to which he listened with great delight. At times of depression, which of course were frequent, the Flowers of the Forest made the old man weep. Falconer put yet more soul into the sounds than he had ever put into them before. He tried to make the old man talk of his childhood, asking him about the place of his birth, the kind of country, how he had been brought up, his family, and many questions of the sort. His answers were vague, and often contradictory. Indeed, the moment the subject was approached, he looked suspicious and cunning. He said his name was John Mackinnon, and Robert, although his belief was strengthened by a hundred little circumstances, had as yet received no proof that he was Andrew Falconer. Remembering the pawn-ticket, and finding that he could play on the flute, he brought him a beautiful instrument–in fact a silver one–the sight of which made the old man’s eyes sparkle. He put it to his lips with trembling hands, blew a note or two, burst into the tears of weakness, and laid it down. But he soon took it up again, and evidently found both pleasure in the tones and sadness in the memories they awakened. At length Robert brought a tailor, and had him dressed like a gentleman–a change which pleased him much. The next step was to take him out every day for a drive, upon which his health began to improve more rapidly. He ate better, grew more lively, and began to tell tales of his adventures, of the truth of which Robert was not always certain, but never showed any doubt. He knew only too well that the use of opium is especially destructive to the conscience. Some of his stories he believed more readily than others, from the fact that he suddenly stopped in them, as if they were leading him into regions of confession which must be avoided, resuming with matter that did not well connect itself with what had gone before. At length he took him out walking, and he comported himself with perfect propriety.
But one day as they were going along a quiet street, Robert met an acquaintance, and stopped to speak with him. After a few moments’ chat he turned, and found that his father, whom he had supposed to be standing beside him, had vanished. A glance at the other side of the street showed the probable refuge–a public-house. Filled but not overwhelmed with dismay, although he knew that months might be lost in this one moment, Robert darted in. He was there, with a glass of whisky in his hand, trembling now more from eagerness than weakness. He struck it from his hold. But he had already swallowed one glass, and he turned in a rage. He was a tall and naturally powerful man–almost as strongly built as his son, with long arms like his, which were dangerous even yet in such a moment of factitious strength and real excitement. Robert could not lift his arm even to defend himself from his father, although, had he judged it necessary, I believe he would not, in the cause of his redemption, have hesitated to knock him down, as he had often served others whom he would rather a thousand times have borne on his shoulders. He received his father’s blow on the cheek. For one moment it made him dizzy, for it was well delivered. But when the bar-keeper jumped across the counter and approached with his fist doubled, that was another matter. He measured his length on the floor, and Falconer seized his father, who was making for the street, and notwithstanding his struggles and fierce efforts to strike again, held him secure and himself scathless, and bore him out of the house.
A crowd gathers in a moment in London, speeding to a fray as the vultures to carrion. On the heels of the population of the neighbouring mews came two policemen, and at the same moment out came the barman to the assistance of Andrew. But Falconer was as well known to the police as if he had a ticket-of-leave, and a good deal better.
‘Call a four-wheel cab,’ he said to one of them. ‘I’m all right.’
The man started at once. Falconer turned to the other.
‘Tell that man in the apron,’ he said, ‘that I’ll make him all due reparation. But he oughtn’t to be in such a hurry to meddle. He gave me no time but to strike hard.’
‘Yes, sir,’ answered the policeman obediently. The crowd thought he must be a great man amongst the detectives; but the bar-keeper vowed he would ‘summons’ him for the assault.
‘You may, if you like,’ said Falconer. ‘When I think of it, you shall do so. You know where I live?’ he said, turning to the policeman.
‘No, sir, I don’t. I only know you well enough.’
‘Put your hand in my coat-pocket, then, and you’ll find a card-case. The other. There! Help yourself.’
He said this with his arms round Andrew’s, who had ceased to cry out when he saw the police.
‘Do you want to give this gentleman in charge, sir?’
‘No. It is a little private affair of my own, this.’
‘Hadn’t you better let him go, sir, and we’ll find him for you when you want him?’
‘No. He may give me in charge if he likes. Or if you should want him, you will find him at my house.’
Then pinioning his prisoner still more tightly in his arms, he leaned forward, and whispered in his ear,
‘Will you go home quietly, or give me in charge? There is no other way, Andrew Falconer.’
He ceased struggling. Through all the flush of the contest his face grew pale. His arms dropped by his side. Robert let him go, and he stood there without offering to move. The cab came up; the policeman got out; Andrew stepped in of his own accord, and Robert followed.
‘You see it’s all right,’ he said. ‘Here, give the barman a sovereign. If he wants more, let me know. He deserved all he got, but I was wrong. John Street.’
His father did not speak a word, or ask a question all the way home. Evidently he thought it safer to be silent. But the drink he had taken, though not enough to intoxicate him, was more than enough to bring back the old longing with redoubled force. He paced about the room the rest of the day like a wild beast in a cage, and in the middle of the night, got up and dressed, and would have crept through the room in which Robert lay, in the hope of getting out. But Robert slept too anxiously for that. The captive did not make the slightest noise, but his very presence was enough to wake his son. He started at a bound from his couch, and his father retreated in dismay to his chamber.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE BROWN LETTER.
At length the time arrived when Robert would make a further attempt, although with a fear and trembling to quiet which he had to seek the higher aid. His father had recovered his attempt to rush anew upon destruction. He was gentler and more thoughtful, and would again sit for an hour at a time gazing into the fire. From the expression of his countenance upon such occasions, Robert hoped that his visions were not of the evil days, but of those of his innocence.
One evening when he was in one of these moods–he had just had his tea, the gas was lighted, and he was sitting as I have described–Robert began to play in the next room, hoping that the music would sink into his heart, and do something to prepare the way for what was to follow. Just as he had played over the Flowers of the Forest for the third time, his housekeeper entered the room, and receiving permission from her master, went through into Andrew’s chamber, and presented a packet, which she said, and said truly, for she was not in the secret, had been left for him. He received it with evident surprise, mingled with some consternation, looked at the address, looked at the seal, laid it on the table, and gazed again with troubled looks into the fire. He had had no correspondence for many years. Falconer had peeped in when the woman entered, but the moment she retired he could watch him no longer. He went on playing a slow, lingering voluntary, such as the wind plays, of an amber autumn evening, on the æolian harp of its pines. He played so gently that he must hear if his father should speak.
For what seemed hours, though it was but half-an-hour, he went on playing. At length he heard a stifled sob. He rose, and peeped again into the room. The gray head was bowed between the hands, and the gaunt frame was shaken with sobs. On the table lay the portraits of himself and his wife; and the faded brown letter, so many years folded in silence and darkness, lay open beside them. He had known the seal, with the bush of rushes and the Gaelic motto. He had gently torn the paper from around it, and had read the letter from the grave–no, from the land beyond, the land of light, where human love is glorified. Not then did Falconer read the sacred words of his mother; but afterwards his father put them into his hands. I will give them as nearly as I can remember them, for the letter is not in my possession.
