for pedestrians. We went upon it to reach the other side.
+Its centre rose high above the other, for the line of the new bridge
+ran like a chord across the arc of the old. Through chance gaps in the
+boarding between, we looked down on the new portion which was as
+yet used by carriages alone. The moon had, throughout the evening,
+alternately shone in brilliance from amidst a lake of blue sky, and been
+overwhelmed in billowy heaps of wind-tormented clouds. As we stood on
+the apex of the bridge, looking at the night, the dark river, and
+the mass of human effort about us, the clouds gathered and closed and
+tumbled upon her in crowded layers. The wind howled through the arches
+beneath, swept along the boarded fences, and whistled in their holes.
+The gas-lights blew hither and thither, and were perplexed to live at
+all.
+
+We were standing at a spot where some shorter pieces had been used in
+the hoarding; and, although I could not see over them, Falconer, whose
+head rose more than half a foot above mine, was looking on the other
+bridge below. Suddenly he grasped the top with his great hands, and his
+huge frame was over it in an instant. I was on the top of the hoarding
+the same moment, and saw him prostrate some twelve feet below. He was
+up the next instant, and running with huge paces diagonally towards the
+Surrey side. He had seen the figure of a woman come flying along from
+the Westminster side, without bonnet or shawl. When she came under the
+spot where we stood, she had turned across at an obtuse angle towards
+the other side of the bridge, and Falconer, convinced that she meant to
+throw herself into the river, went over as I have related. She had all
+but scrambled over the fence--for there was no parapet yet--by the help
+of the great beam that ran along to support it, when he caught her by
+her garments. So poor and thin were those garments, that if she had
+not been poor and thin too, she would have dropped from them into
+the darkness below. He took her in his arms, lifted her down upon the
+bridge, and stood as if protecting her from a pursuing death. I had
+managed to find an easier mode of descent, and now stood a little way
+from them.
+
+'Poor girl! poor girl!' he said, as if to himself: 'was this the only
+way left?'
+
+Then he spoke tenderly to her. What he said I could not hear--I only
+heard the tone.
+
+'O sir!' she cried, in piteous entreaty, 'do let me go. Why should a
+wretched creature like me be forced to live? It's no good to you, sir.
+Do let me go.'
+
+'Come here,' he said, drawing her close to the fence. 'Stand up again on
+the beam. Look down.'
+
+She obeyed, in a mechanical kind of way. But as he talked, and she kept
+looking down on the dark mystery beneath, flowing past with every now
+and then a dull vengeful glitter--continuous, forceful, slow, he felt
+her shudder in his still clasping arm.
+
+'Look,' he said, 'how it crawls along--black and slimy! how silent and
+yet how fierce! Is that a nice place to go to down there? Would there
+be any rest there, do you think, tumbled about among filth and creeping
+things, and slugs that feed on the dead; among drowned women like
+yourself drifting by, and murdered men, and strangled babies? Is that
+the door by which you would like to go out of the world?'
+
+'It's no worse,' she faltered, '--not so bad as what I should leave
+behind.'
+
+'If this were the only way out of it, I would not keep you from it. I
+would say, "Poor thing! there is no help: she must go." But there is
+another way.'
+
+'There is no other way, sir--if you knew all,' she said.
+
+'Tell me, then.'
+
+'I cannot. I dare not. Please--I would rather go.'
+
+She looked, from the mere glimpses I could get of her, somewhere about
+five-and-twenty, making due allowance for the wear of suffering so
+evident even in those glimpses. I think she might have been beautiful if
+the waste of her history could have been restored. That she had had at
+least some advantages of education, was evident from both her tone and
+her speech. But oh, the wild eyes, and the tortured lips, drawn back
+from the teeth with an agony of hopelessness, as she struggled anew,
+perhaps mistrusting them, to escape from the great arms that held her!
+
+'But the river cannot drown you,' Falconer said. 'It can only stop your
+breath. It cannot stop your thinking. You will go on thinking, thinking,
+all the same. Drowning people remember in a moment all their past lives.
+All their evil deeds come up before them, as if they were doing them all
+over again. So they plunge back into the past and all its misery. While
+their bodies are drowning, their souls are coming more and more awake.'
+
+'That is dreadful,' she murmured, with her great eyes fixed on his, and
+growing steadier in their regard. She had ceased to struggle, so he had
+slackened his hold of her, and she was leaning back against the fence.
+
+'And then,' he went on, 'what if, instead of closing your eyes, as you
+expected, and going to sleep, and forgetting everything, you should
+find them come open all at once, in the midst of a multitude of eyes all
+round about you, all looking at you, all thinking about you, all judging
+you? What if you should hear, not a tumult of voices and noises,
+from which you could hope to hide, but a solemn company talking about
+you--every word clear and plain, piercing your heart with what you could
+not deny,--and you standing naked and shivering in the midst of them?'
+
+'It is too dreadful!' she cried, making a movement as if the very horror
+of the idea had a fascination to draw her towards the realization of it.
+'But,' she added, yielding to Falconer's renewed grasp, 'they wouldn't
+be so hard upon me there. They would not be so cruel as men are here.'
+
+'Surely not. But all men are not cruel. I am not cruel,' he added,
+forgetting himself for a moment, and caressing with his huge hand the
+wild pale face that glimmered upon him as it were out of the infinite
+night--all but swallowed up in it.
+
+She drew herself back, and Falconer, instantly removing his hand, said,
+
+'Look in my face, child, and see whether you cannot trust me.'
+
+As he uttered the words, he took off his hat, and stood bare-headed in
+the moon, which now broke out clear from the clouds. She did look at
+him. His hair blew about his face. He turned it towards the wind and the
+moon, and away from her, that she might be undisturbed in her scrutiny.
+But how she judged of him, I cannot tell; for the next moment he called
+out in a tone of repressed excitement,
+
+'Gordon, Gordon, look there--above your head, on the other bridge.'
+
+I looked and saw a gray head peering over the same gap through which
+Falconer had looked a few minutes before. I knew something of his
+personal quest by this time, and concluded at once that he thought it
+was or might be his father.
+
+'I cannot leave the poor thing--I dare not,' he said.
+
+I understood him, and darted off at full speed for the Surrey end of the
+bridge. What made me choose that end, I do not know; but I was right.
+
+I had some reason to fear that I might be stopped when I reached it, as
+I had no business to be upon the new bridge. I therefore managed, where
+the upper bridge sank again towards a level with the lower, to scramble
+back upon it. As I did so the tall gray-headed man passed me with an
+uncertain step. I did not see his face. I followed him a few yards
+behind. He seemed to hear and dislike the sound of my footsteps, for
+he quickened his pace. I let him increase the distance between us, but
+followed him still. He turned down the river. I followed. He began
+to double. I doubled after him. Not a turn could he get before me. He
+crossed all the main roads leading to the bridges till he came to the
+last--when he turned toward London Bridge. At the other end, he went
+down the stairs into Thames Street, and held eastward still. It was not
+difficult to keep up with him, for his stride though long was slow.
+He never looked round, and I never saw his face; but I could not help
+fancying that his back and his gait and his carriage were very like
+Falconer's.
+
+We were now in a quarter of which I knew nothing, but as far as I can
+guess from after knowledge, it was one of the worst districts in London,
+lying to the east of Spital Square. It was late, and there were not many
+people about.
+
+As I passed a court, I was accosted thus:
+
+''Ain't you got a glass of ale for a poor cove, gov'nor?'
+
+'I have no coppers,' I said hastily. 'I am in a hurry besides,' I added
+as I walked on.
+
+'Come, come!' he said, getting up with me in a moment, 'that ain't a
+civil answer to give a cove after his lush, that 'ain't got a blessed
+mag.'
+
+As he spoke he laid his hand rather heavily on my arm. He was a
+lumpy-looking individual, like a groom who had been discharged for
+stealing his horse's provender, and had not quite worn out the clothes
+he had brought with him. From the opposite side at the same moment,
+another man appeared, low in stature, pale, and marked with the
+small-pox.
+
+He advanced upon me at right angles. I shook off the hand of the first,
+and I confess would have taken to my heels, for more reasons than one,
+but almost before I was clear of him, the other came against me, and
+shoved me into one of the low-browed entries which abounded.
+
+I was so eager to follow my chase that I acted foolishly throughout. I
+ought to have emptied my pockets at once; but I was unwilling to lose a
+watch which was an old family piece, and of value besides.
+
+'Come, come! I don't carry a barrel of ale in my pocket,' I said,
+thinking to keep them in good-humour. I know better now. Some of these
+roughs will take all you have in the most good-humoured way in the
+world, bandying chaff with you all the time. I had got amongst another
+set, however.
+
+'Leastways you've got as good,' said a third, approaching from the
+court, as villanous-looking a fellow as I have ever seen.
+
+'This is hardly the right way to ask for it,' I said, looking out for a
+chance of bolting, but putting my hand in my pocket at the same time. I
+confess again I acted very stupidly throughout the whole affair, but it
+was my first experience.
+
+'It's a way we've got down here, anyhow,' said the third with a brutal
+laugh. 'Look out, Savoury Sam,' he added to one of them.
+
+'Now I don't want to hurt you,' struck in the first, coming nearer, 'but
+if you gives tongue, I'll make cold meat of you, and gouge your pockets
+at my leisure, before ever a blueskin can turn the corner.'
+
+Two or three more came sidling up with their hands in their pockets.
+
+'What have you got there, Slicer?' said one of them, addressing the
+third, who looked like a ticket-of-leave man.
+
+'We've cotched a pig-headed counter-jumper here, that didn't know Jim
+there from a man-trap, and went by him as if he'd been a bull-dog on
+a long-chain. He wants to fight cocum. But we won't trouble him. We'll
+help ourselves. Shell out now.'
+
+As he spoke he made a snatch at my watch-chain. I forgot myself and hit
+him. The same moment I received a blow on the head, and felt the blood
+running down my face. I did not quite lose my senses, though, for I
+remember seeing yet another man--a tall fellow, coming out of the gloom
+of the court. How it came into my mind, I do not know, and what I said I
+do not remember, but I must have mentioned Falconer's name somehow.
+
+The man they called Slicer, said,
+
+'Who's he? Don't know the--.'
+
+Words followed which I cannot write.
+
+'What! you devil's gossoon!' returned an Irish voice I had not heard
+before. 'You don't know Long Bob, you gonnof!'
+
+All that passed I heard distinctly, but I was in a half faint, I
+suppose, for I could no longer see.
+
+'Now what the devil in a dice-box do you mean?' said Slicer, possessing
+himself of my watch. 'Who is the blasted cove?--not that I care a flash
+of damnation.'
+
+'A man as 'll knock you down if he thinks you want it, or give you a
+half-a-crown if he thinks you want it--all's one to him, only he'll have
+the choosing which.'
+
+'What the hell's that to me? Look spry. He mustn't lie there all night.
+It's too near the ken. Come along, you Scotch haddock.'
+
+I was aware of a kick in the side as he spoke.
+
+'I tell you what it is, Slicer,' said one whose voice I had not yet
+heard, 'if so be this gentleman's a friend of Long Bob, you just let him
+alone, I say.'
+
+I opened my eyes now, and saw before me a tall rather slender man in a
+big loose dress-coat, to whom Slicer had turned with the words,
+
+'You say! Ha! ha! Well, I say--There's my Scotch haddock! who'll touch
+him?'
+
+'I'll take him home,' said the tall man, advancing towards me. I made an
+attempt to rise. But I grew deadly ill, fell back, and remember nothing
+more.
+
+When I came to myself I was lying on a bed in a miserable place. A
+middle-aged woman of degraded countenance, but kindly eyes, was putting
+something to my mouth with a teaspoon: I knew it by the smell to be gin.
+But I could not yet move. They began to talk about me, and I lay and
+listened. Indeed, while I listened, I lost for a time all inclination to
+get up, I was so much interested in what I heard.
+
+'He's comin' to hisself,' said the woman. 'He'll be all right by and by.
+I wonder what brings the likes of him into the likes of this place. It
+must look a kind of hell to them gentle-folks, though we manage to live
+and die in it.'
+
+'I suppose,' said another, 'he's come on some of Mr. Falconer's
+business.'
+
+'That's why Job's took him in charge. They say he was after somebody or
+other, they think.--No friend of Mr. Falconer's would be after another
+for any mischief,' said my hostess.
+
+'But who is this Mr. Falconer?--Is Long Bob and he both the same alias?'
+asked a third.
+
+'Why, Bessy, ain't you no better than that damned Slicer, who ought to
+ha' been hung up to dry this many a year? But to be sure you 'ain't been
+long in our quarter. Why, every child hereabouts knows Mr. Falconer. Ask
+Bobby there.'
+
+'Who's Mr. Falconer, Bobby?'
+
+A child's voice made reply,
+
+'A man with a long, long beard, that goes about, and sometimes grows
+tired and sits on a door-step. I see him once. But he ain't Mr.
+Falconer, nor Long Bob neither,' added Bobby in a mysterious tone. 'I
+know who he is.'
+
+'What do you mean, Bobby? Who is he, then?'
+
+The child answered very slowly and solemnly,
+
+'He's Jesus Christ.'
+
+The woman burst into a rude laugh.
+
+'Well,' said Bobby in an offended tone, 'Slicer's own Tom says so, and
+Polly too. We all says so. He allus pats me on the head, and gives me a
+penny.'
+
+Here Bobby began to cry, bitterly offended at the way Bessy had received
+his information, after considering him sufficiently important to have
+his opinion asked.
+
+'True enough,' said his mother. 'I see him once a-sittin' on a
+door-step, lookin' straight afore him, and worn-out like, an' a lot o'
+them childer standin' all about him, an' starin' at him as mum as mice,
+for fear of disturbin' of him. When I come near, he got up with a smile
+on his face, and give each on 'em a penny all round, and walked away.
+Some do say he's a bit crazed like; but I never saw no sign o' that; and
+if any one ought to know, that one's Job's Mary; and you may believe me
+when I tell you that he was here night an' mornin' for a week, and after
+that off and on, when we was all down in the cholerer. Ne'er a one of us
+would ha' come through but for him.'
+
+I made an attempt to rise. The woman came to my bedside.
+
+'How does the gentleman feel hisself now?' she asked kindly.
+
+'Better, thank you,' I said. 'I am ashamed of lying like this, but I
+feel very queer.'
+
+'And it's no wonder, when that devil Slicer give you one o' his even
+down blows on the top o' your head. Nobody knows what he carry in his
+sleeve that he do it with--only you've got off well, young man, and that
+I tell you, with a decent cut like that. Only don't you go tryin' to get
+up now. Don't be in a hurry till your blood comes back like.'
+
+I lay still again for a little. When I lifted my hand to my head, I
+found it was bandaged up. I tried again to rise. The woman went to the
+door, and called out,
+
+'Job, the gentleman's feelin' better. He'll soon be able to move, I
+think. What will you do with him now?'
+
+'I'll go and get a cab,' said Job; and I heard him go down a stair.
+
+I raised myself, and got on the floor, but found I could not stand. By
+the time the cab arrived, however, I was able to crawl to it. When Job
+came, I saw the same tall thin man in the long dress coat. His head was
+bound up too.
+
+'I am sorry to see you too have been hurt--for my sake, of course,' I
+said. 'Is it a bad blow?'
+
+'Oh! it ain't over much. I got in with a smeller afore he came right
+down with his slogger. But I say, I hope as how you are a friend of
+Mr. Falconer's, for you see we can't afford the likes of this in this
+quarter for every chance that falls in Slicer's way. Gentlemen has no
+business here.'
+
+'On the contrary, I mean to come again soon, to thank you all for being
+so good to me.'
+
+'Well, when you comes next, you'd better come with him, you know.'
+
+'You mean with Mr. Falconer?'
+
+'Yes, who else? But are you able to go now? for the sooner you're out of
+this the better.'
+
+'Quite able. Just give me your arm.'
+
+He offered it kindly. Taking a grateful farewell of my hostess, I put my
+hand in my pocket, but there was nothing there. Job led me to the mouth
+of the court, where a cab, evidently of a sort with the neighbourhood,
+was waiting for us. I got in. Job was shutting the door.
+
+'Come along with me, Job,' I said. 'I'm going straight to Mr.
+Falconer's. He will like to see you, especially after your kindness to
+me.'
+
+'Well, I don't mind if I do look arter you a little longer; for to tell
+the truth,' said Job, as he opened the door, and got in beside me, 'I
+don't over and above like the look of the--horse.'
+
+'It's no use trying to rob me over again,' I said; but he gave no reply.
+He only shouted to the cabman to drive to John Street, telling him the
+number.
+
+I can scarcely recall anything more till we reached Falconer's chambers.
+Job got out and rang the bell. Mrs. Ashton came down. Her master was not
+come home.
+
+'Tell Mr. Falconer,' I said, 'that I'm all right, only I couldn't make
+anything of it.'
+
+'Tell him,' growled Job, 'that he's got his head broken, and won't be
+out o' bed to-morrow. That's the way with them fine-bred ones. They lies
+a-bed when the likes o' me must go out what they calls a-custamongering,
+broken head and all.'
+
+'You shall stay at home for a week if you like, Job--that is if I've got
+enough to give you a week's earnings. I'm not sure though till I look,
+for I'm not a rich man any more than yourself.'
+
+'Rubbish!' said Job as he got in again; 'I was only flummuxing the old
+un. Bless your heart, sir, I wouldn't stay in--not for nothink. Not for
+a bit of a pat on the crown, nohow. Home ain't none so nice a place to
+go snoozing in--nohow. Where do you go to, gov'nor?'
+
+I told him. When I got out, and was opening the door, leaning on his
+arm, I said I was very glad they hadn't taken my keys.
+
+'Slicer nor Savoury Sam neither's none the better o' you, and I hopes
+you're not much the worse for them,' said Job, as he put into my hands
+my purse and watch. 'Count it, gov'nor, and see if it's all right. Them
+pusses is mannyfactered express for the convenience o' the fakers. Take
+my advice, sir, and keep a yellow dump (sovereign) in yer coat-tails, a
+flatch yenork (half-crown) in yer waistcoat, and yer yeneps (pence) in
+yer breeches. You won't lose much nohow then. Good-night, sir, and I
+wish you better.'
+
+'But I must give you something for plaster,' I said. 'You'll take a
+yellow dump, at least?'
+
+'We'll talk about that another day,' said Job; and with a second still
+heartier good-night, he left me. I managed to crawl up to my room, and
+fell on my bed once more fainting. But I soon recovered sufficiently
+to undress and get into it. I was feverish all night and next day, but
+towards evening begun to recover.
+
+I kept expecting Falconer to come and inquire after me; but he never
+came. Nor did he appear the next day or the next, and I began to be very
+uneasy about him. The fourth day I sent for a cab, and drove to John
+Street. He was at home, but Mrs. Ashton, instead of showing me into his
+room, led me into her kitchen, and left me there.
+
+A minute after, Falconer came to me. The instant I saw him I understood
+it all. I read it in his face: he had found his father.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. ANDREW AT LAST.
+
+Having at length persuaded the woman to go with him, Falconer made her
+take his arm, and led her off the bridge. In Parliament Street he was
+looking about for a cab as they walked on, when a man he did not know,
+stopped, touched his hat, and addressed him.
+
+'I'm thinkin', sir, ye'll be sair wantit at hame the nicht. It wad be
+better to gang at ance, an' lat the puir fowk luik efter themsels for ae
+nicht.'
+
+'I'm sorry I dinna ken ye, man. Do ye ken me?'
+
+'Fine that, Mr. Falconer. There's mony ane kens you and praises God.'
+
+'God be praised!' returned Falconer. 'Why am I wanted at home?'
+
+''Deed I wad raither not say, sir.--Hey!'
+
+This last exclamation was addressed to a cab just disappearing down King
+Street from Whitehall. The driver heard, turned, and in a moment more
+was by their side.
+
+'Ye had better gang into her an' awa' hame, and lea' the poor lassie to
+me. I'll tak guid care o' her.'
+
+She clung to Falconer's arm. The man opened the door of the cab.
+Falconer put her in, told the driver to go to Queen Square, and if he
+could not make haste, to stop the first cab that could, got in himself,
+thanked his unknown friend, who did not seem quite satisfied, and drove
+off.
+
+Happily Miss St. John was at home, and there was no delay. Neither was
+any explanation of more than six words necessary. He jumped again into
+the cab and drove home. Fortunately for his mood, though in fact it
+mattered little for any result, the horse was fresh, and both able and
+willing.
+
+When he entered John Street, he came to observe before reaching his own
+door that a good many men were about in little quiet groups--some twenty
+or so, here and there. When he let himself in with his pass-key, there
+were two men in the entry. Without stopping to speak, he ran up to his
+own chambers. When he got into his sitting-room, there stood De Fleuri,
+who simply waved his hand towards the old sofa. On it lay an elderly
+man, with his eyes half open, and a look almost of idiocy upon his pale,
+puffed face, which was damp and shining. His breathing was laboured, but
+there was no further sign of suffering. He lay perfectly still. Falconer
+saw at once that he was under the influence of some narcotic, probably
+opium; and the same moment the all but conviction darted into his mind
+that Andrew Falconer, his grandmother's son, lay there before him. That
+he was his own father he had no feeling yet. He turned to De Fleuri.
+
+'Thank you, friend,' he said. 'I shall find time to thank you.'
+
+'Are we right?' asked De Fleuri.
+
+'I don't know. I think so,' answered Falconer; and without another word
+the man withdrew.
+
+His first mood was very strange. It seemed as if all the romance had
+suddenly deserted his life, and it lay bare and hopeless. He felt
+nothing. No tears rose to the brim of their bottomless wells--the only
+wells that have no bottom, for they go into the depths of the infinite
+soul. He sat down in his chair, stunned as to the heart and all
+the finer chords of his nature. The man on the horsehair sofa lay
+breathing--that was all. The gray hair about the pale ill-shaven face
+glimmered like a cloud before him. What should he do or say when he
+awaked? How approach this far-estranged soul? How ever send the cry of
+father into that fog-filled world? Could he ever have climbed on those
+knees and kissed those lips, in the far-off days when the sun and the
+wind of that northern atmosphere made his childhood blessed
+beyond dreams? The actual--that is the present phase of the
+ever-changing--looked the ideal in the face; and the mirror that held
+them both, shook and quivered at the discord of the faces reflected.
