Robert Falconer

But Robert needed no encouragement from Shargar. In his present mood he would have mounted a griffin. He was on horseback in a moment. They trotted gently through the streets, and out of the town. Once over the Dee, they gave their horses the rein, and off they went through the dark drizzle. Before they got half-way they were wet to the skin; but little did Robert, or Shargar either, care for that. Not many words passed between them.

‘Hoo ‘ill ye get the horse (plural) in again, Shargar?’ asked Robert.

‘Afore I get them back,’ answered Shargar, ‘they’ll be tired eneuch to gang hame o’ themsel’s. Gin we had only had the luck to meet Jock!—that wad hae been gran’.’

‘What for that?’

‘I wad hae cawed Reid Rorie ower the heid o’ ‘m, an’ left him lyin’—the coorse villain!’

The horses never flagged till they drew up in the main street of Stonehaven. Robert ran down to the harbour to make inquiry, and left Shargar to put them up.

The moon had risen, but the air was so full of vapour that she only succeeded in melting the darkness a little. The sea rolled in front, awful in its dreariness, under just light enough to show a something unlike the land. But the rain had ceased, and the air was clearer. Robert asked a solitary man, with a telescope in his hand, whether he was looking out for the Amphitrite. The man asked him gruffly in return what he knew of her. Possibly the nature of the keg to be put on board had something to do with his Scotch reply. Robert told him he was a friend of the captain, had missed the boat, and would give any one five shillings to put him on board. The man went away and returned with a companion. After some further questioning and bargaining, they agreed to take him. Robert loitered about the pier full of impatience. Shargar joined him.

Day began to break over the waves. They gleamed with a blue-gray leaden sheen. The men appeared coming along the harbour, and descended by a stair into a little skiff, where a barrel, or something like one, lay under a tarpaulin. Robert bade Shargar good-bye, and followed. They pushed off, rowed out into the bay, and lay on their oars waiting for the vessel. The light grew apace, and Robert fancied he could distinguish the two horses with one rider against the sky on the top of the cliffs, moving northwards. Turning his eyes to the sea, he saw the canvas of the brig, and his heart beat fast. The men bent to their oars. She drew nearer, and lay to. When they reached her he caught the rope the sailors threw, was on board in a moment, and went aft to the captain. The Dutchman stared. In a few words Robert made him understand his object, offering to pay for his passage, but the good man would not hear of it. He told him that the lady and gentleman had come on board as brother and sister: the baron was too knowing to run his head into the noose of Scotch law.

‘I cannot throw him over the board,’ said the skipper; ‘and what am I to do? I am afraid it is of no use. Ah! poor thing!’

By this time the vessel was under way. The wind freshened. Mysie had been ill ever since they left the mouth of the river: now she was much worse. Before another hour passed, she was crying to be taken home to her papa. Still the wind increased, and the vessel laboured much.

Robert never felt better, and if it had not been for the cause of his sea-faring, would have thoroughly enjoyed it. He put on some sea-going clothes of the captain’s, and set himself to take his share in working the brig, in which he was soon proficient enough to be useful. When the sun rose, they were in a tossing wilderness of waves. With the sunrise, Robert began to think he had been guilty of a great folly. For what could he do? How was he to prevent the girl from going off with her lover the moment they landed? But his poor attempt would verify his willingness.

The baron came on deck now and then, looking bored. He had not calculated on having to nurse the girl. Had Mysie been well, he could have amused himself with her, for he found her ignorance interesting. As it was, he felt injured, and indeed disgusted at the result of the experiment.

On the third day the wind abated a little; but towards night it blew hard again, and it was not until they reached the smooth waters of the Scheldt that Mysie made her appearance on deck, looking dreadfully ill, and altogether like a miserable, unhappy child. Her beauty was greatly gone, and Lord Rothie did not pay her much attention.

Robert had as yet made no attempt to communicate with her, for there was scarcely a chance of her concealing a letter from the baron. But as soon as they were in smooth water, he wrote one, telling her in the simplest language that the baron was a bad man, who had amused himself by making many women fall in love with him, and then leaving them miserable: he knew one of them himself.

Having finished his letter, he began to look abroad over the smooth water, and the land smooth as the water. He saw tall poplars, the spires of the forest, and rows of round-headed dumpy trees, like domes. And he saw that all the buildings like churches, had either spires like poplars, or low round domes like those other trees. The domes gave an eastern aspect to the country. The spire of Antwerp cathedral especially had the poplar for its model. The pinnacles which rose from the base of each successive start of its narrowing height were just the clinging, upright branches of the poplar—a lovely instance of Art following Nature’s suggestion.