‘My beloved Andrew, I can hardly write, for I am at the point of death. I love you still–love you as dearly as before you left me. Will you ever see this? I will try to send it to you. I will leave it behind me, that it may come into your hands when and how it may please God. You may be an old man before you read these words, and may have almost forgotten your young wife. Oh! if I could take your head on my bosom where it used to lie, and without saying a word, think all that I am thinking into your heart. Oh! my love, my love! will you have had enough of the world and its ways by the time this reaches you? Or will you be dead, like me, when this is found, and the eyes of your son only, my darling little Robert, read the words? Oh, Andrew, Andrew! my heart is bleeding, not altogether for myself, not altogether for you, but both for you and for me. Shall I never, never be able to let out the sea of my love that swells till my heart is like to break with its longing after you, my own Andrew? Shall I never, never see you again? That is the terrible thought–the only thought almost that makes me shrink from dying. If I should go to sleep, as some think, and not even dream about you, as I dream and weep every night now! If I should only wake in the crowd of the resurrection, and not know where to find you! Oh, Andrew, I feel as if I should lose my reason when I think that you may be on the left hand of the Judge, and I can no longer say my love, because you do not, cannot any more love God. I will tell you the dream I had about you last night, which I think was what makes me write this letter. I was standing in a great crowd of people, and I saw the empty graves about us on every side. We were waiting for the great white throne to appear in the clouds. And as soon as I knew that, I cried, “Andrew, Andrew!” for I could not help it. And the people did not heed me; and I cried out and ran about everywhere, looking for you. At last I came to a great gulf. When I looked down into it, I could see nothing but a blue deep, like the blue of the sky, under my feet. It was not so wide but that I could see across it, but it was oh! so terribly deep. All at once, as I stood trembling on the very edge, I saw you on the other side, looking towards me, and stretching out your arms as if you wanted me. You were old and much changed, but I knew you at once, and I gave a cry that I thought all the universe must have heard. You heard me. I could see that. And I was in a terrible agony to get to you. But there was no way, for if I fell into the gulf I should go down for ever, it was so deep. Something made me look away, and I saw a man coming quietly along the same side of the gulf, on the edge, towards me. And when he came nearer to me, I saw that he was dressed in a gown down to his feet, and that his feet were bare and had a hole in each of them. So I knew who it was, Andrew. And I fell down and kissed his feet, and lifted up my hands, and looked into his face–oh, such a face! And I tried to pray. But all I could say was, “O Lord, Andrew, Andrew!” Then he smiled, and said, “Daughter, be of good cheer. Do you want to go to him?” And I said, “Yes, Lord.” Then he said, “And so do I. Come.” And he took my hand and led me over the edge of the precipice; and I was not afraid, and I did not sink, but walked upon the air to go to you. But when I got to you, it was too much to bear; and when I thought I had you in my arms at last, I awoke, crying as I never cried before, not even when I found that you had left me to die without you. Oh, Andrew, what if the dream should come true! But if it should not come true! I dare not think of that, Andrew. I couldn’t be happy in heaven without you. It may be very wicked, but I do not feel as if it were, and I can’t help it if it is. But, dear husband, come to me again. Come back, like the prodigal in the New Testament. God will forgive you everything. Don’t touch drink again, my dear love. I know it was the drink that made you do as you did. You could never have done it. It was the drink that drove you to do it. You didn’t know what you were doing. And then you were ashamed, and thought I would be angry, and could not bear to come back to me. Ah, if you were to come in at the door, as I write, you would see whether or not I was proud to have my Andrew again. But I would not be nice for you to look at now. You used to think me pretty–you said beautiful–so long ago. But I am so thin now, and my face so white, that I almost frighten myself when I look in the glass. And before you get this I shall be all gone to dust, either knowing nothing about you, or trying to praise God, and always forgetting where I am in my psalm, longing so for you to come. I am afraid I love you too much to be fit to go to heaven. Then, perhaps, God will send me to the other place, all for love of you, Andrew. And I do believe I should like that better. But I don’t think he will, if he is anything like the man I saw in my dream. But I am growing so faint that I can hardly write. I never felt like this before. But that dream has given me strength to die, because I hope you will come too. Oh, my dear Andrew, do, do repent and turn to God, and he will forgive you. Believe in Jesus, and he will save you, and bring me to you across the deep place. But I must make haste. I can hardly see. And I must not leave this letter open for anybody but you to read after I am dead. Good-bye, Andrew. I love you all the same. I am, my dearest Husband, your affectionate Wife,
‘H. FALCONER.’
Then followed the date. It was within a week of her death. The letter was feebly written, every stroke seeming more feeble by the contrasted strength of the words. When Falconer read it afterwards, in the midst of the emotions it aroused–the strange lovely feelings of such a bond between him and a beautiful ghost, far away somewhere in God’s universe, who had carried him in her lost body, and nursed him at her breasts–in the midst of it all, he could not help wondering, he told me, to find the forms and words so like what he would have written himself. It seemed so long ago when that faded, discoloured paper, with the gilt edges, and the pale brown ink, and folded in the large sheet, and sealed with the curious wax, must have been written; and here were its words so fresh, so new! not withered like the rose-leaves that scented the paper from the work-box where he had found it, but as fresh as if just shaken from the rose-trees of the heart’s garden. It was no wonder that Andrew Falconer should be sitting with his head in his hands when Robert looked in on him, for he had read this letter.
When Robert saw how he sat, he withdrew, and took his violin again, and played all the tunes of the old country he could think of, recalling Dooble Sandy’s workshop, that he might recall the music he had learnt there.
No one who understands the bit and bridle of the association of ideas, as it is called in the skeleton language of mental philosophy, wherewith the Father-God holds fast the souls of his children–to the very last that we see of them, at least, and doubtless to endless ages beyond–will sneer at Falconer’s notion of making God’s violin a ministering spirit in the process of conversion. There is a well-authenticated story of a convict’s having been greatly reformed for a time, by going, in one of the colonies, into a church, where the matting along the aisle was of the same pattern as that in the church to which he had gone when a boy–with his mother, I suppose. It was not the matting that so far converted him: it was not to the music of his violin that Falconer looked for aid, but to the memories of childhood, the mysteries of the kingdom of innocence which that could recall–those memories which
Are yet the fountain light of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our seeing.
For an hour he did not venture to go near him. When he entered the room he found him sitting in the same place, no longer weeping, but gazing into the fire with a sad countenance, the expression of which showed Falconer at once that the soul had come out of its cave of obscuration, and drawn nearer to the surface of life. He had not seen him look so much like one ‘clothed, and in his right mind,’ before. He knew well that nothing could be built upon this; that this very emotion did but expose him the more to the besetting sin; that in this mood he would drink, even if he knew that he would in consequence be in danger of murdering the wife whose letter had made him weep. But it was progress, notwithstanding. He looked up at Robert as he entered, and then dropped his eyes again. He regarded him perhaps as a presence doubtful whether of angel or devil, even as the demoniacs regarded the Lord of Life who had come to set them free. Bewildered he must have been to find himself, towards the close of a long life of debauchery, wickedness, and the growing pains of hell, caught in a net of old times, old feelings, old truths.
Now Robert had carefully avoided every indication that might disclose him to be a Scotchman even, nor was there the least sign of suspicion in Andrew’s manner. The only solution of the mystery that could have presented itself to him was, that his friends were at the root of it–probably his son, of whom he knew absolutely nothing. His mother could not be alive still. Of his wife’s relatives there had never been one who would have taken any trouble about him after her death, hardly even before it. John Lammie was the only person, except Dr. Anderson, whose friendship he could suppose capable of this development. The latter was the more likely person. But he would be too much for him yet; he was not going to be treated like a child, he said to himself, as often as the devil got uppermost.