+A kind of moral cold seemed to radiate from the object before him, and
+chill him to the very bones. This could not long be endured. He fled
+from the actual to the source of all the ideal--to that Saviour who, the
+infinite mediator, mediates between all hopes and all positions; between
+the most debased actual and the loftiest ideal; between the little
+scoffer of St. Giles's and his angel that ever beholds the face of the
+Father in heaven. He fell on his knees, and spoke to God, saying that
+he had made this man; that the mark of his fingers was on the man's soul
+somewhere. He prayed to the making Spirit to bring the man to his right
+mind, to give him once more the heart of a child, to begin him yet again
+at the beginning. Then at last, all the evil he had done and suffered
+would but swell his gratitude to Him who had delivered him from himself
+and his own deeds. Having breathed this out before the God of his life,
+Falconer rose, strengthened to meet the honourable debased soul when
+it should at length look forth from the dull smeared windows of those
+ill-used eyes.
+
+He felt his pulse. There was no danger from the narcotic. The coma would
+pass away. Meantime he would get him to bed. When he began to undress
+him a new reverence arose which overcame all disgust at the state in
+which he found him. At length one sad little fact about his dress,
+revealing the poverty-stricken attempt of a man to preserve the shadow
+of decency, called back the waters of the far-ebbed ocean of his
+feelings. At the prick of a pin the heart's blood will flow: at the
+sight of--a pin it was--Robert burst into tears, and wept like a child;
+the deadly cold was banished from his heart, and he not only loved, but
+knew that he loved--felt the love that was there. Everything then about
+the worn body and shabby garments of the man smote upon the heart of his
+son, and through his very poverty he was sacred in his eyes. The human
+heart awakened the filial--reversing thus the ordinary process of
+Nature, who by means of the filial, when her plans are unbroken, awakes
+the human; and he reproached himself bitterly for his hardness, as he
+now judged his late mental condition--unfairly, I think. He soon had him
+safe in bed, unconscious of the helping hands that had been busy about
+him in his heedless sleep; unconscious of the radiant planet of love
+that had been folding him round in its atmosphere of affection.
+
+But while he thus ministered, a new question arose in his mind--to meet
+with its own new, God-given answer. What if this should not be the man
+after all?--if this love had been spent in mistake, and did not belong
+to him at all? The answer was, that he was a man. The love Robert had
+given he could not, would not withdraw. The man who had been for a
+moment as his father he could not cease to regard with devotion. At
+least he was a man with a divine soul. He might at least be somebody's
+father. Where love had found a moment's rest for the sole of its foot,
+there it must build its nest.
+
+When he had got him safe in bed, he sat down beside him to think what
+he would do next. This sleep gave him very needful leisure to think. He
+could determine nothing--not even how to find out if he was indeed his
+father. If he approached the subject without guile, the man might be
+fearful and cunning--might have reasons for being so, and for striving
+to conceal the truth. But this was the first thing to make sure of,
+because, if it was he, all the hold he had upon him lay in his knowing
+it for certain. He could not think. He had had little sleep the night
+before. He must not sleep this night. He dragged his bath into his
+sitting-room, and refreshed his faculties with plenty of cold water,
+then lighted his pipe and went on thinking--not without prayer to that
+Power whose candle is the understanding of man. All at once he saw how
+to begin. He went again into the chamber, and looked at the man, and
+handled him, and knew by his art that a waking of some sort was nigh.
+Then he went to a corner of his sitting-room, and from beneath the table
+drew out a long box, and from the box lifted Dooble Sandy's auld wife,
+tuned the somewhat neglected strings, and laid the instrument on the
+table.
+
+When, keeping constant watch over the sleeping man, he judged at length
+that his soul had come near enough to the surface of the ocean of sleep
+to communicate with the outer world through that bubble his body, which
+had floated upon its waves all the night unconscious, he put his chair
+just outside the chamber door, which opened from his sitting-room, and
+began to play gently, softly, far away. For a while he extemporized
+only, thinking of Rothieden, and the grandmother, and the bleach-green,
+and the hills, and the waste old factory, and his mother's portrait
+and letters. As he dreamed on, his dream got louder, and, he hoped, was
+waking a more and more vivid dream in the mind of the sleeper. 'For who
+can tell,' thought Falconer, 'what mysterious sympathies of blood and
+childhood's experience there may be between me and that man?--such, it
+may be, that my utterance on the violin will wake in his soul the
+very visions of which my soul is full while I play, each with its own
+nebulous atmosphere of dream-light around it.' For music wakes its own
+feeling, and feeling wakes thought, or rather, when perfected, blossoms
+into thought, thought radiant of music as those lilies that shine
+phosphorescent in the July nights. He played more and more forcefully,
+growing in hope. But he had been led astray in some measure by the
+fulness of his expectation. Strange to tell, doctor as he was, he had
+forgotten one important factor in his calculation: how the man would
+awake from his artificial sleep. He had not reckoned of how the limbeck
+of his brain would be left discoloured with vile deposit, when the fumes
+of the narcotic should have settled and given up its central spaces to
+the faintness of desertion.
+
+Robert was very keen of hearing. Indeed he possessed all his senses
+keener than any other man I have known. He heard him toss on his bed.
+Then he broke into a growl, and damned the miauling, which, he said,
+the strings could never have learned anywhere but in a cat's belly. But
+Robert was used to bad language; and there are some bad things which,
+seeing that there they are, it is of the greatest consequence to get
+used to. It gave him, no doubt, a pang of disappointment to hear such an
+echo to his music from the soul which he had hoped especially fitted to
+respond in harmonious unison with the wail of his violin. But not
+for even this moment did he lose his presence of mind. He instantly
+moderated the tone of the instrument, and gradually drew the sound away
+once more into the distance of hearing. But he did not therefore let it
+die. Through various changes it floated in the thin aether of the soul,
+changes delicate as when the wind leaves the harp of the reeds by a
+river's brink, and falls a-ringing at the heather bells, or playing with
+the dry silvery pods of honesty that hang in the poor man's garden, till
+at length it drew nearer once more, bearing on its wings the wail of
+red Flodden, the Flowers of the Forest. Listening through the melody for
+sounds of a far different kind, Robert was aware that those sounds had
+ceased; the growling was still; he heard no more turnings to and fro.
+How it was operating he could not tell, further than that there must be
+some measure of soothing in its influence. He ceased quite, and
+listened again. For a few moments there was no sound. Then he heard the
+half-articulate murmuring of one whose organs have been all but overcome
+by the beneficent paralysis of sleep, but whose feeble will would compel
+them to utterance. He was nearly asleep again. Was it a fact, or a fancy
+of Robert's eager heart? Did the man really say,
+
+'Play that again, father. It's bonnie, that! I aye likit the Flooers o'
+the Forest. Play awa'. I hae had a frichtsome dream. I thocht I was i'
+the ill place. I doobt I'm no weel. But yer fiddle aye did me gude. Play
+awa', father!'
+
+All the night through, till the dawn of the gray morning, Falconer
+watched the sleeping man, all but certain that he was indeed his father.
+Eternities of thought passed through his mind as he watched--this time
+by the couch, as he hoped, of a new birth. He was about to see what
+could be done by one man, strengthened by all the aids that love and
+devotion could give, for the redemption of his fellow. As through the
+darkness of the night and a sluggish fog to aid it, the light of a pure
+heaven made its slow irresistible way, his hope grew that athwart the
+fog of an evil life, the darkness that might be felt, the light of the
+Spirit of God would yet penetrate the heart of the sinner, and shake the
+wickedness out of it. Deeper and yet deeper grew his compassion and his
+sympathy, in prospect of the tortures the man must go through, before
+the will that he had sunk into a deeper sleep than any into which opium
+could sink his bodily being, would shake off its deathly lethargy, and
+arise, torn with struggling pain, to behold the light of a new spiritual
+morning. All that he could do he was prepared to do, regardless of
+entreaty, regardless of torture, anger, and hate, with the inexorable
+justice of love, the law that will not, must not, dares not
+yield--strong with an awful tenderness, a wisdom that cannot be turned
+aside, to redeem the lost soul of his father. And he strengthened
+his heart for the conflict by saying that if he would do thus for his
+father, what would not God do for his child? Had He not proved already,
+if there was any truth in the grand story of the world's redemption
+through that obedience unto the death, that his devotion was entire, and
+would leave nothing undone that could be done to lift this sheep out
+of the pit into whose darkness and filth he had fallen out of the sweet
+Sabbath of the universe?
+
+He removed all his clothes, searched the pockets, found in them one poor
+shilling and a few coppers, a black cutty pipe, a box of snuff, a screw
+of pigtail, a knife with a buckhorn handle and one broken blade, and
+a pawn-ticket for a keyed flute, on the proceeds of which he was now
+sleeping--a sleep how dearly purchased, when he might have had it free,
+as the gift of God's gentle darkness! Then he destroyed the garments,
+committing them to the fire as the hoped farewell to the state of which
+they were the symbols and signs.
+
+He found himself perplexed, however, by the absence of some of the usual
+symptoms of the habit of opium, and concluded that his poor father was
+in the habit of using stimulants as well as narcotics, and that the
+action of the one interfered with the action of the other.
+
+He called his housekeeper. She did not know whom her master supposed
+his guest to be, and regarded him only as one of the many objects of his
+kindness. He told her to get some tea ready, as the patient would most
+likely wake with a headache. He instructed her to wait upon him as a
+matter of course, and explain nothing. He had resolved to pass for the
+doctor, as indeed he was; and he told her that if he should be at all
+troublesome, he would be with her at once. She must keep the room dark.
+He would have his own breakfast now; and if the patient remained quiet,
+would sleep on the sofa.
+
+He woke murmuring, and evidently suffered from headache and nausea. Mrs.
+Ashton took him some tea. He refused it with an oath--more of discomfort
+than of ill-nature--and was too unwell to show any curiosity about the
+person who had offered it. Probably he was accustomed to so many changes
+of abode, and to so many bewilderments of the brain, that he did not
+care to inquire where he was or who waited upon him. But happily for the
+heart's desire of Falconer, the debauchery of his father had at length
+reached one of many crises. He had caught cold before De Fleuri and his
+comrades found him. He was now ill--feverish and oppressed. Through the
+whole of the following week they nursed and waited upon him without his
+asking a single question as to where he was or who they were; during all
+which time Falconer saw no one but De Fleuri and the many poor fellows
+who called to inquire after him and the result of their supposed
+success. He never left the house, but either watched by the bedside, or
+waited in the next room. Often would the patient get out of bed, driven
+by the longing for drink or for opium, gnawing him through all the
+hallucinations of delirium; but he was weak, and therefore manageable.
+If in any lucid moments he thought where he was, he no doubt supposed
+that he was in a hospital, and probably had sense enough to understand
+that it was of no use to attempt to get his own way there. He was soon
+much worn, and his limbs trembled greatly. It was absolutely necessary
+to give him stimulants, or he would have died, but Robert reduced them
+gradually as he recovered strength.
+
+But there was an infinite work to be done beyond even curing him of
+his evil habits. To keep him from strong drink and opium, even till the
+craving after them was gone, would be but the capturing of the merest
+outwork of the enemy's castle. He must be made such that, even if the
+longing should return with tenfold force, and all the means for its
+gratification should lie within the reach of his outstretched hand, he
+would not touch them. God only was able to do that for him. He would do
+all that he knew how to do, and God would not fail of his part. For this
+he had raised him up; to this he had called him; for this work he had
+educated him, made him a physician, given him money, time, the love and
+aid of his fellows, and, beyond all, a rich energy of hope and faith in
+his heart, emboldening him to attempt whatever his hand found to do.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. ANDREW REBELS.
+
+As Andrew Falconer grew better, the longing of his mind after former
+excitement and former oblivion, roused and kept alive the longing of his
+body, until at length his thoughts dwelt upon nothing but his diseased
+cravings. His whole imagination, naturally not a feeble one, was
+concentrated on the delights in store for him as soon as he was well
+enough to be his own master, as he phrased it, once more. He soon began
+to see that, if he was in a hospital, it must be a private one, and at
+last, irresolute as he was both from character and illness, made up his
+mind to demand his liberty. He sat by his bedroom fire one afternoon,
+for he needed much artificial warmth. The shades of evening were
+thickening the air. He had just had one of his frequent meals, and was
+gazing, as he often did, into the glowing coals. Robert had come in,
+and after a little talk was sitting silent at the opposite corner of the
+chimney-piece.
+
+'Doctor,' said Andrew, seizing the opportunity, 'you've been very kind
+to me, and I don't know how to thank you, but it is time I was going.
+I am quite well now. Would you kindly order the nurse to bring me my
+clothes to-morrow morning, and I will go.'
+
+This he said with the quavering voice of one who speaks because he
+has made up his mind to speak. A certain something, I believe a vague
+molluscous form of conscience, made him wriggle and shift uneasily upon
+his chair as he spoke.
+
+'No, no,' said Robert, 'you are not fit to go. Make yourself
+comfortable, my dear sir. There is no reason why you should go.'
+
+'There is something I don't understand about it. I want to go.'
+
+'It would ruin my character as a professional man to let a patient in
+your condition leave the house. The weather is unfavourable. I cannot--I
+must not consent.'
+
+'Where am I? I don't understand it. I want to understand it.'
+
+'Your friends wish you to remain where you are for the present.'
+
+'I have no friends.'
+
+'You have one, at least, who puts his house here at your service.'
+
+'There's something about it I don't like. Do you suppose I am incapable
+of taking care of myself?'
+
+'I do indeed,' answered his son with firmness.
+
+'Then you are quite mistaken,' said Andrew, angrily. 'I am quite well
+enough to go, and have a right to judge for myself. It is very kind of
+you, but I am in a free country, I believe.'
+
+'No doubt. All honest men are free in this country. But--'
+
+He saw that his father winced, and said no more. Andrew resumed, after a
+pause in which he had been rousing his feeble drink-exhausted anger,
+
+'I tell you I will not be treated like a child. I demand my clothes and
+my liberty.'
+
+'Do you know where you were found that night you were brought here?'
+
+'No. But what has that to do with it? I was ill. You know that as well
+as I.'
+
+'You are ill now because you were lying then on the wet ground under a
+railway-arch--utterly incapable from the effects of opium, or drink,
+or both. You would have been taken to the police-station, and would
+probably have been dead long before now, if you had not been brought
+here.'
+
+He was silent for some time. Then he broke out,
+
+'I tell you I will go. I do not choose to live on charity. I will not. I
+demand my clothes.'
+
+'I tell you it is of no use. When you are well enough to go out you
+shall go out, but not now.'
+
+'Where am I? Who are you?'
+
+He looked at Robert with a keen, furtive glance, in which were mingled
+bewilderment and suspicion.
+
+'I am your best friend at present.'
+
+He started up--fiercely and yet feebly, for a thought of terror had
+crossed him.
+
+'You do not mean I am in a madhouse?'
+
+Robert made no reply. He left him to suppose what he pleased. Andrew
+took it for granted that he was in a private asylum, sank back in his
+chair, and from that moment was quiet as a lamb. But it was easy to see
+that he was constantly contriving how to escape. This mental occupation,
+however, was excellent for his recovery; and Robert dropped no hint of
+his suspicion. Nor were many precautions necessary in consequence; for
+he never left the house without having De Fleuri there, who was a man
+of determination, nerve, and, now that he ate and drank, of considerable
+strength.
+
+As he grew better, the stimulants given him in the form of medicine at
+length ceased. In their place Robert substituted other restoratives,
+which prevented him from missing the stimulants so much, and at length
+got his system into a tolerably healthy condition, though at his age,
+and after so long indulgence, it could hardly be expected ever to
+recover its tone.
+
+He did all he could to provide him with healthy amusement--played
+backgammon, draughts, and cribbage with him, brought him Sir Walter's
+and other novels to read, and often played on his violin, to which he
+listened with great delight. At times of depression, which of course
+were frequent, the Flowers of the Forest made the old man weep. Falconer
+put yet more soul into the sounds than he had ever put into them before.
+He tried to make the old man talk of his childhood, asking him about the
+place of his birth, the kind of country, how he had been brought up,
+his family, and many questions of the sort. His answers were vague, and
+often contradictory. Indeed, the moment the subject was approached, he
+looked suspicious and cunning. He said his name was John Mackinnon,
+and Robert, although his belief was strengthened by a hundred little
+circumstances, had as yet received no proof that he was Andrew Falconer.
+Remembering the pawn-ticket, and finding that he could play on the
+flute, he brought him a beautiful instrument--in fact a silver one--the
+sight of which made the old man's eyes sparkle. He put it to his lips
+with trembling hands, blew a note or two, burst into the tears of
+weakness, and laid it down. But he soon took it up again, and evidently
+found both pleasure in the tones and sadness in the memories they
+awakened. At length Robert brought a tailor, and had him dressed like
+a gentleman--a change which pleased him much. The next step was to take
+him out every day for a drive, upon which his health began to improve
+more rapidly. He ate better, grew more lively, and began to tell tales
+of his adventures, of the truth of which Robert was not always certain,
+but never showed any doubt. He knew only too well that the use of opium
+is especially destructive to the conscience. Some of his stories he
+believed more readily than others, from the fact that he suddenly
+stopped in them, as if they were leading him into regions of confession
+which must be avoided, resuming with matter that did not well connect
+itself with what had gone before. At length he took him out walking, and
+he comported himself with perfect propriety.
+
+But one day as they were going along a quiet street, Robert met an
+acquaintance, and stopped to speak with him. After a few moments'
+chat he turned, and found that his father, whom he had supposed to be
+standing beside him, had vanished. A glance at the other side of the
+street showed the probable refuge--a public-house. Filled but not
+overwhelmed with dismay, although he knew that months might be lost in
+this one moment, Robert darted in. He was there, with a glass of whisky
+in his hand, trembling now more from eagerness than weakness. He struck
+it from his hold. But he had already swallowed one glass, and he turned
+in a rage. He was a tall and naturally powerful man--almost as strongly
+built as his son, with long arms like his, which were dangerous even
+yet in such a moment of factitious strength and real excitement. Robert
+could not lift his arm even to defend himself from his father, although,
+had he judged it necessary, I believe he would not, in the cause of his
+redemption, have hesitated to knock him down, as he had often served
+others whom he would rather a thousand times have borne on his
+shoulders. He received his father's blow on the cheek. For one moment
+it made him dizzy, for it was well delivered. But when the bar-keeper
+jumped across the counter and approached with his fist doubled, that was
+another matter. He measured his length on the floor, and Falconer seized
+his father, who was making for the street, and notwithstanding his
+struggles and fierce efforts to strike again, held him secure and
+himself scathless, and bore him out of the house.
+
+A crowd gathers in a moment in London, speeding to a fray as the
+vultures to carrion. On the heels of the population of the neighbouring
+mews came two policemen, and at the same moment out came the barman to
+the assistance of Andrew. But Falconer was as well known to the police
+as if he had a ticket-of-leave, and a good deal better.
+
+'Call a four-wheel cab,' he said to one of them. 'I'm all right.'
+
+The man started at once. Falconer turned to the other.
+
+'Tell that man in the apron,' he said, 'that I'll make him all due
+reparation. But he oughtn't to be in such a hurry to meddle. He gave me
+no time but to strike hard.'
+
+'Yes, sir,' answered the policeman obediently. The crowd thought he must
+be a great man amongst the detectives; but the bar-keeper vowed he would
+'summons' him for the assault.
+
+'You may, if you like,' said Falconer. 'When I think of it, you shall do
+so. You know where I live?' he said, turning to the policeman.
+
+'No, sir, I don't. I only know you well enough.'
+
+'Put your hand in my coat-pocket, then, and you'll find a card-case. The
+other. There! Help yourself.'
+
+He said this with his arms round Andrew's, who had ceased to cry out
+when he saw the police.
+
+'Do you want to give this gentleman in charge, sir?'
+
+'No. It is a little private affair of my own, this.'
+
+'Hadn't you better let him go, sir, and we'll find him for you when you
+want him?'
+
+'No. He may give me in charge if he likes. Or if you should want him,
+you will find him at my house.'
+
+Then pinioning his prisoner still more tightly in his arms, he leaned
+forward, and whispered in his ear,
+
+'Will you go home quietly, or give me in charge? There is no other way,
+Andrew Falconer.'
+
+He ceased struggling. Through all the flush of the contest his face
+grew pale. His arms dropped by his side. Robert let him go, and he stood
+there without offering to move. The cab came up; the policeman got out;
+Andrew stepped in of his own accord, and Robert followed.
+
+'You see it's all right,' he said. 'Here, give the barman a sovereign.
+If he wants more, let me know. He deserved all he got, but I was wrong.
+John Street.'
+
+His father did not speak a word, or ask a question all the way home.
+Evidently he thought it safer to be silent. But the drink he had taken,
+though not enough to intoxicate him, was more than enough to bring back
+the old longing with redoubled force. He paced about the room the rest
+of the day like a wild beast in a cage, and in the middle of the night,
+got up and dressed, and would have crept through the room in which
+Robert lay, in the hope of getting out. But Robert slept too anxiously
+for that. The captive did not make the slightest noise, but his very
+presence was enough to wake his son. He started at a bound from his
+couch, and his father retreated in dismay to his chamber.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. THE BROWN LETTER.
+
+At length the time arrived when Robert would make a further attempt,
+although with a fear and trembling to quiet which he had to seek the
+higher aid. His father had recovered his attempt to rush anew upon
+destruction. He was gentler and more thoughtful, and would again sit
+for an hour at a time gazing into the fire. From the expression of his
+countenance upon such occasions, Robert hoped that his visions were not
+of the evil days, but of those of his innocence.
+
+One evening when he was in one of these moods--he had just had his tea,
+the gas was lighted, and he was sitting as I have described--Robert
+began to play in the next room, hoping that the music would sink into
+his heart, and do something to prepare the way for what was to follow.
+Just as he had played over the Flowers of the Forest for the third time,
+his housekeeper entered the room, and receiving permission from her
+master, went through into Andrew's chamber, and presented a packet,
+which she said, and said truly, for she was not in the secret, had been
+left for him. He received it with evident surprise, mingled with some
+consternation, looked at the address, looked at the seal, laid it on the
+table, and gazed again with troubled looks into the fire. He had had
+no correspondence for many years. Falconer had peeped in when the woman
+entered, but the moment she retired he could watch him no longer. He
+went on playing a slow, lingering voluntary, such as the wind plays, of
+an amber autumn evening, on the aeolian harp of its pines. He played so
+gently that he must hear if his father should speak.
+
+For what seemed hours, though it was but half-an-hour, he went on
+playing. At length he heard a stifled sob. He rose, and peeped again
+into the room. The gray head was bowed between the hands, and the gaunt
+frame was shaken with sobs. On the table lay the portraits of himself
+and his wife; and the faded brown letter, so many years folded in
+silence and darkness, lay open beside them. He had known the seal, with
+the bush of rushes and the Gaelic motto. He had gently torn the paper
+from around it, and had read the letter from the grave--no, from the
+land beyond, the land of light, where human love is glorified. Not then
+did Falconer read the sacred words of his mother; but afterwards his
+father put them into his hands. I will give them as nearly as I can
+remember them, for the letter is not in my possession.
