Before the day of return arrived, Robert had taken care to remove the
violin from his bedroom, and carry it once more to its old retreat in
Shargar's garret. The very first evening, however, that grannie again
spent in her own arm-chair, he hied from the house as soon as it grew
dusk, and made his way with his brown-paper parcel to Sandy Elshender's.
Entering the narrow passage from which his shop door opened, and hearing
him hammering away at a sole, he stood and unfolded his treasure, then
drew a low sigh from her with his bow, and awaited the result. He heard
the lap-stone fall thundering on the floor, and, like a spider from his
cavern, Dooble Sanny appeared in the door, with the bend-leather in one
hand, and the hammer in the other.
'Lordsake, man! hae ye gotten her again? Gie's a grup o' her!' he cried,
dropping leather and hammer.
'Na, na,' returned Robert, retreating towards the outer door. 'Ye maun
sweir upo' her that, whan I want her, I sall hae her ohn demur, or I
sanna lat ye lay roset upo' her.'
'I swear 't, Robert; I sweir 't upo' her,' said the soutar hurriedly,
stretching out both his hands as if to receive some human being into his
embrace.
Robert placed the violin in those grimy hands. A look of heavenly
delight dawned over the hirsute and dirt-besmeared countenance, which
drooped into tenderness as he drew the bow across the instrument, and
wiled from her a thin wail as of sorrow at their long separation. He
then retreated into his den, and was soon sunk in a trance, deaf to
everything but the violin, from which no entreaties of Robert, who
longed for a lesson, could rouse him; so that he had to go home
grievously disappointed, and unrewarded for the risk he had run in
venturing the stolen visit.
Next time, however, he fared better; and he contrived so well that,
from the middle of June to the end of August, he had two lessons a week,
mostly upon the afternoons of holidays. For these his master thought
himself well paid by the use of the instrument between. And Robert made
great progress.
Occasionally he saw Miss St. John in the garden, and once or twice met
her in the town; but her desire to find in him a pupil had been greatly
quenched by her unfortunate conjecture as to the cause of his accident.
She had, however, gone so far as to mention the subject to her aunt, who
assured her that old Mrs. Falconer would as soon consent to his being
taught gambling as music. The idea, therefore, passed away; and beyond
a kind word or two when she met him, there was no further communication
between them. But Robert would often dream of waking from a swoon, and
finding his head lying on her lap, and her lovely face bending over him
full of kindness and concern.
By the way, Robert cared nothing for poetry. Virgil was too troublesome
to be enjoyed; and in English he had met with nothing but the dried
leaves and gum-flowers of the last century. Miss Letty once lent him The
Lady of the Lake; but before he had read the first canto through, his
grandmother laid her hands upon it, and, without saying a word, dropped
it behind a loose skirting-board in the pantry, where the mice soon made
it a ruin sad to behold. For Miss Letty, having heard from the woful
Robert of its strange disappearance, and guessing its cause, applied to
Mrs. Falconer for the volume; who forthwith, the tongs aiding, extracted
it from its hole, and, without shade of embarrassment, held it up like
a drowned kitten before the eyes of Miss Letty, intending thereby, no
doubt, to impress her with the fate of all seducing spirits that should
attempt an entrance into her kingdom: Miss Letty only burst into merry
laughter over its fate. So the lode of poetry failed for the present
from Robert's life. Nor did it matter much; for had he not his violin?
I have, I think, already indicated that his grandfather had been a
linen manufacturer. Although that trade had ceased, his family had still
retained the bleachery belonging to it, commonly called the bleachfield,
devoting it now to the service of those large calico manufactures which
had ruined the trade in linen, and to the whitening of such yarn as the
country housewives still spun at home, and the webs they got woven of it
in private looms. To Robert and Shargar it was a wondrous pleasure when
the pile of linen which the week had accumulated at the office under the
ga'le-room, was on Saturday heaped high upon the base of a broad-wheeled
cart, to get up on it and be carried to the said bleachfield, which lay
along the bank of the river. Soft laid and high-borne, gazing into the
blue sky, they traversed the streets in a holiday triumph; and although,
once arrived, the manager did not fail to get some labour out of them,
yet the store of amusement was endless. The great wheel, which drove the
whole machinery; the plash-mill, or, more properly, wauk-mill--a word
Robert derived from the resemblance of the mallets to two huge feet, and
of their motion to walking--with the water plashing and squirting from
the blows of their heels; the beatles thundering in arpeggio upon the
huge cylinder round which the white cloth was wound--each was haunted in
its turn and season. The pleasure of the water itself was inexhaustible.
Here sweeping in a mass along the race; there divided into branches and
hurrying through the walls of the various houses; here sliding through
a wooden channel across the floor to fall into the river in a
half-concealed cataract, there bubbling up through the bottom of a huge
wooden cave or vat, there resting placid in another; here gurgling along
a spout; there flowing in a narrow canal through the green expanse of
the well-mown bleachfield, or lifted from it in narrow curved wooden
scoops, like fairy canoes with long handles, and flung in showers over
the outspread yarn--the water was an endless delight.
