Robert Falconer by George MacDonald (reading fiction TXT) 📕

at once when you want more. Don't be too saving. Enjoy yourself as well as you can. I shall not grudge it.'

Robert smiled a wan smile at the idea of enjoying himself. His friend saw it, but let it pass. There was no good in persuading a man whose grief was all he had left, that he must ere long part with that too. That would have been in lowest deeps of sorrow to open a yet lower deep of horror. But Robert would have refused, and would have been right in refusing to believe with regard to himself what might be true in regard to most men. He might rise above his grief; he might learn to contain his grief; but lose it, forget it?-never.

He went to bid Shargar farewell. As soon as he had a glimpse of what his friend meant, he burst out in an agony of supplication.

'Tak me wi' ye, Robert,' he cried. 'Ye're a gentleman noo. I'll be yer man. I'll put on a livery coat, an' gang wi' ye. I'll awa' to Dr. Anderson. He's sure to lat me gang.'

'No, Shargar,' said Robert, 'I can't have you with me. I've come into trouble, Shargar, and I must fight it out alone.'

'Ay, ay; I ken. Puir Mr. Ericson!'

'There's nothing the matter with Mr. Ericson. Don't ask me any questions. I've said more to you now than I've said to anybody besides.'

'That is guid o' you, Robert. But am I never to see ye again?'

'I don't know. Perhaps we may meet some day.'

'Perhaps is nae muckle to say, Robert,' protested Shargar.

'It's more than can be said about everything, Shargar,' returned Robert, sadly.

'Weel, I maun jist tak it as 't comes,' said Shargar, with a despairing philosophy derived from the days when his mother thrashed him. 'But, eh! Robert, gin it had only pleased the Almichty to sen' me into the warl' in a some respectable kin' o' a fashion!'

'Wi' a chance a' gaein' aboot the country like that curst villain yer brither, I suppose?' retorted Robert, rousing himself for a moment.

'Na, na,' responded Shargar. 'I'll stick to my ain mither. She never learned me sic tricks.'

'Do ye that. Ye canna compleen o' God. It's a' richt as far 's ye're concerned. Gin he dinna something o' ye yet, it'll be your wyte, no his, I'm thinkin'.'

They walked to Dr. Anderson's together, and spent the night there. In the morning Robert got on the coach for Edinburgh.

I cannot, if I would, follow him on his travels. Only at times, when the conversation rose in the dead of night, by some Jacob's ladder of blessed ascent, into regions where the heart of such a man could open as in its own natural clime, would a few words cause the clouds that enveloped this period of his history to dispart, and grant me a peep into the phantasm of his past. I suspect, however, that much of it left upon his mind no recallable impressions. I suspect that much of it looked to himself in the retrospect like a painful dream, with only certain objects and occurrences standing prominent enough to clear the moonlight mist enwrapping the rest.

What the precise nature of his misery was I shall not even attempt to conjecture. That would be to intrude within the holy place of a human heart. One thing alone I will venture to affirm-that bitterness against either of his friends, whose spirits rushed together and left his outside, had no place in that noble nature. His fate lay behind him, like the birth of Shargar, like the death of Ericson, a decree.

I do not even know in what direction he first went. That he had seen many cities and many countries was apparent from glimpses of ancient streets, of mountain-marvels, of strange constellations, of things in heaven and earth which no one could have seen but himself, called up by the magic of his words. A silent man in company, he talked much when his hour of speech arrived. Seldom, however, did he narrate any incident save in connection with some truth of human nature, or fact of the universe.

I do know that the first thing he always did on reaching any new place was to visit the church with the loftiest spire; but he never looked into the church itself until he had left the earth behind him as far as that church would afford him the possibility of ascent. Breathing the air of its highest region, he found himself vaguely strengthened, yes comforted. One peculiar feeling he had, into which I could enter only upon happy occasion, of the presence of God in the wind. He said the wind up there on the heights of human aspiration always made him long and pray. Asking him one day something about his going to church so seldom, he answered thus:

'My dear boy, it does me ten times more good to get outside the spire than to go inside the church. The spire is the most essential, and consequently the most neglected part of the building. It symbolizes the aspiration without which no man's faith can hold its own. But the effort of too many of her priests goes to conceal from the worshippers the fact that there is such a stair, with a door to it out of the church. It looks as if they feared their people would desert them for heaven. But I presume it arises generally from the fact that they know of such an ascent themselves, only by hearsay. The knowledge of God is good, but the church is better!'

