Robert Falconer

‘Hoot, toot, man! Lang or that ye’ll be fiddlin’ i’ the new Jeroozlem.’

‘Eh, man!’ said Alexander, looking up—he had just cracked the roset-ends off his hands, for he had the upper leather of a boot in the grasp of the clams, and his right hand hung arrested on its blind way to the awl—‘duv ye think there’ll be fiddles there? I thocht they war a’ hairps, a thing ‘at I never saw, but it canna be up till a fiddle.’

‘I dinna ken,’ answered Robert; ‘but ye suld mak a pint o’ seein’ for yersel’.’

‘Gin I thoucht there wad be fiddles there, faith I wad hae a try. It wadna be muckle o’ a Jeroozlem to me wantin’ my fiddle. But gin there be fiddles, I daursay they’ll be gran’ anes. I daursay they wad gi’ me a new ane—I mean ane as auld as Noah’s ‘at he played i’ the ark whan the de’il cam’ in by to hearken. I wad fain hae a try. Ye ken a’ aboot it wi’ that grannie o’ yours: hoo’s a body to begin?’

‘By giein’ up the drink, man.’

‘Ay—ay—ay—I reckon ye’re richt. Weel, I’ll think aboot it whan ance I’m throu wi’ this job. That’ll be neist ook, or thereabouts, or aiblins twa days efter. I’ll hae some leiser than.’

Before he had finished speaking he had caught up his awl and begun to work vigorously, boring his holes as if the nerves of feeling were continued to the point of the tool, inserting the bristles that served him for needles with a delicacy worthy of soft-skinned fingers, drawing through the rosined threads with a whisk, and untwining them with a crack from the leather that guarded his hands.

‘Gude nicht to ye,’ said Robert, with the fiddle-case under his arm.

The shoemaker looked up, with his hands bound in his threads.

‘Ye’re no gaein’ to tak her frae me the nicht?’

‘Ay am I, but I’ll fess her back again. I’m no gaein’ to Jericho wi’ her.’

‘Gang to Hecklebirnie wi’ her, and that’s three mile ayont hell.’

‘Na; we maun win farther nor that. There canna be muckle fiddlin’ there.’

‘Weel, tak her to the new Jeroozlem. I s’ gang doon to Lucky Leary’s, and fill mysel’ roarin’ fou, an’ it’ll be a’ your wyte (blame).’

‘I doobt ye’ll get the straiks (blows) though. Or maybe ye think Bell ‘ill tak them for ye.’

Dooble Sanny caught up a huge boot, the sole of which was filled with broad-headed nails as thick as they could be driven, and, in a rage, threw it at Robert as he darted out. Through its clang against the door-cheek, the shoemaker heard a cry from the instrument. He cast everything from him and sprang after Robert. But Robert was down the wynd like a long-legged grayhound, and Elshender could only follow like a fierce mastiff. It was love and grief, though, and apprehension and remorse, not vengeance, that winged his heels. He soon saw that pursuit was vain.

‘Robert! Robert!’ he cried; ‘I canna win up wi’ ye. Stop, for God’s sake! Is she hurtit?’

Robert stopped at once.

‘Ye hae made a bonny leddy o’ her—a lameter (cripple) I doobt, like yer wife,’ he answered, with indignation.

‘Dinna be aye flingin’ a man’s fau’ts in ‘s face. It jist maks him ‘at he canna bide himsel’ or you eyther. Lat’s see the bonny crater.’

Robert complied, for he too was anxious. They were now standing in the space in front of Shargar’s old abode, and there was no one to be seen. Elshender took the box, opened it carefully, and peeped in with a face of great apprehension.

‘I thocht that was a’!’ he said with some satisfaction. ‘I kent the string whan I heard it. But we’ll sune get a new thairm till her,’ he added, in a tone of sorrowful commiseration and condolence, as he took the violin from the case, tenderly as if it had been a hurt child.

One touch of the bow, drawing out a goul of grief, satisfied him that she was uninjured. Next a hurried inspection showed him that there was enough of the catgut twisted round the peg to make up for the part that was broken off. In a moment he had fastened it to the tail-piece, tightened and tuned it. Forthwith he took the bow from the case-lid, and in jubilant guise he expatiated upon the wrong he had done his bonny leddy, till the doors and windows around were crowded with heads peering through the dark to see whence the sounds came, and a little child toddled across from one of the lowliest houses with a ha’penny for the fiddler. Gladly would Robert have restored it with interest, but, alas! there was no interest in his bank, for not a ha’penny had he in the world. The incident recalled Sandy to Rothieden and its cares. He restored the violin to its case, and while Robert was fearing he would take it under his arm and walk away with it, handed it back with a humble sigh and a ‘Praise be thankit;’ then, without another word, turned and went to his lonely stool and home ‘untreasured of its mistress.’ Robert went home too, and stole like a thief to his room.