My reader must understand that Andrew had never been a man of resolution. He had been wilful and headstrong; and these qualities, in children especially, are often mistaken for resolution, and generally go under the name of strength of will. There never was a greater mistake. The mistake, indeed, is only excusable from the fact that extremes meet, and that this disposition is so opposite to the other, that it looks to the careless eye most like it. He never resisted his own impulses, or the enticements of evil companions. Kept within certain bounds at home, after he had begun to go wrong, by the weight of opinion, he rushed into all excesses when abroad upon business, till at length the vessel of his fortune went to pieces, and he was a waif on the waters of the world. But in feeling he had never been vulgar, however much so in action. There was a feeble good in him that had in part been protected by its very feebleness. He could not sin so much against it as if it had been strong. For many years he had fits of shame, and of grief without repentance; for repentance is the active, the divine part–the turning again; but taking more steadily both to strong drink and opium, he was at the time when De Fleuri found him only the dull ghost of Andrew Falconer walking in a dream of its lost carcass.
CHAPTER XV.
FATHER AND SON.
Once more Falconer retired, but not to take his violin. He could play no more. Hope and love were swelling within him. He could not rest. Was it a sign from heaven that the hour for speech had arrived? He paced up and down the room. He kneeled and prayed for guidance and help. Something within urged him to try the rusted lock of his father’s heart. Without any formed resolution, without any conscious volition, he found himself again in his room. There the old man still sat, with his back to the door, and his gaze fixed on the fire, which had sunk low in the grate. Robert went round in front of him, kneeled on the rug before him, and said the one word,
‘Father!’
Andrew started violently, raised his hand, which trembled as with a palsy, to his head, and stared wildly at Robert. But he did not speak. Robert repeated the one great word. Then Andrew spoke, and said in a trembling, hardly audible voice,
‘Are you my son?–my boy Robert, sir?’
‘I am. I am. Oh, father, I have longed for you by day, and dreamed about you by night, ever since I saw that other boys had fathers, and I had none. Years and years of my life–I hardly know how many–have been spent in searching for you. And now I have found you!’
The great tall man, in the prime of life and strength, laid his big head down on the old man’s knee, as if he had been a little child. His father said nothing, but laid his hand on the head. For some moments the two remained thus, motionless and silent. Andrew was the first to speak. And his words were the voice of the spirit that striveth with man.
‘What am I to do, Robert?’
No other words, not even those of passionate sorrow, or overflowing affection, could have been half so precious in the ears of Robert. When a man once asks what he is to do, there is hope for him. Robert answered instantly,
‘You must come home to your mother.’
‘My mother!’ Andrew exclaimed. ‘You don’t mean to say she’s alive?’
‘I heard from her yesterday–in her own hand, too,’ said Robert.
‘I daren’t. I daren’t,’ murmured Andrew.
‘You must, father,’ returned Robert. ‘It is a long way, but I will make the journey easy for you. She knows I have found you. She is waiting and longing for you. She has hardly thought of anything but you ever since she lost you. She is only waiting to see you, and then she will go home, she says. I wrote to her and said, “Grannie, I have found your Andrew.” And she wrote back to me and said, “God be praised. I shall die in peace.”‘
A silence followed.
‘Will she forgive me?’ said Andrew.
‘She loves you more than her own soul,’ answered Robert. ‘She loves you as much as I do. She loves you as God loves you.’
‘God can’t love me,’ said Andrews, feebly. ‘He would never have left me if he had loved me.’
‘He has never left you from the very first. You would not take his way, father, and he just let you try your own. But long before that he had begun to get me ready to go after you. He put such love to you in my heart, and gave me such teaching and such training, that I have found you at last. And now I have found you, I will hold you. You cannot escape–you will not want to escape any more, father?’
Andrew made no reply to this appeal. It sounded like imprisonment for life, I suppose. But thought was moving in him. After a long pause, during which the son’s heart was hungering for a word whereon to hang a further hope, the old man spoke again, muttering as if he were only speaking his thoughts unconsciously.
‘Where’s the use? There’s no forgiveness for me. My mother is going to heaven. I must go to hell. No. It’s no good. Better leave it as it is. I daren’t see her. It would kill me to see her.’
‘It will kill her not to see you; and that will be one sin more on your conscience, father.’
Andrew got up and walked about the room. And Robert only then arose from his knees.
‘And there’s my mother,’ he said.
Andrew did not reply; but Robert saw when he turned next towards the light, that the sweat was standing in beads on his forehead.
‘Father,’ he said, going up to him.
The old man stopped in his walk, turned, and faced his son.
‘Father,’ repeated Robert, ‘you’ve go to repent; and God won’t let you off; and you needn’t think it. You’ll have to repent some day.’
‘In hell, Robert,’ said Andrew, looking him full in the eyes, as he had never looked at him before. It seemed as if even so much acknowledgment of the truth had already made him bolder and honester.
‘Yes. Either on earth or in hell. Would it not be better on earth?’
‘But it will be no use in hell,’ he murmured.
In those few words lay the germ of the preference for hell of poor souls, enfeebled by wickedness. They will not have to do anything there–only to moan and cry and suffer for ever, they think. It is effort, the out-going of the living will that they dread. The sorrow, the remorse of repentance, they do not so much regard: it is the action it involves; it is the having to turn, be different, and do differently, that they shrink from; and they have been taught to believe that this will not be required of them there–in that awful refuge of the will-less. I do not say they think thus: I only say their dim, vague, feeble feelings are such as, if they grew into thought, would take this form. But tell them that the fire of God without and within them will compel them to bethink themselves; that the vision of an open door beyond the smoke and the flames will ever urge them to call up the ice-bound will, that it may obey; that the torturing spirit of God in them will keep their consciences awake, not to remind them of what they ought to have done, but to tell them what they must do now, and hell will no longer fascinate them. Tell them that there is no refuge from the compelling Love of God, save that Love itself–that He is in hell too, and that if they make their bed in hell they shall not escape him, and then, perhaps, they will have some true presentiment of the worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched.
‘Father, it will be of use in hell,’ said Robert. ‘God will give you no rest even there. You will have to repent some day, I do believe–if not now under the sunshine of heaven, then in the torture of the awful world where there is no light but that of the conscience. Would it not be better and easier to repent now, with your wife waiting for you in heaven, and your mother waiting for you on earth?’
Will it be credible to my reader, that Andrew interrupted his son with the words,
‘Robert, it is dreadful to hear you talk like that. Why, you don’t believe in the Bible!’
His words will be startling to one who has never heard the lips of a hoary old sinner drivel out religion. To me they are not so startling as the words of Christian women and bishops of the Church of England, when they say that the doctrine of the everlasting happiness of the righteous stands or falls with the doctrine of the hopeless damnation of the wicked. Can it be that to such the word is everything, the spirit nothing? No. It is only that the devil is playing a very wicked prank, not with them, but in them: they are pluming themselves on being selfish after a godly sort.