+
+'My beloved Andrew, I can hardly write, for I am at the point of death.
+I love you still--love you as dearly as before you left me. Will you
+ever see this? I will try to send it to you. I will leave it behind me,
+that it may come into your hands when and how it may please God. You may
+be an old man before you read these words, and may have almost forgotten
+your young wife. Oh! if I could take your head on my bosom where it used
+to lie, and without saying a word, think all that I am thinking into
+your heart. Oh! my love, my love! will you have had enough of the world
+and its ways by the time this reaches you? Or will you be dead, like
+me, when this is found, and the eyes of your son only, my darling little
+Robert, read the words? Oh, Andrew, Andrew! my heart is bleeding, not
+altogether for myself, not altogether for you, but both for you and
+for me. Shall I never, never be able to let out the sea of my love that
+swells till my heart is like to break with its longing after you, my
+own Andrew? Shall I never, never see you again? That is the terrible
+thought--the only thought almost that makes me shrink from dying. If I
+should go to sleep, as some think, and not even dream about you, as I
+dream and weep every night now! If I should only wake in the crowd of
+the resurrection, and not know where to find you! Oh, Andrew, I feel as
+if I should lose my reason when I think that you may be on the left
+hand of the Judge, and I can no longer say my love, because you do not,
+cannot any more love God. I will tell you the dream I had about you last
+night, which I think was what makes me write this letter. I was standing
+in a great crowd of people, and I saw the empty graves about us on
+every side. We were waiting for the great white throne to appear in the
+clouds. And as soon as I knew that, I cried, "Andrew, Andrew!" for I
+could not help it. And the people did not heed me; and I cried out and
+ran about everywhere, looking for you. At last I came to a great gulf.
+When I looked down into it, I could see nothing but a blue deep, like
+the blue of the sky, under my feet. It was not so wide but that I could
+see across it, but it was oh! so terribly deep. All at once, as I stood
+trembling on the very edge, I saw you on the other side, looking towards
+me, and stretching out your arms as if you wanted me. You were old and
+much changed, but I knew you at once, and I gave a cry that I thought
+all the universe must have heard. You heard me. I could see that. And
+I was in a terrible agony to get to you. But there was no way, for if I
+fell into the gulf I should go down for ever, it was so deep. Something
+made me look away, and I saw a man coming quietly along the same side of
+the gulf, on the edge, towards me. And when he came nearer to me, I saw
+that he was dressed in a gown down to his feet, and that his feet were
+bare and had a hole in each of them. So I knew who it was, Andrew. And
+I fell down and kissed his feet, and lifted up my hands, and looked into
+his face--oh, such a face! And I tried to pray. But all I could say was,
+"O Lord, Andrew, Andrew!" Then he smiled, and said, "Daughter, be of
+good cheer. Do you want to go to him?" And I said, "Yes, Lord." Then he
+said, "And so do I. Come." And he took my hand and led me over the edge
+of the precipice; and I was not afraid, and I did not sink, but walked
+upon the air to go to you. But when I got to you, it was too much to
+bear; and when I thought I had you in my arms at last, I awoke, crying
+as I never cried before, not even when I found that you had left me to
+die without you. Oh, Andrew, what if the dream should come true! But if
+it should not come true! I dare not think of that, Andrew. I couldn't be
+happy in heaven without you. It may be very wicked, but I do not feel as
+if it were, and I can't help it if it is. But, dear husband, come to
+me again. Come back, like the prodigal in the New Testament. God will
+forgive you everything. Don't touch drink again, my dear love. I know it
+was the drink that made you do as you did. You could never have done it.
+It was the drink that drove you to do it. You didn't know what you were
+doing. And then you were ashamed, and thought I would be angry, and
+could not bear to come back to me. Ah, if you were to come in at the
+door, as I write, you would see whether or not I was proud to have my
+Andrew again. But I would not be nice for you to look at now. You used
+to think me pretty--you said beautiful--so long ago. But I am so thin
+now, and my face so white, that I almost frighten myself when I look in
+the glass. And before you get this I shall be all gone to dust,
+either knowing nothing about you, or trying to praise God, and always
+forgetting where I am in my psalm, longing so for you to come. I am
+afraid I love you too much to be fit to go to heaven. Then, perhaps, God
+will send me to the other place, all for love of you, Andrew. And I do
+believe I should like that better. But I don't think he will, if he is
+anything like the man I saw in my dream. But I am growing so faint that
+I can hardly write. I never felt like this before. But that dream has
+given me strength to die, because I hope you will come too. Oh, my dear
+Andrew, do, do repent and turn to God, and he will forgive you. Believe
+in Jesus, and he will save you, and bring me to you across the deep
+place. But I must make haste. I can hardly see. And I must not leave
+this letter open for anybody but you to read after I am dead. Good-bye,
+Andrew. I love you all the same. I am, my dearest Husband, your
+affectionate Wife,
+
+'H. FALCONER.'
+
+Then followed the date. It was within a week of her death. The letter
+was feebly written, every stroke seeming more feeble by the contrasted
+strength of the words. When Falconer read it afterwards, in the midst
+of the emotions it aroused--the strange lovely feelings of such a bond
+between him and a beautiful ghost, far away somewhere in God's universe,
+who had carried him in her lost body, and nursed him at her breasts--in
+the midst of it all, he could not help wondering, he told me, to find
+the forms and words so like what he would have written himself. It
+seemed so long ago when that faded, discoloured paper, with the gilt
+edges, and the pale brown ink, and folded in the large sheet, and sealed
+with the curious wax, must have been written; and here were its words so
+fresh, so new! not withered like the rose-leaves that scented the paper
+from the work-box where he had found it, but as fresh as if just shaken
+from the rose-trees of the heart's garden. It was no wonder that Andrew
+Falconer should be sitting with his head in his hands when Robert looked
+in on him, for he had read this letter.
+
+When Robert saw how he sat, he withdrew, and took his violin again, and
+played all the tunes of the old country he could think of, recalling
+Dooble Sandy's workshop, that he might recall the music he had learnt
+there.
+
+No one who understands the bit and bridle of the association of ideas,
+as it is called in the skeleton language of mental philosophy, wherewith
+the Father-God holds fast the souls of his children--to the very
+last that we see of them, at least, and doubtless to endless ages
+beyond--will sneer at Falconer's notion of making God's violin
+a ministering spirit in the process of conversion. There is a
+well-authenticated story of a convict's having been greatly reformed
+for a time, by going, in one of the colonies, into a church, where the
+matting along the aisle was of the same pattern as that in the church to
+which he had gone when a boy--with his mother, I suppose. It was not the
+matting that so far converted him: it was not to the music of his violin
+that Falconer looked for aid, but to the memories of childhood, the
+mysteries of the kingdom of innocence which that could recall--those
+memories which
+
+     Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
+     Are yet a master light of all our seeing.
+
+For an hour he did not venture to go near him. When he entered the room
+he found him sitting in the same place, no longer weeping, but gazing
+into the fire with a sad countenance, the expression of which showed
+Falconer at once that the soul had come out of its cave of obscuration,
+and drawn nearer to the surface of life. He had not seen him look so
+much like one 'clothed, and in his right mind,' before. He knew well
+that nothing could be built upon this; that this very emotion did but
+expose him the more to the besetting sin; that in this mood he would
+drink, even if he knew that he would in consequence be in danger of
+murdering the wife whose letter had made him weep. But it was progress,
+notwithstanding. He looked up at Robert as he entered, and then dropped
+his eyes again. He regarded him perhaps as a presence doubtful whether
+of angel or devil, even as the demoniacs regarded the Lord of Life who
+had come to set them free. Bewildered he must have been to find himself,
+towards the close of a long life of debauchery, wickedness, and the
+growing pains of hell, caught in a net of old times, old feelings, old
+truths.
+
+Now Robert had carefully avoided every indication that might disclose
+him to be a Scotchman even, nor was there the least sign of suspicion
+in Andrew's manner. The only solution of the mystery that could have
+presented itself to him was, that his friends were at the root of
+it--probably his son, of whom he knew absolutely nothing. His mother
+could not be alive still. Of his wife's relatives there had never been
+one who would have taken any trouble about him after her death, hardly
+even before it. John Lammie was the only person, except Dr. Anderson,
+whose friendship he could suppose capable of this development. The
+latter was the more likely person. But he would be too much for him
+yet; he was not going to be treated like a child, he said to himself, as
+often as the devil got uppermost.
+
+My reader must understand that Andrew had never been a man of
+resolution. He had been wilful and headstrong; and these qualities, in
+children especially, are often mistaken for resolution, and generally go
+under the name of strength of will. There never was a greater mistake.
+The mistake, indeed, is only excusable from the fact that extremes meet,
+and that this disposition is so opposite to the other, that it looks to
+the careless eye most like it. He never resisted his own impulses, or
+the enticements of evil companions. Kept within certain bounds at home,
+after he had begun to go wrong, by the weight of opinion, he rushed into
+all excesses when abroad upon business, till at length the vessel of his
+fortune went to pieces, and he was a waif on the waters of the world.
+But in feeling he had never been vulgar, however much so in action.
+There was a feeble good in him that had in part been protected by its
+very feebleness. He could not sin so much against it as if it had
+been strong. For many years he had fits of shame, and of grief without
+repentance; for repentance is the active, the divine part--the turning
+again; but taking more steadily both to strong drink and opium, he
+was at the time when De Fleuri found him only the dull ghost of Andrew
+Falconer walking in a dream of its lost carcass.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV. FATHER AND SON.
+
+Once more Falconer retired, but not to take his violin. He could play no
+more. Hope and love were swelling within him. He could not rest. Was it
+a sign from heaven that the hour for speech had arrived? He paced up and
+down the room. He kneeled and prayed for guidance and help. Something
+within urged him to try the rusted lock of his father's heart. Without
+any formed resolution, without any conscious volition, he found himself
+again in his room. There the old man still sat, with his back to the
+door, and his gaze fixed on the fire, which had sunk low in the grate.
+Robert went round in front of him, kneeled on the rug before him, and
+said the one word,
+
+'Father!'
+
+Andrew started violently, raised his hand, which trembled as with a
+palsy, to his head, and stared wildly at Robert. But he did not speak.
+Robert repeated the one great word. Then Andrew spoke, and said in a
+trembling, hardly audible voice,
+
+'Are you my son?--my boy Robert, sir?'
+
+'I am. I am. Oh, father, I have longed for you by day, and dreamed about
+you by night, ever since I saw that other boys had fathers, and I had
+none. Years and years of my life--I hardly know how many--have been
+spent in searching for you. And now I have found you!'
+
+The great tall man, in the prime of life and strength, laid his big head
+down on the old man's knee, as if he had been a little child. His father
+said nothing, but laid his hand on the head. For some moments the two
+remained thus, motionless and silent. Andrew was the first to speak. And
+his words were the voice of the spirit that striveth with man.
+
+'What am I to do, Robert?'
+
+No other words, not even those of passionate sorrow, or overflowing
+affection, could have been half so precious in the ears of Robert. When
+a man once asks what he is to do, there is hope for him. Robert answered
+instantly,
+
+'You must come home to your mother.'
+
+'My mother!' Andrew exclaimed. 'You don't mean to say she's alive?'
+
+'I heard from her yesterday--in her own hand, too,' said Robert.
+
+'I daren't. I daren't,' murmured Andrew.
+
+'You must, father,' returned Robert. 'It is a long way, but I will make
+the journey easy for you. She knows I have found you. She is waiting and
+longing for you. She has hardly thought of anything but you ever since
+she lost you. She is only waiting to see you, and then she will go home,
+she says. I wrote to her and said, "Grannie, I have found your Andrew."
+And she wrote back to me and said, "God be praised. I shall die in
+peace."'
+
+A silence followed.
+
+'Will she forgive me?' said Andrew.
+
+'She loves you more than her own soul,' answered Robert. 'She loves you
+as much as I do. She loves you as God loves you.'
+
+'God can't love me,' said Andrews, feebly. 'He would never have left me
+if he had loved me.'
+
+'He has never left you from the very first. You would not take his way,
+father, and he just let you try your own. But long before that he had
+begun to get me ready to go after you. He put such love to you in my
+heart, and gave me such teaching and such training, that I have found
+you at last. And now I have found you, I will hold you. You cannot
+escape--you will not want to escape any more, father?'
+
+Andrew made no reply to this appeal. It sounded like imprisonment for
+life, I suppose. But thought was moving in him. After a long pause,
+during which the son's heart was hungering for a word whereon to hang
+a further hope, the old man spoke again, muttering as if he were only
+speaking his thoughts unconsciously.
+
+'Where's the use? There's no forgiveness for me. My mother is going to
+heaven. I must go to hell. No. It's no good. Better leave it as it is. I
+daren't see her. It would kill me to see her.'
+
+'It will kill her not to see you; and that will be one sin more on your
+conscience, father.'
+
+Andrew got up and walked about the room. And Robert only then arose from
+his knees.
+
+'And there's my mother,' he said.
+
+Andrew did not reply; but Robert saw when he turned next towards the
+light, that the sweat was standing in beads on his forehead.
+
+'Father,' he said, going up to him.
+
+The old man stopped in his walk, turned, and faced his son.
+
+'Father,' repeated Robert, 'you've got to repent; and God won't let you
+off; and you needn't think it. You'll have to repent some day.'
+
+'In hell, Robert,' said Andrew, looking him full in the eyes, as he had
+never looked at him before. It seemed as if even so much acknowledgment
+of the truth had already made him bolder and honester.
+
+'Yes. Either on earth or in hell. Would it not be better on earth?'
+
+'But it will be no use in hell,' he murmured.
+
+In those few words lay the germ of the preference for hell of poor
+souls, enfeebled by wickedness. They will not have to do anything
+there--only to moan and cry and suffer for ever, they think. It is
+effort, the out-going of the living will that they dread. The sorrow,
+the remorse of repentance, they do not so much regard: it is the action
+it involves; it is the having to turn, be different, and do differently,
+that they shrink from; and they have been taught to believe that
+this will not be required of them there--in that awful refuge of the
+will-less. I do not say they think thus: I only say their dim, vague,
+feeble feelings are such as, if they grew into thought, would take this
+form. But tell them that the fire of God without and within them will
+compel them to bethink themselves; that the vision of an open door
+beyond the smoke and the flames will ever urge them to call up the
+ice-bound will, that it may obey; that the torturing spirit of God in
+them will keep their consciences awake, not to remind them of what they
+ought to have done, but to tell them what they must do now, and hell
+will no longer fascinate them. Tell them that there is no refuge from
+the compelling Love of God, save that Love itself--that He is in hell
+too, and that if they make their bed in hell they shall not escape him,
+and then, perhaps, they will have some true presentiment of the worm
+that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched.
+
+'Father, it will be of use in hell,' said Robert. 'God will give you no
+rest even there. You will have to repent some day, I do believe--if not
+now under the sunshine of heaven, then in the torture of the awful world
+where there is no light but that of the conscience. Would it not be
+better and easier to repent now, with your wife waiting for you in
+heaven, and your mother waiting for you on earth?'
+
+Will it be credible to my reader, that Andrew interrupted his son with
+the words,
+
+'Robert, it is dreadful to hear you talk like that. Why, you don't
+believe in the Bible!'
+
+His words will be startling to one who has never heard the lips of a
+hoary old sinner drivel out religion. To me they are not so startling as
+the words of Christian women and bishops of the Church of England, when
+they say that the doctrine of the everlasting happiness of the righteous
+stands or falls with the doctrine of the hopeless damnation of the
+wicked. Can it be that to such the word is everything, the spirit
+nothing? No. It is only that the devil is playing a very wicked prank,
+not with them, but in them: they are pluming themselves on being selfish
+after a godly sort.
+
+'I do believe the Bible, father,' returned Robert, 'and have ordered my
+life by it. If I had not believed the Bible, I fear I should never have
+looked for you. But I won't dispute about it. I only say I believe that
+you will be compelled to repent some day, and that now is the best time.
+Then, you will not only have to repent, but to repent that you did
+not repent now. And I tell you, father, that you shall go to my
+grandmother.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI. CHANGE OF SCENE.
+
+But various reasons combined to induce Falconer to postpone yet for a
+period their journey to the North. Not merely did his father require an
+unremitting watchfulness, which it would be difficult to keep up in his
+native place amongst old friends and acquaintances, but his health was
+more broken than he had at first supposed, and change of air and scene
+without excitement was most desirable. He was anxious too that the
+change his mother must see in him should be as little as possible
+attributable to other causes than those that years bring with them. To
+this was added that his own health had begun to suffer from the watching
+and anxiety he had gone through, and for his father's sake, as well as
+for the labour which yet lay before him, he would keep that as sound
+as he might. He wrote to his grandmother and explained the matter. She
+begged him to do as he thought best, for she was so happy that she did
+not care if she should never see Andrew in this world: it was enough to
+die in the hope of meeting him in the other. But she had no reason to
+fear that death was at hand; for, although much more frail, she felt as
+well as ever.
+
+By this time Falconer had introduced me to his father. I found him in
+some things very like his son; in others, very different. His manners
+were more polished; his pleasure in pleasing much greater: his humanity
+had blossomed too easily, and then run to seed. Alas, to no seed
+that could bear fruit! There was a weak expression about his mouth--a
+wavering interrogation: it was so different from the firmly-closed
+portals whence issued the golden speech of his son! He had a sly,
+sidelong look at times, whether of doubt or cunning, I could not always
+determine. His eyes, unlike his son's, were of a light blue, and
+hazy both in texture and expression. His hands were long-fingered and
+tremulous. He gave your hand a sharp squeeze, and the same instant
+abandoned it with indifference. I soon began to discover in him a
+tendency to patronize any one who showed him a particle of respect
+as distinguished from common-place civility. But under all outward
+appearances it seemed to me that there was a change going on: at least
+being very willing to believe it, I found nothing to render belief
+impossible.
+
+He was very fond of the flute his son had given him, and on that
+sweetest and most expressionless of instruments he played exquisitely.
+
+One evening when I called to see them, Falconer said,
+
+'We are going out of town for a few weeks, Gordon: will you go with us?'
+
+'I am afraid I can't.'
+
+'Why? You have no teaching at present, and your writing you can do as
+well in the country as in town.'
+
+'That is true; but still I don't see how I can. I am too poor for one
+thing.'
+
+'Between you and me that is nonsense.'
+
+'Well, I withdraw that,' I said. 'But there is so much to be done,
+specially as you will be away, and Miss St John is at the Lakes.'
+
+'That is all very true; but you need a change. I have seen for some
+weeks that you are failing. Mind, it is our best work that He wants,
+not the dregs of our exhaustion. I hope you are not of the mind of our
+friend Mr. Watts, the curate of St. Gregory's.'
+
+'I thought you had a high opinion of Mr. Watts,' I returned.
+
+'So I have. I hope it is not necessary to agree with a man in everything
+before we can have a high opinion of him.'
+
+'Of course not. But what is it you hope I am not of his opinion in?'
+
+'He seems ambitious of killing himself with work--of wearing himself out
+in the service of his master--and as quickly as possible. A good deal of
+that kind of thing is a mere holding of the axe to the grindstone, not a
+lifting of it up against thick trees. Only he won't be convinced till it
+comes to the helve. I met him the other day; he was looking as white as
+his surplice. I took upon me to read him a lecture on the holiness of
+holidays. "I can't leave my poor," he said. "Do you think God can't do
+without you?" I asked. "Is he so weak that he cannot spare the help of
+a weary man? But I think he must prefer quality to quantity, and for
+healthy work you must be healthy yourself. How can you be the visible
+sign of the Christ-present amongst men, if you inhabit an exhausted,
+irritable brain? Go to God's infirmary and rest a while. Bring back
+health from the country to those that cannot go to it. If on the way it
+be transmuted into spiritual forms, so much the better. A little more of
+God will make up for a good deal less of you."'
+
+'What did he say to that?'
+
+'He said our Lord died doing the will of his Father. I told him--"Yes,
+when his time was come, not sooner. Besides, he often avoided both
+speech and action." "Yes," he answered, "but he could tell when, and we
+cannot." "Therefore," I rejoined, "you ought to accept your exhaustion
+as a token that your absence will be the best thing for your people.
+If there were no God, then perhaps you ought to work till you drop down
+dead--I don't know."'
+
+'Is he gone yet?'
+
+'No. He won't go. I couldn't persuade him.'
+
+'When do you go?'
+
+'To-morrow.'
+
+'I shall be ready, if you really mean it.'
+
+'That's an if worthy only of a courtier. There may be much virtue in an
+if, as Touchstone says, for the taking up of a quarrel; but that if is
+bad enough to breed one,' said Falconer, laughing. 'Be at the Paddington
+Station at noon to-morrow. To tell the whole truth, I want you to help
+me with my father.'
+
+This last was said at the door as he showed me out.
+
+In the afternoon we were nearing Bristol. It was a lovely day in
+October. Andrew had been enjoying himself; but it was evidently rather
+the pleasure of travelling in a first-class carriage like a gentleman
+than any delight in the beauty of heaven and earth. The country was in
+the rich sombre dress of decay.
+
+'Is it not remarkable,' said my friend to me, 'that the older I grow, I
+find autumn affecting me the more like spring?'
+
+'I am thankful to say,' interposed Andrew, with a smile in which was
+mingled a shade of superiority, 'that no change of the seasons ever
+affects me.'
+
+'Are you sure you are right in being thankful for that, father?' asked
+his son.
+
+His father gazed at him for a moment, seemed to bethink himself after
+some feeble fashion or other, and rejoined,
+
+'Well, I must confess I did feel a touch of the rheumatism this
+morning.'
+
+How I pitied Falconer! Would he ever see of the travail of his soul
+in this man? But he only smiled a deep sweet smile, and seemed to be
+thinking divine things in that great head of his.
+
+At Bristol we went on board a small steamer, and at night were landed at
+a little village on the coast of North Devon. The hotel to which we went
+was on the steep bank of a tumultuous little river, which tumbled past
+its foundation of rock, like a troop of watery horses galloping by with
+ever-dissolving limbs. The elder Falconer retired almost as soon as we
+had had supper. My friend and I lighted our pipes, and sat by the open
+window, for although the autumn was so far advanced, the air here was
+very mild. For some time we only listened to the sound of the waters.
+
+'There are three things,' said Falconer at last, taking his pipe out
+of his mouth with a smile, 'that give a peculiarly perfect feeling of
+abandonment: the laughter of a child; a snake lying across a fallen
+branch; and the rush of a stream like this beneath us, whose only
+thought is to get to the sea.'