The next day was a Saturday, which, indeed, was the real old Sabbath, or at least the half of it, to the schoolboys of Rothieden. Even Robert’s grannie was Jew enough, or rather Christian enough, to respect this remnant of the fourth commandment—divine antidote to the rest of the godless money-making and soul-saving week—and he had the half-day to himself. So as soon as he had had his dinner, he managed to give Shargar the slip, left him to the inroads of a desolate despondency, and stole away to the old factory-garden. The key of that he had managed to purloin from the kitchen where it hung; nor was there much danger of its absence being discovered, seeing that in winter no one thought of the garden. The smuggling of the violin out of the house was the ‘dearest danger’—the more so that he would not run the risk of carrying her out unprotected, and it was altogether a bulky venture with the case. But by spying and speeding he managed it, and soon found himself safe within the high walls of the garden.

It was early spring. There had been a heavy fall of sleet in the morning, and now the wind blew gustfully about the place. The neglected trees shook showers upon him as he passed under them, trampling down the rank growth of the grass-walks. The long twigs of the wall-trees, which had never been nailed up, or had been torn down by the snow and the blasts of winter, went trailing away in the moan of the fitful wind, and swung back as it sunk to a sigh. The currant and gooseberry bushes, bare and leafless, and ‘shivering all for cold,’ neither reminded him of the feasts of the past summer, nor gave him any hope for the next. He strode careless through it all to gain the door at the bottom. It yielded to a push, and the long grass streamed in over the threshold as he entered. He mounted by a broad stair in the main part of the house, passing the silent clock in one of its corners, now expiating in motionlessness the false accusations it had brought against the work-people, and turned into the chaos of machinery.

I fear that my readers will expect, from the minuteness with which I recount these particulars, that, after all, I am going to describe a rendezvous with a lady, or a ghost at least. I will not plead in excuse that I, too, have been infected with Sandy’s mode of regarding her, but I plead that in the mind of Robert the proceeding was involved in something of that awe and mystery with which a youth approaches the woman he loves. He had not yet arrived at the period when the feminine assumes its paramount influence, combining in itself all that music, colour, form, odour, can suggest, with something infinitely higher and more divine; but he had begun to be haunted with some vague aspirations towards the infinite, of which his attempts on the violin were the outcome. And now that he was to be alone, for the first time, with this wonderful realizer of dreams and awakener of visions, to do with her as he would, to hint by gentle touches at the thoughts that were fluttering in his soul, and listen for her voice that by the echoes in which she strove to respond he might know that she understood him, it was no wonder if he felt an ethereal foretaste of the expectation that haunts the approach of souls.

But I am not even going to describe his first tête-à-tête with his violin. Perhaps he returned from it somewhat disappointed. Probably he found her coy, unready to acknowledge his demands on her attention. But not the less willingly did he return with her to the solitude of the ruinous factory. On every safe occasion, becoming more and more frequent as the days grew longer, he repaired thither, and every time returned more capable of drawing the coherence of melody from that matrix of sweet sounds.

At length the people about began to say that the factory was haunted; that the ghost of old Mr. Falconer, unable to repose while neglect was ruining the precious results of his industry, visited the place night after night, and solaced his disappointment by renewing on his favourite violin strains not yet forgotten by him in his grave, and remembered well by those who had been in his service, not a few of whom lived in the neighbourhood of the forsaken building.