‘I do believe the Bible, father,’ returned Robert, ‘and have ordered my life by it. If I had not believed the Bible, I fear I should never have looked for you. But I won’t dispute about it. I only say I believe that you will be compelled to repent some day, and that now is the best time. Then, you will not only have to repent, but to repent that you did not repent now. And I tell you, father, that you shall go to my grandmother.’
CHAPTER XVI.
CHANGE OF SCENE.
But various reasons combined to induce Falconer to postpone yet for a period their journey to the North. Not merely did his father require an unremitting watchfulness, which it would be difficult to keep up in his native place amongst old friends and acquaintances, but his health was more broken than he had at first supposed, and change of air and scene without excitement was most desirable. He was anxious too that the change his mother must see in him should be as little as possible attributable to other causes than those that years bring with them. To this was added that his own health had begun to suffer from the watching and anxiety he had gone through, and for his father’s sake, as well as for the labour which yet lay before him, he would keep that as sound as he might. He wrote to his grandmother and explained the matter. She begged him to do as he thought best, for she was so happy that she did not care if she should never see Andrew in this world: it was enough to die in the hope of meeting him in the other. But she had no reason to fear that death was at hand; for, although much more frail, she felt as well as ever.
By this time Falconer had introduced me to his father. I found him in some things very like his son; in others, very different. His manners were more polished; his pleasure in pleasing much greater: his humanity had blossomed too easily, and then run to seed. Alas, to no seed that could bear fruit! There was a weak expression about his mouth–a wavering interrogation: it was so different from the firmly-closed portals whence issued the golden speech of his son! He had a sly, sidelong look at times, whether of doubt or cunning, I could not always determine. His eyes, unlike his son’s, were of a light blue, and hazy both in texture and expression. His hands were long-fingered and tremulous. He gave your hand a sharp squeeze, and the same instant abandoned it with indifference. I soon began to discover in him a tendency to patronize any one who showed him a particle of respect as distinguished from common-place civility. But under all outward appearances it seemed to me that there was a change going on: at least being very willing to believe it, I found nothing to render belief impossible.
He was very fond of the flute his son had given him, and on that sweetest and most expressionless of instruments he played exquisitely.
One evening when I called to see them, Falconer said,
‘We are going out of town for a few weeks, Gordon: will you go with us?’
‘I am afraid I can’t.’
‘Why? You have no teaching at present, and your writing you can do as well in the country as in town.’
‘That is true; but still I don’t see how I can. I am too poor for one thing.’
‘Between you and me that is nonsense.’
‘Well, I withdraw that,’ I said. ‘But there is so much to be done, specially as you will be away, and Miss St John is at the Lakes.’
‘That is all very true; but you need a change. I have seen for some weeks that you are failing. Mind, it is our best work that He wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I hope you are not of the mind of our friend Mr. Watts, the curate of St. Gregory’s.’
‘I thought you had a high opinion of Mr. Watts,’ I returned.
‘So I have. I hope it is not necessary to agree with a man in everything before we can have a high opinion of him.’
‘Of course not. But what is it you hope I am not of his opinion in?’
‘He seems ambitious of killing himself with work–of wearing himself out in the service of his master–and as quickly as possible. A good deal of that kind of thing is a mere holding of the axe to the grindstone, not a lifting of it up against thick trees. Only he won’t be convinced till it comes to the helve. I met him the other day; he was looking as white as his surplice. I took upon me to read him a lecture on the holiness of holidays. “I can’t leave my poor,” he said. “Do you think God can’t do without you?” I asked. “Is he so weak that he cannot spare the help of a weary man? But I think he must prefer quality to quantity, and for healthy work you must be healthy yourself. How can you be the visible sign of the Christ-present amongst men, if you inhabit an exhausted, irritable brain? Go to God’s infirmary and rest a while. Bring back health from the country to those that cannot go to it. If on the way it be transmuted into spiritual forms, so much the better. A little more of God will make up for a good deal less of you.’
‘What did he say to that?’
‘He said our Lord died doing the will of his Father. I told him–“Yes, when his time was come, not sooner. Besides, he often avoided both speech and action.” “Yes,” he answered, “but he could tell when, and we cannot.” “Therefore,” I rejoined, “you ought to accept your exhaustion as a token that your absence will be the best thing for your people. If there were no God, then perhaps you ought to work till you drop down dead–I don’t know.”‘
‘Is he gone yet?’
‘No. He won’t go. I couldn’t persuade him.’
‘When do you go?’
‘To-morrow.’
‘I shall be ready, if you really mean it.’
‘That’s an if worthy only of a courtier. There may be much virtue in an if, as Touchstone says, for the taking up of a quarrel; but that if is bad enough to breed one,’ said Falconer, laughing. ‘Be at the Paddington Station at noon to-morrow. To tell the whole truth, I want you to help me with my father.’
This last was said at the door as he showed me out.
In the afternoon we were nearing Bristol. It was a lovely day in October. Andrew had been enjoying himself; but it was evidently rather the pleasure of travelling in a first-class carriage like a gentleman than any delight in the beauty of heaven and earth. The country was in the rich sombre dress of decay.
‘Is it not remarkable,’ said my friend to me, ‘that the older I grow, I find autumn affecting me the more like spring?’
‘I am thankful to say,’ interposed Andrew, with a smile in which was mingled a shade of superiority, ‘that no change of the seasons ever affects me.’
‘Are you sure you are right in being thankful for that, father?’ asked his son.
His father gazed at him for a moment, seemed to bethink himself after some feeble fashion or other, and rejoined,
‘Well, I must confess I did feel a touch of the rheumatism this morning.’
How I pitied Falconer! Would he ever see of the travail of his soul in this man? But he only smiled a deep sweet smile, and seemed to be thinking divine things in that great head of his.
At Bristol we went on board a small steamer, and at night were landed at a little village on the coast of North Devon. The hotel to which we went was on the steep bank of a tumultuous little river, which tumbled past its foundation of rock, like a troop of watery horses galloping by with ever-dissolving limbs. The elder Falconer retired almost as soon as we had had supper. My friend and I lighted our pipes, and sat by the open window, for although the autumn was so far advanced, the air here was very mild. For some time we only listened to the sound of the waters.
‘There are three things,’ said Falconer at last, taking his pipe out of his mouth with a smile, ‘that give a peculiarly perfect feeling of abandonment: the laughter of a child; a snake lying across a fallen branch; and the rush of a stream like this beneath us, whose only thought is to get to the sea.’
We did not talk much that night, however, but went soon to bed. None of us slept well. We agreed in the morning that the noise of the stream had been too much for us all, and that the place felt close and torpid. Andrew complained that the ceaseless sound wearied him, and Robert that he felt the aimless endlessness of it more than was good for him. I confess it irritated me like an anodyne unable to soothe. We were clearly all in want of something different. The air between the hills clung to them, hot and moveless. We would climb those hills, and breathe the air that flitted about over their craggy tops.
As soon as we had breakfasted, we set out. It was soon evident that Andrew could not ascend the steep road. We returned and got a carriage. When we reached the top, it was like a resurrection, like a dawning of hope out of despair. The cool friendly wind blew on our faces, and breathed strength into our frames. Before us lay the ocean, the visible type of the invisible, and the vessels with their white sails moved about over it like the thoughts of men feebly searching the unknown. Even Andrew Falconer spread out his arms to the wind, and breathed deep, filling his great chest full.
