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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.