+
+We did not talk much that night, however, but went soon to bed. None of
+us slept well. We agreed in the morning that the noise of the stream
+had been too much for us all, and that the place felt close and torpid.
+Andrew complained that the ceaseless sound wearied him, and Robert that
+he felt the aimless endlessness of it more than was good for him.
+I confess it irritated me like an anodyne unable to soothe. We were
+clearly all in want of something different. The air between the hills
+clung to them, hot and moveless. We would climb those hills, and breathe
+the air that flitted about over their craggy tops.
+
+As soon as we had breakfasted, we set out. It was soon evident that
+Andrew could not ascend the steep road. We returned and got a carriage.
+When we reached the top, it was like a resurrection, like a dawning
+of hope out of despair. The cool friendly wind blew on our faces, and
+breathed strength into our frames. Before us lay the ocean, the visible
+type of the invisible, and the vessels with their white sails moved
+about over it like the thoughts of men feebly searching the unknown.
+Even Andrew Falconer spread out his arms to the wind, and breathed deep,
+filling his great chest full.
+
+'I feel like a boy again,' he said.
+
+His son strode to his side, and laid his arm over his shoulders.
+
+'So do I, father,' he returned; 'but it is because I have got you.'
+
+The old man turned and looked at him with a tenderness I had never seen
+on his face before. As soon as I saw that, I no longer doubted that he
+could be saved.
+
+We found rooms in a farm-house on the topmost height.
+
+'These are poor little hills, Falconer,' I said. 'Yet they help one like
+mountains.'
+
+'The whole question is,' he returned, 'whether they are high enough to
+lift you out of the dirt. Here we are in the airs of heaven--that is all
+we need.'
+
+'They make me think how often, amongst the country people of Scotland, I
+have wondered at the clay-feet upon which a golden head of wisdom stood!
+What poor needs, what humble aims, what a narrow basement generally, was
+sufficient to support the statues of pure-eyed Faith and white-handed
+Hope.'
+
+'Yes,' said Falconer: 'he who is faithful over a few things is a lord of
+cities. It does not matter whether you preach in Westminster Abbey, or
+teach a ragged class, so you be faithful. The faithfulness is all.'
+
+After an early dinner we went out for a walk, but we did not go far
+before we sat down upon the grass. Falconer laid himself at full length
+and gazed upwards.
+
+'When I look like this into the blue sky,' he said, after a moment's
+silence, 'it seems so deep, so peaceful, so full of a mysterious
+tenderness, that I could lie for centuries, and wait for the dawning of
+the face of God out of the awful loving-kindness.'
+
+I had never heard Falconer talk of his own present feelings in this
+manner; but glancing at the face of his father with a sense of his
+unfitness to hear such a lofty utterance, I saw at once that it was for
+his sake that he had thus spoken. The old man had thrown himself back
+too, and was gazing into the sky, puzzling himself, I could see, to
+comprehend what his son could mean. I fear he concluded, for the time,
+that Robert was not gifted with the amount of common-sense belonging
+of right to the Falconer family, and that much religion had made him
+a dreamer. Still, I thought I could see a kind of awe pass like a
+spiritual shadow across his face as he gazed into the blue gulfs over
+him. No one can detect the first beginnings of any life, and those
+of spiritual emotion must more than any lie beyond our ken: there is
+infinite room for hope. Falconer said no more. We betook ourselves early
+within doors, and he read King Lear to us, expounding the
+spiritual history of the poor old king after a fashion I had never
+conceived--showing us how the said history was all compressed, as far as
+human eye could see of it, into the few months that elapsed between
+his abdication and his death; how in that short time he had to learn
+everything that he ought to have been learning all his life; and how,
+because he had put it off so long, the lessons that had then to be given
+him were awfully severe.
+
+I thought what a change it was for the old man to lift his head into the
+air of thought and life, out of the sloughs of misery in which he had
+been wallowing for years.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII. IN THE COUNTRY.
+
+The next morning Falconer, who knew the country, took us out for a
+drive. We passed through lanes and gates out upon all open moor, where
+he stopped the carriage, and led us a few yards on one side. Suddenly,
+hundreds of feet below us, down what seemed an almost precipitous
+descent, we saw the wood-embosomed, stream-trodden valley we had left
+the day before. Enough had been cleft and scooped seawards out of
+the lofty table-land to give room for a few little conical hills with
+curious peaks of bare rock. At the bases of these hills flowed noisily
+two or three streams, which joined in one, and trotted out to sea over
+rocks and stones. The hills and the sides of the great cleft were half
+of them green with grass, and half of them robed in the autumnal foliage
+of thick woods. By the streams and in the woods nestled pretty houses;
+and away at the mouth of the valley and the stream lay the village. All
+around, on our level, stretched farm and moorland.
+
+When Andrew Falconer stood so unexpectedly on the verge of the steep
+descent, he trembled and started back with fright. His son made him sit
+down a little way off, where yet we could see into the valley. The sun
+was hot, the air clear and mild, and the sea broke its blue floor into
+innumerable sparkles of radiance. We sat for a while in silence.
+
+'Are you sure,' I said, in the hope of setting my friend talking, 'that
+there is no horrid pool down there? no half-trampled thicket, with
+broken pottery and shreds of tin lying about? no dead carcass, or dirty
+cottage, with miserable wife and greedy children? When I was a child,
+I knew a lovely place that I could not half enjoy, because, although
+hidden from my view, an ugly stagnation, half mud, half water, lay in a
+certain spot below me. When I had to pass it, I used to creep by with a
+kind of dull terror, mingled with hopeless disgust, and I have never got
+over the feeling.'
+
+'You remind me much of a friend of mine of whom I have spoken to you
+before,' said Falconer, 'Eric Ericson. I have shown you many of his
+verses, but I don't think I ever showed you one little poem containing
+an expression of the same feeling. I think I can repeat it.
+
+     'Some men there are who cannot spare
+     A single tear until they feel
+     The last cold pressure, and the heel
+     Is stamped upon the outmost layer.
+
+     And, waking, some will sigh to think
+     The clouds have borrowed winter's wing--
+     Sad winter when the grasses spring
+     No more about the fountain's brink.
+
+     And some would call me coward-fool:
+     I lay a claim to better blood;
+     But yet a heap of idle mud
+     Hath power to make me sorrowful.
+
+I sat thinking over the verses, for I found the feeling a little
+difficult to follow, although the last stanza was plain enough. Falconer
+resumed.
+
+'I think this is as likely as any place,' he said, 'to be free of such
+physical blots. For the moral I cannot say. But I have learned, I hope,
+not to be too fastidious--I mean so as to be unjust to the whole because
+of the part. The impression made by a whole is just as true as the
+result of an analysis, and is greater and more valuable in every
+respect. If we rejoice in the beauty of the whole, the other is
+sufficiently forgotten. For moral ugliness, it ceases to distress
+in proportion as we labour to remove it, and regard it in its true
+relations to all that surrounds it. There is an old legend which I dare
+say you know. The Saviour and his disciples were walking along the way,
+when they came upon a dead dog. The disciples did not conceal their
+disgust. The Saviour said: "How white its teeth are!"'
+
+'That is very beautiful,' I rejoined. 'Thank God for that. It is true,
+whether invented or not. But,' I added, 'it does not quite answer to the
+question about which we have been talking. The Lord got rid of the pain
+of the ugliness by finding the beautiful in it.'
+
+'It does correspond, however, I think, in principle,' returned Falconer;
+'only it goes much farther, making the exceptional beauty hallow
+the general ugliness--which is the true way, for beauty is life, and
+therefore infinitely deeper and more powerful than ugliness which is
+death. "A dram of sweet," says Spenser, "is worth a pound of sour."'
+
+It was so delightful to hear him talk--for what he said was not only
+far finer than my record of it, but the whole man spoke as well as his
+mouth--that I sought to start him again.
+
+'I wish,' I said, 'that I could see things as you do--in great masses
+of harmonious unity. I am only able to see a truth sparkling here and
+there, and to try to lay hold of it. When I aim at more, I am like
+Noah's dove, without a place to rest the sole of my foot.'
+
+'That is the only way to begin. Leave the large vision to itself, and
+look well after your sparkles. You will find them grow and gather and
+unite, until you are afloat on a sea of radiance--with cloud shadows no
+doubt.'
+
+'And yet,' I resumed, 'I never seem to have room.'
+
+'That is just why.'
+
+'But I feel that I cannot find it. I know that if I fly to that bounding
+cape on the far horizon there, I shall only find a place--a place to
+want another in. There is no fortunate island out on that sea.'
+
+'I fancy,' said Falconer, 'that until a man loves space, he will never
+be at peace in a place. At least so I have found it. I am content if you
+but give me room. All space to me throbs with being and life; and the
+loveliest spot on the earth seems but the compression of space till
+the meaning shines out of it, as the fire flies out of the air when you
+drive it close together. To seek place after place for freedom, is a
+constant effort to flee from space, and a vain one, for you are ever
+haunted by the need of it, and therefore when you seek most to escape
+it, fancy that you love it and want it.'
+
+'You are getting too mystical for me now,' I said. 'I am not able to
+follow you.'
+
+'I fear I was on the point of losing myself. At all events I can go no
+further now. And indeed I fear I have been but skirting the Limbo of
+Vanities.'
+
+He rose, for we could both see that this talk was not in the least
+interesting to our companion. We got again into the carriage, which,
+by Falconer's orders, was turned and driven in the opposite direction,
+still at no great distance from the lofty edge of the heights that rose
+above the shore.
+
+We came at length to a lane bounded with stone walls, every stone of
+which had its moss and every chink its fern. The lane grew more and
+more grassy; the walls vanished; and the track faded away into a narrow
+winding valley, formed by the many meeting curves of opposing hills.
+They were green to the top with sheep-grass, and spotted here and there
+with patches of fern, great stones, and tall withered foxgloves. The
+air was sweet and healthful, and Andrew evidently enjoyed it because
+it reminded him again of his boyhood. The only sound we heard was the
+tinkle of a few tender sheep-bells, and now and then the tremulous
+bleating of a sheep. With a gentle winding, the valley led us into a
+more open portion of itself, where the old man paused with a look of
+astonished pleasure.
+
+Before us, seaward, rose a rampart against the sky, like the turreted
+and embattled wall of a huge eastern city, built of loose stones piled
+high, and divided by great peaky rocks. In the centre rose above them
+all one solitary curiously-shaped mass, one of the oddest peaks of the
+Himmalays in miniature. From its top on the further side was a sheer
+descent to the waters far below the level of the valley from which it
+immediately rose. It was altogether a strange freaky fantastic place,
+not without its grandeur. It looked like the remains of a frolic of
+the Titans, or rather as if reared by the boys and girls, while their
+fathers and mothers 'lay stretched out huge in length,' and in breadth
+too, upon the slopes around, and laughed thunderously at the sportive
+invention of their sons and daughters. Falconer helped his father up to
+the edge of the rampart that he might look over. Again he started back,
+'afraid of that which was high,' for the lowly valley was yet at a great
+height above the diminished waves. On the outside of the rampart ran a
+narrow path whence the green hill-side went down steep to the sea.
+The gulls were screaming far below us; we could see the little flying
+streaks of white. Beyond was the great ocean. A murmurous sound came up
+from its shore.
+
+We descended and seated ourselves on the short springy grass of a little
+mound at the foot of one of the hills, where it sank slowly, like the
+dying gush of a wave, into the hollowest centre of the little vale.
+
+'Everything tends to the cone-shape here,' said Falconer,--'the oddest
+and at the same time most wonderful of mathematical figures.'
+
+'Is it not strange,' I said, 'that oddity and wonder should come so
+near?'
+
+'They often do in the human world as well,' returned he. 'Therefore it
+is not strange that Shelley should have been so fond of this place.
+It is told of him that repeated sketches of the spot were found on the
+covers of his letters. I know nothing more like Shelley's poetry than
+this valley--wildly fantastic and yet beautiful--as if a huge genius
+were playing at grandeur, and producing little models of great things.
+But there is one grand thing I want to show you a little further on.'
+
+We rose, and walked out of the valley on the other side, along the lofty
+coast. When we reached a certain point, Falconer stood and requested us
+to look as far as we could, along the cliffs to the face of the last of
+them.
+
+'What do you see?' he asked.
+
+'A perpendicular rock, going right down into the blue waters,' I
+answered.
+
+'Look at it: what is the outline of it like? Whose face is it?'
+
+'Shakspere's, by all that is grand!' I cried.
+
+'So it is,' said Andrew.
+
+'Right. Now I'll tell you what I would do. If I were very rich, and
+there were no poor people in the country, I would give a commission to
+some great sculptor to attack that rock and work out its suggestion.
+Then, if I had any money left, we should find one for Bacon, and one for
+Chaucer, and one for Milton; and, as we are about it, we may fancy as
+many more as we like; so that from the bounding rocks of our island, the
+memorial faces of our great brothers should look abroad over the seas
+into the infinite sky beyond.'
+
+'Well, now,' said the elder, 'I think it is grander as it is.'
+
+'You are quite right, father,' said Robert. 'And so with many of our
+fancies for perfecting God's mighty sketches, which he only can finish.'
+
+Again we seated ourselves and looked out over the waves.
+
+'I have never yet heard,' I said, 'how you managed with that poor girl
+that wanted to drown herself--on Westminster Bridge, I mean--that night,
+you remember.'
+
+'Miss St. John has got her in her own house at present. She has given
+her those two children we picked up at the door of the public-house to
+take care of. Poor little darlings! they are bringing back the life in
+her heart already. There is actually a little colour in her cheek--the
+dawn, I trust, of the eternal life. That is Miss St. John's way.
+As often as she gets hold of a poor hopeless woman, she gives her
+a motherless child. It is wonderful what the childless woman and
+motherless child do for each other.'
+
+'I was much amused the other day with the lecture one of the police
+magistrates gave a poor creature who was brought before him for
+attempting to drown herself. He did give her a sovereign out of the poor
+box, though.'
+
+'Well, that might just tide her over the shoal of self-destruction,'
+said Falconer. 'But I cannot help doubting whether any one has a right
+to prevent a suicide from carrying out his purpose, who is not prepared
+to do a good deal more for him than that. What would you think of the
+man who snatched the loaf from a hungry thief, threw it back into the
+baker's cart, and walked away to his club-dinner? Harsh words of rebuke,
+and the threat of severe punishment upon a second attempt--what are
+they to the wretch weary of life? To some of them the kindest punishment
+would be to hang them for it. It is something else than punishment
+that they need. If the comfortable alderman had but "a feeling of their
+afflictions," felt in himself for a moment how miserable he must be,
+what a waste of despair must be in his heart, before he would do it
+himself, before the awful river would appear to him a refuge from the
+upper air, he would change his tone. I fear he regards suicide chiefly
+as a burglarious entrance into the premises of the respectable firm of
+Vension, Port, & Co.'
+
+'But you mustn't be too hard upon him, Falconer; for if his God is
+his belly, how can he regard suicide as other than the most awful
+sacrilege?'
+
+'Of course not. His well-fed divinity gives him one great commandment:
+"Thou shalt love thyself with all thy heart. The great breach is to hurt
+thyself--worst of all to send thyself away from the land of luncheons
+and dinners, to the country of thought and vision." But, alas! he
+does not reflect on the fact that the god Belial does not feed all his
+votaries; that he has his elect; that the altar of his inner-temple
+too often smokes with no sacrifice of which his poor meagre priests may
+partake. They must uphold the Divinity which has been good to them, and
+not suffer his worship to fall into disrepute.'
+
+'Really, Robert,' said his father, 'I am afraid to think what you
+will come to. You will end in denying there is a God at all. You don't
+believe in hell, and now you justify suicide. Really--I must say--to say
+the least of it--I have not been accustomed to hear such things.'
+
+The poor old man looked feebly righteous at his wicked son. I verily
+believe he was concerned for his eternal fate. Falconer gave a pleased
+glance at me, and for a moment said nothing. Then he began, with a kind
+of logical composure:
+
+'In the first place, father, I do not believe in such a God as some
+people say they believe in. Their God is but an idol of the heathen,
+modified with a few Christian qualities. For hell, I don't believe there
+is any escape from it but by leaving hellish things behind. For suicide,
+I do not believe it is wicked because it hurts yourself, but I do
+believe it is very wicked. I only want to put it on its own right
+footing.'
+
+'And pray what do you consider its right footing?'
+
+'My dear father, I recognize no duty as owing to a man's self. There is
+and can be no such thing. I am and can be under no obligation to myself.
+The whole thing is a fiction, and of evil invention. It comes from the
+upper circles of the hell of selfishness. Or, perhaps, it may with some
+be merely a form of metaphysical mistake; but an untruth it is. Then for
+the duty we do owe to other people: how can we expect the men or women
+who have found life to end, as it seems to them, in a dunghill of
+misery--how can we expect such to understand any obligation to live for
+the sake of the general others, to no individual of whom, possibly, do
+they bear an endurable relation? What remains?--The grandest, noblest
+duty from which all other duty springs: the duty to the possible God.
+Mind, I say possible God, for I judge it the first of my duties towards
+my neighbour to regard his duty from his position, not from mine.'
+
+'But,' said I, 'how would you bring that duty to bear on the mind of a
+suicide?'
+
+'I think some of the tempted could understand it, though I fear not
+one of those could who judge them hardly, and talk sententiously of the
+wrong done to a society which has done next to nothing for her, by the
+poor, starved, refused, husband-tortured wretch perhaps, who hurries at
+last to the might of the filthy flowing river which, the one thread
+of hope in the web of despair, crawls through the city of death. What
+should I say to him? I should say: "God liveth: thou art not thine own
+but his. Bear thy hunger, thy horror in his name. I in his name will
+help thee out of them, as I may. To go before he calleth thee, is to say
+'Thou forgettest,' unto him who numbereth the hairs of thy head. Stand
+out in the cold and the sleet and the hail of this world, O son of man,
+till thy Father open the door and call thee. Yea, even if thou knowest
+him not, stand and wait, lest there should be, after all, such a loving
+and tender one, who, for the sake of a good with which thou wilt be
+all-content, and without which thou never couldst be content, permits
+thee there to stand--for a time--long to his sympathizing as well as to
+thy suffering heart."'
+
+Here Falconer paused, and when he spoke again it was from the
+ordinary level of conversation. Indeed I fancied that he was a little
+uncomfortable at the excitement into which his feelings had borne him.
+
+'Not many of them could understand this, I dare say: but I think most of
+them could feel it without understanding it. Certainly the "belly with
+good capon lined" will neither understand nor feel it. Suicide is a sin
+against God, I repeat, not a crime over which human laws have any hold.
+In regard to such, man has a duty alone--that, namely, of making it
+possible for every man to live. And where the dread of death is not
+sufficient to deter, what can the threat of punishment do? Or what great
+thing is gained if it should succeed? What agonies a man must have gone
+through in whom neither the horror of falling into such a river, nor
+of the knife in the flesh instinct with life, can extinguish the vague
+longing to wrap up his weariness in an endless sleep!'
+
+'But,' I remarked, 'you would, I fear, encourage the trade in suicide.
+Your kindness would be terribly abused. What would you do with the
+pretended suicides?'
+
+'Whip them, for trifling with and trading upon the feelings of their
+kind.'
+
+'Then you would drive them to suicide in earnest.'
+
+'Then they might be worth something, which they were not before.'
+
+'We are a great deal too humane for that now-a-days, I fear. We don't
+like hurting people.'
+
+'No. We are infested with a philanthropy which is the offspring of our
+mammon-worship. But surely our tender mercies are cruel. We don't like
+to hang people, however unfit they may be to live amongst their fellows.
+A weakling pity will petition for the life of the worst murderer--but
+for what? To keep him alive in a confinement as like their notion of
+hell as they dare to make it--namely, a place whence all the sweet
+visitings of the grace of God are withdrawn, and the man has not a
+chance, so to speak, of growing better. In this hell of theirs they will
+even pamper his beastly body.'
+
+'They have the chaplain to visit them.'
+
+'I pity the chaplain, cut off in his labours from all the aids which
+God's world alone can give for the teaching of these men. Human
+beings have not the right to inflict such cruel punishment upon their
+fellow-man. It springs from a cowardly shrinking from responsibility,
+and from mistrust of the mercy of God;--perhaps first of all from an
+over-valuing of the mere life of the body. Hanging is tenderness itself
+to such a punishment.'
+
+'I think you are hardly fair, though, Falconer. It is the fear of
+sending them to hell that prevents them from hanging them.'
+
+'Yes. You are right, I dare say. They are not of David's mind, who would
+rather fall into the hands of God than of men. They think their hell is
+not so hard as his, and may be better for them. But I must not, as you
+say, forget that they do believe their everlasting fate hangs upon their
+hands, for if God once gets his hold of them by death, they are lost for
+ever.'
+
+'But the chaplain may awake them to a sense of their sins.'
+
+'I do not think it is likely that talk will do what the discipline of
+life has not done. It seems to me, on the contrary, that the clergyman
+has no commission to rouse people to a sense of their sins. That is not
+his work. He is far more likely to harden them by any attempt in that
+direction. Every man does feel his sins, though he often does not know
+it. To turn his attention away from what he does feel by trying to rouse
+in him feelings which are impossible to him in his present condition, is
+to do him a great wrong. The clergyman has the message of salvation,
+not of sin, to give. Whatever oppression is on a man, whatever trouble,
+whatever conscious something that comes between him and the blessedness
+of life, is his sin; for whatever is not of faith is sin; and from all
+this He came to save us. Salvation alone can rouse in us a sense of our
+sinfulness. One must have got on a good way before he can be sorry for
+his sins. There is no condition of sorrow laid down as necessary to
+forgiveness. Repentance does not mean sorrow: it means turning away from
+the sins. Every man can do that, more or less. And that every man must
+do. The sorrow will come afterwards, all in good time. Jesus offers to
+take us out of our own hands into his, if we will only obey him.'
+
+The eyes of the old man were fixed on his son as he spoke. He did seem
+to be thinking. I could almost fancy that a glimmer of something like
+hope shone in his eyes.
+
+It was time to go home, and we were nearly silent all the way.
+
+The next morning was so wet that we could not go out, and had to amuse
+ourselves as we best might in-doors. But Falconer's resources never
+failed. He gave us this day story after story about the poor people he
+had known. I could see that his object was often to get some truth into
+his father's mind without exposing it to rejection by addressing it
+directly to himself; and few subjects could be more fitted for affording
+such opportunity than his experiences among the poor.
+
+The afternoon was still rainy and misty. In the evening I sought to lead
+the conversation towards the gospel-story; and then Falconer talked as
+I never heard him talk before. No little circumstance in the narratives
+appeared to have escaped him. He had thought about everything, as it
+seemed to me. He had looked under the surface everywhere, and found
+truth--mines of it--under all the upper soil of the story. The deeper he
+dug the richer seemed the ore. This was combined with the most pictorial
+apprehension of every outward event, which he treated as if it had been
+described to him by the lips of an eye-witness. The whole thing lived in
+his words and thoughts.
