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'But,' said I, 'how would you bring that duty to bear on the mind of
a suicide?'

'I think some of the tempted could understand it, though I fear not
one of those could who judge them hardly, and talk sententiously of
the wrong done to a society which has done next to nothing for her,
by the poor, starved, refused, husband-tortured wretch perhaps, who
hurries at last to the might of the filthy flowing river which, the
one thread of hope in the web of despair, crawls through the city of
death. What should I say to him? I should say: "God liveth: thou
art not thine own but his. Bear thy hunger, thy horror in his name.
I in his name will help thee out of them, as I may. To go before
he calleth thee, is to say 'Thou forgettest,' unto him who numbereth
the hairs of thy head. Stand out in the cold and the sleet and the
hail of this world, O son of man, till thy Father open the door and
call thee. Yea, even if thou knowest him not, stand and wait, lest
there should be, after all, such a loving and tender one, who, for
the sake of a good with which thou wilt be all-content, and without
which thou never couldst be content, permits thee there to
stand--for a time--long to his sympathizing as well as to thy
suffering heart."'

Here Falconer paused, and when he spoke again it was from the
ordinary level of conversation. Indeed I fancied that he was a
little uncomfortable at the excitement into which his feelings had
borne him.

'Not many of them could understand this, I dare say: but I think
most of them could feel it without understanding it. Certainly the
"belly with good capon lined" will neither understand nor feel it.
Suicide is a sin against God, I repeat, not a crime over which
human laws have any hold. In regard to such, man has a duty
alone--that, namely, of making it possible for every man to live.
And where the dread of death is not sufficient to deter, what can
the threat of punishment do? Or what great thing is gained if it
should succeed? What agonies a man must have gone through in whom
neither the horror of falling into such a river, nor of the knife in
the flesh instinct with life, can extinguish the vague longing to
wrap up his weariness in an endless sleep!'

'But,' I remarked, 'you would, I fear, encourage the trade in
suicide. Your kindness would be terribly abused. What would you do
with the pretended suicides?'

'Whip them, for trifling with and trading upon the feelings of their
kind.'

'Then you would drive them to suicide in earnest.'

'Then they might be worth something, which they were not before.'

'We are a great deal too humane for that now-a-days, I fear. We
don't like hurting people.'

'No. We are infested with a philanthropy which is the offspring of
our mammon-worship. But surely our tender mercies are cruel. We
don't like to hang people, however unfit they may be to live amongst
their fellows. A weakling pity will petition for the life of the
worst murderer--but for what? To keep him alive in a confinement as
like their notion of hell as they dare to make it--namely, a place
whence all the sweet visitings of the grace of God are withdrawn,
and the man has not a chance, so to speak, of growing better. In
this hell of theirs they will even pamper his beastly body.'

'They have the chaplain to visit them.'

'I pity the chaplain, cut off in his labours from all the aids which
God's world alone can give for the teaching of these men. Human
beings have not the right to inflict such cruel punishment upon
their fellow-man. It springs from a cowardly shrinking from
responsibility, and from mistrust of the mercy of God;--perhaps
first of all from an over-valuing of the mere life of the body.
Hanging is tenderness itself to such a punishment.'

'I think you are hardly fair, though, Falconer. It is the fear of
sending them to hell that prevents them from hanging them.'

'Yes. You are right, I dare say. They are not of David's mind, who
would rather fall into the hands of God than of men. They think
their hell is not so hard as his, and may be better for them. But I
must not, as you say, forget that they do believe their everlasting
fate hangs upon their hands, for if God once gets his hold of them
by death, they are lost for ever.'

'But the chaplain may awake them to a sense of their sins.'

'I do not think it is likely that talk will do what the discipline
of life has not done. It seems to me, on the contrary, that the
clergyman has no commission to rouse people to a sense of their
sins. That is not his work. He is far more likely to harden them
by any attempt in that direction. Every man does feel his sins,
though he often does not know it. To turn his attention away from
what he does feel by trying to rouse in him feelings which are
impossible to him in his present condition, is to do him a great
wrong. The clergyman has the message of salvation, not of sin, to
give. Whatever oppression is on a man, whatever trouble, whatever
conscious something that comes between him and the blessedness of
life, is his sin; for whatever is not of faith is sin; and from all
this He came to save us. Salvation alone can rouse in us a sense of
our sinfulness. One must have got on a good way before he can be
sorry for his sins. There is no condition of sorrow laid down as
necessary to forgiveness. Repentance does not mean sorrow: it means
turning away from the sins. Every man can do that, more or less.
And that every man must do. The sorrow will come afterwards, all
in good time. Jesus offers to take us out of our own hands into
his, if we will only obey him.'

