Robert Falconer Part 93

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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.ses built a cloudy bridge across the sky from horizon to horizon, and beneath it shone the rosy-sailed s.h.i.+ps 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 mult.i.tude 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 G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+vering cry; but the vault of heaven encloses the tempest and the shrieking bird and the echoing heart; and the sun of G.o.d'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 c.h.i.n.ks 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 G.o.d. 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d 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 gra.s.s 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 Sall.u.s.t 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 G.o.d and you, father. G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d, 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 want.i.t 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d at a'; but G.o.d 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."