Robert Falconer by George MacDonald (reading fiction TXT) 📕

breathing the air of a higher life, and therefore in all natural ways fulfilling his endless human relations to them. Whatever you do for them, let your own being, that is you in relation to them, be the background, that so you may be a link between them and God, or rather I should say, between them and the knowledge of God.'

While Falconer spoke, his face grew grander and grander, till at last it absolutely shone. I felt that I walked with a man whose faith was his genius.

'Of one thing I am pretty sure,' he resumed, 'that the same recipe Goethe gave for the enjoyment of life, applies equally to all work: "Do the thing that lies next you." That is all our business. Hurried results are worse than none. We must force nothing, but be partakers of the divine patience. How long it took to make the cradle! and we fret that the baby Humanity is not reading Euclid and Plato, even that it is not understanding the Gospel of St. John! If there is one thing evident in the world's history, it is that God hasteneth not. All haste implies weakness. Time is as cheap as space and matter. What they call the church militant is only at drill yet, and a good many of the officers too not out of the awkward squad. I am sure I, for a private, am not. In the drill a man has to conquer himself, and move with the rest by individual attention to his own duty: to what mighty battlefields the recruit may yet be led, he does not know. Meantime he has nearly enough to do with his goose-step, while there is plenty of single combat, skirmish, and light cavalry work generally, to get him ready for whatever is to follow. I beg your pardon: I am preaching.'

'Eloquently,' I answered.

Of some of the places into which Falconer led me that night I will attempt no description-places blazing with lights and mirrors, crowded with dancers, billowing with music, close and hot, and full of the saddest of all sights, the uninteresting faces of commonplace women.

'There is a passion,' I said, as we came out of one of these dreadful places, 'that lingers about the heart like the odour of violets, like a glimmering twilight on the borders of moonrise; and there is a passion that wraps itself in the vapours of patchouli and coffins, and streams from the eyes like gaslight from a tavern. And yet the line is ill to draw between them. It is very dreadful. These are women.'

'They are in God's hands,' answered Falconer. 'He hasn't done with them yet. Shall it take less time to make a woman than to make a world? Is not the woman the greater? She may have her ages of chaos, her centuries of crawling slime, yet rise a woman at last.'

'How much alike all those women were!'

'A family likeness, alas! which always strikes you first.'

'Some of them looked quite modest.'

'There are great differences. I do not know anything more touching than to see how a woman will sometimes wrap around her the last remnants of a soiled and ragged modesty. It has moved me almost to tears to see such a one hanging her head in shame during the singing of a detestable song. That poor thing's shame was precious in the eyes of the Master, surely.'

'Could nothing be done for her?'

'I contrived to let her know where she would find a friend if she wanted to be good: that is all you can do in such cases. If the horrors of their life do not drive them out at such an open door, you can do nothing else, I fear-for the time.'

'Where are you going now, may I ask?'

'Into the city-on business,' he added with a smile.

'There will be nobody there so late.'

'Nobody! One would think you were the beadle of a city church, Mr. Gordon.'

We came into a very narrow, dirty street. I do not know where it is. A slatternly woman advanced from an open door, and said,

'Mr. Falconer.'

He looked at her for a moment.

'Why, Sarah, have you come to this already?' he said.

'Never mind me, sir. It's no more than you told me to expect. You knowed him better than I did. Leastways I'm an honest woman.'

'Stick to that, Sarah; and be good-tempered.'

'I'll have a try anyhow, sir. But there's a poor cretur a dyin' up-stairs; and I'm afeard it'll go hard with her, for she throwed a Bible out o' window this very morning, sir.'

'Would she like to see me? I'm afraid not.'

'She's got Lilywhite, what's a sort of a reader, readin' that same Bible to her now.'

'There can be no great harm in just looking in,' he said, turning to me.

'I shall be happy to follow you-anywhere,' I returned.

'She's awful ill, sir; cholerer or summat,' said Sarah, as she led the way up the creaking stair.

We half entered the room softly. Two or three women sat by the chimney, and another by a low bed, covered with a torn patchwork counterpane, spelling out a chapter in the Bible. We paused for a moment to hear what she was reading. Had the book been opened by chance, or by design? It was the story of David and Bathsheba. Moans came from the bed, but the candle in a bottle, by which the woman was reading, was so placed that we could not see the sufferer.

We stood still and did not interrupt the reading.

'Ha! ha! ha!' laughed a coarse voice from the side of the chimney: 'the saint, you see, was no better than some of the rest of us!'