‘I feel like a boy again,’ he said.
His son strode to his side, and laid his arm over his shoulders.
‘So do I, father,’ he returned; ‘but it is because I have got you.’
The old man turned and looked at him with a tenderness I had never seen on his face before. As soon as I saw that, I no longer doubted that he could be saved.
We found rooms in a farm-house on the topmost height.
‘These are poor little hills, Falconer,’ I said. ‘Yet they help one like mountains.’
‘The whole question is,’ he returned, ‘whether they are high enough to lift you out of the dirt. Here we are in the airs of heaven–that is all we need.’
‘They make me think how often, amongst the country people of Scotland, I have wondered at the clay-feet upon which a golden head of wisdom stood! What poor needs, what humble aims, what a narrow basement generally, was sufficient to support the statues of pure-eyed Faith and white-handed Hope,’
‘Yes,’ said Falconer: ‘he who is faithful over a few things is a lord of cities. It does not matter whether you preach in Westminster Abbey, or teach a ragged class, so you be faithful. The faithfulness is all.’
After an early dinner we went out for a walk, but we did not go far before we sat down upon the grass. Falconer laid himself at full length and gazed upwards.
‘When I look like this into the blue sky,’ he said, after a moment’s silence, ‘it seems so deep, so peaceful, so full of a mysterious tenderness, that I could lie for centuries, and wait for the dawning of the face of God out of the awful loving-kindness.’
I had never heard Falconer talk of his own present feelings in this manner; but glancing at the face of his father with a sense of his unfitness to hear such a lofty utterance, I saw at once that it was for his sake that he had thus spoken. The old man had thrown himself back too, and was gazing into the sky, puzzling himself, I could see, to comprehend what his son could mean. I fear he concluded, for the time, that Robert was not gifted with the amount of common-sense belonging of right to the Falconer family, and that much religion had made him a dreamer. Still, I thought I could see a kind of awe pass like a spiritual shadow across his face as he gazed into the blue gulfs over him. No one can detect the first beginnings of any life, and those of spiritual emotion must more than any lie beyond our ken: there is infinite room for hope. Falconer said no more. We betook ourselves early within doors, and he read King Lear to us, expounding the spiritual history of the poor old king after a fashion I had never conceived–showing us how the said history was all compressed, as far as human eye could see of it, into the few months that elapsed between his abdication and his death; how in that short time he had to learn everything that he ought to have been learning all his life; and how, because he had put it off so long, the lessons that had then to be given him were awfully severe.
I thought what a change it was for the old man to lift his head into the air of thought and life, out of the sloughs of misery in which he had been wallowing for years.
CHAPTER XVII.
IN THE COUNTRY.
The next morning Falconer, who knew the country, took us out for a drive. We passed through lanes and gates out upon all open moor, where he stopped the carriage, and led us a few yards on one side. Suddenly, hundreds of feet below us, down what seemed an almost precipitous descent, we saw the wood-embosomed, stream-trodden valley we had left the day before. Enough had been cleft and scooped seawards out of the lofty table-land to give room for a few little conical hills with curious peaks of bare rock. At the bases of these hills flowed noisily two or three streams, which joined in one, and trotted out to sea over rocks and stones. The hills and the sides of the great cleft were half of them green with grass, and half of them robed in the autumnal foliage of thick woods. By the streams and in the woods nestled pretty houses; and away at the mouth of the valley and the stream lay the village. All around, on our level, stretched farm and moorland.
When Andrew Falconer stood so unexpectedly on the verge of the steep descent, he trembled and started back with fright. His son made him sit down a little way off, where yet we could see into the valley. The sun was hot, the air clear and mild, and the sea broke its blue floor into innumerable sparkles of radiance. We sat for a while in silence.
‘Are you sure,’ I said, in the hope of setting my friend talking, ‘that there is no horrid pool down there? no half-trampled thicket, with broken pottery and shreds of tin lying about? no dead carcass, or dirty cottage, with miserable wife and greedy children? When I was a child, I knew a lovely place that I could not half enjoy, because, although hidden from my view, an ugly stagnation, half mud, half water, lay in a certain spot below me. When I had to pass it, I used to creep by with a kind of dull terror, mingled with hopeless disgust, and I have never got over the feeling.’
‘You remind me much of a friend of mine of whom I have spoken to you before,’ said Falconer, ‘Eric Ericson. I have shown you many of his verses, but I don’t think I ever showed you one little poem containing an expression of the same feeling. I think I can repeat it.
‘Some men there are who cannot spare
A single tear until they feel
The last cold pressure, and the heel Is stamped upon the outmost layer.
And, waking, some will sigh to think
The clouds have borrowed winter’s wing– Sad winter when the grasses spring
No more about the fountain’s brink.
And some would call me coward-fool:
I lay a claim to better blood;
But yet a heap of idle mud
Hath power to make me sorrowful.
I sat thinking over the verses, for I found the feeling a little difficult to follow, although the last stanza was plain enough. Falconer resumed.
‘I think this is as likely as any place,’ he said, ‘to be free of such physical blots. For the moral I cannot say. But I have learned, I hope, not to be too fastidious–I mean so as to be unjust to the whole because of the part. The impression made by a whole is just as true as the result of an analysis, and is greater and more valuable in every respect. If we rejoice in the beauty of the whole, the other is sufficiently forgotten. For moral ugliness, it ceases to distress in proportion as we labour to remove it, and regard it in its true relations to all that surrounds it. There is an old legend which I dare say you know. The Saviour and his disciples were walking along the way, when they came upon a dead dog. The disciples did not conceal their disgust. The Saviour said: “How white its teeth are!”‘
‘That is very beautiful,’ I rejoined. ‘Thank God for that. It is true, whether invented or not. But,’ I added, ‘it does not quite answer to the question about which we have been talking. The Lord got rid of the pain of the ugliness by finding the beautiful in it.’
‘It does correspond, however, I think, in principle,’ returned Falconer; ‘only it goes much farther, making the exceptional beauty hallow the general ugliness–which is the true way, for beauty is life, and therefore infinitely deeper and more powerful than ugliness which is death. “A dram of sweet,” says Spenser, ‘is worth a pound of sour.”‘
It was so delightful to hear him talk–for what he said was not only far finer than my record of it, but the whole man spoke as well as his mouth–that I sought to start him again.
‘I wish,’ I said, ‘that I could see things as you do–in great masses of harmonious unity. I am only able to see a truth sparkling here and there, and to try to lay hold of it. When I aim at more, I am like Noah’s dove, without a place to rest the sole of my foot.’
‘That is the only way to begin. Leave the large vision to itself, and look well after your sparkles. You will find them grow and gather and unite, until you are afloat on a sea of radiance–with cloud shadows no doubt.’
‘And yet,’ I resumed, ‘I never seem to have room.’
‘That is just why.’
‘But I feel that I cannot find it. I know that if I fly to that bounding cape on the far horizon there, I shall only find a place–a place to want another in. There is no fortunate island out on that sea.’