+
+'When anything looks strange, you must look the deeper,' he would say.
+
+At the close of one of our fits of talk, he rose and went to the window.
+
+'Come here,' he said, after looking for a moment.
+
+All day a dropping cloud had filled the space below, so that the hills
+on the opposite side of the valley were hidden, and the whole of the
+sea, near as it was. But when we went to the window we found that a
+great change had silently taken place. The mist continued to veil the
+sky, and it clung to the tops of the hills; but, like the rising curtain
+of a stage, it had rolled half-way up from their bases, revealing a
+great part of the sea and shore, and half of a cliff on the opposite
+side of the valley: this, in itself of a deep red, was now smitten by
+the rays of the setting sun, and glowed over the waters a splendour of
+carmine. As we gazed, the vaporous curtain sank upon the shore, and the
+sun sank under the waves, and the sad gray evening closed in the weeping
+night, and clouds and darkness swathed the weary earth. For doubtless
+the earth needs its night as well as the creatures that live thereon.
+
+In the morning the rain had ceased, but the clouds remained. But they
+were high in the heavens now, and, like a departing sorrow, revealed the
+outline and form which had appeared before as an enveloping vapour of
+universal and shapeless evil. The mist was now far enough off to be seen
+and thought about. It was clouds now--no longer mist and rain. And I
+thought how at length the evils of the world would float away, and we
+should see what it was that made it so hard for us to believe and be at
+peace.
+
+In the afternoon the sky had partially cleared, but clouds hid the sun
+as he sank towards the west. We walked out. A cold autumnal wind blew,
+not only from the twilight of the dying day, but from the twilight
+of the dying season. A sorrowful hopeless wind it seemed, full of
+the odours of dead leaves--those memories of green woods, and of damp
+earth--the bare graves of the flowers. Would the summer ever come again?
+
+We were pacing in silence along a terraced walk which overhung the shore
+far below. More here than from the hilltop we seemed to look immediately
+into space, not even a parapet intervening betwixt us and the ocean.
+The sound of a mournful lyric, never yet sung, was in my brain; it drew
+nearer to my mental grasp; but ere it alighted, its wings were gone,
+and it fell dead on my consciousness. Its meaning was this: 'Welcome,
+Requiem of Nature. Let me share in thy Requiescat. Blow, wind of
+mournful memories. Let us moan together. No one taketh from us the joy
+of our sorrow. We may mourn as we will.'
+
+But while I brooded thus, behold a wonder! The mass about the sinking
+sun broke up, and drifted away in cloudy bergs, as if scattered on the
+diverging currents of solar radiance that burst from the gates of the
+west, and streamed east and north and south over the heavens and over
+the sea. To the north, these masses built a cloudy bridge across the
+sky from horizon to horizon, and beneath it shone the rosy-sailed ships
+floating stately through their triumphal arch up the channel to their
+home. Other clouds floated stately too in the upper sea over our heads,
+with dense forms, thinning into vaporous edges. Some were of a dull
+angry red; some of as exquisite a primrose hue as ever the flower itself
+bore on its bosom; and betwixt their edges beamed out the sweetest,
+purest, most melting, most transparent blue, the heavenly blue which is
+the symbol of the spirit as red is of the heart. I think I never saw
+a blue to satisfy me before. Some of these clouds threw shadows of
+many-shaded purple upon the green sea; and from one of the shadows, so
+dark and so far out upon the glooming horizon that it looked like
+an island, arose as from a pier, a wondrous structure of dim, fairy
+colours, a multitude of rainbow-ends, side by side, that would have
+spanned the heavens with a gorgeous arch, but failed from the very
+grandeur of the idea, and grew up only a few degrees against the clouded
+west. I stood rapt. The two Falconers were at some distance before me,
+walking arm in arm. They stood and gazed likewise. It was as if God had
+said to the heavens and the earth and the chord of the seven colours,
+'Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.' And I said to my soul, 'Let the
+tempest rave in the world; let sorrow wail like a sea-bird in the midst
+thereof; and let thy heart respond to her shivering cry; but the vault
+of heaven encloses the tempest and the shrieking bird and the echoing
+heart; and the sun of God's countenance can with one glance from above
+change the wildest winter day into a summer evening compact of poets'
+dreams.'
+
+My companions were walking up over the hill. I could see that Falconer
+was earnestly speaking in his father's ear. The old man's head was bent
+towards the earth. I kept away. They made a turn from home. I still
+followed at a distance. The evening began to grow dark. The autumn wind
+met us again, colder, stronger, yet more laden with the odours of death
+and the frosts of the coming winter. But it no longer blew as from the
+charnel-house of the past; it blew from the stars through the chinks of
+the unopened door on the other side of the sepulchre. It was a wind
+of the worlds, not a wind of the leaves. It told of the march of the
+spheres, and the rest of the throne of God. We were going on into the
+universe--home to the house of our Father. Mighty adventure! Sacred
+repose! And as I followed the pair, one great star throbbed and radiated
+over my head.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII. THREE GENERATIONS.
+
+The next week I went back to my work, leaving the father and son alone
+together. Before I left, I could see plainly enough that the bonds
+were being drawn closer between them. A whole month passed before they
+returned to London. The winter then had set in with unusual severity.
+But it seemed to bring only health to the two men. When I saw Andrew
+next, there was certainly a marked change upon him. Light had banished
+the haziness from his eye, and his step was a good deal firmer. I can
+hardly speak of more than the physical improvement, for I saw very
+little of him now. Still I did think I could perceive more of judgment
+in his face, as if he sometimes weighed things in his mind. But it was
+plain that Robert continued very careful not to let him a moment out
+of his knowledge. He busied him with the various sights of London,
+for Andrew, although he knew all its miseries well, had never yet been
+inside Westminster Abbey. If he could only trust him enough to get him
+something to do! But what was he fit for? To try him, he proposed once
+that he should write some account of what he had seen and learned in
+his wanderings; but the evident distress with which he shrunk from the
+proposal was grateful to the eyes and heart of his son.
+
+It was almost the end of the year when a letter arrived from John
+Lammie, informing Robert that his grandmother had caught a violent cold,
+and that, although the special symptoms had disappeared, it was evident
+her strength was sinking fast, and that she would not recover.
+
+He read the letter to his father.
+
+'We must go and see her, Robert, my boy,' said Andrew.
+
+It was the first time that he had shown the smallest desire to visit
+her. Falconer rose with glad heart, and proceeded at once to make
+arrangements for their journey.
+
+It was a cold, powdery afternoon in January, with the snow thick on the
+ground, save where the little winds had blown the crown of the street
+bare before Mrs. Falconer's house. A post-chaise with four horses swept
+wearily round the corner, and pulled up at her door. Betty opened it,
+and revealed an old withered face very sorrowful, and yet expectant.
+Falconer's feelings I dare not, Andrew's I cannot attempt to describe,
+as they stepped from the chaise and entered. Betty led the way without a
+word into the little parlour. Robert went next, with long quiet strides,
+and Andrew followed with gray, bowed head. Grannie was not in her chair.
+The doors which during the day concealed the bed in which she slept,
+were open, and there lay the aged woman with her eyes closed. The room
+was as it had always been, only there seemed a filmy shadow in it that
+had not been there before.
+
+'She's deein', sir,' whispered Betty. 'Ay is she. Och hone!'
+
+Robert took his father's hand, and led him towards the bed. They drew
+nigh softly, and bent over the withered, but not even yet very wrinkled
+face. The smooth, white, soft hands lay on the sheet, which was folded
+back over her bosom. She was asleep, or rather, she slumbered.
+
+But the soul of the child began to grow in the withered heart of the old
+man as he regarded his older mother, and as it grew it forced the tears
+to his eyes, and the words to his lips.
+
+'Mother!' he said, and her eyelids rose at once. He stooped to kiss
+her, with the tears rolling down his face. The light of heaven broke and
+flashed from her aged countenance. She lifted her weak hands, took his
+head, and held it to her bosom.
+
+'Eh! the bonnie gray heid!' she said, and burst into a passion of
+weeping. She had kept some tears for the last. Now she would spend all
+that her griefs had left her. But there came a pause in her sobs, though
+not in her weeping, and then she spoke.
+
+'I kent it a' the time, O Lord. I kent it a' the time. He's come hame.
+My Anerew, my Anerew! I'm as happy 's a bairn. O Lord! O Lord!'
+
+And she burst again into sobs, and entered paradise in radiant weeping.
+
+Her hands sank away from his head, and when her son gazed in her face he
+saw that she was dead. She had never looked at Robert.
+
+The two men turned towards each other. Robert put out his arms. His
+father laid his head on his bosom, and went on weeping. Robert held him
+to his heart.
+
+When shall a man dare to say that God has done all he can?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX. THE WHOLE STORY.
+
+The men laid their mother's body with those of the generations that had
+gone before her, beneath the long grass in their country churchyard
+near Rothieden--a dreary place, one accustomed to trim cemeteries and
+sentimental wreaths would call it--to Falconer's mind so friendly to the
+forsaken dust, because it lapt it in sweet oblivion.
+
+They returned to the dreary house, and after a simple meal such as both
+had used to partake of in their boyhood, they sat by the fire, Andrew in
+his mother's chair, Robert in the same chair in which he had learned his
+Sallust and written his versions. Andrew sat for a while gazing into the
+fire, and Robert sat watching his face, where in the last few months a
+little feeble fatherhood had begun to dawn.
+
+'It was there, father, that grannie used to sit, every day, sometimes
+looking in the fire for hours, thinking about you, I know,' Robert said
+at length.
+
+Andrew stirred uneasily in his chair.
+
+'How do you know that?' he asked.
+
+'If there was one thing I could be sure of, it was when grannie was
+thinking about you, father. Who wouldn't have known it, father, when her
+lips were pressed together, as if she had some dreadful pain to bear,
+and her eyes were looking away through the fire--so far away! and I
+would speak to her three times before she would answer? She lived only
+to think about God and you, father. God and you came very close together
+in her mind. Since ever I can remember, almost, the thought of you was
+just the one thing in this house.'
+
+Then Robert began at the beginning of his memory, and told his father
+all that he could remember. When he came to speak about his solitary
+musings in the garret, he said--and long before he reached this part, he
+had relapsed into his mother tongue:
+
+'Come and luik at the place, father. I want to see 't again, mysel'.'
+
+He rose. His father yielded and followed him. Robert got a candle in the
+kitchen, and the two big men climbed the little narrow stair and stood
+in the little sky of the house, where their heads almost touched the
+ceiling.
+
+'I sat upo' the flure there,' said Robert, 'an' thoucht and thoucht what
+I wad du to get ye, father, and what I wad du wi' ye whan I had gotten
+ye. I wad greit whiles, 'cause ither laddies had a father an' I had
+nane. An' there's whaur I fand mamma's box wi' the letter in 't and her
+ain picter: grannie gae me that ane o' you. An' there's whaur I used
+to kneel doon an' pray to God. An' he's heard my prayers, and grannie's
+prayers, and here ye are wi' me at last. Instead o' thinkin' aboot ye,
+I hae yer ain sel'. Come, father, I want to say a word o' thanks to God,
+for hearin' my prayer.'
+
+He took the old man's hand, led him to the bedside, and kneeled with him
+there.
+
+My reader can hardly avoid thinking it was a poor sad triumph that
+Robert had after all. How the dreams of the boy had dwindled in settling
+down into the reality! He had his father, it was true, but what a
+father! And how little he had him!
+
+But this was not the end; and Robert always believed that the end must
+be the greater in proportion to the distance it was removed, to give
+time for its true fulfilment. And when he prayed aloud beside his
+father, I doubt not that his thanksgiving and his hope were equal.
+
+The prayer over, he took his father's hand and led him down again to the
+little parlour, and they took their seats again by the fire; and Robert
+began again and went on with his story, not omitting the parts belonging
+to Mary St. John and Eric Ericson.
+
+When he came to tell how he had encountered him in the deserted factory:
+
+'Luik here, father, here's the mark o' the cut,' he said, parting the
+thick hair on the top of his head.
+
+His father hid his face in his hands.
+
+'It wasna muckle o' a blow that ye gied me, father,' he went on, 'but
+I fell against the grate, and that was what did it. And I never tellt
+onybody, nae even Miss St. John, wha plaistered it up, hoo I had gotten
+'t. And I didna mean to say onything aboot it; but I wantit to tell ye a
+queer dream, sic a queer dream it garred me dream the same nicht.'
+
+As he told the dream, his father suddenly grew attentive, and before he
+had finished, looked almost scared; but he said nothing. When he came
+to relate his grandmother's behaviour after having discovered that the
+papers relating to the factory were gone, he hid his face in his hands
+once more. He told him how grannie had mourned and wept over him, from
+the time when he heard her praying aloud as he crept through her room
+at night to their last talk together after Dr. Anderson's death. He set
+forth, as he could, in the simplest language, the agony of her soul over
+her lost son. He told him then about Ericson, and Dr. Anderson, and how
+good they had been to him, and at last of Dr. Anderson's request that he
+would do something for him in India.
+
+'Will ye gang wi' me, father?' he asked.
+
+'I'll never leave ye again, Robert, my boy,' he answered. 'I have been
+a bad man, and a bad father, and now I gie mysel' up to you to mak the
+best o' me ye can. I daurna leave ye, Robert.'
+
+'Pray to God to tak care o' ye, father. He'll do a'thing for ye, gin
+ye'll only lat him.'
+
+'I will, Robert.'
+
+'I was mysel' dreidfu' miserable for a while,' Robert resumed, 'for I
+cudna see or hear God at a'; but God heard me, and loot me ken that he
+was there an' that a' was richt. It was jist like whan a bairnie waukens
+up an' cries oot, thinkin' it's its lane, an' through the mirk comes
+the word o' the mither o' 't, sayin', "I'm here, cratur: dinna greit."
+And I cam to believe 'at he wad mak you a good man at last. O father,
+it's been my dream waukin' an' sleepin' to hae you back to me an'
+grannie, an' mamma, an' the Father o' 's a', an' Jesus Christ that's
+done a'thing for 's. An' noo ye maun pray to God, father. Ye will pray
+to God to haud a grip o' ye--willna ye, father?'
+
+'I will, I will, Robert. But I've been an awfu' sinner. I believe I was
+the death o' yer mother, laddie.'
+
+Some closet of memory was opened; a spring of old tenderness gushed
+up in his heart; at some window of the past the face of his dead wife
+looked out: the old man broke into a great cry, and sobbed and wept
+bitterly. Robert said no more, but wept with him.
+
+Henceforward the father clung to his son like a child. The heart of
+Falconer turned to his Father in heaven with speechless thanksgiving.
+The ideal of his dreams was beginning to dawn, and his life was
+new-born.
+
+For a few days Robert took Andrew about to see those of his old friends
+who were left, and the kindness with which they all received him, moved
+Andrew's heart not a little. Every one who saw him seemed to feel that
+he or she had a share in the redeeming duty of the son. Robert was in
+their eyes like a heavenly messenger, whom they were bound to aid;
+for here was the possessed of demons clothed and in his right mind.
+Therefore they overwhelmed both father and son with kindness. Especially
+at John Lammie's was he received with a perfection of hospitality; as
+if that had been the father's house to which he had returned from his
+prodigal wanderings.
+
+The good old farmer begged that they would stay with him for a few days.
+
+'I hae sae mony wee things to luik efter at Rothieden, afore we gang,'
+said Robert.
+
+'Weel, lea' yer father here. We s' tak guid care o' 'im, I promise ye.'
+
+'There's only ae difficulty. I believe ye are my father's frien', Mr.
+Lammie, as ye hae been mine, and God bless ye; sae I'll jist tell you
+the trowth, what for I canna lea' him. I'm no sure eneuch yet that he
+could withstan' temptation. It's the drink ye ken. It's months sin' he's
+tasted it; but--ye ken weel eneuch--the temptation's awfu'. Sin' ever
+I got him back, I haena tasted ae mou'fu' o' onything that cud be ca'd
+strong drink mysel', an' as lang 's he lives, not ae drap shall cross my
+lips--no to save my life.'
+
+'Robert,' said Mr. Lammie, giving him his hand with solemnity, 'I sweir
+by God that he shanna see, smell, taste, nor touch drink in this hoose.
+There's but twa boatles o' whusky, i' the shape o' drink, i' the hoose;
+an' gin ye say 'at he sall bide, I'll gang and mak them an' the midden
+weel acquant.'
+
+Andrew was pleased at the proposal. Robert too was pleased that his
+father should be free of him for a while. It was arranged for three
+days. Half-an-hour after, Robert came upon Mr. Lammie emptying the two
+bottles of whisky into the dunghill in the farmyard.
+
+He returned with glad heart to Rothieden. It did not take him long to
+arrange his grandmother's little affairs. He had already made up his
+mind about her house and furniture. He rang the bell one morning for
+Betty.
+
+'Hae ye ony siller laid up, Betty?'
+
+'Ay. I hae feifteen poun' i' the savin's bank.'
+
+'An' what do ye think o' doin'?'
+
+'I'll get a bit roomy, an' tak in washin'.
+
+'Weel, I'll tell ye what I wad like ye to do. Ye ken Mistress
+Elshender?'
+
+'Fine that. An' a verra dacent body she is.'
+
+'Weel, gin ye like, ye can haud this hoose, an' a' 'at's in't, jist as
+it is, till the day o' yer deith. And ye'll aye keep it in order, an'
+the ga'le-room ready for me at ony time I may happen to come in upo'
+ye in want o' a nicht's quarters. But I wad like ye, gin ye hae nae
+objections, to tak Mistress Elshender to bide wi' ye. She's turnin' some
+frail noo, and I'm unner great obligation to her Sandy, ye ken.'
+
+'Ay, weel that. He learnt ye to fiddle, Robert--I hoombly beg your
+pardon, sir, Mister Robert.'
+
+'Nae offence, Betty, I assure ye. Ye hae been aye gude to me, and I
+thank ye hertily.'
+
+Betty could not stand this. Her apron went up to her eyes.
+
+'Eh, sir,' she sobbed, 'ye was aye a gude lad.'
+
+'Excep' whan I spak o' Muckledrum, Betty.'
+
+She laughed and sobbed together.
+
+'Weel, ye'll tak Mistress Elshender in, winna ye?'
+
+'I'll do that, sir. And I'll try to do my best wi' her.'
+
+'She can help ye, ye ken, wi' yer washin', an' sic like.'
+
+'She's a hard-workin' wuman, sir. She wad do that weel.'
+
+'And whan ye're in ony want o' siller, jist write to me. An' gin
+onything suld happen to me, ye ken, write to Mr. Gordon, a frien' o'
+mine. There's his address in Lonnon.'
+
+'Eh, sir, but ye are kin'. God bless ye for a'.'
+
+She could bear no more, and left the room crying.
+
+Everything settled at Rothieden, he returned to Bodyfauld. The most
+welcome greeting he had ever received in his life, lay in the shine
+of his father's eyes when he entered the room where he sat with Miss
+Lammie. The next day they left for London.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX. THE VANISHING.
+
+They came to see me the very evening of their arrival. As to Andrew's
+progress there could be no longer any doubt. All that was necessary for
+conviction on the point was to have seen him before and to see him now.
+The very grasp of his hand was changed. But not yet would Robert leave
+him alone.
+
+It will naturally occur to my reader that his goodness was not much yet.
+It was not. It may have been greater than we could be sure of, though.
+But if any one object that such a conversion, even if it were perfected,
+was poor, inasmuch as the man's free will was intromitted with, I
+answer: 'The development of the free will was the one object. Hitherto
+it was not free.' I ask the man who says so: 'Where would your free will
+have been if at some period of your life you could have had everything
+you wanted?' If he says it is nobler in a man to do with less help,
+I answer, 'Andrew was not noble: was he therefore to be forsaken? The
+prodigal was not left without the help of the swine and their husks, at
+once to keep him alive and disgust him with the life. Is the less help
+a man has from God the better?' According to you, the grandest thing of
+all would be for a man sunk in the absolute abysses of sensuality all at
+once to resolve to be pure as the empyrean, and be so, without help from
+God or man. But is the thing possible? As well might a hyena say: I will
+be a man, and become one. That would be to create. Andrew must be kept
+from the evil long enough to let him at least see the good, before he
+was let alone. But when would we be let alone? For a man to be fit to be
+let alone, is for a man not to need God, but to be able to live without
+him. Our hearts cry out, 'To have God is to live. We want God. Without
+him no life of ours is worth living. We are not then even human, for
+that is but the lower form of the divine. We are immortal, eternal: fill
+us, O Father, with thyself. Then only all is well.' More: I heartily
+believe, though I cannot understand the boundaries of will and
+inspiration, that what God will do for us at last is infinitely beyond
+any greatness we could gain, even if we could will ourselves from the
+lowest we could be, into the highest we can imagine. It is essential
+divine life we want; and there is grand truth, however incomplete or
+perverted, in the aspiration of the Brahmin. He is wrong, but he wants
+something right. If the man had the power in his pollution to will
+himself into the right without God, the fact that he was in that
+pollution with such power, must damn him there for ever. And if God must
+help ere a man can be saved, can the help of man go too far towards the
+same end? Let God solve the mystery--for he made it. One thing is sure:
+We are his, and he will do his part, which is no part but the all in
+all. If man could do what in his wildest self-worship he can imagine,
+the grand result would be that he would be his own God, which is the
+Hell of Hells.
+
+For some time I had to give Falconer what aid I could in being with his
+father while he arranged matters in prospect of their voyage to India.
+Sometimes he took him with him when he went amongst his people, as he
+called the poor he visited. Sometimes, when he wanted to go alone, I
+had to take him to Miss St. John, who would play and sing as I had never
+heard any one play or sing before. Andrew on such occasions carried his
+flute with him, and the result of the two was something exquisite. How
+Miss St. John did lay herself out to please the old man! And pleased he
+was. I think her kindness did more than anything else to make him feel
+like a gentleman again. And in his condition that was much.
+
+At length Falconer would sometimes leave him with Miss St. John, till
+he or I should go for him: he knew she could keep him safe. He knew that
+she would keep him if necessary.
+
+One evening when I went to see Falconer, I found him alone. It was one
+of these occasions.
+
+'I am very glad you have come, Gordon,' he said. 'I was wanting to see
+you. I have got things nearly ready now. Next month, or at latest, the
+one after, we shall sail; and I have some business with you which had
+better be arranged at once. No one knows what is going to happen. The
+man who believes the least in chance knows as little as the man who
+believes in it the most. My will is in the hands of Dobson. I have left
+you everything.'
