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This electronic text was created by John Bechard, London, England
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ROBERT FALCONER

by GEORGE MACDONALD, LL.D.

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.