One gusty afternoon, like the first, but late in the spring, Robert repaired as usual to this his secret haunt. He had played for some time, and now, from a sudden pause of impulse, had ceased, and begun to look around him. The only light came from two long pale cracks in the rain-clouds of the west. The wind was blowing through the broken windows, which stretched away on either hand. A dreary, windy gloom, therefore, pervaded the desolate place; and in the dusk, and their settled order, the machines looked multitudinous. An eerie sense of discomfort came over him as he gazed, and he lifted his violin to dispel the strange unpleasant feeling that grew upon him. But at the first long stroke across the strings, an awful sound arose in the further room; a sound that made him all but drop the bow, and cling to his violin. It went on. It was the old, all but forgotten whirr of bobbins, mingled with the gentle groans of the revolving horizontal wheel, but magnified in the silence of the place, and the echoing imagination of the boy, into something preternaturally awful. Yielding for a moment to the growth of goose-skin, and the insurrection of hair, he recovered himself by a violent effort, and walked to the door that connected the two compartments. Was it more or less fearful that the jenny was not going of itself? that the figure of an old woman sat solemnly turning and turning the hand-wheel? Not without calling in the jury of his senses, however, would he yield to the special plea of his imagination, but went nearer, half expecting to find that the mutch, with its big flapping borders, glimmering white in the gloom across many a machine, surrounded the face of a skull. But he was soon satisfied that it was only a blind woman everybody knew—so old that she had become childish. She had heard the reports of the factory being haunted, and groping about with her half-withered brain full of them, had found the garden and the back door open, and had climbed to the first-floor by a farther stair, well known to her when she used to work that very machine. She had seated herself instinctively, according to ancient wont, and had set it in motion once more.

Yielding to an impulse of experiment, Robert began to play again. Thereupon her disordered ideas broke out in words. And Robert soon began to feel that it could hardly be more ghastly to look upon a ghost than to be taken for one.

‘Ay, ay, sir,’ said the old woman, in a tone of commiseration, ‘it maun be sair to bide. I dinna wonner ‘at ye canna lie still. But what gars ye gang daunerin’ aboot this place? It’s no yours ony langer. Ye ken whan fowk’s deid, they tyne the grip (loose hold). Ye suld gang hame to yer wife. She micht say a word to quaiet yer auld banes, for she’s a douce an’ a wice woman—the mistress.’

Then followed a pause. There was a horror about the old woman’s voice, already half dissolved by death, in the desolate place, that almost took from Robert the power of motion. But his violin sent forth an accidental twang, and that set her going again.

‘Ye was aye a douce honest gentleman yersel’, an’ I dinna wonner ye canna bide it. But I wad hae thoucht glory micht hae hauden ye in. But yer ain son! Eh ay! And a braw lad and a bonnie! It’s a sod thing he bude to gang the wrang gait; and it’s no wonner, as I say, that ye lea’ the worms to come an’ luik efter him. I doobt—I doobt it winna be to you he’ll gang at the lang last. There winna be room for him aside ye in Awbrahawm’s boasom. And syne to behave sae ill to that winsome wife o’ his! I dinna wonner ‘at ye maun be up! Eh na! But, sir, sin ye are up, I wish ye wad speyk to John Thamson no to tak aff the day ‘at I was awa’ last ook, for ‘deed I was verra unweel, and bude to keep my bed.’

Robert was beginning to feel uneasy as to how he should get rid of her, when she rose, and saying, ‘Ay, ay, I ken it’s sax o’clock,’ went out as she had come in. Robert followed, and saw her safe out of the garden, but did not return to the factory.

So his father had behaved ill to his mother too!

‘But what for hearken to the havers o’ a dottled auld wife?’ he said to himself, pondering as he walked home.

Old Janet told a strange story of how she had seen the ghost, and had had a long talk with him, and of what he said, and of how he groaned and played the fiddle between. And finding that the report had reached his grandmother’s ears, Robert thought it prudent, much to his discontent, to intermit his visits to the factory. Mrs. Falconer, of course, received the rumour with indignant scorn, and peremptorily refused to allow any examination of the premises.

But how have the violin by him and not hear her speak? One evening the longing after her voice grow upon him till he could resist it no longer. He shut the door of his garret-room, and, with Shargar by him, took her out and began to play softly, gently—oh so softly, so gently! Shargar was enraptured. Robert went on playing.

Suddenly the door opened, and his grannie stood awfully revealed before them. Betty had heard the violin, and had flown to the parlour in the belief that, unable to get any one to heed him at the factory, the ghost had taken Janet’s advice, and come home. But his wife smiled a smile of contempt, went with Betty to the kitchen—over which Robert’s room lay—heard the sounds, put off her creaking shoes, stole up-stairs on her soft white lambswool stockings, and caught the pair. The violin was seized, put in its case, and carried off; and Mrs. Falconer rejoiced to think she had broken a gin set by Satan for the unwary feet of her poor Robert. Little she knew the wonder of that violin—how it had kept the soul of her husband alive! Little she knew how dangerous it is to shut an open door, with ever so narrow a peep into the eternal, in the face of a son of Adam! And little she knew how determinedly and restlessly a nature like Robert’s would search for another, to open one possibly which she might consider ten times more dangerous than that which she had closed.

