Robert Falconer, George MacDonald [beach read .TXT] 📗

pianos, moonlight, and lovely women were distasteful to the over-ruling Fate, and obnoxious to the vengeance stored in the gray cloud of his providence, drove him from the awful entrance of the temple of his Isis.

Nor did Miss St. John dare to make any advances to the dreadful old lady. She would wait. For Mrs. Forsyth, she cared nothing about the whole affair. It only gave her fresh opportunity for smiling condescensions about 'poor Mrs. Falconer.' So Paradise was over and gone.

But though the loss of Miss St. John and the piano was the last blow, his sorrow did not rest there, but returned to brood over his bonny lady. She was scattered to the winds. Would any of her ashes ever rise in the corn, and moan in the ripening wind of autumn? Might not some atoms of the bonny leddy creep into the pines on the hill, whose 'soft and soul-like sounds' had taught him to play the Flowers of the Forest on those strings which, like the nerves of an amputated limb, yet thrilled through his being? Or might not some particle find its way by winds and waters to sycamore forest of Italy, there creep up through the channels of its life to some finely-rounded curve of noble tree, on the side that ever looks sunwards, and be chosen once again by the violin-hunter, to be wrought into a new and fame-gathering instrument?

Could it be that his bonny lady had learned her wondrous music in those forests, from the shine of the sun, and the sighing of the winds through the sycamores and pines? For Robert knew that the broad-leaved sycamore, and the sharp, needle-leaved pine, had each its share in the violin. Only as the wild innocence of human nature, uncorrupted by wrong, untaught by suffering, is to that nature struggling out of darkness into light, such and so different is the living wood, with its sweetest tones of obedient impulse, answering only to the wind which bloweth where it listeth, to that wood, chosen, separated, individualized, tortured into strange, almost vital shape, after a law to us nearly unknown, strung with strings from animal organizations, and put into the hands of man to utter the feelings of a soul that has passed through a like history. This Robert could not yet think, and had to grow able to think it by being himself made an instrument of God's music.

What he could think was that the glorious mystery of his bonny leddy was gone for ever-and alas! she had no soul. Here was an eternal sorrow. He could never meet her again. His affections, which must live for ever, were set upon that which had passed away. But the child that weeps because his mutilated doll will not rise from the dead, shall yet find relief from his sorrow, a true relief, both human and divine. He shall know that that which in the doll made him love the doll, has not passed away. And Robert must yet be comforted for the loss of his bonny leddy. If she had had a soul, nothing but her own self could ever satisfy him. As she had no soul, another body might take her place, nor occasion reproach of inconstancy.

But, in the meantime, the shears of Fate having cut the string of the sky-soaring kite of his imagination, had left him with the stick in his hand. And thus the rest of that winter was dreary enough. The glow was out of his heart; the glow was out of the world. The bleak, kindless wind was hissing through those pines that clothed the hill above Bodyfauld, and over the dead garden, where in the summer time the rose had looked down so lovingly on the heartsease. If he had stood once more at gloaming in that barley-stubble, not even the wail of Flodden-field would have found him there, but a keen sense of personal misery and hopeless cold. Was the summer a lie?

Not so. The winter restrains, that the summer may have the needful time to do its work well; for the winter is but the sleep of summer.

Now in the winter of his discontent, and in Nature finding no help, Robert was driven inwards-into his garret, into his soul. There, the door of his paradise being walled up, he began, vaguely, blindly, to knock against other doors-sometimes against stone-walls and rocks, taking them for doors-as travel-worn, and hence brain-sick men have done in a desert of mountains. A door, out or in, he must find, or perish.

It fell, too, that Miss St. John went to visit some friends who lived in a coast town twenty miles off; and a season of heavy snow followed by frost setting in, she was absent for six weeks, during which time, without a single care to trouble him from without, Robert was in the very desert of desolation. His spirits sank fearfully. He would pass his old music-master in the street with scarce a recognition, as if the bond of their relation had been utterly broken, had vanished in the smoke of the martyred violin, and all their affection had gone into the dust-heap of the past.