‘I fancy,’ said Falconer, ‘that until a man loves space, he will never be at peace in a place. At least so I have found it. I am content if you but give me room. All space to me throbs with being and life; and the loveliest spot on the earth seems but the compression of space till the meaning shines out of it, as the fire flies out of the air when you drive it close together. To seek place after place for freedom, is a constant effort to flee from space, and a vain one, for you are ever haunted by the need of it, and therefore when you seek most to escape it, fancy that you love it and want it.’
‘You are getting too mystical for me now,’ I said. ‘I am not able to follow you.’
‘I fear I was on the point of losing myself. At all events I can go no further now. And indeed I fear I have been but skirting the Limbo of Vanities.’
He rose, for we could both see that this talk was not in the least interesting to our companion. We got again into the carriage, which, by Falconer’s orders, was turned and driven in the opposite direction, still at no great distance from the lofty edge of the heights that rose above the shore.
We came at length to a lane bounded with stone walls, every stone of which had its moss and every chink its fern. The lane grew more and more grassy; the walls vanished; and the track faded away into a narrow winding valley, formed by the many meeting curves of opposing hills. They were green to the top with sheep-grass, and spotted here and there with patches of fern, great stones, and tall withered foxgloves. The air was sweet and healthful, and Andrew evidently enjoyed it because it reminded him again of his boyhood. The only sound we heard was the tinkle of a few tender sheep-bells, and now and then the tremulous bleating of a sheep. With a gentle winding, the valley led us into a more open portion of itself, where the old man paused with a look of astonished pleasure.
Before us, seaward, rose a rampart against the sky, like the turreted and embattled wall of a huge eastern city, built of loose stones piled high, and divided by great peaky rocks. In the centre rose above them all one solitary curiously-shaped mass, one of the oddest peaks of the Himmalays in miniature. From its top on the further side was a sheer descent to the waters far below the level of the valley from which it immediately rose. It was altogether a strange freaky fantastic place, not without its grandeur. It looked like the remains of a frolic of the Titans, or rather as if reared by the boys and girls, while their fathers and mothers ‘lay stretched out huge in length,’ and in breadth too, upon the slopes around, and laughed thunderously at the sportive invention of their sons and daughters. Falconer helped his father up to the edge of the rampart that he might look over. Again he started back, ‘afraid of that which was high,’ for the lowly valley was yet at a great height above the diminished waves. On the outside of the rampart ran a narrow path whence the green hill-side went down steep to the sea. The gulls were screaming far below us; we could see the little flying streaks of white. Beyond was the great ocean. A murmurous sound came up from its shore.
We descended and seated ourselves on the short springy grass of a little mound at the foot of one of the hills, where it sank slowly, like the dying gush of a wave, into the hollowest centre of the little vale.
‘Everything tends to the cone-shape here,’ said Falconer,–‘the oddest and at the same time most wonderful of mathematical figures.’
‘Is it not strange,’ I said, ‘that oddity and wonder should come so near?’
‘They often do in the human world as well,’ returned he. ‘Therefore it is not strange that Shelley should have been so fond of this place. It is told of him that repeated sketches of the spot were found on the covers of his letters. I know nothing more like Shelley’s poetry than this valley–wildly fantastic and yet beautiful–as if a huge genius were playing at grandeur, and producing little models of great things. But there is one grand thing I want to show you a little further on.’
We rose, and walked out of the valley on the other side, along the lofty coast. When we reached a certain point, Falconer stood and requested us to look as far as we could, along the cliffs to the face of the last of them.
‘What do you see?’ he asked.
‘A perpendicular rock, going right down into the blue waters,’ I answered.
‘Look at it: what is the outline of it like? Whose face is it?’
‘Shakspere’s, by all that is grand!’ I cried.
‘So it is,’ said Andrew.
‘Right. Now I’ll tell you what I would do. If I were very rich, and there were no poor people in the country, I would give a commission to some great sculptor to attack that rock and work out its suggestion. Then, it I had any money left, we should find one for Bacon, and one for Chaucer, and one for Milton; and, as we are about it, we may fancy as many more as we like; so that from the bounding rocks of our island, the memorial faces of our great brothers should look abroad over the seas into the infinite sky beyond.’
‘Well, now,’ said the elder, ‘I think it is grander as it is.’
‘You are quite right, father,’ said Robert. ‘And so with many of our fancies for perfecting God’s mighty sketches, which he only can finish.’
Again we seated ourselves and looked out over the waves.
‘I have never yet heard,’ I said, ‘how you managed with that poor girl that wanted to drown herself–on Westminster Bridge, I mean–that night, you remember.’
‘Miss St. John has got her in her own house at present. She has given her those two children we picked up at the door of the public-house to take care of. Poor little darlings! they are bringing back the life in her heart already. There is actually a little colour in her cheek–the dawn, I trust, of the eternal life. That is Miss St. John’s way. As often as she gets hold of a poor hopeless woman, she gives her a motherless child. It is wonderful what the childless woman and motherless child do for each other.’
‘I was much amused the other day with the lecture one of the police magistrates gave a poor creature who was brought before him for attempting to drown herself. He did give her a sovereign out of the poor box, though.’
‘Well, that might just tide her over the shoal of self-destruction,’ said Falconer. ‘But I cannot help doubting whether any one has a right to prevent a suicide from carrying out his purpose, who is not prepared to do a good deal more for him than that. What would you think of the man who snatched the loaf from a hungry thief, threw it back into the baker’s cart, and walked away to his club-dinner? Harsh words of rebuke, and the threat of severe punishment upon a second attempt–what are they to the wretch weary of life? To some of them the kindest punishment would be to hang them for it. It is something else than punishment that they need. If the comfortable alderman had but “a feeling of their afflictions,” felt in himself for a moment how miserable he must be, what a waste of despair must be in his heart, before he would do it himself, before the awful river would appear to him a refuge from the upper air, he would change his tone. I fear he regards suicide chiefly as a burglarious entrance into the premises of the respectable firm of Vension, Port, & Co.’
‘But you mustn’t be too hard upon him, Falconer; for if his God is his belly, how can he regard suicide as other than the most awful sacrilege?’
‘Of course not. His well-fed divinity gives him one great commandment: “Thou shalt love thyself with all thy heart. The great breach is to hurt thyself–worst of all to send thyself away from the land of luncheons and dinners, to the country of thought and vision.” But, alas! he does not reflect on the fact that the god Belial does not feed all his votaries; that he has his elect; that the altar of his inner-temple too often smokes with no sacrifice of which his poor meagre priests may partake. They must uphold the Divinity which has been good to them, and not suffer his worship to fall into disrepute.’
‘Really, Robert,’ said his father, ‘I am afraid to think what you will come to. You will end in denying there is a God at all. You don’t believe in hell, and now you justify suicide. Really–I must say–to say the least of it–I have not been accustomed to hear such things.’
The poor old man looked feebly righteous at his wicked son. I verily believe he was concerned for his eternal fate. Falconer gave a pleased glance at me, and for a moment said nothing. Then he began, with a kind of logical composure:
‘In the first place, father, I do not believe in such a God as some people say they believe in. Their God is but an idol of the heathen, modified with a few Christian qualities. For hell, I don’t believe there is any escape from it but by leaving hellish things behind. For suicide, I do not believe it is wicked because it hurts yourself, but I do believe it is very wicked. I only want to put it on its own right footing.’