'I think he was a good deal worse just then,' said Falconer, stepping forward.

'Gracious! there's Mr. Falconer,' said another woman, rising, and speaking in a flattering tone.

'Then,' remarked the former speaker, 'there's a chance for old Moll and me yet. King David was a saint, wasn't he? Ha! ha!'

'Yes, and you might be one too, if you were as sorry for your faults as he was for his.'

'Sorry, indeed! I'll be damned if I be sorry. What have I to be sorry for? Where's the harm in turning an honest penny? I ha' took no man's wife, nor murdered himself neither. There's yer saints! He was a rum 'un. Ha! ha!'

Falconer approached her, bent down and whispered something no one could hear but herself. She gave a smothered cry, and was silent.

'Give me the book,' he said, turning towards the bed. 'I'll read you something better than that. I'll read about some one that never did anything wrong.'

'I don't believe there never was no sich a man,' said the previous reader, as she handed him the book, grudgingly.

'Not Jesus Christ himself?' said Falconer.

'Oh! I didn't know as you meant him.'

'Of course I meant him. There never was another.'

'I have heard tell-p'raps it was yourself, sir-as how he didn't come down upon us over hard after all, bless him!'

Falconer sat down on the side of the bed, and read the story of Simon the Pharisee and the woman that was a sinner. When he ceased, the silence that followed was broken by a sob from somewhere in the room. The sick woman stopped her moaning, and said,

'Turn down the leaf there, please, sir. Lilywhite will read it to me when you're gone.'

The some one sobbed again. It was a young slender girl, with a face disfigured by the small-pox, and, save for the tearful look it wore, poor and expressionless. Falconer said something gentle to her.

'Will he ever come again?' she sobbed.

'Who?' asked Falconer.

'Him-Jesus Christ. I've heard tell, I think, that he was to come again some day.'

'Why do you ask?'

'Because-' she said, with a fresh burst of tears, which rendered the words that followed unintelligible. But she recovered herself in a few moments, and, as if finishing her sentence, put her hand up to her poor, thin, colourless hair, and said,

'My hair ain't long enough to wipe his feet.'

'Do you know what he would say to you, my girl?' Falconer asked.

'No. What would he say to me? He would speak to me, would he?'

'He would say: Thy sins are forgiven thee.'

'Would he, though? Would he?' she cried, starting up. 'Take me to him-take me to him. Oh! I forgot. He's dead. But he will come again, won't he? He was crucified four times, you know, and he must ha' come four times for that. Would they crucify him again, sir?'

'No, they wouldn't crucify him now-in England at least. They would only laugh at him, shake their heads at what he told them, as much as to say it wasn't true, and sneer and mock at him in some of the newspapers.'

'Oh dear! I've been very wicked.'

'But you won't be so any more.'

'No, no, no. I won't, I won't, I won't.'

She talked hurriedly, almost wildly. The coarse old woman tapped her forehead with her finger. Falconer took the girl's hand.

'What is your name?' he said.

'Nell.'

'What more?'

'Nothing more.'

'Well, Nelly,' said Falconer.

'How kind of you to call me Nelly!' interrupted the poor girl. 'They always calls me Nell, just.'

'Nelly,' repeated Falconer, 'I will send a lady here to-morrow to take you away with her, if you like, and tell you how you must do to find Jesus.-People always find him that want to find him.'

The elderly woman with the rough voice, who had not spoken since he whispered to her, now interposed with a kind of cowed fierceness.

'Don't go putting humbug into my child's head now, Mr. Falconer-'ticing her away from her home. Everybody knows my Nell's been an idiot since ever she was born. Poor child!'

'I ain't your child,' cried the girl, passionately. 'I ain't nobody's child.'

'You are God's child,' said Falconer, who stood looking on with his eyes shining, but otherwise in a state of absolute composure.

'Am I? Am I? You won't forget to send for me, sir?'

'That I won't,' he answered.

She turned instantly towards the woman, and snapped her fingers in her face.

'I don't care that for you,' she cried. 'You dare to touch me now, and I'll bite you.'

'Come, come, Nelly, you mustn't be rude,' said Falconer.

'No, sir, I won't no more, leastways to nobody but she. It's she makes me do all the wicked things, it is.'

She snapped her fingers in her face again, and then burst out crying.

'She will leave you alone now, I think,' said Falconer. 'She knows it will be quite as well for her not to cross me.'

This he said very significantly, as he turned to the door, where he bade them a general good-night.