The eyes of the old man were fixed on his son as he spoke, He did
seem to be thinking. I could almost fancy that a glimmer of
something like hope shone in his eyes.

It was time to go home, and we were nearly silent all the way.

The next morning was so wet that we could not go out, and had to
amuse ourselves as we best might in-doors. But Falconer's resources
never failed. He gave us this day story after story about the poor
people he had known. I could see that his object was often to get
some truth into his father's mind without exposing it to rejection
by addressing it directly to himself; and few subjects could be more
fitted for affording such opportunity than his experiences among the
poor.

The afternoon was still rainy and misty. In the evening I sought to
lead the conversation towards the gospel-story; and then Falconer
talked as I never heard him talk before. No little circumstance in
the narratives appeared to have escaped him. He had thought about
everything, as it seemed to me. He had looked under the surface
everywhere, and found truth--mines of it--under all the upper soil
of the story. The deeper he dug the richer seemed the ore. This
was combined with the most pictorial apprehension of every outward
event, which he treated as if it had been described to him by the
lips of an eye-witness. The whole thing lived in his words and
thoughts.

'When anything looks strange, you must look the deeper,' he would
say.

At the close of one of our fits of talk, he rose and went to the
window.

'Come here,' he said, after looking for a moment.

All day a dropping cloud had filled the space below, so that the
hills on the opposite side of the valley were hidden, and the whole
of the sea, near as it was. But when we went to the window we found
that a great change had silently taken place. The mist continued to
veil the sky, and it clung to the tops of the hills; but, like the
rising curtain of a stage, it had rolled half-way up from their
bases, revealing a great part of the sea and shore, and half of a
cliff on the opposite side of the valley: this, in itself of a deep
red, was now smitten by the rays of the setting sun, and glowed over
the waters a splendour of carmine. As we gazed, the vaporous
curtain sank upon the shore, and the sun sank under the waves, and
the sad gray evening closed in the weeping night, and clouds and
darkness swathed the weary earth. For doubtless the earth needs its
night as well as the creatures that live thereon.

In the morning the rain had ceased, but the clouds remained. But
they were high in the heavens now, and, like a departing sorrow,
revealed the outline and form which had appeared before as an
enveloping vapour of universal and shapeless evil. The mist was now
far enough off to be seen and thought about. It was clouds now--no
longer mist and rain. And I thought how at length the evils of the
world would float away, and we should see what it was that made it
so hard for us to believe and be at peace.

In the afternoon the sky had partially cleared, but clouds hid the
sun as he sank towards the west. We walked out. A cold autumnal
wind blew, not only from the twilight of the dying day, but from the
twilight of the dying season. A sorrowful hopeless wind it seemed,
full of the odours of dead leaves--those memories of green woods,
and of damp earth--the bare graves of the flowers. Would the summer
ever come again?

We were pacing in silence along a terraced walk which overhung the
shore far below. More here than from the hilltop we seemed to look
immediately into space, not even a parapet intervening betwixt us
and the ocean. The sound of a mournful lyric, never yet sung, was
in my brain; it drew nearer to my mental grasp; but ere it alighted,
its wings were gone, and it fell dead on my consciousness. Its
meaning was this: 'Welcome, Requiem of Nature. Let me share in thy
Requiescat. Blow, wind of mournful memories. Let us moan together.
No one taketh from us the joy of our sorrow. We may mourn as we
will.'