‘And pray what do you consider its right footing?’
‘My dear father, I recognize no duty as owing to a man’s self. There is and can be no such thing. I am and can be under no obligation to myself. The whole thing is a fiction, and of evil invention. It comes from the upper circles of the hell of selfishness. Or, perhaps, it may with some be merely a form of metaphysical mistake; but an untruth it is. Then for the duty we do owe to other people: how can we expect the men or women who have found life to end, as it seems to them, in a dunghill of misery–how can we expect such to understand any obligation to live for the sake of the general others, to no individual of whom, possibly, do they bear an endurable relation? What remains?–The grandest, noblest duty from which all other duty springs: the duty to the possible God. Mind, I say possible God, for I judge it the first of my duties towards my neighbour to regard his duty from his position, not from mine.’
‘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.’
Andrew was pleased at the proposal. Robert too was pleased that his father should be free of him for a while. It was arranged for three days. Half-an-hour after, Robert came upon Mr. Lammie emptying the two bottles of whisky into the dunghill in the farmyard.
He returned with glad heart to Rothieden. It did not take him long to arrange his grandmother’s little affairs. He had already made up his mind about her house and furniture. He rang the bell one morning for Betty.
‘Hae ye ony siller laid up, Betty?’
‘Ay. I hae feifteen poun’ i’ the savin’s bank.’
‘An’ what do ye think o’ doin’?’
‘I’ll get a bit roomy, an’ tak in washin’.
‘Weel, I’ll tell ye what I wad like ye to do. Ye ken Mistress Elshender?’
‘Fine that. An’ a verra dacent body she is.’
‘Weel, gin ye like, ye can haud this hoose, an’ a’ ‘at’s in’t, jist as it is, till the day o’ yer deith. And ye’ll aye keep it in order, an’ the ga’le-room ready for me at ony time I may happen to come in upo’ ye in want o’ a nicht’s quarters. But I wad like ye, gin ye hae nae objections, to tak Mistress Elshender to bide wi’ ye. She’s turnin’ some frail noo, and I’m unner great obligation to her Sandy, ye ken.’
‘Ay, weel that. He learnt ye to fiddle, Robert–I hoombly beg your pardon, sir, Mister Robert.’
‘Nae offence, Betty, I assure ye. Ye hae been aye gude to me, and I thank ye hertily.’
Betty could not stand this. Her apron went up to her eyes.
‘Eh, sir,’ she sobbed, ‘ye was aye a gude lad.’
‘Excep’ whan I spak o’ Muckledrum, Betty.’
She laughed and sobbed together.
‘Weel, ye’ll tak Mistress Elshender in, winna ye?’
‘I’ll do that, sir. And I’ll try to do my best wi’ her.’
‘She can help ye, ye ken, wi’ yer washin’, an’ sic like.’
‘She’s a hard-workin’ wuman, sir. She wad do that weel.’
‘And whan ye’re in ony want o’ siller, jist write to me. An’ gin onything suld happen to me, ye ken, write to Mr. Gordon, a frien’ o’ mine. There’s his address in Lonnon.’
‘Eh, sir, but ye are kin’. God bless ye for a’.’
She could bear no more, and left the room crying.
Everything settled at Rothieden, he returned to Bodyfauld. The most welcome greeting he had ever received in his life, lay in the shine of his father’s eyes when he entered the room where he sat with Miss Lammie. The next day they left for London.
CHAPTER XX.
THE VANISHING.
They came to see me the very evening of their arrival. As to Andrew’s progress there could be no longer any doubt. All that was necessary for conviction on the point was to have seen him before and to see him now. The very grasp of his hand was changed. But not yet would Robert leave him alone.
It will naturally occur to my reader that his goodness was not much yet. It was not. It may have been greater than we could be sure of, though. But if any one object that such a conversion, even if it were perfected, was poor, inasmuch as the man’s free will was intromitted with, I answer: ‘The development of the free will was the one object. Hitherto it was not free.’ I ask the man who says so: ‘Where would your free will have been if at some period of your life you could have had everything you wanted?’ If he says it is nobler in a man to do with less help, I answer, ‘Andrew was not noble: was he therefore to be forsaken? The prodigal was not left without the help of the swine and their husks, at once to keep him alive and disgust him with the life. Is the less help a man has from God the better?’ According to you, the grandest thing of all would be for a man sunk in the absolute abysses of sensuality all at once to resolve to be pure as the empyrean, and be so, without help from God or man. But is the thing possible? As well might a hyena say: I will be a man, and become one. That would be to create. Andrew must be kept from the evil long enough to let him at least see the good, before he was let alone. But when would we be let alone? For a man to be fit to be let alone, is for a man not to need God, but to be able to live without him. Our hearts cry out, ‘To have God is to live. We want God. Without him no life of ours is worth living. We are not then even human, for that is but the lower form of the divine. We are immortal, eternal: fill us, O Father, with thyself. Then only all is well.’ More: I heartily believe, though I cannot understand the boundaries of will and inspiration, that what God will do for us at last is infinitely beyond any greatness we could gain, even if we could will ourselves from the lowest we could be, into the highest we can imagine. It is essential divine life we want; and there is grand truth, however incomplete or perverted, in the aspiration of the Brahmin. He is wrong, but he wants something right. If the man had the power in his pollution to will himself into the right without God, the fact that he was in that pollution with such power, must damn him there for ever. And if God must help ere a man can be saved, can the help of man go too far towards the same end? Let God solve the mystery–for he made it. One thing is sure: We are his, and he will do his part, which is no part but the all in all. If man could do what in his wildest self-worship he can imagine, the grand result would be that he would be his own God, which is the Hell of Hells.
For some time I had to give Falconer what aid I could in being with his father while he arranged matters in prospect of their voyage to India. Sometimes he took him with him when he went amongst his people, as he called the poor he visited. Sometimes, when he wanted to go alone, I had to take him to Miss St. John, who would play and sing as I had never heard any one play or sing before. Andrew on such occasions carried his flute with him, and the result of the two was something exquisite. How Miss St. John did lay herself out to please the old man! And pleased he was. I think her kindness did more than anything else to make him feel like a gentleman again. And in his condition that was much.
At length Falconer would sometimes leave him with Miss St. John, till he or I should go for him: he knew she could keep him safe. He knew that she would keep him if necessary.
One evening when I went to see Falconer, I found him alone. It was one of these occasions.
‘I am very glad you have come, Gordon,’ he said. ‘I was wanting to see you. I have got things nearly ready now. Next month, or at latest, the one after, we shall sail; and I have some business with you which had better be arranged at once. No one knows what is going to happen. The man who believes the least in chance knows as little as the man who believes in it the most. My will is in the hands of Dobson. I have left you everything.’
I was dumb.
‘Have you any objection?’ he said, a little anxiously.
‘Am I able to fulfil the conditions?’ I faltered.
‘I have burdened you with no conditions,’ he returned. ‘I don’t believe in conditions. I know your heart and mind now. I trust you perfectly.’
‘I am unworthy of it.’
‘That is for me to judge.’
‘Will you have no trustees?’
‘Not one.’
‘What do you want me to do with your property?’
‘You know well enough. Keep it going the right way.’
‘I will always think what you would like.’