When Alexander heard of the affair, he was at first overwhelmed with the misfortune; but gathering a little heart at last, he set to ‘working,’ as he said himself, ‘like a verra deevil’; and as he was the best shoemaker in the town, and for the time abstained utterly from whisky, and all sorts of drink but well-water, he soon managed to save the money necessary, and redeem the old fiddle. But whether it was from fancy, or habit, or what, even Robert’s inexperienced ear could not accommodate itself, save under protest, to the instrument which once his teacher had considered all but perfect; and it needed the master’s finest touch to make its tone other than painful to the sense of the neophyte.

No one can estimate too highly the value of such a resource to a man like the shoemaker, or a boy like Robert. Whatever it be that keeps the finer faculties of the mind awake, wonder alive, and the interest above mere eating and drinking, money-making and money-saving; whatever it be that gives gladness, or sorrow, or hope—this, be it violin, pencil, pen, or, highest of all, the love of woman, is simply a divine gift of holy influence for the salvation of that being to whom it comes, for the lifting of him out of the mire and up on the rock. For it keeps a way open for the entrance of deeper, holier, grander influences, emanating from the same riches of the Godhead. And though many have genius that have no grace, they will only be so much the worse, so much the nearer to the brute, if you take from them that which corresponds to Dooble Sanny’s fiddle.

CHAPTER XII. ROBERT’S PLAN OF SALVATION

For some time after the loss of his friend, Robert went loitering and mooning about, quite neglecting the lessons to which he had not, it must be confessed, paid much attention for many weeks. Even when seated at his grannie’s table, he could do no more than fix his eyes on his book: to learn was impossible; it was even disgusting to him. But his was a nature which, foiled in one direction, must, absolutely helpless against its own vitality, straightway send out its searching roots in another. Of all forces, that of growth is the one irresistible, for it is the creating power of God, the law of life and of being. Therefore no accumulation of refusals, and checks, and turnings, and forbiddings, from all the good old grannies in the world, could have prevented Robert from striking root downward, and bearing fruit upward, though, as in all higher natures, the fruit was a long way off yet. But his soul was only sad and hungry. He was not unhappy, for he had been guilty of nothing that weighed on his conscience. He had been doing many things of late, it is true, without asking leave of his grandmother, but wherever prayer is felt to be of no avail, there cannot be the sense of obligation save on compulsion. Even direct disobedience in such case will generally leave little soreness, except the thing forbidden should be in its own nature wrong, and then, indeed, ‘Don Worm, the conscience,’ may begin to bite. But Robert felt nothing immoral in playing upon his grandfather’s violin, nor even in taking liberties with a piece of lumber for which nobody cared but possibly the dead; therefore he was not unhappy, only much disappointed, very empty, and somewhat gloomy. There was nothing to look forward to now, no secret full of riches and endless in hope—in short, no violin.

To feel the full force of his loss, my reader must remember that around the childhood of Robert, which he was fast leaving behind him, there had gathered no tenderness—none at least by him recognizable as such. All the women he came in contact with were his grandmother and Betty. He had no recollection of having ever been kissed. From the darkness and negation of such an embryo-existence, his nature had been unconsciously striving to escape—struggling to get from below ground into the sunlit air—sighing after a freedom he could not have defined, the freedom that comes, not of independence, but of love—not of lawlessness, but of the perfection of law. Of this beauty of life, with its wonder and its deepness, this unknown glory, his fiddle had been the type. It had been the ark that held, if not the tables of the covenant, yet the golden pot of angel’s food, and the rod that budded in death. And now that it was gone, the gloomier aspect of things began to lay hold upon him; his soul turned itself away from the sun, and entered into the shadow of the under-world. Like the white-horsed twins of lake Regillus, like Phoebe, the queen of skyey plain and earthly forest, every boy and girl, every man and woman, that lives at all, has to divide many a year between Tartarus and Olympus.