But while I brooded thus, behold a wonder! The mass about the
sinking sun broke up, and drifted away in cloudy bergs, as if
scattered on the diverging currents of solar radiance that burst
from the gates of the west, and streamed east and north and south
over the heavens and over the sea. To the north, these masses built
a cloudy bridge across the sky from horizon to horizon, and beneath
it shone the rosy-sailed ships floating stately through their
triumphal arch up the channel to their home. Other clouds floated
stately too in the upper sea over our heads, with dense forms,
thinning into vaporous edges. Some were of a dull angry red; some
of as exquisite a primrose hue as ever the flower itself bore on its
bosom; and betwixt their edges beamed out the sweetest, purest, most
melting, most transparent blue, the heavenly blue which is the
symbol of the spirit as red is of the heart. I think I never saw a
blue to satisfy me before. Some of these clouds threw shadows of
many-shaded purple upon the green sea; and from one of the shadows,
so dark and so far out upon the glooming horizon that it looked like
an island, arose as from a pier, a wondrous structure of dim, fairy
colours, a multitude of rainbow-ends, side by side, that would have
spanned the heavens with a gorgeous arch, but failed from the very
grandeur of the idea, and grew up only a few degrees against the
clouded west. I stood rapt. The two Falconers were at some
distance before me, walking arm in arm. They stood and gazed
likewise. It was as if God had said to the heavens and the earth
and the chord of the seven colours, 'Comfort ye, comfort ye my
people.' And I said to my soul, 'Let the tempest rave in the world;
let sorrow wail like a sea-bird in the midst thereof; and let thy
heart respond to her shivering cry; but the vault of heaven encloses
the tempest and the shrieking bird and the echoing heart; and the
sun of God's countenance can with one glance from above change the
wildest winter day into a summer evening compact of poets' dreams.'

My companions were walking up over the hill. I could see that
Falconer was earnestly speaking in his father's ear. The old man's
head was bent towards the earth. I kept away. They made a turn
from home. I still followed at a distance. The evening began to
grow dark. The autumn wind met us again, colder, stronger, yet more
laden with the odours of death and the frosts of the coming winter.
But it no longer blew as from the charnel-house of the past; it
blew from the stars through the chinks of the unopened door on the
other side of the sepulchre. It was a wind of the worlds, not a
wind of the leaves. It told of the march of the spheres, and the
rest of the throne of God. We were going on into the universe--home
to the house of our Father. Mighty adventure! Sacred repose! And
as I followed the pair, one great star throbbed and radiated over my
head.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THREE GENERATIONS.

The next week I went back to my work, leaving the father and son
alone together. Before I left, I could see plainly enough that the
bonds were being drawn closer between them. A whole month passed
before they returned to London. The winter then had set in with
unusual severity. But it seemed to bring only health to the two
men. When I saw Andrew next, there was certainly a marked change
upon him. Light had banished the haziness from his eye, and his
step was a good deal firmer. I can hardly speak of more than the
physical improvement, for I saw very little of him now. Still I did
think I could perceive more of judgment in his face, as if he
sometimes weighed things in his mind. But it was plain that Robert
continued very careful not to let him a moment out of his knowledge.
He busied him with the various sights of London, for Andrew,
although he knew all its miseries well, had never yet been inside
Westminster Abbey. If he could only trust him enough to get him
something to do! But what was he fit for? To try him, he proposed
once that he should write some account of what he had seen and
learned in his wanderings; but the evident distress with which he
shrunk from the proposal was grateful to the eyes and heart of his
son.

It was almost the end of the year when a letter arrived from John
Lammie, informing Robert that his grandmother had caught a violent
cold, and that, although the special symptoms had disappeared, it
was evident her strength was sinking fast, and that she would not
recover.

He read the letter to his father.

'We must go and see her, Robert, my boy,' said Andrew.

It was the first time that he had shown the smallest desire to visit
her. Falconer rose with glad heart, and proceeded at once to make
arrangements for their journey.

It was a cold, powdery afternoon in January, with the snow thick on
the ground, save where the little winds had blown the crown of the
street bare before Mrs. Falconer's house. A post-chaise with four
horses swept wearily round the corner, and pulled up at her door.
Betty opened it, and revealed an old withered face very sorrowful,
and yet expectant. Falconer's feelings I dare not, Andrew's I
cannot attempt to describe, as they stepped from the chaise and
entered. Betty led the way without a word into the little parlour.
Robert went next, with long quiet strides, and Andrew followed with
gray, bowed head. Grannie was not in her chair. The doors which
during the day concealed the bed in which she slept, were open, and
there lay the aged woman with her eyes closed. The room was as it
had always been, only there seemed a filmy shadow in it that had not
been there before.

'She's deein', sir,' whispered Betty. 'Ay is she. Och hone!'

Robert took his father's hand, and led him towards the bed. They
drew nigh softly, and bent over the withered, but not even yet very
wrinkled face. The smooth, white, soft hands lay on the sheet,
which was folded back over her bosom. She was asleep, or rather,
she slumbered.

