Books: Robert Falconer

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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 protégé of his, though--that Shargar. The fellow is as
good as a dog, and that's saying not a little for him. I wonder if
he can learn--or if he takes after his father the marquis, who never
could spell. Well, it is a comfort to have something to do worth
doing. I did think of endowing a hospital; but I'm not sure that it
isn't better to endow a good man than a hospital. I'll think about
it. I won't say anything about Shargar either, till I see how he
goes on. I might give him a job, though, now and then. But where
to fall in with him--prowling about after jobs?'

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

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

CHAPTER IX.

A HUMAN SOUL.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The doctor smiled a far-off sly smile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

'But I will give you the money if you like.'

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

'And why not if I choose, Mr. Falconer?'

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

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

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

'Who is that at the street door?' he said.

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

'I dinna hear onybody,' answered Robert.

'There was somebody,' returned Ericson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A PRAYER.

O Lord, my God, how long
Shall my poor heart pant for a boundless joy?
How long, O mighty Spirit, shall I hear
The murmur of Truth's crystal waters slide
>From the deep caverns of their endless being,
But my lips taste not, and the grosser air
Choke each pure inspiration of thy will?

I would be a wind,
Whose smallest atom is a viewless wing,
All busy with the pulsing life that throbs
To do thy bidding; yea, or the meanest thing
That has relation to a changeless truth
Could I but be instinct with thee--each thought
The lightning of a pure intelligence,
And every act as the loud thunder-clap
Of currents warring for a vacuum.

Lord, clothe me with thy truth as with a robe.
Purge me with sorrow. I will bend my head,
And let the nations of thy waves pass over,
Bathing me in thy consecrated strength.
And let the many-voiced and silver winds
Pass through my frame with their clear influence.
O save me--I am blind; lo! thwarting shapes
Wall up the void before, and thrusting out
Lean arms of unshaped expectation, beckon
Down to the night of all unholy thoughts.

I have seen
Unholy shapes lop off my shining thoughts,
Which I had thought nursed in thine emerald light;
And they have lent me leathern wings of fear,
Of baffled pride and harrowing distrust;
And Godhead with its crown of many stars,
Its pinnacles of flaming holiness,
And voice of leaves in the green summer-time,
Has seemed the shadowed image of a self.
Then my soul blackened; and I rose to find
And grasp my doom, and cleave the arching deeps
Of desolation.

O Lord, my soul is a forgotten well;
Clad round with its own rank luxuriance;
A fountain a kind sunbeam searches for,
Sinking the lustre of its arrowy finger
Through the long grass its own strange virtue5
Hath blinded up its crystal eye withal:
Make me a broad strong river coming down
With shouts from its high hills, whose rocky hearts
Throb forth the joy of their stability
In watery pulses from their inmost deeps,
And I shall be a vein upon thy world,
Circling perpetual from the parent deep.
O First and Last, O glorious all in all,
In vain my faltering human tongue would seek
To shape the vesture of the boundless thought,
Summing all causes in one burning word;
Give me the spirit's living tongue of fire,
Whose only voice is in an attitude
Of keenest tension, bent back on itself
With a strong upward force; even as thy bow
Of bended colour stands against the north,
And, in an attitude to spring to heaven,
Lays hold of the kindled hills.

Most mighty One,
Confirm and multiply my thoughts of good;
Help me to wall each sacred treasure round
With the firm battlements of special action.
Alas my holy, happy thoughts of thee
Make not perpetual nest within my soul,
But like strange birds of dazzling colours stoop
The trailing glories of their sunward speed,
For one glad moment filling my blasted boughs
With the sunshine of their wings.

Make me a forest
Of gladdest life, wherein perpetual spring
Lifts up her leafy tresses in the wind.

Lo! now I see
Thy trembling starlight sit among my pines,
And thy young moon slide down my arching boughs
With a soft sound of restless eloquence.
And I can feel a joy as when thy hosts
Of trampling winds, gathering in maddened bands,
Roar upward through the blue and flashing day
Round my still depths of uncleft solitude.