‘No; do not. Think what is right; and where there is no right or wrong plain in itself, then think what is best. You may see good reason to change some of my plans. You may be wrong; but you must do what you see right–not what I see or might see right.’
‘But there is no need to talk so seriously about it,’ I said. ‘You will manage it yourself for many years yet. Make me your steward, if you like, during your absence: I will not object to that.’
‘You do not object to the other, I hope?’
‘No.’
‘Then so let it be. The other, of course. I have, being a lawyer myself, taken good care not to trust myself only with the arranging of these matters. I think you will find them all right.’
‘But supposing you should not return–you have compelled me to make the supposition–‘
‘Of course. Go on.’
‘What am I to do with the money in the prospect of following you?’
‘Ah! that is the one point on which I want a word, although I do not think it is necessary. I want to entail the property.’
‘How?’
‘By word of mouth,’ he answered, laughing. ‘You must look out for a right man, as I have done, get him to know your ways and ideas, and if you find him worthy–that is a grand wide word–our Lord gave it to his disciples–leave it all to him in the same way I have left it to you, trusting to the spirit of truth that is in him, the spirit of God. You can copy my will–as far as it will apply, for you may have, one way or another, lost the half of it by that time. But, by word of mouth, you must make the same condition with him as I have made with you–that is, with regard to his leaving it, and the conditions on which he leaves it, adding the words, “that it may descend thus in perpetuum.” And he must do the same.’
He broke into a quiet laugh. I knew well enough what he meant. But he added:
‘That means, of course, for as long as there is any.’
‘Are you sure you are doing right, Falconer?’ I said.
‘Quite. It is better to endow one man, who will work as the Father works, than a hundred charities. But it is time I went to fetch my father. Will you go with me?’
This was all that passed between us on the subject, save that, on our way, he told me to move to his rooms, and occupy them until he returned.
‘My papers,’ he added, ‘I commit to your discretion.’
On our way back from Queen Square, he joked and talked merrily. Andrew joined in. Robert showed himself delighted with every attempt at gaiety or wit that Andrew made. When we reached the house, something that had occurred on the way made him turn to Martin Chuzzlewit, and he read Mrs. Gamp’s best to our great enjoyment.
I went down with the two to Southampton, to see them on board the steamer. I staid with them there until she sailed. It was a lovely morning in the end of April, when at last I bade them farewell on the quarter-deck. My heart was full. I took his hand and kissed it. He put his arms round me, and laid his cheek to mine. I was strong to bear the parting.
The great iron steamer went down in the middle of the Atlantic, and I have not yet seen my friend again.
CHAPTER XXI.
IN EXPECTATIONE.
I had left my lodging and gone to occupy Falconer’s till his return. There, on a side-table among other papers, I found the following verses. The manuscript was much scored and interlined, but more than decipherable, for he always wrote plainly. I copied them out fair, and here they are for the reader that loves him.
Twilight is near, and the day grows old; The spiders of care are weaving their net; All night ’twill be blowing and rainy and cold; I cower at his door from the wind and wet.
He sent me out the world to see,
Drest for the road in a garment new; It is clotted with clay, and worn beggarly– The porter will hardly let me through!
I bring in my hand a few dusty ears– Once I thought them a tribute meet!
I bring in my heart a few unshed tears: Which is my harvest–the pain or the wheat?
A broken man, at the door of his hall I listen, and hear it go merry within;
The sounds are of birthday-festival! Hark to the trumpet! the violin!
I know the bench where the shadowed folk Sit ‘neath the music-loft–there none upbraids! They will make me room who bear the same yoke, Dear publicans, sinners, and foolish maids!
An ear has been hearing my heart forlorn! A step comes soft through the dancing-din! Oh Love eternal! oh woman-born!
Son of my Father to take me in!
One moment, low at our Father’s feet
Loving I lie in a self-lost trance; Then walk away to the sinners’ seat,
With them, at midnight, to rise and dance!
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
1 In Scotch the ch and gh are almost always guttural. The gh according to Mr. Alexander Ellis, the sole authority in the past pronunciation of the country, was guttural in England in the time of Shakspere.
2 An exclamation of pitiful sympathy, inexplicable to the understanding. Thus the author covers his philological ignorance of the cross-breeding of the phrase.
3 Extra–over all–ower a’–orra–one more than is wanted.
4 Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur.
Atque animum nunc huc celerem, nunc dividit illuc. Æneid: IV. 285
5 This line is one of many instances in which my reader will see both the carelessness of Ericson and my religion towards his remains.
6 Why should Sir Walter Scott, who felt the death of Camp, his bullterrier, so much that he declined a dinner engagement in consequence, say on the death of his next favourite, a grayhound bitch–‘Rest her body, since I dare not say soul!’? Where did he get that dare not? Is it well that the daring of genius should be circumscribed by an unbelief so common-place as to be capable only of subscription?
7 Amongst Ericson’s papers I find the following sonnets, which belong to the mood here embodied:
Oft, as I rest in quiet peace, am I
Thrust out at sudden doors, and madly driven Through desert solitudes, and thunder-riven Black passages which have not any sky.
The scourge is on me now, with all the cry Of ancient life that hath with murder striven. How many an anguish hath gone up to heaven! How many a hand in prayer been lifted high When the black fate came onward with the rush Of whirlwind, avalanche, or fiery spume! Even at my feet is cleft a shivering tomb Beneath the waves; or else with solemn hush The graveyard opens, and I feel a crush
As if we were all huddled in one doom.
Comes there, O Earth, no breathing time for thee? No pause upon thy many-chequered lands?
Now resting on my bed with listless hands, I mourn thee resting not. Continually
Hear I the plashing borders of the sea Answer each other from the rocks and sands. Troop all the rivers seawards; nothing stands, But with strange noises hasteth terribly. Loam-eared hyenas go a moaning by.
Howls to each other all the bloody crew Of Afric’s tigers. But, O men, from you
Comes this perpetual sound more loud and high Than aught that vexes air. I hear the cry Of infant generations rising too.
8 This sonnet and the preceding are both one line deficient.
9 To these two sonnets Falconer had appended this note.
‘Something I wrote to Ericson concerning these, during my first college vacation, produced a reply of which the following is a passage: “On writing the first I was not aware that James and John were the Sons of Thunder. For a time it did indeed grieve me to think of the spiritual-minded John as otherwise than a still and passionless lover of Christ.”‘
Note from John Bechard, creator of this Electronic text.
The following is a list of Scottish words which are found in George MacDonald’s “Robert Falconer”. I have compiled this list myself and worked out the definitions from context with the help of Margaret West, from Leven in Fife, Scotland, and also by referring to a word list found in a collection of poems by Robert Burns, “Chamber’s Scots Dialect Dictionary from the 17th century to the Present” c. 1911 and “Scots-English English-Scots Dictionary” Lomond Books c. 1998. I have tried to be as thorough as possible given the limited resources and welcome any feedback on this list which may be wrong (my e-mail address is JaBBechard@aol.com). This was never meant to be a comprehensive list of the National Scottish Language, but rather an aid to understanding some of the conversations and references in this text in the Broad Scots. I do apologise for any mistakes or omissions. I aimed for my list to be very comprehensive, and it often repeats the same word in a plural or