But the soul of the child began to grow in the withered heart of the
old man as he regarded his older mother, and as it grew it forced
the tears to his eyes, and the words to his lips.

'Mother!' he said, and her eyelids rose at once. He stooped to kiss
her, with the tears rolling down his face. The light of heaven
broke and flashed from her aged countenance. She lifted her weak
hands, took his head, and held it to her bosom.

'Eh! the bonnie gray heid!' she said, and burst into a passion of
weeping. She had kept some tears for the last. Now she would spend
all that her griefs had left her. But there came a pause in her
sobs, though not in her weeping, and then she spoke.

'I kent it a' the time, O Lord. I kent it a' the time. He's come
hame. My Anerew, my Anerew! I'm as happy 's a bairn. O Lord! O
Lord!'

And she burst again into sobs, and entered paradise in radiant
weeping.

Her hands sank away from his head, and when her son gazed in her
face he saw that she was dead. She had never looked at Robert.

The two men turned towards each other. Robert put out his arms.
His father laid his head on his bosom, and went on weeping. Robert
held him to his heart.

When shall a man dare to say that God has done all he can?

CHAPTER XIX.

THE WHOLE STORY.

The men laid their mother's body with those of the generations that
had gone before her, beneath the long grass in their country
churchyard near Rothieden--a dreary place, one accustomed to trim
cemeteries and sentimental wreaths would call it--to Falconer's mind
so friendly to the forsaken dust, because it lapt it in sweet
oblivion.

They returned to the dreary house, and after a simple meal such as
both had used to partake of in their boyhood, they sat by the fire,
Andrew in his mother's chair, Robert in the same chair in which he
had learned his Sallust and written his versions. Andrew sat for a
while gazing into the fire, and Robert sat watching his face, where
in the last few months a little feeble fatherhood had begun to dawn.

'It was there, father, that grannie used to sit, every day,
sometimes looking in the fire for hours, thinking about you, I
know,' Robert said at length.

Andrew stirred uneasily in his chair.

'How do you know that?' he asked.

'If there was one thing I could be sure of, it was when grannie was
thinking about you, father. Who wouldn't have known it, father,
when her lips were pressed together, as if she had some dreadful
pain to bear, and her eyes were looking away through the fire--so
far away! and I would speak to her three times before she would
answer? She lived only to think about God and you, father. God and
you came very close together in her mind. Since ever I can
remember, almost, the thought of you was just the one thing in this
house.'

Then Robert began at the beginning of his memory, and told his
father all that he could remember. When he came to speak about his
solitary musings in the garret, he said--and long before he reached
this part, he had relapsed into his mother tongue:

'Come and luik at the place, father. I want to see 't again,
mysel'.'

He rose. His father yielded and followed him. Robert got a candle
in the kitchen, and the two big men climbed the little narrow stair
and stood in the little sky of the house, where their heads almost
touched the ceiling.

'I sat upo' the flure there,' said Robert, 'an' thoucht and thoucht
what I wad du to get ye, father, and what I wad du wi' ye whan I had
gotten ye. I wad greit whiles, 'cause ither laddies had a father
an' I had nane. An' there's whaur I fand mamma's box wi' the letter
in 't and her ain picter: grannie gae me that ane o' you. An'
there's whaur I used to kneel doon an' pray to God. An' he's heard
my prayers, and grannie's prayers, and here ye are wi' me at last.
Instead o' thinkin' aboot ye, I hae yer ain sel'. Come, father, I
want to say a word o' thanks to God, for hearin' my prayer.'

He took the old man's hand, led him to the bedside, and kneeled with
him there.

My reader can hardly avoid thinking it was a poor sad triumph that
Robert had after all. How the dreams of the boy had dwindled in
settling down into the reality! He had his father, it was true, but
what a father! And how little he had him!

But this was not the end; and Robert always believed that the end
must be the greater in proportion to the distance it was removed, to
give time for its true fulfilment. And when he prayed aloud beside
his father, I doubt not that his thanksgiving and his hope were
equal.

The prayer over, he took his father's hand and led him down again to
the little parlour, and they took their seats again by the fire; and
Robert began again and went on with his story, not omitting the
parts belonging to Mary St. John and Eric Ericson.

When he came to tell how he had encountered him in the deserted
factory:

'Luik here, father, here's the mark o' the cut,' he said, parting
the thick hair on the top of his head.

