Books: Robert Falconer

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'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 bleaehfield, 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 aërial 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.