Dooble Sanny's character did not improve. He took more and more whisky, his bouts of drinking alternating as before with fits of hopeless repentance. His work was more neglected than ever, and his wife having no money to spend even upon necessaries, applied in desperation to her husband's bottle for comfort. This comfort, to do him justice, he never grudged her; and sometimes before midday they would both be drunk-a condition expedited by the lack of food. When they began to recover, they would quarrel fiercely; and at last they became a nuisance to the whole street. Little did the whisky-hating old lady know to what god she had really offered up that violin-if the consequences of the holocaust can be admitted as indicating the power which had accepted it.

But now began to appear in Robert the first signs of a practical outcome of such truth as his grandmother had taught him, operating upon the necessities of a simple and earnest nature. Reality, however lapt in vanity, or even in falsehood, cannot lose its power. It is-the other is not. She had taught him to look up-that there was a God. He would put it to the test. Not that he doubted it yet: he only doubted whether there was a hearing God. But was not that worse? It was, I think. For it is of far more consequence what kind of a God, than whether a God or no. Let not my reader suppose I think it possible there could be other than a perfect God-perfect-even to the vision of his creatures, the faith that supplies the lack of vision being yet faithful to that vision. I speak from Robert's point of outlook. But, indeed, whether better or worse is no great matter, so long as he would see it or what there was. He had no comfort, and, without reasoning about it, he felt that life ought to have comfort-from which point he began to conclude that the only thing left was to try whether the God in whom his grandmother believed might not help him. If the God would but hear him, it was all he had yet learned to require of his Godhood. And that must ever be the first thing to require. More demands would come, and greater answers he would find. But now-if God would but hear him! If he spoke to him but one kind word, it would be the very soul of comfort; he could no more be lonely. A fountain of glad imaginations gushed up in his heart at the thought. What if, from the cold winter of his life, he had but to open the door of his garret-room, and, kneeling by the bare bedstead, enter into the summer of God's presence! What if God spoke to him face to face! He had so spoken to Moses. He sought him from no fear of the future, but from present desolation; and if God came near to him, it would not be with storm and tempest, but with the voice of a friend. And surely, if there was a God at all, that is, not a power greater than man, but a power by whose power man was, he must hear the voice of the creature whom he had made, a voice that came crying out of the very need which he had created. Younger people than Robert are capable of such divine metaphysics. Hence he continued to disappear from his grandmother's parlour at much the same hour as before. In the cold, desolate garret, he knelt and cried out into that which lay beyond the thought that cried, the unknowable infinite, after the God that may be known as surely as a little child knows his mysterious mother. And from behind him, the pale-blue, star-crowded sky shone upon his head, through the window that looked upwards only.

Mrs. Falconer saw that he still went away as he had been wont, and instituted observations, the result of which was the knowledge that he went to his own room. Her heart smote her, and she saw that the boy looked sad and troubled. There was scarce room in her heart for increase of love, but much for increase of kindness, and she did increase it. In truth, he needed the smallest crumb of comfort that might drop from the table of God's 'feastful friends.'

Night after night he returned to the parlour cold to the very heart. God was not to be found, he said then. He said afterwards that even then 'God was with him though he knew it not.'

For the very first night, the moment that he knelt and cried, 'O Father in heaven, hear me, and let thy face shine upon me'-like a flash of burning fire the words shot from the door of his heart: 'I dinna care for him to love me, gin he doesna love ilka body;' and no more prayer went from the desolate boy that night, although he knelt an hour of agony in the freezing dark. Loyal to what he had been taught, he struggled hard to reduce his rebellious will to what he supposed to be the will of God. It was all in vain. Ever a voice within him-surely the voice of that God who he thought was not hearing-told him that what he wanted was the love belonging to his human nature, his human needs-not the preference of a court-favourite. He had a dim consciousness that he would be a traitor to his race if he accepted a love, even from God, given him as an exception from his kind. But he did not care to have such a love. It was not what his heart yearned for. It was not love. He could not love such a love. Yet he strove against it all-fought for religion against right as he could; struggled to reduce his rebellious feelings, to love that which was unlovely, to choose that which was abhorrent, until nature almost gave way under the effort. Often would he sink moaning on the floor, or stretch himself like a corpse, save that it was face downwards, on the boards of the bedstead. Night after night he returned to the battle, but with no permanent success.