+
+I was dumb.
+
+'Have you any objection?' he said, a little anxiously.
+
+'Am I able to fulfil the conditions?' I faltered.
+
+'I have burdened you with no conditions,' he returned. 'I don't believe
+in conditions. I know your heart and mind now. I trust you perfectly.'
+
+'I am unworthy of it.'
+
+'That is for me to judge.'
+
+'Will you have no trustees?'
+
+'Not one.'
+
+'What do you want me to do with your property?'
+
+'You know well enough. Keep it going the right way.'
+
+'I will always think what you would like.'
+
+'No; do not. Think what is right; and where there is no right or wrong
+plain in itself, then think what is best. You may see good reason to
+change some of my plans. You may be wrong; but you must do what you see
+right--not what I see or might see right.'
+
+'But there is no need to talk so seriously about it,' I said. 'You will
+manage it yourself for many years yet. Make me your steward, if you
+like, during your absence: I will not object to that.'
+
+'You do not object to the other, I hope?'
+
+'No.'
+
+'Then so let it be. The other, of course. I have, being a lawyer myself,
+taken good care not to trust myself only with the arranging of these
+matters. I think you will find them all right.'
+
+'But supposing you should not return--you have compelled me to make the
+supposition--'
+
+'Of course. Go on.'
+
+'What am I to do with the money in the prospect of following you?'
+
+'Ah! that is the one point on which I want a word, although I do not
+think it is necessary. I want to entail the property.'
+
+'How?'
+
+'By word of mouth,' he answered, laughing. 'You must look out for a
+right man, as I have done, get him to know your ways and ideas, and if
+you find him worthy--that is a grand wide word--our Lord gave it to his
+disciples--leave it all to him in the same way I have left it to you,
+trusting to the spirit of truth that is in him, the spirit of God. You
+can copy my will--as far as it will apply, for you may have, one way or
+another, lost the half of it by that time. But, by word of mouth, you
+must make the same condition with him as I have made with you--that is,
+with regard to his leaving it, and the conditions on which he leaves it,
+adding the words, "that it may descend thus in perpetuum." And he must
+do the same.'
+
+He broke into a quiet laugh. I knew well enough what he meant. But he
+added:
+
+'That means, of course, for as long as there is any.'
+
+'Are you sure you are doing right, Falconer?' I said.
+
+'Quite. It is better to endow one man, who will work as the Father
+works, than a hundred charities. But it is time I went to fetch my
+father. Will you go with me?'
+
+This was all that passed between us on the subject, save that, on our
+way, he told me to move to his rooms, and occupy them until he returned.
+
+'My papers,' he added, 'I commit to your discretion.'
+
+On our way back from Queen Square, he joked and talked merrily. Andrew
+joined in. Robert showed himself delighted with every attempt at gaiety
+or wit that Andrew made. When we reached the house, something that had
+occurred on the way made him turn to Martin Chuzzlewit, and he read Mrs.
+Gamp's best to our great enjoyment.
+
+I went down with the two to Southampton, to see them on board the
+steamer. I staid with them there until she sailed. It was a lovely
+morning in the end of April, when at last I bade them farewell on the
+quarter-deck. My heart was full. I took his hand and kissed it. He put
+his arms round me, and laid his cheek to mine. I was strong to bear the
+parting.
+
+The great iron steamer went down in the middle of the Atlantic, and I
+have not yet seen my friend again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI. IN EXPECTATIONE.
+
+I had left my lodging and gone to occupy Falconer's till his return.
+There, on a side-table among other papers, I found the following
+verses. The manuscript was much scored and interlined, but more than
+decipherable, for he always wrote plainly. I copied them out fair, and
+here they are for the reader that loves him.
+
+     Twilight is near, and the day grows old;
+       The spiders of care are weaving their net;
+     All night 'twill be blowing and rainy and cold;
+       I cower at his door from the wind and wet.
+
+     He sent me out the world to see,
+       Drest for the road in a garment new;
+     It is clotted with clay, and worn beggarly--
+       The porter will hardly let me through!
+
+     I bring in my hand a few dusty ears--
+       Once I thought them a tribute meet!
+     I bring in my heart a few unshed tears:
+       Which is my harvest--the pain or the wheat?
+
+     A broken man, at the door of his hall
+       I listen, and hear it go merry within;
+     The sounds are of birthday-festival!
+       Hark to the trumpet! the violin!
+
+     I know the bench where the shadowed folk
+       Sit 'neath the music-loft--there none upbraids!
+     They will make me room who bear the same yoke,
+       Dear publicans, sinners, and foolish maids!
+
+     An ear has been hearing my heart forlorn!
+       A step comes soft through the dancing-din!
+     Oh Love eternal! oh woman-born!
+       Son of my Father to take me in!
+
+     One moment, low at our Father's feet
+       Loving I lie in a self-lost trance;
+     Then walk away to the sinners' seat,
+       With them, at midnight, to rise and dance!
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: In Scotch the ch and gh are almost always guttural. The gh according
+to Mr. Alexander Ellis, the sole authority in the past pronunciation of
+the country, was guttural in England in the time of Shakspere.]
+
+[Footnote 2: An exclamation of pitiful sympathy, inexplicable to the understanding.
+Thus the author covers his philological ignorance of the cross-breeding
+of the phrase.]
+
+[Footnote 3: Extra--over all--ower a'--orra--one more than is wanted.]
+
+[Footnote 4: Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur. Atque animum nunc huc celerem, nunc dividit
+illuc. AEneid: IV. 285]
+
+[Footnote 5: This line is one of many instances in which my reader will see both
+the carelessness of Ericson and my religion towards his remains.]
+
+[Footnote 6: Why should Sir Walter Scott, who felt the death of Camp, his
+bullterrier, so much that he declined a dinner engagement in
+consequence, say on the death of his next favourite, a grayhound
+bitch--'Rest her body, since I dare not say soul!'? Where did he
+get that dare not? Is it well that the daring of genius should be
+circumscribed by an unbelief so common-place as to be capable only of
+subscription?]
+
+[Footnote 7: Amongst Ericson's papers I find the following sonnets, which belong to
+the mood here embodied:
+
+       Oft, as I rest in quiet peace, am I
+     Thrust out at sudden doors, and madly driven
+     Through desert solitudes, and thunder-riven
+     Black passages which have not any sky.
+     The scourge is on me now, with all the cry
+     Of ancient life that hath with murder striven.
+     How many an anguish hath gone up to heaven!
+     How many a hand in prayer been lifted high
+     When the black fate came onward with the rush
+     Of whirlwind, avalanche, or fiery spume!
+     Even at my feet is cleft a shivering tomb
+     Beneath the waves; or else with solemn hush
+     The graveyard opens, and I feel a crush
+     As if we were all huddled in one doom.
+
+       Comes there, O Earth, no breathing time for thee?
+     No pause upon thy many-chequered lands?
+     Now resting on my bed with listless hands,
+     I mourn thee resting not.  Continually
+     Hear I the plashing borders of the sea
+     Answer each other from the rocks and sands.
+     Troop all the rivers seawards; nothing stands,
+     But with strange noises hasteth terribly.
+     Loam-eared hyenas go a moaning by.
+     Howls to each other all the bloody crew
+     Of Afric's tigers.  But, O men, from you
+     Comes this perpetual sound more loud and high
+     Than aught that vexes air.  I hear the cry
+     Of infant generations rising too.]
+
+[Footnote 8: This sonnet and the preceding are both one line deficient.]
+
+[Footnote 9: To these two sonnets Falconer had appended this note:
+'Something I wrote to Ericson concerning these, during my first college
+vacation, produced a reply of which the following is a passage: "On
+writing the first I was not aware that James and John were the Sons
+of Thunder. For a time it did indeed grieve me to think of the
+spiritual-minded John as otherwise than a still and passionless lover of
+Christ."']
+
+
+
+Note from John Bechard, creator of this Electronic text.
+
+The following is a list of Scottish words which are found in George
+MacDonald's "Robert Falconer". I have compiled this list myself and
+worked out the definitions from context with the help of Margaret West,
+from Leven in Fife, Scotland, and also by referring to a word list
+found in a collection of poems by Robert Burns, "Chamber's Scots
+Dialect Dictionary from the 17th century to the Present" c. 1911 and
+"Scots-English English-Scots Dictionary" Lomond Books c. 1998. I have
+tried to be as thorough as possible given the limited resources and
+welcome any feedback on this list which may be wrong (my e-mail address
+is JaBBechard@aol.com). This was never meant to be a comprehensive list
+of the National Scottish Language, but rather an aid to understanding
+some of the conversations and references in this text in the Broad
+Scots. I do apologise for any mistakes or omissions. I aimed for my list
+to be very comprehensive, and it often repeats the same word in a plural
+or diminutive form. As well, it includes words that are quite obvious to
+native English speakers, only spelled in such a way to demonstrate the
+regional pronunciation.
+
+This list is a compressed form that consists of three columns for
+'word', 'definition', and 'additional notes'. It is set up with a comma
+between each item and a hard return at the end of each definition. This
+means that this section could easily be cut and pasted into its own text
+file and imported into a database or spreadsheet as a comma separated
+variable file (.csv file). Failing that, you could do a search and
+replace for commas in this section (I have not used any commas in my
+words, definitions or notes) and replace the commas with spaces or tabs.
+
+
+
+
+Glossary:
+
+     Word,Definition,Notes
+
+     a',all; every,also have
+     a' gait,everywhere,
+     a' thing,everything; anything,
+     abeelity,ability,
+     abettin',abetting,
+     a'body,everyone; everybody,
+     aboon,above; up; over,
+     aboord,aboard,
+     aboot,about,
+     aboot it an' aboot it,all about,
+     abune,above; up; over,
+     accep's,accepts,
+     accoont,account,
+     accoonts,accounts,
+     accordin',according,
+     acquant,acquainted,
+     a'-creatin',all-creating,
+     ae,one,
+     aff,off; away; past; beyond,
+     aff-gang,outlet,
+     afflickit,afflicted,
+     affoord,afford,
+     affront,affront; disgrace; shame,
+     affrontet,affronted; disgraced,also ashamed; shamed
+     afit,afoot; on foot,
+     afore,before; in front of,
+     aforehan',beforehand,
+     aften,often,
+     aftener,more often,
+     agen,against,
+     aheid,ahead,
+     ahin',behind; after; at the back of,
+     ahint,behind; after; at the back of,
+     aiblins,perhaps; possibly,
+     aidin',aiding,
+     ailin',ailing; sick,
+     ain,own,also one
+     airin',airing,
+     airm,arm,
+     airm-cheir,armchair,
+     airms,arms,also coat of arms; crest
+     airmy,army,
+     airth,earth,
+     aise,ashes,
+     ait,eat,
+     aither,either,
+     aiths,oaths,
+     aitin',eating,
+     aits,oats,
+     alane,alone,
+     alang,along,
+     Algerine,Algerian,
+     alloo,allow,
+     allooed,allowed,
+     Almichty,Almighty; God,
+     amaist,almost,
+     amang,among; in; together with,
+     amen's,amends,
+     amo',among,
+     amuntit,amounted,
+     an',and,
+     ance,once,
+     ane,one,also a single person or thing
+     aneath,beneath; under,
+     anent,opposite to; in front of,also concerning
+     Anerew,Andrew,
+     anes,ones,
+     angert,angered; angry,also grieved
+     anither,another,
+     answerin',answering,
+     answert,answered,
+     a'ready,already,
+     aricht,aright,
+     aside,beside,also aside
+     aspirin',aspiring,
+     astarn,astern,
+     'at,that,
+     ate,hate,also eat
+     a'thegither,all together,
+     a'thing,everything; anything,
+     'at's,that is; that has,
+     attreebuted,attributed,
+     atweel,indeed; truely; of course,
+     atween,between,
+     aucht,eight; eighth,also ought; own; possess
+     aul',old,
+     auld,old,
+     aulder,older,
+     aumrie,cupboard; pantry; store-closet,
+     aumry,cupboard; pantry; store-closet,
+     a'-uphaudin',all-upholding; all-supporting,
+     ava,at all; of all,exclamation of banter; ridicule
+     awa,away; distant,also off; go away
+     awa',away; distant,also off; go away
+     awaur,aware,
+     Awbrahawm,Abraham,
+     aweel,ah well; well then; well,
+     awfu',awful,
+     awpron,apron,
+     ay,yes; indeed,exclamation of surprise; wonder
+     aye,yes; indeed,
+     ayont,beyond; after,
+     bade,did bide,
+     badena,did not bide,
+     bagonet,bayonet,
+     bailey,civic dignitary; magistrate,
+     bairn,child,
+     bairnie,little child,diminutive
+     bairns,children,
+     baith,both,
+     bakehoose,bakery,
+     baneless,insipid; without pith,
+     banes,bones,
+     barfut,barefoot,
+     barrin',barring,
+     barrowfu',wheelbarrow full,
+     baubee,halfpenny,
+     baubees,halfpennies,
+     bauchles,old pair of shoes,also shoes down at the heel
+     baukie,bat,
+     beggit,begged,
+     beginnin',beginning,
+     begud,began,
+     behaud,withhold; wait; delay,also behold
+     behavin',behaving,
+     bein',being,
+     beir,bear,
+     beirer,bearer,
+     beirs,bears,
+     bejan,first year's student,at a Scottish university
+     belangs,belongs,
+     believin',believing,
+     ben' leather,thick leather for soling boots/shoes,
+     bena,be not; is not,
+     bend-leather,thick leather for soling boots/shoes,
+     benn,in; inside; into; within; inwards,also inner room
+     benn the hoose,in/into the parlour,best room of the house
+     beowty,beauty,
+     beuks,books,
+     beyon',beyond,
+     bide,endure; bear; remain; live,also desire; wish
+     bides,endures; bears; remains; lives,also stays for
+     biggit,built,
+     bilin',boiling,also the whole quantity
+     bin',bind,
+     binna,be not,
+     birse,bristle; hair; plume of hair,
+     bit,but; bit,also small; little--diminutive
+     bitch,,term of contempt usually applied to a man
+     bitin',biting,
+     bittie,little bit,diminutive
+     bittock,a little bit; a short distance,
+     blaeberries,blueberries,
+     blastit,blasted,
+     blate,over-modest; bashful; shy,
+     blaud,spoil; injure; soil,
+     blaudit,spoiled; injured; soiled,
+     blaw,blow,
+     blecks,nonplusses; perplexes; beats,
+     blessin',blessing,
+     blether,talk nonsense; babble; boast,
+     bletherin',talking nonsense; babbling; boasting,
+     blethers,talks nonsense; babbles; boasts,nonsense; foolish talk
+     blin',blind,
+     blink,take a hasty glance; ogle,also shine; gleam; twinkle; glimmer
+     blinner,blinder,
+     blude,blood,
+     bluidy,bloody,
+     boasom,bosom,
+     boatles,bottles,
+     boddom,bottom,
+     body,person; fellow,also body
+     boglet,bamboozled; terrified,
+     bonnet,man's cap,
+     bonnetfu',bonnetful; capful,
+     bonnets,man's caps,
+     bonnie,good; beautiful; pretty; handsome,
+     bonniest,best; most beautiful; prettiest,also considerable
+     bonny,good; beautiful; pretty; handsome,
+     boodie,ghost; hobgoblin,
+     booin',bowing,
+     bools,marbles,
+     boon',bound,
+     boord,board (i.e. room and board),
+     bothie,cottage in common for farm-servants,
+     boucht,bought,
+     bourach,heap; cluster; mound,
+     bowat,stable-lantern,
+     bowie,small barrel or cask,
+     boxie,little box,diminutive
+     brae,hill; hillside; high ground by a river,
+     braid,broad; having a strong accent,
+     brak,break,
+     brakfast,breakfast,
+     brat,child,term of contempt
+     braw,beautiful; good; fine,also lovely (girl); handsome (boy)
+     brawly,admirably; very; very much; well,
+     breedth,breadth,
+     breeks,breeches; trousers,
+     breid,bread,
+     breist,breast,
+     breists,breasts,
+     breith,breath,
+     breme-bush,broom-bush,also simpleton
+     brewin',brewing,
+     brig,bridge,
+     brither,brother,
+     brithers,brothers; fellows,
+     brithren,brethren; brothers,
+     brocht,brought,
+     broo,brow; eyebrow,
+     broucht,brought,
+     browst,brewage; booze,also the consequences of one's own acts
+     bruik,broke,
+     brunt,burned,
+     bude,would prefer to; behoved,also must; had to
+     budena,must not; could not; might not,
+     buff,nonsense,
+     buik,book,also Bible
+     buiks,books,
+     bund,bound,
+     burd alane,quite alone,also the only surviving child of a family
+     burn,water; stream; brook,
+     burnin',burning,
+     burnside,along the side of a stream,
+     buss,bush; shrub; thicket,
+     butes,boots,
+     butt,main room in a croft; outside,includes kitchen and storage
+     butt the hoose,into the house; into the kitchen,
+     by ordinar,out of the ordinary; supernatural,also unusual
+     by ordinar',out of the ordinary; supernatural,also unusual
+     by-ordinar,out of the ordinary; supernatural,also unusual
+     byous,exceedingly; extraordinary; very,
+     ca,drive; impel; hammer,
+     ca',call; name,
+     ca'd,called,
+     cadger,carrier; pedlar,
+     ca'in',calling,
+     cairds,cards,
+     cairriage,carriage,
+     cairriet,carried,
+     cairry,carry,
+     cairryin',carrying,
+     calfie,little calf,diminutive
+     callant,stripling; lad,term of affection
+     cam,came,
+     cam',came,
+     camna,did not come,
+     camstairie,unmanageable; wild; obstinate,
+     camstairy,unmanageable; wild; obstinate,
+     camstary,unmanageable; wild; obstinate,
+     can'le,candle,
+     canna,cannot,also cotton-grass
+     canny,cautious; prudent; shrewd; artful,
+     cap,wooden cup or bowl,
+     capt'n,captain,
+     carena,do not care,
+     carldoddies,stalks of rib-grass,also term of endearment
+     carritchis,catechism,
+     ca's,calls,
+     cast up,taunt; reproach,
+     catchin',catching,
+     cattle,lice; fleas,used contemptuously of persons
+     cauld,cold,
+     caure,calves,
+     'cause,because,
+     caw,drive; impel; hammer,
+     cawed,driven; impeled; hammered,
+     cawin',driving; impeling; hammering,
+     ceevil,civil,
+     'cep',except; but,
+     chackit,checkered,
+     chairge,charge,
+     chap,knock; hammer; strike; rap,
+     chappit,knocked; hammered; struck; rapped,
+     chaps,knocks; hammers; strikes; raps,
+     chaumer,chamber; room; bedroom,
+     cheep,chirp; creak; hint; word,
+     cheerman,chairman,
+     chessel,tub for pressing cheese,
+     chice,choice,
+     chiel',child; young person; fellow,term of fondness or intimacy
+     chield,child; young person; fellow,term of fondness or intimacy
+     chimla-lug,fireside,
+     chits,sweetbreads,
+     chop,shop; store,
+     circumspec',circumspect,
+     claes,clothes; dress,
+     claikin',clucking (like a hen),also talk much in a trivial way
+     claith,cloth,
+     clams,vice or pincers,used by saddlers and shoemakers
+     clap,press down; pat; fondle,
+     clashes,blows; slaps; messes,also gossip; tittle-tattle
+     clash-pyet,tell-tale; scandal-monger,
+     clean,altogether; entirely,also comely; shapely; empty; clean
+     cleant,cleaned,
+     clear-e'ed,clear-eyed,
+     cleed,clothe; shelter,
+     cleedin',clothing; sheltering,
+     cleuks,claws; hands; paws,
+     clo'en,cloven,
+     clomb,climbed,
+     clood,cloud,
+     cloods,clouds,
+     cloody,cloudy,
+     close,narrow alley; blind alley,also enclosed land
+     closin',closing,
+     clype,tell tales; gossip,
+     coaties,children's coats; petticoats,
+     coaton,cotton,
+     coats,petticoats,
+     coch,coach,
+     coches,coaches,
+     coff,buy,
+     colliginer,college student,also college boy
+     Come yer wa's butt.,Come on in.,
+     comin',coming,
+     comman'ment,commandment,
+     compleen,complain,
+     con thanks,return thanks,
+     considerin',considering,
+     contradickit,contradicted,
+     contrairy,contrary,
+     contred,contradicted; thwarted; crossed,
+     convence,convince,
+     conversin',conversing,
+     convertit,converted,
+     coorse,coarse,also course
+     coort,court,
+     corbie,crow; raven,
+     cornel,colonel,
+     correck,correct,
+     cottar,farm tenant; cottager,
+     cottars,farm tenants; cottagers,
+     cottar-wark,stipulated work done by the cottager,
+     couldna,could not,
+     coupit,tilted; tumbled; drank off,
+     couples,rafters,
+     crackin',cracking,
+     cracklin',crackling,
+     crap o' the wa',natural shelf between wall and roof,
+     crappit,topped; cropped; lopped,
+     crappit heids,stuffed head of cod or haddock,
+     crater,creature,
+     cratur,creature,
+     craturs,creatures,