It is strange how some individual broidery or figure upon Nature's
garment will delight a boy long before he has ever looked Nature in
the face, or begun to love herself. But Robert was soon to become dimly
conscious of a life within these things--a life not the less real that
its operations on his mind had been long unrecognized.
On the grassy bank of the gently-flowing river, at the other edge of
whose level the little canal squabbled along, and on the grassy brae
which rose immediately from the canal, were stretched, close beside each
other, with scarce a stripe of green betwixt, the long white webs of
linen, fastened down to the soft mossy ground with wooden pegs, whose
tops were twisted into their edges. Strangely would they billow in the
wind sometimes, like sea-waves, frozen and enchanted flat, seeking to
rise and wallow in the wind with conscious depth and whelming mass. But
generally they lay supine, saturated with light and its cleansing power.
Falconer's jubilation in the white and green of a little boat, as we
lay, one bright morning, on the banks of the Thames between Richmond
and Twickenham, led to such a description of the bleachfield that I can
write about it as if I had known it myself.
One Saturday afternoon in the end of July, when the westering sun was
hotter than at midday, he went down to the lower end of the field, where
the river was confined by a dam, and plunged from the bank into deep
water. After a swim of half-an-hour, he ascended the higher part of the
field, and lay down upon a broad web to bask in the sun. In his ears
was the hush rather than rush of the water over the dam, the occasional
murmur of a belt of trees that skirted the border of the field, and
the dull continuous sound of the beatles at their work below, like a
persistent growl of thunder on the horizon.
Had Robert possessed a copy of Robinson Crusoe, or had his grandmother
not cast The Lady of the Lake, mistaking it for an idol, if not to the
moles and the bats, yet to the mice and the black-beetles, he might
have been lying reading it, blind and deaf to the face and the voice
of Nature, and years might have passed before a response awoke in
his heart. It is good that children of faculty, as distinguished from
capacity, should not have too many books to read, or too much of early
lessoning. The increase of examinations in our country will increase
its capacity and diminish its faculty. We shall have more compilers and
reducers and fewer thinkers; more modifiers and completers, and fewer
inventors.
He lay gazing up into the depth of the sky, rendered deeper and bluer by
the masses of white cloud that hung almost motionless below it, until he
felt a kind of bodily fear lest he should fall off the face of the round
earth into the abyss. A gentle wind, laden with pine odours from the
sun-heated trees behind him, flapped its light wing in his face: the
humanity of the world smote his heart; the great sky towered up
over him, and its divinity entered his soul; a strange longing after
something 'he knew not nor could name' awoke within him, followed by
the pang of a sudden fear that there was no such thing as that which he
sought, that it was all a fancy of his own spirit; and then the voice
of Shargar broke the spell, calling to him from afar to come and see
a great salmon that lay by a stone in the water. But once aroused, the
feeling was never stilled; the desire never left him; sometimes growing
even to a passion that was relieved only by a flood of tears.
Strange as it may sound to those who have never thought of such things
save in connection with Sundays and Bibles and churches and sermons,
that which was now working in Falconer's mind was the first dull and
faint movement of the greatest need that the human heart possesses--the
need of the God-Man. There must be truth in the scent of that pine-wood:
some one must mean it. There must be a glory in those heavens that
depends not upon our imagination: some power greater than they must
dwell in them. Some spirit must move in that wind that haunts us with a
kind of human sorrow; some soul must look up to us from the eye of that
starry flower. It must be something human, else not to us divine.
Little did Robert think that such was his need--that his soul was
searching after One whose form was constantly presented to him, but as
constantly obscured and made unlovely by the words without knowledge
spoken in the religious assemblies of the land; that he was longing
without knowing it on the Saturday for that from which on the Sunday he
would be repelled without knowing it. Years passed before he drew nigh
to the knowledge of what he sought.
For weeks the mood broken by the voice of his companion did not return,
though the forms of Nature were henceforth full of a pleasure he had
never known before. He loved the grass; the water was more gracious to
him; he would leave his bed early, that he might gaze on the clouds of
the east, with their borders gold-blasted with sunrise; he would linger
in the fields that the amber and purple, and green and red, of the
sunset, might not escape after the sun unseen. And as long as he felt
the mystery, the revelation of the mystery lay before and not behind
him.
And Shargar--had he any soul for such things? Doubtless; but how could
he be other than lives behind Robert? For the latter had ancestors--that
is, he came of people with a mental and spiritual history; while the
former had been born the birth of an animal; of a noble sire, whose
family had for generations filled the earth with fire, famine,
slaughter, and licentiousness; and of a wandering outcast mother, who
blindly loved the fields and woods, but retained her affection for her
offspring scarcely beyond the period while she suckled them. The love
of freedom and of wild animals that she had given him, however, was far
more precious than any share his male ancestor had borne in his mental
constitution. After his fashion he as well as Robert enjoyed the sun
and the wind and the water and the sky; but he had sympathies with the
salmon and the rooks and the wild rabbits even stronger than those of
Robert.