CHAPTER XXIII. ROBERT FINDS A NEW INSTRUMENT

At length the vessel lay alongside the quay, and as Mysie stepped from its side the skipper found an opportunity of giving her Robert’s letter. It was the poorest of chances, but Robert could think of no other. She started on receiving it, but regarding the skipper’s significant gestures put it quietly away. She looked anything but happy, for her illness had deprived her of courage, and probably roused her conscience. Robert followed the pair, saw them enter The Great Labourer—what could the name mean? could it mean The Good Shepherd?—and turned away helpless, objectless indeed, for he had done all that he could, and that all was of no potency. A world of innocence and beauty was about to be hurled from its orbit of light into the blackness of outer chaos; he knew it, and was unable to speak word or do deed that should frustrate the power of a devil who so loved himself that he counted it an honour to a girl to have him for her ruin. Her after life had no significance for him, save as a trophy of his victory. He never perceived that such victory was not yielded to him; that he gained it by putting on the garments of light; that if his inward form had appeared in its own ugliness, not one of the women whose admiration he had secured would not have turned from him as from the monster of an old tale.

Robert wandered about till he was so weary that his head ached with weariness. At length he came upon the open space before the cathedral, whence the poplar-spire rose aloft into a blue sky flecked with white clouds. It was near sunset, and he could not see the sun, but the upper half of the spire shone glorious in its radiance. From the top his eye sank to the base. In the base was a little door half open. Might not that be the lowly narrow entrance through the shadow up to the sun-filled air? He drew near with a kind of tremor, for never before had he gazed upon visible grandeur growing out of the human soul, in the majesty of everlastingness—a tree of the Lord’s planting. Where had been but an empty space of air and light and darkness, had risen, and had stood for ages, a mighty wonder awful to the eye, solid to the hand. He peeped through the opening of the door: there was the foot of a stair—marvellous as the ladder of Jacob’s dream—turning away towards the unknown. He pushed the door and entered. A man appeared and barred his advance. Robert put his hand in his pocket and drew out some silver. The man took one piece—looked at it—turned it over—put it in his pocket, and led the way up the stair. Robert followed and followed and followed.

He came out of stone walls upon an airy platform whence the spire ascended heavenwards. His conductor led upward still, and he followed, winding within a spiral network of stone, through which all the world looked in. Another platform, and yet another spire springing from its basement. Still up they went, and at length stood on a circle of stone surrounding like a coronet the last base of the spire which lifted its apex untrodden. Then Robert turned and looked below. He grasped the stones before him. The loneliness was awful.

There was nothing between him and the roofs of the houses, four hundred feet below, but the spot where he stood. The whole city, with its red roofs, lay under him. He stood uplifted on the genius of the builder, and the town beneath him was a toy. The all but featureless flat spread forty miles on every side, and the roofs of the largest buildings below were as dovecots. But the space between was alive with awe—so vast, so real!

He turned and descended, winding through the network of stone which was all between him and space. The object of the architect must have been to melt away the material from before the eyes of the spirit. He hung in the air in a cloud of stone. As he came in his descent within the ornaments of one of the basements, he found himself looking through two thicknesses of stone lace on the nearing city. Down there was the beast of prey and his victim; but for the moment he was above the region of sorrow. His weariness and his headache had vanished utterly. With his mind tossed on its own speechless delight, he was slowly descending still, when he saw on his left hand a door ajar. He would look what mystery lay within. A push opened it. He discovered only a little chamber lined with wood. In the centre stood something—a bench-like piece of furniture, plain and worn. He advanced a step; peered over the top of it; saw keys, white and black; saw pedals below: it was an organ! Two strides brought him in front of it. A wooden stool, polished and hollowed with centuries of use, was before it. But where was the bellows? That might be down hundreds of steps below, for he was half-way only to the ground. He seated himself musingly, and struck, as he thought, a dumb chord. Responded, up in the air, far overhead, a mighty booming clang. Startled, almost frightened, even as if Mary St. John had said she loved him, Robert sprung from the stool, and, without knowing why, moved only by the chastity of delight, flung the door to the post. It banged and clicked. Almost mad with the joy of the titanic instrument, he seated himself again at the keys, and plunged into a tempest of clanging harmony. One hundred bells hang in that tower of wonder, an instrument for a city, nay, for a kingdom. Often had Robert dreamed that he was the galvanic centre of a thunder-cloud of harmony, flashing off from every finger the willed lightning tone: such was the unexpected scale of this instrument—so far aloft in the sunny air rang the responsive notes, that his dream appeared almost realized. The music, like a fountain bursting upwards, drew him up and bore him aloft. From the resounding cone of bells overhead he no longer heard their tones proceed, but saw level-winged forms of light speeding off with a message to the nations. It was only his roused phantasy; but a sweet tone is nevertheless a messenger of God; and a right harmony and sequence of such tones is a little gospel.

At length he found himself following, till that moment unconsciously, the chain of tunes he well remembered having played on his violin the night he went first with Ericson to see Mysie, ending with his strange chant about the witch lady and the dead man’s hand.

Ere he had finished the last, his passion had begun to fold its wings, and he grew dimly aware of a beating at the door of the solitary chamber in which he sat. He knew nothing of the enormity of which he was guilty—presenting unsought the city of Antwerp with a glorious phantasia. He did not know that only upon grand, solemn, world-wide occasions, such as a king’s birthday or a ball at the Hôtel de Ville, was such music on the card. When he flung the door to, it had closed with a spring lock, and for the last quarter of an hour three gens-d’arme, commanded by the sacristan of the tower, had been thundering thereat. He waited only to finish the last notes of the wild Orcadian chant, and opened the door. He was seized by the collar, dragged down the stair into the street, and through a crowd of wondering faces—poor unconscious dreamer! it will not do to think on the house-top even, and you had been dreaming very loud indeed in the church spire—away to the bureau of the police.