+     cried,called; summoned,
+     crookit,crooked,
+     croon,crown,
+     croudin',cooing; croaking; groaning,
+     Cry Moany,Cremona,make of violin
+     cryin',calling; summoning,
+     cryin' doon,decrying; depreciating,
+     cud,could,
+     cudna,could not,
+     culd,could,
+     cumber,encumbrance; inconvenience,
+     cunnin',cunning,
+     curst,cursed,
+     cuttin',cutting,
+     cutty pipe,short tobacco-pipe,
+     cwytes,petticoats,
+     dacent,decent,
+     dame,young unmarried woman; damsel,also farmer's wife
+     damnin',damning; condemning,
+     dancin',dancing,
+     dang,knock; bang; drive,also damn
+     darnin',darning,
+     dauchter,daughter,
+     daunerin',strolling; sauntering; ambling,
+     daur,dare; challenge,
+     daured,dared; challenged,
+     daurna,dare not; do not dare,
+     daursay,dare say,
+     dauty,darling; pet,term of endearment
+     dawtie,darling; pet,term of endearment
+     daylicht,daylight,
+     debosh,excessive indulgence; debauch,also extravagance; waste
+     deboshed,debauched; worthless,
+     deceitfu',deceitful,
+     deceivin',deceiving,
+     dee,do,also die
+     deed,died,also deed; indeed
+     'deed,indeed,
+     dee'd,died,
+     deein',doing,also dying
+     deevil,devil,
+     deevil-ma'-care,devil-may-care; utterly careless,also no matter
+     deevilry,devilry,
+     deevils,devils,
+     deid,dead,
+     deif,deaf,
+     deil,devil,also not
+     de'il,devil,also not
+     De'il a bit!,Not at all!  Not a bit!,
+     deith,death,
+     deleeberately,deliberately,
+     dementit,demented; mad; crazy,
+     denner,dinner,
+     desertit,deserted,
+     desperate,exceedingly; beyond measure,also irreclaimable; very bad
+     didna,did not,
+     differ,difference; dissent,also differ
+     dingin',overcoming; wearying; vexing,also raining/snowing heavily
+     dinna,do not,
+     direckly,directly; immediately,
+     dirt,worthless persons or things,term of contempt
+     dishcloot,cloth for washing dishes,
+     disna,does not,
+     disoun,disown,
+     distinckly,distinctly,
+     div,do,
+     divots,thin flat pieces of sod,
+     dochter,daughter,
+     doesna,does not,
+     doin',doing,
+     doin's,doings,
+     doited,foolish; stupefied; crazy,
+     dominie,minister; schoolmaster,slightly contemptuous
+     dooble,double; duplicate,also double dealing; devious
+     dooble-sole,double-sole,
+     doobt,suspect; know; doubt,have an unpleasant conviction
+     doobtin',suspecting; knowing,also doubting
+     doobtless,doubtless,
+     doobts,suspects; knows,also doubts
+     dooce,gentle; sensible; sober; prudent,
+     dooms,extremely; exceedingly; very,
+     doon,down,
+     doonricht,downright,
+     door-cheek,door-post; threshold; doorway,
+     door-stane,flagstone at the threshold of a door,
+     dother,daughter,
+     dottled,crazy; in dotage,
+     douce,gentle; sensible; sober; prudent,
+     dowie,sad; lonely; depressing; dismal,also ailing
+     draigon,dragon; also boy's paper kite,reference to Revelation 12-13
+     draigons,dragons,also boys' paper kites
+     dram,glass of whisky,
+     drap,drop; small quantity of,
+     drap i' the hoose,presence of someone unknown,
+     drappit,dropped,
+     drappy,little drop; a little (liquor),diminutive
+     drauchts,plans; schemes; policies,also lineaments of the face
+     drave,drove,
+     drawin',drawing,
+     dreadfu',dreadful,
+     dreamin',dreaming,
+     drear,dreary; dreariness; tedium,
+     dreidfu',dreadful; dreadfully,
+     drift,snow driven by the wind,
+     driftin',drifting,snow driven by the wind
+     drinkin',drinking,
+     drivin',driving,
+     droont,drowned,
+     drucken,drunken; tipsy,
+     drum-heid,drum head,
+     drunken,drank; drunk,
+     du,do,
+     duin',doing,
+     dumfoundered,perplexed; stunned; amazed,
+     dune,done,
+     dunna,do not,
+     duv,do,
+     duvna,do not,
+     dwalls,dwells,
+     d'ye,do you,
+     dyke,wall of stone or turf,
+     eaves-drapper,eavesdropper,
+     Ebberdeen,Aberdeen,
+     ee,eye,
+     een,eyes,
+     e'en,even; just; simply; equal,also eyes; evening
+     efter,after; afterwards,
+     efterhin,after; afterwards,
+     efternune,afternoon,
+     eident,industrious; diligent; steady,
+     elbuck,elbow,
+     eleckit,elected,chosen by God for salvation (Calvinism)
+     ellwand,ell-wand; ruler; yardstick,1 ell = 37 inches or 94 cm
+     en',end,
+     endit,ended,
+     eneuch,enough,
+     Englan',England,
+     enjoyin',enjoying,
+     eppiteet,appetite,
+     er,ere; before,
+     er',ere; before,
+     Erse,Irish; Gaelic,
+     etairnity,eternity,
+     ewie,young ewe,
+     exackly,exactly,
+     excep',except,
+     expairience,experience,
+     expeckin',expecting,
+     expecs,expects,
+     eyther,either,
+     fa',fall; befall,
+     fac',fact; truth; reality,
+     fac's,facts; truths; realities,
+     factor,manager of a landed property,lets farms; collects rents
+     fact'ry,factory,
+     faddom,fathom,
+     fa'en,fallen,
+     failin',failing,
+     faimilies,families,
+     faimily,family,
+     fain,eager; anxious; fond,also fondly; gladly
+     fa'in',falling,
+     fairmy,little farm,diminutive
+     Faith!,Indeed!; Truly!,exclamation
+     fallow,fellow; chap,
+     fan',found,also felt
+     fand,found,
+     farrer,farther,
+     fash,trouble; inconvenience; vex,
+     faun't,found,
+     faured,favoured; featured,
+     faut,fault; blame,
+     fau'ts,faults,
+     feared,afraid; frightened; scared,
+     fearfu',fearful; easily frightened,
+     fearsome,terrifying; fearful; awful,
+     feart,afraid; frightened; scared,
+     feelin',feeling,
+     fegs!,truly!; really!; goodness!,mild oath; exclamation of surprise
+     feifteen,fifteen,
+     fell,very; potent; keen; harsh; sharp,intensifies; also turf
+     feow,few,
+     ferlie,wonder; novelty; curiosity,
+     fess,fetch; bring,
+     fest,fast,
+     festen,fasten; bind,
+     fiddlin',fiddling,
+     fin',find,also feel
+     fir-can'le,a torch; 'firwood' used as a candle,
+     fishin',fishing,
+     fit,foot; base,also fit; capable; able
+     flax,flax; wick,
+     flech,flea,
+     fleys,terrifies; frightens,
+     fleyt,terrified; frightened,
+     flingin',kicking; throwing,
+     flittin',shifting; removing; departing,
+     flooers,flowers,
+     flure,floor,
+     flurin',flooring,
+     forby,as well; as well as; besides,also over and above
+     forbye,as well; as well as; besides,also over and above
+     foresicht,foresight,
+     foret,forward,
+     forgather,assemble; encounter,also meet for a special purpose
+     forgathert,assembled; encountered,also met for a special purpose
+     forgettin',forgetting,
+     forgie,forgive,
+     forgien,forgiven,
+     fortnicht,fortnight; two weeks,
+     fou,full; well-fed,
+     fouchten,fought,
+     fower-hoors,four o'clock tea,
+     fowk,folk,
+     frae,from,
+     freely,quite; very; thoroughly,
+     freits,superstitions; charms,also superstitious fancies
+     fremt,stranger,also strange; foreign
+     fren',friend,
+     fricht,frighten; scare away,also fright
+     frichtit,frightened; scared away,
+     frichtsome,frightful,
+     frien',friend,
+     frien's,friends,
+     frien'ship,friendship,
+     fu',full; very; much,
+     fule,fool,
+     fummles,fumbles,
+     fun',found,
+     fun-buss,whin-bush,
+     fund,found,
+     furbye,as well; as well as; besides,also over and above
+     fushionless,pithless; tasteless; feeble,
+     fut,foot,
+     gae,gave,
+     gaed,went,
+     gaein',going,
+     gae's,gave us; gave his,
+     gaird,guard; watch,
+     gait,way; fashion,also route; street
+     gaither,gather,
+     ga'le,gable,
+     gane,gone,
+     gang,go; goes; depart; walk,
+     gang yer wa's,go on,
+     gangs,goes; walks,
+     gar,cause; make; compel,
+     garred,made; caused; compelled,
+     garrin',making; causing; compelling,
+     gars,makes; causes; compels,
+     gart,made; caused; compelled,
+     gar't,make it; cause it; compel it,
+     gate,way; route,also method; fashion; habit
+     gatherin',gathering,
+     gaun,going,
+     'gen,by; in time for; whether,
+     German Ocean,,old reference to the English Channel & North Sea
+     gether,gather,
+     gettin',getting,
+     gey,fairly; considerably,also considerable
+     gi',give,
+     gie,give,
+     gie a lift,give a helping hand,
+     gied,gave,
+     giein',giving,
+     gien,if; as if; then; whether,also given
+     gi'en,given,
+     giena,do not give,
+     gies,gives,
+     gie's,gives; give us; give his,
+     gill,tipple; drink,
+     gin,if; as if; then; whether,
+     gird,hoop for a barrel or tub,
+     girn,grimace; snarl; twist the features,
+     glaid,glad,
+     glaidly,gladly,
+     glaiss,glass,
+     gleds,kites; buzzards,
+     gleg,quick; lively; smart; quick-witted,
+     Glendronach,particular brand of whisky,
+     glimmerin',glimmering,
+     gloamin',twilight; dusk,
+     gloggie,insipid; artificial; unnatural,
+     glowered,stared; gazed; scowled,
+     goin',going,
+     goon,gown,
+     goul,howl; yell; whine,
+     gowd,gold,
+     gowk,cuckoo; fool; blockhead,
+     gran',grand; capital; first-rate,
+     grandmither,grandmother,
+     gran'father,grandfather,
+     gran'mither,grandmother,
+     grat,cried; wept,
+     gravestane,gravestone; tombstone; headstone,
+     greet,cry; weep,
+     greetin',crying; weeping,
+     greit,cry; weep,
+     greitin',crying; weeping,
+     greits,cries; weeps,
+     grew,greyhound,
+     grip,grasp; understand,also hold
+     grips,grasps; understands,seizures; colic
+     growin',growing,
+     grun',ground,
+     grup,grip; grasp,
+     grups,grips; grasp,
+     grutten,cried; wept,
+     gude,good,also God
+     gude-bye,goodbye,
+     gude-hertit,good-hearted,
+     gudeness,goodness,
+     guid,good,also God
+     guide,treat; handle; look after; save; keep,
+     Guidsake!,For God's sake!,
+     ha',have,also hall; house
+     haddie,haddock,
+     hadna,had not,
+     hae,have; has,also here
+     ha'e,have,also here
+     haein',having,
+     haena,have not,
+     hae't,have it,
+     haill,whole,
+     hairm,harm,
+     hairps,harps,
+     hairst,harvest,
+     hairst-play,school holidays during harvest,
+     Haith!,Faith!,exclamation of surprise
+     haithen,heathen,
+     haiven,heaven,
+     halesome,wholesome; pure,
+     half-dizzen,half-dozen,
+     half-stervit,half-starved,
+     hame,home,
+     han',hand,
+     han'fu',handful,
+     hangin',hanging,
+     hangt,hanged,
+     hang't,hanged,
+     han'le,handle,
+     han'led,handled; treated,
+     han'let,handled,
+     han's,hands,
+     hantle,much; large quantity; far,
+     hard,heard,also hard
+     hash,mess; muddle,
+     hasna,does not have,
+     haud,hold; keep,
+     hauden,held; kept,
+     haudin',holding; keeping,
+     hauld,hold,
+     haveless,careless (therefore helpless),also wasteful; incompetent
+     haven,heaven,
+     haverin',talking incoherently; babbling,
+     havers,nonsense; foolish talk; babble,
+     hay-sow,long oblong stack of hay,shaped like a sow
+     he that will to Cupar maun to Cupar,a wilful man must have his way,
+     heap,very much,also heap
+     heardna,did not hear,
+     hearin',hearing,
+     hearken,hearken; hear; listen,
+     hearkened,hearkened; heard; listened,
+     hearkenin',hearkening; listening,
+     hearkent,hearkened; heard; listened,
+     Hecklebirnie,Hell,
+     hecklet,cross-questioned; examined,
+     hed,had,also hid
+     heepocreet,hypocrite,
+     heicht,height,
+     heid,head; heading,
+     heids,heads; headings,
+     helpin',helping,
+     helpit,helped,
+     her lane,on her own,
+     hersel',herself,
+     hert,heart,
+     hertily,heartily,
+     herts,hearts,
+     het,hot; burning,
+     hev,have,
+     Hielan',Highland,
+     Hielan'man,Highland man,
+     hillo,,a call to attract attention
+     him lane,on his own,
+     himsel',himself,
+     hinder,hinder; hind; latter,
+     hine,away; afar; to a distance,
+     hing,hang,
+     hingin',hanging,
+     hings,hangs,
+     hinnerance,hinderance,
+     hinney,honey,
+     hintit,hinted,
+     hips,borders of a district,
+     hiz,us,emphatic
+     hizzies,hussies; silly girls,
+     hoo,how,
+     hooever,however,
+     hooly,slowly; cautiously; gently,also 'take your time'
+     hoomble,humble,
+     hoombly,humbly,
+     hoor,hour,
+     hoo's,how is,
+     hoose,house,
+     hooses,houses,
+     hoot,pshaw,exclamation of doubt or contempt
+     Hoot awa!,tuts!; nonsense!,also exclamation of sympathy
+     hoot toot,tut!,exclamation of annoyance
+     hoots,pshaw,exclamation of doubt or contempt
+     horse-huves,horse hooves,
+     hose,stocking,
+     hostit,coughed,
+     houp,hope,
+     houpe,hope,
+     houps,hopes,
+     humblet,humbled,
+     hunger,hunger; starve,
+     hungert,starved,
+     hunner,hundred,
+     huntin',hunting,
+     hurdies,buttocks,
+     hurry an' a scurry,uproar; tumult,
+     hurtit,hurt,
+     huves,hooves,
+     hynd,straight; by the nearest road,
+     i',in; into,
+     I doobt,I know; I suspect,
+     I wat,I know; I assure (you),
+     ilk,every; each,also common; ordinary
+     ilka,every; each,also common; ordinary
+     ilkabody,everybody; everyone,
+     ill,bad; evil; hard; harsh; badly,also misfortune; harm
+     'ill,will,
+     ill-contrived,tricky; mischievous,also badly behaved; ill-tempered
+     ill-doin',badly behaved,also leading an evil life
+     ill-fashioned,vulgar in habits; ill-mannered,also quarrelsome
+     ill-faured,unbecoming; ill-mannered; clumsy,also unpleasant
+     ill-mainnert,ill-mannered,
+     ill-tongued,foul-tongued; abusive,
+     ill-used,used wrongly,
+     ill-willy,ill-tempered; spiteful; grudging,also reluctant
+     'im,him,
+     impidence,impudence,
+     imputin',imputing,
+     inheritin',inheriting,
+     in't,in it,
+     interesstin',interesting,
+     interferin',interfering,
+     interruppit,interrupted,
+     intil,into; in; within,
+     ir,are,
+     Ishmeleets,Ishmaelites,
+     isna,is not; is no,
+     is't,is it,
+     ither,other; another; further,
+     'ither,other; another; further,
+     itsel',itself,
+     iver,ever,
+     jabberin',chattering; idle talking,
+     jaloosed,suspected; guessed; imagined,
+     jaud,lass; girl; worthless woman,old worn-out horse
+     jaw,billow; splash; surge; wave,
+     jawin',talking; chattering,
+     Jeames,James,
+     Jeck,Jack,
+     jeedgment,judgement,
+     Jeroozlem,Jerusalem,
+     jined,joined,
+     jines,joins,
+     jist,just,
+     judgin',judging,
+     jumps,tallies; coincides,
+     justifee,justify,
+     justifeein',justifying,
+     jyler,jailer,
+     kailyard,kitchen garden; small cottage garden,
+     keek,look; peep; spy,
+     keekin',looking; peeping; prying,
+     keepit,kept,
+     kelpie,water-sprite; river-horse,
+     ken,know; be acquainted with; recognise,
+     kenna,do not know,
+     kennin',knowing,
+     kens,knows,
+     kent,known; knew,
+     kep,keep; catch,also intercept; encounter
+     kickin',kicking,
+     kickit,kicked,
+     kin',kind; nature; sort; agreeable,also somewhat; in some degree
+     kin'ness,kindness,
+     kirk,church,
+     kirks,churches,
+     kirkyaird,churchyard,
+     kirstened,christened,
+     kirstenin',christening,
+     kissin',kissing,
+     kist,chest; coffer; box; chest of drawers,
+     kists,chests; coffers; boxes; luggage,
+     kitchie,kitchen,
+     kittlins,kittens,
+     kneipit,knocked,
+     lad,boy,term of commendation or reverence
+     laddie,boy,term of affection
+     laddies,boys,term of affection
+     lads,boys,term of commendation or reverence
+     laicher,lower,
+     laird,landed proprietor; squire; lord,
+     lameter,cripple,also lame
+     lammie,little lamb,term of endearment
+     lan',land; country; ground,
+     lane,lone; alone; lonely; solitary,
+     lang,long; big; large; many,also slow; tedious
+     langed,longed,
+     langer,longer,
+     lang-leggit,long legged,
+     lang's,long as,
+     lang-tailed,tedious,
+     lan'less,landless,
+     lap,leaped,
+     lapstane,stone on which a shoemaker,hammers his leather
+     lass,girl; young woman,term of address
+     lasses,girls; young women,
+     lassie,girl,term of endearment
+     lat,let; allow,
+     lat's,let's; let us; let his,
+     latten,let; allowed,
+     lattin',letting; allowing,
+     lauch,laugh,
+     lauchin',laughing,
+     lauchter,laughter,
+     lave,rest; remainder; others,also leave
+     laverock,lark (type of bird),
+     Lawlands,Lowlands,
+     lea,leave,
+     lea',leave,
+     leadin',leading,
+     leal,loyal; faithful; sincere; true,
+     learnin',learning,also teaching
+     learnt,learned,also taught
+     leavin',leaving,
+     leddy,lady,also boy; lad; laddy
+     lee,pasture; fallow ground,also shelter from wind or rain; lie
+     leear,lier,
+     leebrary,library,
+     leed,lied; told lies,
+     leein',lying; telling lies,
+     lees,lies,
+     leevin',living; living being,
+     leiser,leisure,
+     len',lend; give; grant,also loan
+     len'th,length,
+     leuch,laughed,
+     leuk,look; watch; appearance,
+     leys,grasslands,
+     licht,light,
+     lichtlie,make light of; disparage,
+     lickin',thrashing; punishment,
+     lien,lain,
+     lift,load; boost; lift; helping hand,also sky; heavens
+     liket,liked,
+     likit,liked,
+     likliheid,likelyhood,
+     likly,likely,
+     limmer,rascal; rogue,also loose woman; prostitute
+     lingel,shoemaker's thread,
+     links,stretch of sandy grass-covered ground,near the seashore
+     lint-bells,flowers of the flax,
+     lippen,trust; depend on,also look after
+     list,enlist as a soldier,
+     livin',living,
+     'll,will,
+     lockit,locked,
+     longin',longing,
+     Lonnon,London,
+     loon,rascal; rogue; ragamuffin,also boy; lad
+     loot,let; allowed; permitted,
+     Losh!,corrupt form of 'Lord',exclamation of surprise or wonder
+     losin',losing,
+     loup,leap; jump; spring,
+     loup-coonter lads,shopkeepers; salesmen,
+     loupin',leaping; jumping; springing,
+     loupin'-on-stane,horse-block,
+     lowse,loose; free,also dishonest; immoral
+     luckie-daddie,grandfather,also fondly regarded forefather
+     luckie-daiddie,grandfather,also fondly regarded forefather
+     luckie-minnie,grandmother,
+     lucky,old woman,
+     lucky-daiddy,grandfather,also fondly regarded forefather
+     lug,ear; fin (fish); handle,also shallow wooden dish
+     lugs,ears,
+     luik,look,
+     luikin',looking,
+     luikit,looked,
+     luiks,looks,
+     luve,love,
+     lyin',lying,
+     lythe,shelter,
+     'm,him,
+     ma,my,
+     magistrand,student about to become M.A.,at Aberdeen University
+     maijesty,majesty,
+     mainner,manner,
+     mainners,manners,
+     mair,more; greater,
+     mairch,march,
+     mairry,marry,
+     maist,most; almost,
+     'maist,almost,
+     maist han',almost,
+     maister,master; mister,
+     maistly,mostly; most of all,
+     maitter,matter,
+     maitters,matters,
+     mak,make; do,
+     mak',make; do,
+     makin',making; doing,
+     maks,makes; does,
+     mak's,makes; does,
+     man-body,full grown man,
+     Markis,Marquis,
+     maukin,hare,also a reference to a poem by Burns
+     maun,must; have to,
+     maunna,must not; may not,
+     mayna,may not,
+     meanin',meaning,
+     meddlin',meddling,
+     meenit,minute,
+     meenits,minutes,
+     meenute,minute,
+     meesery,misery,
+     mell,mix; be intimate; meddle,
+     mem,Ma'am; Miss; Madam,
+     men',mend,
+     men'in',mending; healing,
+     men't,mended,
+     merchan's,merchants; shopkeepers,
+     mercifu',merciful; favourable,
+     mere,mare,also mere
+     merried,married,
+     merry,marry,also merry
+     micht,might,
+     michtna,might not,
+     michty,mighty; God,
+     midden,dunghill; manure pile,
+     middlin',tolerable; mediocre; fairly well,
+     mids,midst; middle,
+     mids',midst; middle,
+     min',mind; recollection,also recollect; remember
+     min' upo',remember,
+     mind,mind; recollection,also recollect; remember
+     ministert,ministered,
+     minit,minute,
+     mint,insinuate; hint; feign,also aim at; attempt
+     mintin',insinuating; hinting; feigning,also aiming at; attempting
+     mintit,insinuated; hinted; feigned,also aimed at; attempted
+     mirk,darkness; gloom; night,
+     mischeef,mischief; injury; harm,
+     misdoobt,doubt; disbelieve; suspect,
+     missionar',missionary,
+     mistak,mistake,
+     mither,mother,
+     mithers,mothers,
+     mizzer,measure,
+     moedesty,modesty,
+     mony,many,
+     moo',mouth,
+     moose,mouse,
+     mornin',morning,
+     morn's,tomorrow,
+     mou',mouth,
+     moufu',mouthful,
+     mou'fu',mouthful,
+     mould,mould; loose earth; top soil,
+     muckle,huge; enormous; big; great; much,
+     muckler,bigger; greater,
+     mull,snuff-box,
+     mune,moon,
+     munelicht,moonlight,
+     murnin',mourning,
+     mutch,woman's cap with protruding frill,worn under the bonnet
+     mutchkin,liquid measure,equal to an English pint
+     my lane,on my own,
+     mysel',myself,
+     na,not; by no means,