'Could it be,' I ventured to suggest, 'that, in order to ascend, they must put off the priests' garments?'

'Good, my boy!' he answered. 'All are priests up there, and must be clothed in fine linen, clean and white-the righteousness of saints-not the imputed righteousness of another,-that is a lying doctrine-but their own righteousness which God has wrought in them by Christ.' I never knew a man in whom the inward was so constantly clothed upon by the outward, whose ordinary habits were so symbolic of his spiritual tastes, or whose enjoyment of the sight of his eyes and the hearing of his ears was so much informed by his highest feelings. He regarded all human affairs from the heights of religion, as from their church-spires he looked down on the red roofs of Antwerp, on the black roofs of Cologne, on the gray roofs of Strasburg, or on the brown roofs of Basel-uplifted for the time above them, not in dissociation from them.

On the base of the missing twin-spire at Strasburg, high over the roof of the church, stands a little cottage-how strange its white muslin window-curtains look up there! To the day of his death he cherished the fancy of writing a book in that cottage, with the grand city to which London looks a modern mushroom, its thousand roofs with row upon row of windows in them-often five garret stories, one above the other, and its thickets of multiform chimneys, the thrones and procreant cradles of the storks, marvellous in history, habit, and dignity-all below him.

He was taken ill at Valence and lay there for a fortnight, oppressed with some kind of low fever. One night he awoke from a refreshing sleep, but could not sleep again. It seemed to him afterwards as if he had lain waiting for something. Anyhow something came. As it were a faint musical rain had invaded his hearing; but the night was clear, for the moon was shining on his window-blind. The sound came nearer, and revealed itself a delicate tinkling of bells. It drew nearer still and nearer, growing in sweet fulness as it came, till at length a slow torrent of tinklings went past his window in the street below. It was the flow of a thousand little currents of sound, a gliding of silvery threads, like the talking of water-ripples against the side of a barge in a slow canal-all as soft as the moonlight, as exquisite as an odour, each sound tenderly truncated and dull. A great multitude of sheep was shifting its quarters in the night, whence and whither and why he never knew. To his heart they were the messengers of the Most High. For into that heart, soothed and attuned by their thin harmony, not on the wind that floated without breaking their lovely message, but on the ripples of the wind that bloweth where it listeth, came the words, unlooked for, their coming unheralded by any mental premonition, 'My peace I give unto you.' The sounds died slowly away in the distance, fainting out of the air, even as they had grown upon it, but the words remained.

In a few moments he was fast asleep, comforted by pleasure into repose; his dreams were of gentle self-consoling griefs; and when he awoke in the morning-'My peace I give unto you,' was the first thought of which he was conscious. It may be that the sound of the sheep-bells made him think of the shepherds that watched their flocks by night, and they of the multitude of the heavenly host, and they of the song-'On earth peace': I do not know. The important point is not how the words came, but that the words remained-remained until he understood them, and they became to him spirit and life.

He soon recovered strength sufficiently to set out again upon his travels, great part of which he performed on foot. In this way he reached Avignon. Passing from one of its narrow streets into an open place in the midst, all at once he beheld, towering above him, on a height that overlooked the whole city and surrounding country, a great crucifix. The form of the Lord of Life still hung in the face of heaven and earth. He bowed his head involuntarily. No matter that when he drew nearer the power of it vanished. The memory of it remained with its first impression, and it had a share in what followed.

He made his way eastward towards the Alps. As he walked one day about noon over a desolate heath-covered height, reminding him not a little of the country of his childhood, the silence seized upon him. In the midst of the silence arose the crucifix, and once more the words which had often returned upon him sounded in the ears of the inner hearing, 'My peace I give unto you.' They were words he had known from the earliest memorial time. He had heard them in infancy, in childhood, in boyhood, in youth: now first in manhood it flashed upon him that the Lord did really mean that the peace of his soul should be the peace of their souls; that the peace wherewith his own soul was quiet, the peace at the very heart of the universe, was henceforth theirs-open to them, to all the world, to enter and be still. He fell upon his knees, bowed down in the birth of a great hope, held up his hands towards heaven, and cried, 'Lord Christ, give me thy peace.'

He said no more, but rose, caught up his stick, and strode forward, thinking.

He had learned what the sentence meant; what that was of which it