Robert Falconer. George MacDonald
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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