+     nae,no; none; not,
+     naebody,nobody; no one,
+     naething,nothing,
+     nane,none,
+     nanetheless,nonetheless,
+     nater,nature,
+     nat'ral,natural,
+     natur',nature,
+     naything,nothing,
+     nearhan',nearly; almost; near by,
+     near-han',nearly; almost; near by,
+     nears,kidneys,
+     nebs,tips; points; nibs; beaks,
+     neebor,neighbour,
+     neebors,neighbours,
+     neebour,neighbour,
+     needfu',needful; necessary; needy,
+     needna,do not need; need not,
+     ne'er-do-weel,an incorrigible; troublemaker,
+     neist,next; nearest,
+     nesty,nasty,
+     neuk,nook; recess; interior angle,also corner
+     news,talk; gossip,
+     nicht,night; evening,
+     niffer,exchange; barter,
+     no,not,
+     no',not,
+     noething,nothing,
+     noo,now,
+     noo',now,
+     noo a-days,now; in these days,
+     nor,than; although; if,also nor
+     nor's,than is,
+     notwithstandin',notwithstanding,
+     nuik,corner,
+     o',of; on,
+     objeck,object,
+     obleeged,obliged,
+     och,,exclamation of sorrow or regret
+     och hone,alas,
+     Od,disguised form of 'God',mince oath
+     odds,consequence; change,
+     o'er,over; upon; too,
+     ohn,without; un-,uses past participle not present progressive
+     Ohone!,Alas!,
+     on',and,possibly a mispelling--should be an'
+     onlike,unlike,
+     onsays,unsays,
+     ony,any,
+     onybody,anybody; anyone,
+     onything,anything,
+     ook,week,
+     ooks,weeks,
+     oor,our,
+     'oor,hour,
+     oors,ours,
+     oorsel's,ourselves,
+     oot,out,
+     ootcast,outcast,
+     oots,outs,
+     ootside,outside,
+     opingon,opinion,
+     opingons,opinions,
+     opposit,opposite,
+     or,before; ere; until; by,also or
+     ordinar,ordinary; usual; natural,also custom; habit
+     ordinar',ordinary; usual; natural,also custom; habit
+     orra,odd job (man); exceptional; over all,also idle
+     o't,of it,
+     oucht,anything; all,also ought
+     ouchtna,ought not,
+     oursel's,ourselves,
+     ow,oh,exclamation of surprise
+     ower,over; upon; too,
+     owerta'en,overtaken,
+     oye,grandchild; grandson; nephew,
+     pailace,palace,
+     paintit,painted,
+     pairt,part,
+     pandies,strokes on the palm with a cane,
+     papistry,Romanism; Popery,
+     Paradees,Paradise,
+     parritch,oatmeal porridge,
+     partic'lar,particular,
+     pat,put; made,
+     peacefu',peaceful,
+     pecks,blows; strikes,
+     pernickety,precise; particular; fastidious,also difficult to please
+     perris,parish,
+     piana,piano,
+     picter,picture; sight; spectacle,
+     pictur',picture,
+     piece,slice of bread; lunch,
+     pint,point,
+     pipit,piped; played the (bag)pipes,
+     pirn,reel; bobbin,on which thread is wound
+     pit,put; make,
+     pitawta,potato,
+     pits,puts; makes,
+     pitten,put; made,
+     plack,the smallest coin,worth 1/3 of a penny
+     plaguit,plagued; troubled,
+     plaid,plaid used as a blanket,
+     plaistered,plastered,
+     plash-mill,fulling-mill,
+     playacks,playthings; toys,
+     play-actin',acting,
+     playin',playing,
+     playt,played,
+     pliskie,trick; prank; practical joke,
+     plisky,trick; prank,
+     ploy,amusement; sport; escapade,
+     ploys,amusements; sports; escapades,
+     poassible,possible,
+     poddock,frog,
+     pooch,pocket; pouch,
+     pooer,power,
+     pooerfu',powerful,
+     poored,poured,
+     poothers,powders,
+     pop',pope,
+     porkmanty,portmanteau,
+     positeeve,positive,
+     pouch,pouch; pocket,
+     poun',pound (sterling),
+     prayin',praying,
+     preachin',preaching,
+     pree,taste; try; prove; experience,
+     prent,print,
+     prentice-han',novice,
+     press,wall-cupboard with shelves,
+     preten',pretend,
+     preten't,pretended,
+     prood,proud,
+     pruv,prove,
+     pruved,proved,
+     pu',pull,
+     public,public house; pub,
+     public-hoose,public house,
+     pu'd,pulled,
+     puddin's,intestines,
+     puir,poor,
+     pun',pound (sterling),
+     putten,put,
+     quaiet,quiet,
+     quaiet sough,quiet tongue,
+     quaieter,quieter,
+     quaietly,quietly,
+     quaietness,quietness,
+     quean,queen; young girl; hussy,
+     queston,question,also sum
+     questons,questions,also sums
+     quest'ons,questions,
+     quibblin',quibbling,
+     rade,rode,
+     rael,real,
+     railly,really,
+     raither,rather,
+     rale,real; true; very,
+     rampaugin',rampaging,
+     randy,rough; wild; riotous,also coarse-tongued; abusive
+     rase,rose,
+     rash,needle used in weaving,
+     readin',reading,
+     reamy,creamy,
+     rebukit,rebuked,
+     receipt,recipe,
+     reckonin',reckoning,
+     reconceelin',reconciling,
+     reconcilet,reconciled,
+     reekit,rigged out; well-dressed,
+     regairdit,regarded,
+     reg'ment,regiment,
+     reid,red,
+     reik,smoke; vapour,
+     rejeckit,rejected,
+     remainin',remaining,
+     remeid,remedy; cure; redress,
+     repentin',repenting,
+     resentin',resenting,
+     respec',respect,
+     respecks,respects; considers worthy,
+     richt,right; correct,also mend
+     richteous,righteous,
+     richteousness,righteousness,
+     richtly,certainly; positively,
+     rig,ridge; space between furrows,also long narrow hill
+     rin,run,
+     rinnin',running,
+     rins,runs,
+     risin',rising,
+     rist,rest,
+     rivin',renting; tearing; tuging; wrenching,
+     rizzon,reason,
+     rizzonin',reasoning,
+     rizzons,reasons,
+     roarin',roaring,
+     rockit,rocked,
+     ro'd,road; course; way,
+     Rom',Rome,
+     roof-tree,beam forming the angle of a roof,
+     roomy,little room,diminutive
+     roon,around; round,
+     roon',around; round,
+     roset,resin; cobbler's wax,
+     roset-ends,shoemaker's waxed thread-ends,
+     rottan,rat,
+     rouch,rough,
+     rowdie,hag; beldame,
+     ruck,bulk; mass; majority,
+     ruggin',pulling forcibly; tugging; tearing,
+     ruggin' and rivin',draging forcibly,also contending for possession
+     runklet,wrinkled; creased; crumpled,
+     's,us; his; as; is,also has
+     s',shall,
+     sae,so; as,
+     saft,muddy; soft; silly; foolish,
+     saiddlet,saddled,
+     sair,sore; sorely; sad; hard; very; greatly,also serve; satisfy
+     sair heid,headache,
+     sair-vroucht,hard-worked,
+     saitisfee,satisfy,
+     saitisfeed,satisfied,
+     saitisfeet,satisfied,
+     salamander,large poker with a flat heated end,for lighting fires
+     sall,shall,
+     sang,song,
+     sangs,songs,
+     sanna,shall not,
+     Sanny,Sandy,also Scotsman
+     sark,shirt,
+     sarks,shirts,
+     sattle,settle,
+     saven,wise; knowledgeable,also seven
+     savin',saving,also except
+     savin's,savings,
+     Sawtan,Satan,
+     sax,six,
+     saxpence,sixpence,
+     sayin',saying,
+     scar,cliff; precipice,
+     scart,scratch; strike a match; scrape,
+     schuil,school,
+     schuilin',schooling; education,
+     schuilmaister,schoolmaster,
+     schule,school,
+     schule-time,time for school,
+     scoonrel,scoundrel,
+     scoon'rel,scoundrel,
+     Scotlan',Scotland,
+     scraich,shriek; scream; bird's shrill cry,
+     scrattit,scratched; dug,
+     screed,recite rapidly; talk tediously; reel off,also scraping sound
+     Scripter,Scripture,
+     sculduddery,fornication; grossness; obscenity,
+     scunner,disgust; disgusting; revolting,
+     scunnert,disgusted; loathed,
+     scurry,scour; got about from place to place,also wander aimlessly
+     seck,sack,
+     seein',seeing,
+     seekin',seeking,
+     se'enteen,seventeen,
+     sel',self,
+     self-forgettin',self-forgetting,
+     sellt,sold,
+     semies,second year's university students,at Aberdeen University
+     sen',send,
+     sendin',sending,
+     sen'in',sending,
+     servan',servant,
+     servan's,servants,
+     sessions-buik,church record of its proceedings,
+     set,set out; start off; become,also inclined; disposed
+     Setterday,Saturday,
+     shacken,shaken,
+     shackle-bane,wrist; wrist-bone,
+     Shackspear,Shakespeare,
+     shak'-doon,shakedown; crude makeshift bed,
+     shanna,shall not,
+     sharpset,keen; sharp-witted,
+     sharp-set,keen; sharp-witted,
+     shaw,show; reveal,also grove
+     shawn,shown,
+     shaws,shows,
+     shearin',shearing (sheep),
+     shillin',shilling,
+     shillin's,shillings,
+     shinin',shining,
+     shochlin,waddling; in-kneed,
+     shochlin',waddling; in-kneed,
+     shoothers,shoulders,
+     shortcomin's,shortcomings,
+     shortent,shortened,
+     shouldna,should not,
+     shuit,suit,
+     shune,shoes,
+     shutin',shooting,
+     sib,relation; akin; closely related,
+     sic,such; so; similar,
+     siccan,such a; such an,
+     sicht,sight,
+     sichtit,sighted,
+     sicker,secure; safe; firm; sure,
+     sic-like,suchlike; likewise,like such a person or thing
+     side,district; region,also the side of
+     sidin',siding,
+     siller,silver; money; wealth,
+     simmer,Summer,
+     sin,since; ago; since then,also sin; sun
+     sin',since; ago; since then,
+     sinfu',sinful,
+     singin',singing,
+     sittin',sitting,
+     skelf,shelf,also splinter
+     skelpin',digging; ploughing,also beating; striking
+     skirl,scream; sing shrilly,
+     slack,slow,
+     slauchtert,slaughtered,
+     sleepin',sleeping,
+     sleepit,slept,
+     sleicht o' han',sleight of hand,
+     sliddery,slippery; smooth,also sly; deceitful
+     slinkin',slinking,
+     slip,let slip; convey by stealth,
+     slippin',slipping,
+     slips,tricks,
+     sma',small; little; slight; narrow; young,
+     smacks,single-masted sailing boats,not necessarily a Scottish word
+     smeddum,spirit; mettle; liveliness,
+     smilin',smiling,
+     smokin',smoking; smouldering,
+     smokin' flax,smouldering wick,reference to Matthew 12:20
+     smorin',smothering; suffocating,
+     snappin',snapping,
+     snaw,snow,
+     sneck,door-latch; catch (gate),also latch
+     snod,smooth; neat; trim; tidy; snug,
+     sod,sad,
+     sodger,soldier,
+     sodgers,soldiers,
+     sojer,soldier,
+     some,somewhat; rather; quite; very,also some
+     somehoo,somehow,
+     sookit,sucked,
+     soon',sound,
+     soonds,sounds,
+     sornin',taking food or lodging; sponging,taking by force of threat
+     sortit,sorted,
+     soucht,sought,
+     sough,sigh; sound of wind; deep breath,
+     soun',sound,
+     soun's,sounds,
+     soutar,shoemaker; cobbler,
+     sowl,soul,
+     sowls,souls,
+     spak,spoke,
+     spak',spoke,
+     spark,speck; spot; blemish; atom,
+     spaud,spade,
+     speakin',speaking,
+     speerit,spirit,
+     speik,speak,
+     speikin',speaking,
+     speir,ask about; enquire; question,
+     speired,asked about; enquired; questioned,
+     speirin',asking about; enquiring; questioning,
+     speirs,asks about; enquires; questions,
+     speirt,asked about; enquired; questioned,
+     spen',spend,
+     spence,storeroom; larder,
+     speyk,speak,
+     speykin,speaking,
+     speykin',speaking,
+     spier,ask about; enquire; question,
+     spring,quick lively tune,
+     spult,spilt,
+     spunes,spoons,
+     Squaur,square,
+     stack,stuck,
+     stair,stairs; staircase,
+     stamack,stomach,
+     stamacks,stomachs,
+     stampin',stamping,
+     stan',stand; stop,
+     stane,stone; measure of weight,1 stone = 14 pounds
+     stanes,stones,
+     stan'in',standing,
+     stan's,stands,
+     starnie,very small quantity,
+     startit,started,
+     steek,shut; close; clench,also stitch (as in clothing)
+     steekit,shut; closed; clenched,
+     stept,stepped,
+     sterve,starve,
+     stew,dust; vapour; smoke,also stench; stink
+     stickin',sticking; goring,
+     stingin',stinging,
+     stinkin',stinking,
+     stockin'-fit,feet clothed in stockings,i.e. without shoes
+     stook,arranging the sheaves in a stook,
+     stoun',ache; throb,
+     stown,stolen,
+     Straddle Vawrious,Stradivarius,make of violin
+     strae-deith,death in bed; natural death,not a violent death
+     straik,streak; stroke; blow; caress,
+     straiks,streaks; strokes; blows; caresses,
+     strang,strong,
+     strathspey,Highland dance,like a reel but slower
+     straucht,straighten; straight,
+     straught,straight,
+     stravaguin',saunter; stroll; go about aimlessly,
+     stren'th,strength,
+     stucken,stuck,
+     stud,stood,
+     stule,stool,
+     styte,nonsense,
+     subjec',subject,
+     subjeck,subject,
+     subjecks,subjects,
+     substrackin',subtracting,
+     sudna,should not,
+     sufferin',suffering,
+     suffert,suffered,
+     suld,should,
+     suldna,should not,
+     sumph,soft blunt fellow; simpleton; fool,
+     sune,soon; early,
+     sune's,soon as,
+     sung,singed,
+     sunk,drivel; loiter,also be in a low dejected state
+     sup,drink,
+     supped,drank,
+     supposin',supposing,
+     swack,elastic; limber; supple,
+     swarf,swoon; faint,
+     sweer,swear,
+     sweir,swear,
+     sweirer,swearer,
+     sweirin',swearing,
+     sweirs,swears,
+     sworn,swore,
+     syde,wide and long; hanging low down,
+     syne,ago; since; then; at that time,also in (good) time
+     't,it,
+     tae,toe; also tea,also the one; to
+     taed,toad,
+     ta'en,taken; seized,
+     taes,toes,
+     taings,tongs; prongs,
+     tak,take; seize,
+     tak',take; seize,
+     tak tent,look out; pay attention; watch,
+     takin',taking,
+     taks,takes; seizes,
+     talkin',talking,
+     tane,the one,also taken
+     tap,top; tip; head,
+     tastin',tasting,
+     taucht,taught,
+     tauld,told,
+     tawtie,potato,
+     taxed,found fault with; scolded,
+     tay,tea; supper,
+     tay-time,tea time; supper,
+     teachin',teaching,
+     teep,type,
+     telled,told,
+     tellin',telling,
+     tellt,told,
+     tell't,told,
+     telt,told,
+     tent,attention; care; heed; notice,
+     thae,those; these,
+     thairm,fiddle-string,also intestine; gut; belly
+     than,then,also than
+     thankfu',thankful,
+     thankit,thanked,
+     thanksgivin',thanksgiving,
+     that'll,that will,
+     the day,today,
+     the morn,tomorrow,
+     the nicht,tonight,
+     the noo,just now; now,
+     the piece,apiece,
+     thegither,together,
+     themsels,themselves,
+     themsel's,themselves,
+     thereaboots,thereabouts,
+     thimmel,thimble,
+     thinkin',thinking,
+     thinksna,does not think,
+     this mony a day,for some time,
+     tho',though,
+     thocht,thought,
+     thochtna,did not think,
+     thochts,thoughts,
+     thoo,thou; you (God),
+     thoomacks,violin-pegs,
+     thoucht,thought,
+     thouchts,thoughts,
+     thrapple,windpipe; throat,
+     thrivin',thriving,
+     throu,through,
+     throu',through,
+     throuw,through,
+     throw,through,
+     thrum,particle; tangle; mess,
+     ticht,tight,
+     til,to; till; until; about; at; before,
+     till,to; till; until; about; at; before,
+     timmer,timber; wood,
+     tint,lost; got lost,
+     'tis,it is,
+     tither,the other,
+     tod,fox,
+     toom,empty; unload,
+     toomin',emptying; unloading,
+     toon,town; village,
+     toon-piper,town piper,
+     toot,tut!,exclamation of annoyance
+     Toots!,Tuts!; Tush!,
+     towie,string,
+     trailin',dragging forcibly; hauling along,
+     traivel,travel,
+     traivellin',travelling,
+     tramp,trudge,also tramp
+     transe,passage within a house,also alley; narrow space
+     tribble,trouble,
+     trimlin',trembling,
+     troo,trust; believe,
+     troosers,trousers,
+     troth,truth; indeed,also used as an exclamation
+     trowth,truth; indeed,also used as an exclamation
+     tryin',trying,
+     'ts,its,
+     tu,too; also,
+     tuik,took,
+     tum'ler,tumbler; glass (of whisky),
+     turnin',turning,
+     turnt,turned,
+     twa,two; a few,
+     twa three,several,
+     twal,twelve,
+     twalmonth,twelvemonth; year,
+     'twas,it was,
+     twise,twice,
+     tyke,dog,also rough clownish fellow
+     tyne,lose; get lost; miss,
+     'ull,will,
+     umquhile,former; of old; late,
+     unbecomin',unbecoming,
+     unco,unknown; odd; strange; uncouth,also very great
+     unco',unknown; odd; strange; uncouth,also very great
+     understan',understand,
+     unner,under,
+     unnerstan,understand,
+     unnerstan',understand,
+     unpleasin',unpleasing; unpleasant,
+     unsoucht,unsought,
+     unweel,unwell,
+     up the stair,upstairs,also to heaven
+     uphaud,uphold; maintain; support,
+     uphaudin',upholding; maintaining; supporting,
+     upo',upon; on to; at,
+     upsettin',forward; ambitious; stuck-up; proud,
+     vailue,value,
+     vainishin',vanishing,
+     vainities,vanities,
+     verra,very; true; real,
+     vex,trouble; vexation,
+     vraith,apparition,
+     vrang,wrong,
+     vratch,wretch,
+     vrote,wrote,
+     vroucht,wrought; worked,
+     wa',wall,also way; away
+     wad,would,
+     wadna,would not,
+     wailin',wailing,
+     waitin',waiting,
+     wakin',waking,
+     wall,well; spring of water,
+     wallopin',dancing; galloping,also beating; thrashing; knocking
+     wame,belly; stomach; womb; hollow,
+     wamlin',rolling; undulating,
+     wan,reached; gained; got,
+     wan'erer,wanderer,
+     wantin',wanting; lacking; without; in want of,
+     wantit,wanted,
+     war,were,
+     wark,work; labour,also show of affection
+     warl',world; worldly goods,also a large number
+     warld,world,
+     warldly,worldly,
+     warna,were not,
+     warran',warrant; guarantee,
+     warst,worst,
+     wa's,walls,also ways
+     washin',washing,
+     wasna,was not,
+     was't,was it,
+     wastit,wasted,
+     wat,wet,see also 'I wat.'
+     watchin',watching,
+     watter,water,
+     wauken,awake; wake,
+     waukens,wakes,
+     waukin',waking,
+     waukit,woke,
+     waukmill,fulling mill,
+     wauk-mill,fulling-mill,
+     waur,worse,also spend money
+     waure,ware,
+     weddin',wedding,
+     wee,small; little; bit,also short time; while
+     weel,well; fine,
+     weel-behaved,well-behaved,
+     weelfaur,welfare,
+     weel's,well as,
+     weet,wet; dew; rain,
+     weicht,weight,
+     weir,wear,also hedge; fence; enclosure
+     weirs,wears,
+     weyver,weaver; knitter,also knitter of stockings; spider
+     wha,who,
+     wha',who,
+     whaever,whoever,
+     whan,when,
+     wharever,wherever,
+     wha's,who is,also whose
+     whase,whose,
+     What for no?,Why not?,
+     What for?,Why?,
+     whaur,where,
+     whaur'll,where will,
+     whaur's,where is; where has,
+     wheen,little; few; number; quantity,
+     whiles,sometimes; at times; now and then,
+     whilie,short time,
+     whilk,which,
+     whumle,whelm; overwhelm; upset,
+     whusky,whisky,
+     whustle,whistle,
+     whustled,whistled,
+     wi',with,
+     wice,wise,
+     wife,woman; landlady,also wife
+     wight,fellow,
+     willin'ly,willingly,
+     willna,will not,
+     win,reach; gain; get; go; come,
+     win',wind,also reach; gain; get; go; come
+     winkit,winked,
+     winna,will not,
+     winnin',reaching; gaining; getting,
+     winnock,window,
+     winsome,large; comely; merry,
+     wi'oot,without,
+     wirrycow,scarecrow,
+     wis,was,also wish
+     wiss,wish,
+     wissed,wished,
+     wit,intelligence; information,also sense; wisdom
+     wite,blame; reproach; fault,
+     withoot,without,
+     withstan',withstand,
+     wob,web; woven material,
+     wolums,volumes,
+     wonner,wonder; marvel,
+     wonnerfu',wonderful; great; large,
+     wonnerin',wondering,
+     wonnert,wondered,
+     wordy,little word; little saying or proverb,diminutive
+     workin',working,
+     worryin',worrying,
+     wouldna,would not,
+     wow,woe,exclamation of wonder or grief or satisfaction
+     wrang,wrong; injured,
+     writin',writing,
+     wud,wood; forest,adj.-enraged; angry; mad; also would
+     wuddyfous,gallows' birds; scamps,also small ill-tempered persons
+     wull,will; wish; desire,also astray; stray; wild
+     wuman,woman,
+     wumman,woman,
+     wuss,wish,
+     wynd,narrow lane or street; alley,
+     wynds,narrow lanes or streets; alleys,
+     wyte,blame; reproach; fault,
+     yaird,yard; garden; farmyard,also yard (36 inches)
+     yairds,yards; gardens,also yards (1 yard = 36 inches)
+     ye,you; yourself,
+     year,years,also year
+     ye'll,you will,
+     Yellow-beak,first year's student,at Aberdeen University
+     yer,your,
+     yer lane,on your own,
+     ye're,you are,
+     yersel,yourself,
+     yer'sel,yourself,
+     yersel',yourself,
+     yersels,yourselves,
+     ye've,you have,
+     yird,earth,
+     yon,that; those; that there; these,
+     yonner,yonder; over there; in that place,
+     yon's,that is; that (thing) there is,
+     yoong,young,
+     yowth,youth,
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Robert Falconer, by George MacDonald
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT FALCONER ***
+
+***** This file should be named 2561.txt or 2561.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/5/6/2561/
+
+Produced by John Bechard
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
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