His father hid his face in his hands.

'It wasna muckle o' a blow that ye gied me, father,' he went on,
'but I fell against the grate, and that was what did it. And I
never tellt onybody, nae even Miss St. John, wha plaistered it up,
hoo I had gotten 't. And I didna mean to say onything aboot it; but
I wantit to tell ye a queer dream, sic a queer dream it garred me
dream the same nicht.'

As he told the dream, his father suddenly grew attentive, and before
he had finished, looked almost scared; but he said nothing. When he
came to relate his grandmother's behaviour after having discovered
that the papers relating to the factory were gone, he hid his face
in his hands once more. He told him how grannie had mourned and
wept over him, from the time when he heard her praying aloud as he
crept through her room at night to their last talk together after
Dr. Anderson's death. He set forth, as he could, in the simplest
language, the agony of her soul over her lost son. He told him then
about Ericson, and Dr. Anderson, and how good they had been to him,
and at last of Dr. Anderson's request that he would do something for
him in India.

'Will ye gang wi' me, father?' he asked.

'I'll never leave ye again, Robert, my boy,' he answered. 'I have
been a bad man, and a bad father, and now I gie mysel' up to you to
mak the best o' me ye can. I daurna leave ye, Robert.'

'Pray to God to tak care o' ye, father. He'll do a'thing for ye,
gin ye'll only lat him.'

'I will, Robert.'

'I was mysel' dreidfu' miserable for a while,' Robert resumed, 'for
I cudna see or hear God at a'; but God heard me, and loot me ken
that he was there an' that a' was richt. It was jist like whan a
bairnie waukens up an' cries oot, thinkin' it 's its lane, an'
through the mirk comes the word o' the mither o' 't, sayin', "I'm
here, cratur: dinna greit." And I cam to believe 'at he wad mak you
a good man at last. O father, it's been my dream waukin' an'
sleepin' to hae you back to me an' grannie, an' mamma, an' the
Father o' 's a', an' Jesus Christ that's done a'thing for 's. An'
noo ye maun pray to God, father. Ye will pray to God to haud a grip
o' ye--willna ye, father?'

'I will, I will, Robert. But I've been an awfu' sinner. I believe
I was the death o' yer mother, laddie.'

Some closet of memory was opened; a spring of old tenderness gushed
up in his heart; at some window of the past the face of his dead
wife looked out: the old man broke into a great cry, and sobbed and
wept bitterly. Robert said no more, but wept with him.

Henceforward the father clung to his son like a child. The heart of
Falconer turned to his Father in heaven with speechless
thanksgiving. The ideal of his dreams was beginning to dawn, and
his life was new-born.

For a few days Robert took Andrew about to see those of his old
friends who were left, and the kindness with which they all received
him, moved Andrew's heart not a little. Every one who saw him
seemed to feel that he or she had a share in the redeeming duty of
the son. Robert was in their eyes like a heavenly messenger, whom
they were bound to aid; for here was the possessed of demons clothed
and in his right mind. Therefore they overwhelmed both father and
son with kindness. Especially at John Lammie's was he received with
a perfection of hospitality; as if that had been the father's house
to which he had returned from his prodigal wanderings.

The good old farmer begged that they would stay with him for a few
days.

'I hae sae mony wee things to luik efter at Rothieden, afore we
gang,' said Robert.

'Weel, lea' yer father here. We s' tak guid care o' 'im, I promise
ye.'

'There's only ae difficulty. I believe ye are my father's frien',
Mr. Lammie, as ye hae been mine, and God bless ye; sae I'll jist
tell you the trowth, what for I canna lea' him. I'm no sure eneuch
yet that he could withstan' temptation. It's the drink ye ken.
It's months sin' he's tasted it; but--ye ken weel eneuch--the
temptation's awfu'. Sin' ever I got him back, I haena tasted ae
mou'fu' o' onything that cud be ca'd strong drink mysel', an' as
lang 's he lives, not ae drap shall cross my lips--no to save my
life.'

'Robert,' said Mr. Lammie, giving him his hand with solemnity, 'I
sweir by God that he shanna see, smell, taste, nor touch drink in
this hoose. There's but twa boatles o' whusky, i' the shape o'
drink, i' the hoose; an' gin ye say 'at he sall bide, I'll gang and
mak them an' the midden weel acquant.'