CHAPTER XXIV. DEATH

I need not recount the proceedings of the Belgian police; how they interrogated Robert concerning a letter from Mary St. John which they found in an inner pocket; how they looked doubtful over a copy of Horace that lay in his coat, and put evidently a momentous question about some algebraical calculations on the fly-leaf of it. Fortunately or unfortunately—I do not know which—Robert did not understand a word they said to him. He was locked up, and left to fret for nearly a week; though what he could have done had he been at liberty, he knew as little as I know. At last, long after it was useless to make any inquiry about Miss Lindsay, he was set at liberty. He could just pay for a steerage passage to London, whence he wrote to Dr. Anderson for a supply, and was in Aberdeen a few days after.

This was Robert’s first cosmopolitan experience. He confided the whole affair to the doctor, who approved of all, saying it could have been of no use, but he had done right. He advised him to go home at once, for he had had letters inquiring after him. Ericson was growing steadily worse—in fact, he feared Robert might not see him alive.

If this news struck Robert to the heart, his pain was yet not without some poor alleviation:—he need not tell Ericson about Mysie, but might leave him to find out the truth when, free of a dying body, he would be better able to bear it. That very night he set off on foot for Rothieden. There was no coach from Aberdeen till eight the following morning, and before that he would be there.

It was a dreary journey without Ericson. Every turn of the road reminded him of him. And Ericson too was going a lonely unknown way.

Did ever two go together upon that way? Might not two die together and not lose hold of each other all the time, even when the sense of the clasping hands was gone, and the soul had withdrawn itself from the touch? Happy they who prefer the will of God to their own even in this, and would, as the best friend, have him near who can be near—him who made the fourth in the fiery furnace! Fable or fact, reader, I do not care. The One I mean is, and in him I hope.

Very weary was Robert when he walked into his grandmother’s house.

Betty came out of the kitchen at the sound of his entrance.

‘Is Mr. Ericson—?’

‘Na; he’s nae deid,’ she answered. ‘He’ll maybe live a day or twa, they say.’

‘Thank God!’ said Robert, and went to his grandmother.

‘Eh, laddie!’ said Mrs. Falconer, the first greetings over, ‘ane ‘s ta’en an’ anither ‘s left! but what for ‘s mair nor I can faddom. There’s that fine young man, Maister Ericson, at deith’s door; an’ here am I, an auld runklet wife, left to cry upo’ deith, an’ he winna hear me.’

‘Cry upo’ God, grannie, an’ no upo’ deith,’ said Robert, catching at the word as his grandmother herself might have done. He had no such unfair habit when I knew him, and always spoke to one’s meaning, not one’s words. But then he had a wonderful gift of knowing what one’s meaning was.

He did not sit down, but, tired as he was, went straight to The Boar’s Head. He met no one in the archway, and walked up to Ericson’s room. When he opened the door, he found the large screen on the other side, and hearing a painful cough, lingered behind it, for he could not control his feelings sufficiently. Then he heard a voice—Ericson’s voice; but oh, how changed!—He had no idea that he ought not to listen.

‘Mary,’ the voice said, ‘do not look like that. I am not suffering. It is only my body. Your arm round me makes me so strong! Let me lay my head on your shoulder.’

A brief pause followed.

‘But, Eric,’ said Mary’s voice, ‘there is one that loves you better than I do.’

‘If there is,’ returned Ericson, feebly, ‘he has sent his angel to deliver me.’

‘But you do believe in him, Eric?’

The voice expressed anxiety no less than love.

‘I am going to see. There is no other way. When I find him, I shall believe in him. I shall love him with all my heart, I know. I love the thought of him now.’

‘But that’s not himself, my—darling!’ she said.

‘No. But I cannot love himself till I find him. Perhaps there is no Jesus.’

‘Oh, don’t say that. I can’t bear to hear you talk so,’

‘But, dear heart, if you’re so sure of him, do you think he would turn me away because I don’t do what I can’t do? I would if I could with all my heart. If I were to say I believed in him, and then didn’t trust him, I could understand it. But when it’s only that I’m not sure about what I never saw, or had enough of proof to satisfy me of, how can he be vexed at that? You seem to me to do him great wrong, Mary. Would you now banish me for ever, if I should, when my brain is wrapped in the clouds of death, forget you along with everything else for a moment?’

‘No, no, no. Don’t talk like that, Eric, dear. There may be reasons, you know.’

‘I know what they say well enough. But I expect Him, if there is a Him, to be better even than you, my beautiful—and I don’t know a fault in you, but that you believe in a God you can’t trust. If I believed in a God, wouldn’t I trust him just? And I do hope in him. We’ll see, my darling. When we meet again I think you’ll say I was right.’