For now arose within him, not without ultimate good, the evil phantasms of a theology which would explain all God’s doings by low conceptions, low I mean for humanity even, of right, and law, and justice, then only taking refuge in the fact of the incapacity of the human understanding when its own inventions are impugned as undivine. In such a system, hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell. Hence, as foundations must be laid in the deepest, the system is founded in hell, and the first article in the creed that Robert Falconer learned was, ‘I believe in hell.’ Practically, I mean, it was so; else how should it be that as often as a thought of religious duty arose in his mind, it appeared in the form of escaping hell, of fleeing from the wrath to come? For his very nature was hell, being not born in sin and brought forth in iniquity, but born sin and brought forth iniquity. And yet God made him. He must believe that. And he must believe, too, that God was just, awfully just, punishing with fearful pains those who did not go through a certain process of mind which it was utterly impossible they should go through without a help which he would give to some, and withhold from others, the reason of the difference not being such, to say the least of it, as to come within the reach of the persons concerned. And this God they said was love. It was logically absurd, of course, yet, thank God, they did say that God was love; and many of them succeeded in believing it, too, and in ordering their ways as if the first article of their creed had been ‘I believe in God’; whence, in truth, we are bound to say it was the first in power and reality, if not in order; for what are we to say a man believes, if not what he acts upon? Still the former article was the one they brought chiefly to bear upon their children. This mortar, probably they thought, threw the shell straighter than any of the other field-pieces of the church-militant. Hence it was even in justification of God himself that a party arose to say that a man could believe without the help of God at all, and after believing only began to receive God’s help—a heresy all but as dreary and barren as the former. No one dreamed of saying—at least such a glad word of prophecy never reached Rothieden—that, while nobody can do without the help of the Father any more than a new-born babe could of itself live and grow to a man, yet that in the giving of that help the very fatherhood of the Father finds its one gladsome labour; that for that the Lord came; for that the world was made; for that we were born into it; for that God lives and loves like the most loving man or woman on earth, only infinitely more, and in other ways and kinds besides, which we cannot understand; and that therefore to be a man is the soul of eternal jubilation.

Robert consequently began to take fits of soul-saving, a most rational exercise, worldly wise and prudent—right too on the principles he had received, but not in the least Christian in its nature, or even God-fearing. His imagination began to busy itself in representing the dire consequences of not entering into the one refuge of faith. He made many frantic efforts to believe that he believed; took to keeping the Sabbath very carefully—that is, by going to church three times, and to Sunday-school as well; by never walking a step save to or from church; by never saying a word upon any subject unconnected with religion, chiefly theoretical; by never reading any but religious books; by never whistling; by never thinking of his lost fiddle, and so on—all the time feeling that God was ready to pounce upon him if he failed once; till again and again the intensity of his efforts utterly defeated their object by destroying for the time the desire to prosecute them with the power to will them. But through the horrible vapours of these vain endeavours, which denied God altogether as the maker of the world, and the former of his soul and heart and brain, and sought to worship him as a capricious demon, there broke a little light, a little soothing, soft twilight, from the dim windows of such literature as came in his way. Besides The Pilgrim’s Progress there were several books which shone moon-like on his darkness, and lifted something of the weight of that Egyptian gloom off his spirit. One of these, strange to say, was Defoe’s Religious Courtship, and one, Young’s Night Thoughts. But there was another which deserves particular notice, inasmuch as it did far more than merely interest or amuse him, raising a deep question in his mind, and one worthy to be asked. This book was the translation of Klopstock’s Messiah, to which I have already referred. It was not one of his grandmother’s books, but had probably belonged to his father: he had found it in his little garret-room. But as often as she saw him reading it, she seemed rather pleased, he thought. As to the book itself, its florid expatiation could neither offend nor injure a boy like Robert, while its representation of our Lord was to him a wonderful relief from that given in the pulpit, and in all the religious books he knew. But the point for the sake of which I refer to it in particular is this: Amongst the rebel angels who are of the actors in the story, one of the principal is a cherub who repents of making his choice with Satan, mourns over his apostasy, haunts unseen the steps of our Saviour, wheels lamenting about the cross, and would gladly return to his lost duties in heaven, if only he might—a doubt which I believe is left unsolved in the volume, and naturally enough remained unsolved in Robert’s mind:—Would poor Abaddon be forgiven and taken home again? For although naturally, that is, to judge by his own instincts, there could be no question of his forgiveness, according to what he had been taught there could be no question of his perdition. Having no one to talk to, he divided himself and went to buffets on the subject, siding, of course, with the better half of himself which supported the merciful view of the matter; for all his efforts at keeping the Sabbath, had in his own honest judgment failed so entirely, that he had no ground for believing himself one of the elect. Had he succeeded in persuading himself that he was, there is no saying to what lengths of indifference about others the chosen prig might have advanced by this time.

He made one attempt to open the subject with Shargar.

‘Shargar, what think ye?’ he said suddenly, one day. ‘Gin a de’il war to repent, wad God forgie him?’

‘There’s no sayin’ what fowk wad du till ance they’re tried,’ returned Shargar, cautiously.

Robert did not care to resume the question with one who so circumspectly refused to take a metaphysical or a priori view of the matter.