Hear me, O Lord,
When the black night draws down upon my soul,
And voices of temptation darken down
The misty wind, slamming thy starry doors,
With bitter jests. 'Thou fool!' they seem to say
'Thou hast no seed of goodness in thee; all
Thy nature hath been stung right through and through.
Thy sin hath blasted thee, and made thee old.
Thou hadst a will, but thou hast killed it--dead--
And with the fulsome garniture of life
Built out the loathsome corpse. Thou art a child
Of night and death, even lower than a worm.
Gather the skirts up of thy shadowy self,
And with what resolution thou hast left,
Fall on the damned spikes of doom.'

O take me like a child,
If thou hast made me for thyself, my God,
And lead me up thy hills. I shall not fear
So thou wilt make me pure, and beat back sin
With the terrors of thine eye.

Lord hast thou sent
Thy moons to mock us with perpetual hope?
Lighted within our breasts the love of love,
To make us ripen for despair, my God?

Oh, dost thou hold each individual soul
Strung clear upon thy flaming rods of purpose?
Or does thine inextinguishable will
Stand on the steeps of night with lifted hand,
Filling the yawning wells of monstrous space
With mixing thought--drinking up single life
As in a cup? and from the rending folds
Of glimmering purpose, the gloom do all thy navied stars
Slide through the gloom with mystic melody,
Like wishes on a brow? Oh, is my soul,
Hung like a dew-drop in thy grassy ways,
Drawn up again into the rack of change,
Even through the lustre which created it?
O mighty one, thou wilt not smite me through
With scorching wrath, because my spirit stands
Bewildered in thy circling mysteries.

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

Lord, thy strange mysteries come thickening down
Upon my head like snow-flakes, shutting out
The happy upper fields with chilly vapour.
Shall I content my soul with a weak sense
Of safety? or feed my ravenous hunger with
Sore-purged hopes, that are not hopes, but fears
Clad in white raiment?
I know not but some thin and vaporous fog,
Fed with the rank excesses of the soul,
Mocks the devouring hunger of my life
With satisfaction: lo! the noxious gas
Feeds the lank ribs of gaunt and ghastly death
With double emptiness, like a balloon,
Borne by its lightness o'er the shining lands,
A wonder and a laughter.
The creeds lie in the hollow of men's hearts
Like festering pools glassing their own corruption:
The slimy eyes stare up with dull approval,
And answer not when thy bright starry feet
Move on the watery floors.

O wilt thou hear me when I cry to thee?
I am a child lost in a mighty forest;
The air is thick with voices, and strange hands
Reach through the dusk and pluck me by the skirts.
There is a voice which sounds like words from home,
But, as I stumble on to reach it, seems
To leap from rock to rock. Oh! if it is
Willing obliquity of sense, descend,
Heal all my wanderings, take me by the hand,
And lead me homeward through the shadows.
Let me not by my wilful acts of pride
Block up the windows of thy truth, and grow
A wasted, withered thing, that stumbles on
Down to the grave with folded hands of sloth
And leaden confidence.

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

Turn forth her silver lining on the night:

SONG.

They are blind and they are dead:
We will wake them as we go;
There are words have not been said;
There are sounds they do not know.
We will pipe and we will sing--
With the music and the spring,
Set their hearts a wondering.

They are tired of what is old:
We will give it voices new;
For the half hath not been told
Of the Beautiful and True.
Drowsy eyelids shut and sleeping!
Heavy eyes oppressed with weeping!
Flashes through the lashes leaping!

Ye that have a pleasant voice,
Hither come without delay;
Ye will never have a choice
Like to that ye have to-day:
Round the wide world we will go,
Singing through the frost and snow,
Till the daisies are in blow.

Ye that cannot pipe or sing,
Ye must also come with speed;
Ye must come and with you bring
Weighty words and weightier deed:
Helping hands and loving eyes,
These will make them truly wise--
Then will be our Paradise.

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

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

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

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

Yet in his misery, he cried upon God.

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

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.